Investigate, January 2006

INVESTIGATE

January 2006:

Christine Rankin

Sweetwaters

Inflation

Rod Donald

Issue 60

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New Zealand’s best cur rent affairs magazine

INVESTIGATE BREAKING NEWS

JANUARY 2006

RANKIN FILE She calls the Prime Minister “threatening” and says cabinet minister Steve Maharey is “disgustingly smarmy”. In this exclusive interview with IAN WISHART former Winz boss CHRISTINE RANKIN claims the Government is deliberately misleading parliament, says it’s symptomatic of what’s going wrong in NZ society, and outlines her new mission to change things from the ground up - for the sake of the children

JAILBIRD SINGS Daniel Keighley is the face that launched a thousand bands, but his world came crashing down when Sweetwaters 99 went bust. Six years and a jail term later, DANIEL KEIGHLEY is telling all in a gripping new book called “Sweetwaters”, and in this extract he paints a pretty grim picture of what many see as a ‘soft’ prison, and the goingson of the inmates and guards

THE RETURN OF KA-CHING! There’s a generation of young New Zealanders entering the workforce who’ve never known the word “inflation” or experienced its pain. But as SHAUN DAVIES and MATT JOHNSON report from our Sydney bureau, the beast of inflation is back and it’s about to stalk a cash register near you

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ROD Was Green Party co-leader ROD DONALD a dinosaur or a visionary? GREG MOON was one of the last people to interview Donald before he died, and that interview is here

CULTURE WARS The debate over teaching Intelligent Design Theory in schools is less about science, reports JAMES MORROW, than it is about whether science has become a religion all of its own, where biology textbooks are the new Scriptures

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL New figures: guns reduce crime

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nvestigate has long been a magazine that dared to sail against the prevailing wind. When we launched around six years ago, one of our early issues looked at the question of gun control, and whether banning citizens from owning and carrying hand guns really did cut crime, as liberal media, talkback hosts and other well-meaning types would have us all believe.

You see, as a parent I have been so brainwashed by the “guns are bad” campaign that I automatically recoil at the idea of letting my 14 year old use an air rifle. And my younger children don’t have toy guns either. All this is despite the fact that I support gun ownership and use.

That’s an example of how Would-be criminals are strongly effective the thought police deterred by the knowledge that have been in this country.

So let’s return to the anyone in public, or at work, or question at hand: six years in the shops may be carrying after we raised the issue in Zealand, what do the a concealed pistol New latest figures say about the link between guns and violent crime? Stand by for a violent surprise.

Following headline-grabbing gun massacres at Dunblane in the UK, and Port Arthur in Tasmania, the British and Australian governments moved in 1997/98 to virtually outlaw private firearm ownership as far as the average citydweller was concerned. The forced disarming of the populations of each country was highly successful, and lauded by both governments as a big step on the way to reducing violent crimes and the chances of further such massacres.

But the latest figures tell a grim story. While it is true there was a small drop in murders in Australia – a reduction of about 20 deaths – there’s been a huge surge in other violent crimes that far outweighs any benefits from gun control. For example, assaults jumped from 102,000 in 1995 to 152,000 in 2001, three years after gun control was introduced. The number of robberies leapt from 6, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

14,000 in 1995 to 26,000 – an incredible 82% increase.

Then there’s rape.

An analysis of rape rate trends between 1995 and 2003 in Australia, the UK and the US shows reported rapes rose 26.5% in Australia, a whopping 59.8% in Britain, and they fell 13.5% in the USA. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

In the ten American states that re-introduced the right for their citizens to carry handguns in public in the mid 1990s, reported rapes had dropped by an average of 30% by 2004 – a much higher decrease than in those US states where handguns remained banned.

Researchers into gun use call this crime reduction “the halo effect”, because the wider community – not just the armed citizen – enjoys the benefit of reduced crime.

Essentially, they believe, would-be criminals are strongly deterred by the knowledge that anyone in public, or at work, or in the shops may be carrying a concealed pistol. For the criminal planning a bank robbery, that means there is a strong possibility they themselves could be shot in the back by a bank customer.

For the criminal planning a rape, there is always the chance they could be shot by a small handgun concealed on the victim’s person, or by someone nearby.

There is now nearly 10 years’ data on the failure of gun control in the UK and Australia, and the success of re-arming ordinary citizens in the United States. It is no longer possible to ignore the falling crime rates in countries where every citizen is a potential cop, while in countries that prohibit handguns and frown on citizen self-defence the crime rates are soaring.

The only other option is that Australia, the UK and New Zealand are sicker societies than the United States.

Perhaps we are, although I suspect most of us would prefer to think not. Maybe it’s time for National or Act to take a real in depth look at the figures, and campaign in 2008 on allowing handguns in New Zealand.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM,

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VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES DODGY SAFETY ADS I see that LTNZ and the Police have developed another contentious ‘safety’ advert on TV, to further confuse the public with an element of fear.

We are regaled with the information that crashing a car at 90 kph has an impact on the human body, equivalent to falling from the 1st floor of a building. At 110 kph the impact on the body equates to falling from the 5th floor of a building. In other words an increase of 20 kph equals 4 floors, or 5 kph / floor.

Treating these figures with a negative extension shows that a crash at 85 kph will have no impact on the human body at all, because it will equate to falling from the ground floor, to the ground floor! At 75 kph there will be negative impact on the human body because it will be 5 metres below ground level! See how ridiculous this becomes?

Previously, a professor from Monash University portrayed on a TV advert, two cars driving down an airstrip, one at 65 kph the other at 60 kph. A truck drives across in front of the cars. Both cars hit the truck; the 65 kph car at 35 kph and the 60 kph car at 5 kph.

No explanation was given for the difference in speed on impact. Neither driver attempted evasive action.

The Police and LTNZ budget would be better spent on educating drivers, rather than terrifying some drivers with explicit details of what might, under extremely unusual circumstances, happen!

R. Jordan, Tauranga

WASTED YOUTH I have just read the very sad article, ‘The Child Who is Divorcing Her Parents’ in your October edition.

Our hearts go out to Murray and Donna, this is not an isolated case as our family has a similar story.

Our daughter was the victim of sexual abuse, by guests billeted in our home when she was fifteen. She was afraid to tell any one as she didn’t want the young men to get into trouble!! Because of her subsequent behaviour and our discovery of what had taken place my hus8, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

band and I – with our daughter – sought the help of a counsellor to mediate in helping the three of us to resolve some of the difficult issues that had resulted. Our daughter had by this time run away from home because of a relationship she had become involved in.

Unfortunately, the counsellor abused his role, and as a consequence of his unethical behaviour we made a formal complaint against him.

Fortunately the NZ Association of Counsellors listened to us, investigated further and charged the counsellor with professional misconduct. A hearing took place many months later, resulting in all four charges against the counsellor being upheld and disciplinary action taken.

However his conduct has caused much heartbreak and damage in our family (primarily in our daughter’s life) that cannot be undone.

The counsellor assisted our daughter’s application for the Independent Youth Benefit (IYB) when she was not eligible for it, and in fact had her first application declined. The counsellor promised her he would help her to get it and, in the ‘review’ process of the IYB, false allegations were made by him about us, based on the fabrications of our daughter and converted into ‘professional’ jargon by the counsellor. Our daughter’s ‘case worker’ at WINZ, and the Special Education Service psychologist contracted to WINZ did not seek any verification of the counsellor’s letter. Much later we eventually obtained a copy of this letter through the Ministry of Social Development.

As a consequence of the counsellor’s actions the IYB was granted enabling our daughter to remain away from home and live her lifestyle of choice, causing us deep concern and heartbreak. We were not permitted any information about her, including not being informed that the IYB had been approved. We only found out when our daughter came home to remove her belongings and move into a flat. She was still at High School and Bursary exams were looming (for which we had already paid the fees) Because of the Privacy Act we could be told

nothing unless our daughter chose to tell us. In spite of the fact we were still her legal guardians, we had no rights. It is a long and heartbreaking story. All doors were closed against us and over a period of two years my husband and I have spent many hours, weeks and months, seeking answers.

I initially went to the Press about the IYB being granted to teens without a thorough investigation of their true circumstances. As a result several parents made contact, all with similar stories. There has been much abuse of the IYB by young teenagers wanting to escape the boundaries of home and use the money to finance their choice of lifestyle, against their parents’ wishes. The procedures and administration of the IYB are poorly carried out and no one takes responsibility for what happens to the teenager once the IYB is approved. The parents can’t, and the Government departments don’t, ‘they just administer it’.

Two years later our attractive intelligent and talented daughter has no academic qualifications, just an $11,000 debt, courtesy of the government, for a course she did not complete, and a living away from home allowance (the IYB stopped when she turned 18).

Not a very auspicious beginning to the responsibilities and challenges of adulthood.

She is working, and we do see her regularly, she has returned home to live on three separate occasions between flats.

A support group has been established seeking further investigation of the procedures and practices in the granting of the IYB. It is hoped that through the efforts of those involved urgent and necessary changes will be made. It is very clear that the rights of children over-ride the rights of parents and the Privacy Act complicates matters even further.

Megan is young and immature and has been caught up in something that is beyond her ability to make wise and sensible decisions.

And yes, I believe that Megan’s decision (with the encouragement and assistance of those who should know better) to ‘divorce her parents’, is the result of ongoing manifestations of the original trauma, compounded by transference and bad counselling.

We are astounded that the NZAC has not taken action against the Rosa counsellor involved in this case.

This story needed to be told, it is a matter of serious public interest.

Thank you Investigate, for publishing it, and the names of the predators.

Thankyou also Murray and Donna for having the courage and determination to seek justice and to go public with your story. You have our support and admiration. We understand your heartbreak and frustration and hope that in time there will be restoration and reconciliation with your daughter Most parents dearly love their children and have their best interests at heart, but parenting is no easy task in New Zealand’s liberal social climate. Support is often needed for parents. Sadly our family is unlikely to trust a counsellor or psychologist again. I am sure there are good ones out there but it is a matter of finding them.

Name and address supplied

ULTIMATE BETRAYAL I don’t want to perpetuate a continuing cycle but I have to respond to Joanna Sanders of Wellington.

Joanna, you are playing at words, which is precisely what the social engineers do. I have no idea what you were trying to say in the December “Communiques”.

I do now know of two families, normal (we know what we mean by families), who have been shafted, (means totally let down), by CYF, (means a pack of Yes Prime Minister lackeys).

For my money CYF has moved from caregiver & protector to ammoral juggernaut.

May God preserve us.

Tony Hore, Wanganui

FETAL DISTRESS I was extremely distressed to the point of feeling physically sick after reading your article on Fetal Distress. What is this world coming to and why is this subject kept so quiet? As a mother of a premature baby (34weeks @ 1365gms) I have experienced my own distress and the fine balance between life and death of a ‘so-called’ fetus, (although in my case the doctors treating me always referred to my ‘baby’ not my ‘fetus’). I feel disgusted at Auckland University (of which I am a graduate) allowing this kind of macabre experimentation to go on in the name of ‘medical science’. When are we going to start treating our children with the respect they deserve and put a stop to this global genocide!

Deanne Rogers, Auckland

EXCELLENT EXPOSE Congratulations to you on your excellent and comprehensive expose of the experimentation being conducted at the Auckland Medical School on fetal parts. This research is immoral and unethical and should be prohibited by law. It provides further evidence that the killing of innocent and defenceless unborn children is intrinsically evil. It is appalling that an unborn child that is deemed to be unwanted and of no value while alive becomes after its destruction a commodity of great value.

No ethical committee can make ethical that which is always unethical.

The unborn child is a member of the human family and is endowed by its creator at conception with an inalienable right to life. The child then should be accorded the respect and protection due to the human person. The killing of the child then is a grave offence to its Creator and a violation of its human rights. The experimentation on its fetal remains is a further affront to God and an offence against the child’s dignity as a human being.

Experimentation on the fetal remains of aborted children masquerades as part of a culture of life; it is not, it is part of a culture of death.

It seeks to justify the killing of unborn children because we need their fetal remains for research to benefit the living.

It seeks to coerce women into abortion by having them believe that good has come from the death of their children which they have sacrificed for the good of mankind.

Right to Life seriously questions the right of mothers to give consent to experiments on the fetal remains of their babies. Unborn babies are not the property of the mother or of any other person. There is no human right that allows a human being to own another human being. The unborn child has not given consent to its destruction or to research being conducted on its fetal remains, therefore there is no ethical consent for this research.

Right to Life will continue to lobby government for effective legal protection for the right to life of unborn children, Our society has also written to the Minister of Health requesting that the government act with urgency to introduce legislation that will prohibit this unethical research. We are committed to vigorously lobby government and Parliament until this legislation is passed.

Ken Orr, Right to Life New Zealand Inc., Christchurch

RETURN TO EREBUS “A Return To Erebus” in the November issue disturbed me. I cannot rid my mind of the suspicion that it is a piece of special pleading. It is odd that now, after several years of apparent acceptance of Judge Mahon’s findings and the reiteration of his famous sound bite, it is still felt necessary to proclaim that the two pilots were blameless. Why did the writer imply that the then Chief Inspector of Air Accidents was not only incompetent but biased?

My aeronautical experience is minimal but I spent many years as a watch keeping officer and captain of merchant ships and there is much January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM,

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in common between aviation and seafaring. Basic airmanship and seamanship were hammered home long before qualification.

The airline was undoubtedly culpable but much of the evidence as reviewed in the article leads, in my opinion, to the conclusion that Mr Chippindale was right.

Ian Condie, Dunedin

LET THEM REST I was somewhat surprised at the article in the November issue by Stuart Macfarlane. The introductory blurb stated Macfarlane to be concerned that there are attempts afoot to discredit the Mahon report, but the article does not clearly document what those attempts are, or who is behind them. The article is little more than a re-hash of previous writings on Erebus by Macfarlane and others, notably Captain Gordon Vette. If the comments by Cullen, Rudman, et al, were recent and prompted Macfarlane to burst into print then he would have helped readers by citing the date of these remarks.

Nobody in the aviation community denies the ground breaking work of the Mahon report, or the valuable contribution to “human factors” of both Mahon and Captain Vette – they were clearly ahead of their time. However, Mahon’s unconditional release of the flight crew from all blame is one aspect that does not sit well with many in the aviation community, who wonder at the wisdom of flying a heavy commercial jet transport at 260 plus knots at an altitude of 1,500 feet over terrain with which the crew were not familiar and in questionable visibility. Don’t get me wrong – the vast majority of the blame (85 90%) clearly sits with the airline and the Civil Aviation Authority, of that there is no doubt – the flight crew were inadequately prepared and briefed, there were commercial pressures to visit McMurdo rather than diverting to the South Magnetic Pole and Dry Valleys area in the event of bad weather at McMurdo, and inadequate supervision of the airline. Sadly, after 26 years there is still not a clear consensus among professional aviators regarding the exact degree of blame (if any) that sits with the air crew – many of us are not convinced that Mahon understood some of the finer points of the responsibilities of professional aviators, a fault that is also evident in Macfarlane’s various writings. Equally sad is the fact that both Mahon and Captain Vette were treated badly by the Muldoon Government and the airline, and both suffered reputational and financial loss as a result.

The remarks by the three commentators hardly constitute an orchestrated attempt to discredit Mahon. In the absence of a good reason for reviving the controversy, Macfarlane should do the memories of all the victims of TE901 – and those of us left to grieve – a great favour by remaining silent.

Barry Smith, via email

ISLAMIC SILENCE Political Islam is not welcome here. The Five Pillars that are the foundations of the Islamic faith are clearly, essentially and absolutely nonpolitical.

The great Islamic scholar, Dr Abdul Aziz Sachedina made this point: “An Islamic ‘state’ is not part of the faith. What is required by faith is working towards justice and equity in the public space. There is no concept of ‘nation state’ in the classical formulation of political theory.

We have the legal concept of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. The first, ‘sphere of Islam’ means any part of the earth where Muslims predominate and create a government. The opposite is the ‘sphere of war’, which must be brought under the dominance of Muslims. These two concepts are absent in the Qur’an and Hadith.”

Therefore only the most radical and extreme Muslim sects within Islam would want to set the stage for a “sphere of war” in New Zealand. Peace-loving Muslims, living peaceably in New Zealand, would 10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

not tolerate such ideas. Muslim silence is a vote for Sharia Law in New Zealand. For crying out loud, Muslims, tell your Muslim extremists to leave New Zealand. They are not welcome.

Steve Sunde, Auckland

BODY ENHANCER I have just read your recent article on Body Enhancer and had a few comments. I am one of the one hundred people that asked for my money back as the product didn’t work for me or my wife – what you may want to have asked Zenith was if they had refunded the money to those hundred people. The answer you would find is “No” and then you may want to have asked them why not?

At the time I asked for the refund they referred me to the study that is extensively referenced in your article. I looked at the actual results and stats and there were conclusions and claims that Zenith made that were simply not supported by the results. I found this to be a real concern.

I agree that the product should be tested to see if it works, however all the variables need to be tested. For example they want you drink 6 to 8 glasses of water a night , and refrain from eating 2 hours prior to going to bed each night in addition to taking the Body Enhancer immediately before bed time. What the test should also test is the weight loss of people who drink the 6-8 glasses of water and refrain from eating 2 hours prior to bed time with out taking Body Enhancer – Why? Because if you drink water regularly then the body will not retain water so your weight will decrease (the majority of our body is water). Secondly lots of people eat before going to bed so stopping this would also I imagine reduce weight particularly as that food is hard to process by the body when we sleep so is more likely to be stored as fat - these results would have nothing to do with Body Enhancer.

There is more to this than the Judge, the Commerce Commission, your article, and Zenith would have as believe.

I suggest that a clinical test be taken and that takes into account all the variables. Get all parties to agree that they will accept the result of theTest.

The test should have all participants following the product program guidelines with one group actually taking Body Enhancer and the other not.

Brett Fraser, Auckland

EVOLUTIONARY FUNDAMENTALISM In reply to Warwick Don (“Evolutionary Fundamentalism”, December) you wrote: “When faced with a tough scientific challenge to its comfort zones, modern biology reacts like the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, screaming ‘heresy’ and refusing to let opposing theories be debated in scientific or educational fora in the hope that they won’t take hold”. Now you know as well as I do that it is Creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design that refuse realistic debate on opposing issues. Scientists are quite happy to debate the issue when they feel they are not simply wasting their time.

I have read such books as “Icons of Evolution” by Jonathan Wells, “Signs of Intelligence” by Dembski and Kushiner and many others on the subject of Intelligent Design. No reviews of these books in magazines such as yours even mentions the many examples of faulty logic, fallacies, ignored facts, misleading statements and even outright lies that many scientists have pointed out in such books.

No scientist would claim to know how the bacterium flagellum evolved and so bringing the subject up yet again is pointless. Let’s debate the facts. In his book ”Icons of Evolution” Jonathan Wells concedes, “Obviously, the human species has a history. Many fossils have been found that appear to be genuine, and many of them have some features that are ape-like and some that are human-like”. Presumably, then, ID supporters accept that humans have evolved from Australopithecus. Let us just accept for the moment that a Designer

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 11

made the bacterium flagellum and created Australopithecus. None of this tells us anything about such a Designer. Can you provide “absolute proof ” for the existence of this Designer?

We know from archeology that the Bible is just one perspective of history in the Middle East, and a very slanted one at that. Therefore, unless He likes misleading us, the God of the Old Testament cannot be the designer.

Of course none of this would matter but the type of argument demonstrated in books that support ID has even reached the highest levels in the administrations of the USA, UK and Australia. Relevant facts are ignored and misleading statements made. To top it off Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalism is being used to fuel and justify the current strife in the Middle East.

Knowing your commitment to free and fair debate on the subject I presume this letter will head straight to the rubbish bin. I will not be the only one surprised by this. On the subject of ID a respected geneticist recently wrote to me, “Facts and logical argument from those facts are not a welcome part of their curricula”.

Terry Toohill, Whangarei WISHART RESPONDS

You sling off at alleged major errors and fallacies in the ID books, but fail to quote specifics of any. You presume that ID supporters agree that humans have evolved from Australopithecus. No, there’s no evidence of that and I’m reminded of Henry Gee, chief science writer for Nature, who remarked only six years ago that each fossil is “an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps”. And it was Gee who then told us that all the scientific evidence for human evolution “can be fitted into a small box”.

This is where the rubber hits the road for evolution Terry. On blog sites, in classrooms and in letters to the editor evolutionists make bold claims for evolution that just don’t stack up against the scant evidence.

Again, as Henry Gee summed it up, the evolutionary “just so” stories are “a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.”

And you guys call this “science” that should be taught in schools?

Moving on, you suggest that we can know nothing of the Designer who created the flagellum or Australopithecus. I disagree. The mere fact that the flagellum is based on a design that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern vehicle engineering studio suggests that humans must bear some resemblance to the Designer. After all, a dog would never appreciate the finer points of a rotary engine or an outboard motor, but humans can. We recognize design.

If I could provide “absolute proof ” of the Designer there would be no need of faith. Conversely, can you provide “absolute proof ” that evolution is true, or that the universe had a natural cause? No, you can’t either. Each of us relies on faith for at least part of our argument.

You then critique the historical reliability of the Old Testament. Hard as it may be to accept, the Bible has been proven correct on every historical detail it is still possible to corroborate after all these centuries. And that point was made by no lesser light than atheist archaeologist William Dever, one of the leading scientists in ancient Middle Eastern research.

The Old Testament records the activities of God as seen by human eyes.

While God inspired the writers he remained a largely two dimensional figure viewed from afar. But the New Testament reveals the full majesty of God in Christ walking among us. One can really only interpret the Old Testament through the lens of the New. If you want to see the Designer up close, look there.

ANSWER THIS QUESTION Let me clarify evolution as both ‘fact’ and ‘theory’. That evolution has occurred has been established beyond all reasonable doubt, in the same way that a rotating Earth and continental drift are regarded as estab12, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

lished phenomena. In my letter (November 2005), I deliberately preceded the statement “evolution itself is a fact” with the qualifying phrase “to all intents and purposes” (which you appear to have overlooked), in order to reflect the provisional nature of science. Calling evolution “a fact” (I was certainly not referring to “evolutionary theory”) is no different from accepting gravity as a reality.

By contrast, evolution as theory essentially is concerned with natural explanations relating to the ‘how’ of the process and continues to attract scientific research and discussion. “Opposing theories” are considered, provided they are scientific. Given the decidedly healthy state of the scientific enterprise in this field, concepts like “Darwin’s leaking evolutionary dyke” and “the cold winds of change” can only be dismissed for what they are – figments of the antievolutionary imagination.

Stephen Jay Gould has put it as well as anyone: “Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent’”.

It is therefore ironic that you should claim to “know for a fact” how scientists would react when confronted by a human skeleton in Carboniferous rock, or by any other ‘out of place’ fossil. I suggest that you do not know this “for a fact” at all – that you are merely making assumptions, presumably in order to denigrate the integrity of evolutionary scientists.

And you still do not get it, or won’t get it: Scientists, in adopting a necessary methodological naturalism/materialism, do not make “an a priori assumption that even if supernaturalism exists that it [has] played no part [in nature]”. The supernatural, even if it does exist, is ignored simply because it is beyond the scope of science. Is this really too difficult to comprehend?

I agree, science “can add weight to the probability of a particular truth claim being really true”, but only if the truth claim lies within the natural world. I am still unable to accept that “we are all fundamentalists”. This, to me, renders the word virtually meaningless in that it fails to differentiate between those who maintain a strict adherence to the supposed truth of certain beliefs (thus falling within the generally accepted definition of fundamentalism), and those who prefer a more scientific or open approach to reality. I consider myself a member of the second group. You will likely disagree with this placement. So be it.

Warwick Don, Dunedin WISHART RESPONDS

Warwick. You equate the ‘fact’ of evolution with the reality of gravity. Here’s the difference: It is abundantly obvious that a force holds us fast to the earth’s surface. It is by no means abundantly obvious that evolution as it is commonly taught (amoeba to man) is a reality. Given the huge amount of evidence supporting microevolution (change within a species), why is there no compelling evidence of macroevolution (change from one species to another)? Surely if one led to the other there would be, as Darwin claimed, thousands of transitional species. There aren’t. Yet scientists persist in saying that because a bacterium became resistant to antibiotics or a finch beak grew longer, somehow this proves apes became human. Oh really?

It is precisely this kind of linguistic sleight of hand that the public are now beginning to see through. Biologists are forever trying to gain credibility for evolution by equating it with other well-proven scientific foundations, like gravity. I remember years ago doing a news story about a bunch of shonks in Queensland who used to sell patches of desert to gullible investors by publishing full page ads extolling the virtues of the land adjacent to the plots they were actually selling.

Now to the heart of your argument.

On the one hand you say science doesn’t rule out the supernatural being involved in the development of life, it just ignores it because it cannot test the

supernatural. That’s fine, I accept that this is your line of reasoning as it stands, but can’t you then see the trap you fall into? If God did indeed – as a matter of objective fact – create life, and guide its development supernaturally, and science cannot get its head around that possibility, then scientists have wasted a hundred and fifty years investigating evolutionary fiction.

Because if God did that, then no matter how many times you spin the wheel Darwin’s theory will always be wrong. But using your definition of science, we would be forced to continue teaching an evolutionary fairy story to school children for the next 800 years, or in fact forever, because our current definition of science requires us to pretend the true cause doesn’t exist!

This is the point I have repeatedly tried to make to you: a definition of science that says science should ignore the truth if the truth happens to be supernatural, is not science at all. It is merely atheism posing as science. A true scientist goes where the evidence leads, even if it leads to the supernatural.

That’s why the debate over teaching Intelligent Design in schools is relevant: students should be exposed to the strengths and weaknesses of competing scientific theories, not told that they must ignore one simply because it doesn’t lead to a naturalistic (read ‘atheistic’) outcome.

Perhaps I can take this debate a step further by inviting you to respond to this specific premise: Let’s assume for the sake of argument that God appears in the clouds for the entire world to see on a Friday afternoon six months from now and says in a clear voice heard by every living soul on the planet: “I’m God, I created life, Darwin got it wrong.”

What, in your view, is the proper scientific response to such an occurrence? Is it the role of science to ignore God’s divine revelation (because it was supernatural), and therefore continue teaching Darwinian evolution in schools and universities?

I want a crisp response to this exact scenario. Forget the side debate about whether one considers such an event likely, let’s just assume for the purpose of discussion that it happens. How should science respond?

Yours in anticipation, Editor.

PUTTING IRAQ IN PERSPECTIVE If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the US capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington.

Alan King, Salt Lake City, Utah

CHINA CRISIS The supposed transcript of Chi Haotian’s briefing was sobering and interesting reading. There is plenty of evidence that a conflict on the scale he suggests is possible would not be worth waiting for the outcome of. Even those whose elevated status gave them space in a shelter would probably be postponing the end. The prospect of being trapped with politicians for an extended period is enough to make me take my chances outside however slim they may be.

Chi looks to be using a slant on Darwin’s theory of evolution to make a case for the Chinese being superior by virtue of some evidence that their lineage goes back farther into history that some or all other races. While the recorded length of Chinese history may or may not be as claimed, a briefing which appears to suggest that the deaths of hundreds of millions so the Party retains control is perfectly understandable, should hardly be seen as evidence for a claim that being around longer makes one superior.

Perhaps he should consider the fate of someone else who claimed a superiority in 1942 after a convincing defeat of the Allies in Malaya. In response to an offering of atonement to the Japanese by the Chinese of Malaya (50,000,000 Straits dollars was involved) General Yamashita

responded with a speech that which concluded that the Japanese were descended from the gods, the Europeans, as fully explained by Darwin, from the monkeys. In a war between gods and monkeys there could only be one victor. The wheels fell off the Japanese military wagon fairly quickly and Yamashita was hanged in 1946 after the monkeys won the shooting war.

Darwin has, perhaps without ever realising, allowed the development of a theory which, if it gets out of hand, will be the end of us.

Thanks Charles, I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Terry Brown, via email

POPE DOES A PILATE Helen Clark’s Motorcade is caught speeding and it is the drivers and police escort that take the heat in court. David Benson-Pope authorises the release of documents to the media, and now his press secretary Pete Coleman is in the gun and could lose his job. I suppose one thing you can say about these politicians is that they are consistent.

Peter Tashkoff, Auckland

POPE CAUGHT SINNING David Benson-Pope’s situation provides useful lessons. Firstly, of the perils of ‘being wise after the event’, and passing erroneous judgement on practices once an acceptable and widespread part of school culture; attempts to prosecute are ridiculous. This cultural relativism likewise prevents successful villification of the colonising English, of even the hungry cannibal. Secondly, the best politicians make an art form of stretching the truth like rubber and are never caught telling lies. The Labour party are convinced of the worth of their Associate Minister of Justice and his explanations for the matter before parliament, so are his police and the ‘enquirers’. That there is now public debate provoked by victim and witness testimony makes further investigation necessary, where such wasn’t justifiable previously. It’s another ministerial foot fault, with the mouth now safely filled.

Nicholas Keesing, Auckland

POPE ON A ROPE? The David Benson-Pope affair epitomizes all that is wrong with our country today. Here is a man, a former school master, of whom nine credible and reliable witnesses (according to the police) say he indulged in strange and unusual bullying whilst teaching in Dunedin.

While some may say this was the culture of the day, they’d be wrong.

While I remember getting a rap across the knuckles from my teacher once, I certainly never had my wrists taped to a desk and my mouth filled with an object of the master’s choosing.

And while we could all, apparently even the victims, forgive the sensitive new age cabinet minister for his former behaviour, forgiveness requires a modicum of repentance first. Benson-Pope has refused to repent, telling Parliament the incidents never happened. Then he subtly changed his tune to that trusty old standby of cretins – “I can’t recall”. Trust me, if I’d shoved my ball in the mouth of a schoolboy, I’d know for certain one way or the other.

David Benson-Pope is expecting us to believe he’s suffering from advanced Alzheimers. Fine. He should give up the ministerial salary if his memory is that addled. As far as I’m concerned, Benson-Pope has hung himself out to dry with his lies, and has no one but himself to blame.

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

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 13

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE

Heroin users need guidance from professionals, not reformed addicts

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t is desperately sad for Nguyen Tuong Van’s family that he was hanged in Singapore for heroin trafficking. However, we should not allow our sorrow for Nguyen’s death to cloud our hatred of his criminal act. In much of the public outrage over Singapore’s death sentence for the 25-year-old Australian there has been a morally repugnant subtext: that he didn’t deserve to die because he did nothing wrong, or, indeed, that he was a victim of the Federal Government’s tough on drugs policy.

One writer of a letter to the Melbourne Age claimed Nguyen had committed a “selfless act born of a desperate situation”.

In this newspaper’s letThere is a general perception that ters page, Al Svirskis of workers involved in harm-minimiMount Druitt claimed: sation programs hold ambiguous “Those more responsible than Nguyen Tuong Van moral attitudes towards illicit drug for the wasted lives of use, perhaps because some themheroin users … are the zero-tolerance anti-drug selves use drugs warriors.” Legalised prescribed heroin would “save the lives of many users as well as ‘mules’ like Nguyen”.

The reason Nguyen didn’t deserve to die is because we don’t believe in judicial killing. But he did deserve severe punishment because what he did was very wrong, regardless of whether he agreed to import heroin to enrich himself or to pay his twin brother’s debts. A lot of people have debts and don’t stoop to heroin trafficking.

As Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, said, the 396 grams of heroin found strapped to Nguyen’s body and in his backpack at Changi Airport in 2002 were the equivalent of 26,000 doses on the street.

It is not “zero-tolerance anti-drug warriors” who are responsible for lives wasted on heroin. Legalising heroin, which is the ultimate goal of harm-minimisation advocates, might reduce overdose deaths but the normalisa14, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

tion of drug use would only expand the number of addicts.

There is an unfortunate tension between the Federal Government’s successful crackdown on drug importation and distribution, which has led to a heroin drought and reduced deaths in recent years, and the implied acceptance of drug use by state-funded harm-minimisation industries.

If, for instance, needle exchange programs are supposed to provide a first point of contact with drug rehabilitation opportunities, what was a health worker at a needle van in Redfern doing facilitating a heroin sale?

This extraordinary story, uncovered by Sun-Herald police reporter John Kidman last month, is contained in police statements in a recent murder trial.

The death by heroin overdose of 40-year-old father of four Edward Carr in Redfern in 2004 led to the revenge killing by Carr’s best friend, Phillip Harrison, of one of three men who helped buy the heroin. Harrison was found guilty of murder by a Supreme Court jury a couple of weeks back.

But buried in the police brief of evidence is the damning claim that the fatal heroin deal was organised by a man who worked for the needle exchange program.

In a sworn statement dated August 6, 2004, Surry Hills Constable Heath Clark says: “Darrell Martin told us that [he and] Edward Carr approached a male whom Martin knows to be employed by the needle exchange program.

“This male was standing next to the needle exchange bus and [Martin and Carr] inquired about scoring heroin.

The needle exchange worker used a mobile phone on their behalf to arrange the purchase of some heroin.”

Martin and Carr went to a children’s swing in a park near The Block and bought heroin from the dealer, which Carr later injected with fatal consequences.

The claims have never been investigated. A spokesman for the Sydney South West Area Health Service, which runs the Redfern needle exchange bus, said no

“It is a curious observation that people who are dependent on drugs or alcohol are often drawn to welfare work aimed at alleviating the misery caused by just such addictions. They are thus incapable of providing clear moral persuasion to steer addicts away from the alcohol or drug abuse. Unwilling or unable to practise abstinence themselves, they cannot advocate it for others”

action had been taken because “we haven’t been given any evidence”.

There is no suggestion of any wider involvement by the needle exchange bus or any of its employees. But there is a general perception that workers involved in harm-minimisation programs hold ambiguous moral attitudes towards illicit drug use, perhaps because some themselves use drugs.

It is a curious observation that people who are dependent on drugs or alcohol are often drawn to welfare work aimed at alleviating the misery caused by just such addictions. They are thus incapable of providing clear moral persuasion to steer addicts away from the alcohol or drug abuse. Unwilling or unable to practise abstinence themselves, they cannot advocate it for others.

This is the perception of Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, who maintains a strict no-alcohol rule for all those who work with his Cape York

partnerships. They advocate abstinence in Aboriginal communities, and therefore believe they should walk the walk.

Nothing could be further from Pearson’s clear-eyed reality than the notorious case of Marion Watson, the ACT community health worker awarded the Order of Australia medal for her work helping drug addicts.

The problem was that Watson’s idea of helping was to sell them heroin – about $10,000 worth a week. She was arrested and jailed in 1998.

Watson was the poster girl for the harm-minimisation lobby in the ACT. Her downfall was proof of the folly of non-judgemental programs which advocate “responsible” drug use rather than prevention and treatment.

Attempts to minimise Nguyen’s crime do not alleviate his plight.

They simply reinforce an attitude in Singapore that Australians are moral relativists, unable to recognise wrongdoing and ever ready to excuse it.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 15

LAURA’S WORLD

LAURA WILSON Where to from here?

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have been out of work for nearly one year. An outrageous luxury, or an embarrassing misfortune? Well, neither actually, more of a necessity, but one that has placed me in the most curious no-mans-land in terms of something I have always taken for granted: my ‘place’ in society.

The primary thing about my ‘placement’ is it has always been dictated by me, whether I’ve been the young traveler on the extended O.E, or the beer-drinking university student, or the neophyte teacher – I have always created my status. Until seven months ago when I gave birth.

Suddenly I was doing something that life experience hadn’t prepared me for at all, and doing it 24 hours a day. Initially, when people asked ‘so what do you do?’ it didn’t occur to me to answer ‘I’m a mother’, as that doesn’t define an action. Instead I said ‘I’m looking after a child’, to which I Saying I’m a full-time Mum feels quickly added a footnote as ‘it’s so much the same as admitting I’m addicted such fun….long may it last beto chocolate. There is something fore I have to get back to terribly self-indulgent about it the real world’.

One doesn’t need footnotes to justify how long one plans to be a teacher, an engineer or a tree-pruner. Only when one is on holiday, or on an invalid pension or a full-time parent does one need to say ‘until…..’ at the end of the definition.

But until what? This is my unprepared-for dilemma.

No one, myself included, expects full time mothering to be anything other than a temporary glitch in my personal working life.

It appears that what I am supposed to do in order to remain comfortably normal, is place my son in the care of others whilst I return to my primary career of defining myself through my work. Once I am safely able to answer the “what do you do” question with something more prestigious than “I wipe my son’s bum”, I can afford the add-on, “oh, and I’m a mum”.

16, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

Being a mum is entirely acceptable as long as it’s an add-on to a career. But used as a definition on its own it hangs in the air like an unexplained odour, as if I had just admitted to being rottenly rich, or simply too lazy to work. If I were to turn people’s expressions into words they would read “so…..you have one 10 kilogram baby to look after, and that takes up all your time?

You’re kidding me, right?”

Saying I’m a full-time Mum feels the same as admitting I’m addicted to chocolate. There is something terribly self-indulgent about it. Almost as if I’m being precious. As if State Care is not good enough for my son, who of course is special and unique and needs all of my time.

Interestingly enough, that bourgeois piece of exclusivity happens to be the truth. It has taken me some time to admit to myself that there is no more special thing in this world than my son. Admitting this, I had to wonder why then I continuously asserted my priority of returning to work, or of taking a few university papers, or starting a home business as if I have oodles of empty time on my hands.

Money is the paramount reason parents give for returning to work a.s.a.p. But extensive research carried out in Europe, USA and Australia shows that it is the highest income families, ie; those who least need two incomes, who are returning to work the earliest. Those who can most afford to have one full-time parent, don’t.

The issue then is one of status-maintenance with many mothers (and fathers) simply not willing to swap hardwon job titles for the humble title, parent.

All this business about individual rights of the adult to do this and have that….can be argued ad nauseum, in the same way I am at leisure to feel either freed or imprisoned by motherhood. But what should not be a subject of individual whims is the health, happiness and rights of the child.

A decade of international research into the effects of Childcare Centres on children is revealed in Australian

journalist Anne Manne’s recent book, Motherhood. It is a startling read, including test results that show high levels of cortisol, a stress-induced hormone present at greatly increased levels in the saliva of children in Care, and of accelerated peer aggression, the opposite of what socialisation is supposed to achieve.

Mannes is no proponent of a return to women in the home, any more than I am. But she does make a distinction between providing a child with Love, or with Care. Parents (and other one-on-one carers such as grandparents) provide love, of the beyond-reason, unconditional variety that is so rare on earth. Caregivers provide Care, which even at its very highest level is still a far cry from the indescribable love of parents.

The question then is, do babies and preschoolers actually NEED this Love fulltime, or is a blend of daytime Care and evening/weekend parental Love adequate for healthy physiological and psychological growth?

Manne collates and deciphers worldwide data on Care Centre versus parent-raised children, declaring that we are staring down the barrel of a growing generation of Carecentre kids with raised aggression.

Let’s be real, how much love and attention can a baby receive from an $11/hour Childcarer with an adult to baby ratio of 1:5? As Manne puts it, whilst one baby is being fed the other four lie unattended.

What if there is an emergency such as a fire? Can one person carry five babies? What about the days all five babies cry simultaneously, and the Carer has a headache, or a hangover?

No doubt there are many truly loving Carers, and many lousy parents who do best for their child by handing them over. But the point of the research is not to judge adults for this or that choice (or necessity) but to evaluate children. Like it or not the exclusive Love of a parent is irreplaceable food for the child. Not specious indulgence, but real soul-enriching, cell-blossoming, character-forming food.

For my part, I find the concept of being so necessary, so irreplaceable and unique rather thrilling. I guess now it is up to me to do some deprogramming of my “it’s All About Me” mind, that looks to define itself by grandiose career achievements (and relative bank balance), and re-program it to place higher value on the role of nurturing my soft, small, wispy-haired boy, like only I can.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 17

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER Cradle of the republic

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’m quite tempted to not pass any further comment on the makeup of our new Government.

In a sense, it’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel; safe, predictable, and everyone’s doing it. But I’m going to anyway. It’s my stock in trade. To not put my two penny-worth in would be remiss of me.

Perhaps this Government can be defined less well by what it is, than by what will come after it. What it is, plainly, is unashamed expediency on the part of all involved. What may come after it, could be all the more predictable because of this.

One of the historical quirks of the New Zealand psyche is our disinclination towards revolution, civil disobedience, or any other The position of Governor-Gen- form of violent opposito those acts or direceral has become corrupted. It has tion tions of inept or corbecome a political rubber stamp, rupted Government along with such appointments as which we find unpalatable. Rather, we respond the Commissioner of Police and to such dictates by ignorthe Chief of the Defence Force ing them. It is not in our nature to rant or rave about the desires and designs of Government which are demonstrably foolish, unworkable, or draconian, or even a combination of all three. We don’t (at least not anymore) join unions, and protest loudly, like the Australians. We don’t fire guns in the street like the Arabs.

We don’t wave placards, and throw potatoes, and get water-cannoned by the Police, like the Europeans; we don’t burn books, or lynch people, or block the motorways with tractors (even if we may occasionally drive them up Parliament’s steps), or leave severed horses’ heads in the beds of politicians’ mistresses. Instead, we are more inclined to simply shake our collective heads, and walk away. With such disregard comes, inevitably, a diminution of respect for, or regard to the relevance of, Government in general.

18, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

I believe that the shallow and expedient nature of the Government we have been delivered will be reflected in just such a response from much of the electorate. Many New Zealanders already felt disenfranchised before the election, and the numerous, and inevitable, post-poll machinations and Machiavellianisms have done little if anything to dampen their cynicism.

That National should attempt to cuddle up to the Maori Party is hardly surprising, and I was one of those who suggested just such a liaison, long before the 17th of September. But that they should offer to abandon so much of the policy and rhetoric of Orewa One, without so much as a batted eyelid, in pursuit of the Ninth Floor of the Beehive, left even me with raised eyebrows.

That Winston should hop into bed with Helen, after vehemently denying that he had any such intention, will surprise few, but please even fewer.

That Labour should so comprehensively, and so unashamedly, shaft the Greens, after such a rosy, cosy, joint election campaign, will surprise no-one outside the naïve, and poorly informed, if well-intentioned, Green core vote.

That Peter Dunne should shoot himself in one foot before the election, and appears to have shot himself in the other following it, is quite bizarre; clinging to the Ministerial salary which is all that remains of his once-proud ship of public respect, he will almost certainly go down with the wreckage of this Last Labour Government.

That the Deputy Leader of the National Party should be openly critical of the Governor General is a little surprising; but quite frankly, I don’t blame Gerry Brownlee for his comments, nor do I disagree with him. We have arrived at a crux in our nation’s history. The position of Governor-General has become corrupted. It has become a political rubber stamp, along with such appointments as the Commissioner of Police and the Chief of the Defence Force. Ordinary people no longer take such high offices, or their temporal holders, seriously. They are seen as being little more than mouthpieces of the Government of the Day, in no way independent, and cer-

“It is inevitable, as time goes by, that New Zealanders will feel less and less regard for both the monarchy, and its constitutional position, if both our Queen’s representative, and the Government which appoints that person, continue to display open and blatant disregard for both the principles of democracy, and the essential apolitical posture of the Head of State”

tainly not able – or even intended – to protect the rights of the citizenry against the excesses of the State.

It is inevitable, as time goes by, that New Zealanders will feel less and less regard for both the monarchy, and its constitutional position, if both our Queen’s representative, and the Government which appoints that person, continue to display open and blatant disregard for both the principles of democracy, and the essential apolitical posture of the Head of State.

Indeed, it is perhaps time that we as a nation gave serious consideration to the manner in which the holder of such office is selected. At this time, several contenders have been suggested as possible successors to Dame Sylvia Cartwright – who, as a former Judge, may be seen as a political appointee herself. They include a former rugby player, and a self-confessed Republican former Prime Minister. I would contend that both such suggestions are ridiculous.

If New Zealand is to have itself taken seriously, as a nation where State and Government are independent, we need to look very closely, and honestly, at the constitutional position of the Vice-Regal, and at the motivations of the person who fills that role.

I would suggest that a patsy appointment of some politically acceptable, and politically correct, placeholder, is not acceptable. Our Queen’s representative needs to be an unbiased statesperson; someone unaffected by the political machinations of the day, and someone who will, by compunction of duty, be possessed of the courage and moral fortitude, and just as importantly, the support of the people, to sack the Government of the Day, should such become necessary.

I would suggest that perhaps only a very few people, from only a very few walks of life, are possessed of such necessary attributes, in New Zealand at this time.

My first choice, and I have suggested it more than a few times now, would be the Maori Queen.

Alternatively, a distinguished retired career military officer, holder of the Queen’s Commission, could be expected to execute the office of Viceroy with honour and distinction. Perhaps such officers and gentlemen as Air Marshal Carey Adamson, or Vice Admiral Sir Somerford Teagle, or men of their ilk, may be available to fill this vital position.

The only other option I see as viable, in terms of both public acceptability, independence, and effectiveness, is the direct appointment of a Royal Vice Regal; and in this, the only figure to spring immediately to this writer’s mind, is HRH Prince Andrew – an accomplished former military officer himself, and without question, Her Majesty’s representative.

But if our elected representatives do choose to ignore the fundamental importance of constitutional Governance, they would be foolish to presume that the public’s apathy towards the subject will automatically translate itself into support for the not-very-well-hidden Republican agenda which pervades not only the core of the Government, but the upper levels of the Opposition as well. I believe there is a fork in the road to Republicanism, which the secret planners and back-room dealers, blinded by their own ideology and arrogance, have failed to see.

The signpost to this fork may be found in the way in which rural

New Zealand voted this year. Overwhelmingly, the provinces swung to National, and the pundits, Left, Right, and Media, have all assumed that this is because they had tired of the direction in which the Labour Government has been leading New Zealand. They are only partially right. Provincial New Zealand swung to the right because they are tired of being ignored. The roughly one-third of New Zealanders who don’t live in big cities, think differently from the roughly two-thirds who do. They have different value systems, a different work ethic, they are inherently conservative, quite patriotic, and, perhaps because of the necessity born of isolation, they are resiliently independent-minded.

They have flocked to National this past election because they see the National Party as the most obvious saviour to deliver them from the evils of urban liberalism. When they eventually realise that National is just as subservient to the clamour of the city vote as is Labour, they will, in all likelihood, and in true Kiwi fashion, simply walk away, both from the two major parties, and from that same urban liberal New Zealand society.

Why is this important? After all, in any democracy, reality is that minorities will be subject to the will of majorities; and so it should ever remain. But there is a difference in this case, and it is an important one. That Provincial one-third of New Zealand, just happens to produce about three-quarters of its national wealth. And if conservative, patriotic, Monarchist, rural New Zealand is bullied into abandoning their nation as they know and love it, they are quite likely to take the cities out at the knees, by abandoning them as well. Urban economic activity is largely consumed internally. But export dollars come from farming, fishing, mining, and forestry, and these things don’t happen in cities – and the Provinces know it. Faced with the prospect of enforced Republicanism, the Heartland may up and decide that it is better off without an unproductive urban millstone around its neck. The South Island, brimming with tourists, bursting with sheep, and floating on a sea of untapped oil, has had a simmering pro-independence undercurrent for more than a century. The Provincial North, equally marginalized, under-appreciated, and contributing magnitudinally more than its demographic fair share, may well feel the same way.

How ironic it may prove, that the strongest proponents of Republicanism may be those who ultimately fail to benefit from it. Clinging to power at any cost, for the sake of pushing an agenda for which there is little public support, may well be the undoing of this Government and its various several factions. What may come after them, then, could be very interesting indeed.

There is already grumbling discontent in the hinterland. Motorists have taken to flashing their headlights to warn other drivers of impending speed traps, in numbers this writer has not seen these past twenty years; and as we know, this sort of behaviour is about as close to civil revolt as New Zealand ever gets. Mayhap these beacons of danger, also serve to indicate trouble on the highway ahead.

Perhaps in this cauldron of social engineering which we call New Zealand, we are destined to witness the conception and birth of not one, but maybe two, or even three, Brave New Republics.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 19

DOUBLE SPEAK

IAN WISHART Why Benson-Pope has to go

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n terms of the great political scandals, maybe David Benson-Pope’s extra-curricular activities from 20 years ago don’t rate as highly as some, but it’s hard to avoid reaching the conclusion that the Labour government has well and truly lost any sense of morality and consequent authority.

Once upon a time, Labour stood for accountability against the excesses of greed and the old boys’ network. Indeed, this was largely the election platform that delivered a Helen Clark administration in 1999.

Today, that government is unrecognizable, well and truly overtaken by the stench of political decay.

The release of the poSo why didn’t they prosecute? lice report into BensonAccording to the police, the Pope’s alleged predilection for shoving balls in Benson-Pope case was old, the mouths of schooland not worth the effort boys says less about his guilt or innocence than it does about the gutlessness of the police administration post-Doone and the incredible raw power and cynicism that Helen and her minions can bring to bear to make sure that supposedly independent authorities see things their way.

The police claim that Benson-Pope, a former senior High School teacher turned cabinet minister, was treated like any other citizen during their investigation. Yet here was a teacher against whom the police found a prima facie case, going unprosecuted.

This would be in contrast to the case of a Rotorua childcare worker who police charged with assault a couple of months ago after allegedly pulling sheets and blankets over the heads of three wayward children and throwing a pillow over the top for good measure.

David Benson-Pope’s non prosecution also falls in sharp relief when you consider the case of a female Tauranga schoolteacher six years ago who was prosecuted for assault for taping children’s mouths shut 20, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

(sound familiar?) and whacking them with rulers when they spoke out of turn, according to a Herald report in 1999.

David Benson-Pope appears to have lied to Parliament when he denied that any of these events took place on his watch, because according to the police files there were four credible witnesses and another three who could provide corroborating evidence. Between these seven former students, police confirmed they had a prima facie case against Benson-Pope, despite his denials of innocence.

So why didn’t they prosecute? According to the police, who also failed to prosecute the Prime Minister for fraud despite a prima facie case, the Benson-Pope case was old, and not worth the effort. Perhaps, but on the flipside we’re talking about a Minister of the Crown who appears – as I’ve said – to have lied to Parliament about the truth of the events. There’s no getting around the obvious: as long as Benson-Pope retains his ministerial portfolios he leaves his government in an ongoing constitutional crisis of credibility.

To Benson-Pope’s ongoing shame, as every day goes by he looks less like a genuine liberal and more like a liberal in drag. Then again, that could just be an unfortunate hangover from his days as a civil union cheerleader.

The issue is not really whether Benson-Pope should be convicted of assault, it is about whether there is one single minister on Clark’s team who is capable of telling the truth and abiding by the law of the land.

From the Artful Dodger at the top of the chain, to Mr Gormsby and his tennis balls, to Dyson the drunk driver or Lianne the Liar – in fact too many ministerial casualties to mention – Labour has the reek of a body overdue for a coffin.

Going on current performance, the next three years are going to be an interminable hell for all of us as we wait for this terminally-ill administration to finally cark it.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 21

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER UNdependable UNprepared UNspeakable!

F

or many years now – not unlike I suspect most other people who have a love of history and who believe that “they who ignore history are bound to repeat its mistakes” – I have been casting a very leery eye on an organisation that rejoices in the misnomer, The United Nations. Certainly it has been a very popular organisation amongst smaller client-states who have, through the auspices of the UN, managed for decades to unashamedly milk the democratic, and mainly Western, states of the trillions necessary to shore up their corrupt and frequently evil regimes that are the true reason that so much poverty still exists even today in our world.

Take the UN Human Rights ComIn a manner not that mission for instance. How many of divorced from the attitude of a thoroughly spoilt us do you think are even vaguely child it has of course beaware as to the membership of this come enormously popuapparently touchy-feely organisation lar for many of these rogue beneficiary states to naturally revile and to regularly bite the hands that have been feeding them. Notably they single out for particular abuse and opprobrium, of course, the United States of America, probably the single greatest donor of baksheesh that the world has ever known. That gratitude of any sort is ever the due of those that give and give should scarcely surprise anyone at all, for throughout history so many examples of such rank ingratitude exist that this entire magazine could not contain them all, yet examples within living memory are quite apparent as we look at the current attitudes of France and Germany towards the country that under the Marshall Plan almost single handedly financed the re-building of WW2 shattered Europe.

So I guess that with the US being continually attacked and reviled by even countries in Europe who owe them, in effect, much of what they enjoy today, it should not 22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

come as any real surprise that a plethora of modern day dictatorships, if not actual gangster states, are much given within the various structures of the United Nations to the regular smiting, both hip and thigh, of anything at all that smacks of democracy or fair play.

This brings me to the curious case of the visitation to our shores of one Professor Rodolfo Stavenhagen. The good Professor carries with him almost impeccable credentials – well certainly to any hand-wringing apologist – as to the inherent wickedness of any white colonists who once trotted around the globe planting their national flags all over the map. The Professor works, apparently free of charge but no doubt with suitable expenses, for no lesser organisation than the United Nations Human Rights Commission, or perhaps to be fully accurate, a sort of sub-division of that August body that tends to consider the “Human rights of indigenous people, First Nations or Aboriginals “.

Whilst certainly being quite a lot to have inscribed on one’s visitors card, it condenses nicely to “UN Busybody”. Being New Zealanders, we of course welcome pretty well anyone at all to our country do we not, although perhaps if we were to be a little more sensible in this area we might perhaps in the future be a trifle more concerned as to what some of these UN folk might be up to, and indeed who it is that they in fact truly represent.

Take the UN Human Rights Commission for instance.

How many of us do you think are even vaguely aware as to the membership of this apparently touchy-feely organisation, that in fact membership currently includes the Sudan, who you may recall from TV News is currently involved in a wee bit of genocide, or perhaps the genial Robert Mugabe who having wrecked his own country Zimbabwe presumably now feels qualified to send one of his organisation’s representatives to NZ to see how we are getting on in a democratic sense. Oh yes, we shouldn’t forget Saudi Arabia where the term, ”Give us a hand mate” is one more usually addressed to a petty thief by the guy with the sharp sword about to lop off a limb.

“The Iraqi oil scandal, as it is so delicately described by the elitist world press, is in fact, if you care to research out the details on the net, a tale of corruption of world record proportion, by United Nations officials who cynically set about to steal hundreds of millions of dollars of oil revenue that was meant to supply food and medicine to the people of Iraq”

Or perhaps China, where religious and political freedoms are such examples for the rest of the world to follow. Pakistan also resides on this commission, perhaps on the basis that, after all, elections only confuse people don’t they? Then there’s Cuba. You know, that wonderful little Caribbean paradise that has all those problems trying to fend off the tens of thousands of refugees from Florida and Miami each year.

Mind you at least one country that actually headed up the UN Human Rights Commission in 2003 had managed to solve the problem of noisy aircraft flying overhead; you may recall Libya had developed quite a reputation in this area.

So as I say, Professor Rodolfo Stavenhagen certainly came to our shores with the broadest possible knowledge as to what human rights are all about, having amongst his organisation’s leadership people so inherently wicked and evil as to provide a wonderful yardstick for unbiased and expert comparison when adjudicating on the alleged grinding down of the Whanau by the offspring of the dreaded colonists. The latter, rather confusingly of course, tend these days to make up a fair proportion, genetically speaking, of the bloodlines of the supposedly oppressed as well. Hell of a task the Professor has volunteered for, when you come to think about it, like in a country where Maori and Europeans have known each other for years, in the Biblical sense that is. Leaving aside recent immigration, those folk actually born here are now so thoroughly mixed up genetically that, sure you can choose to call yourself Maori or Pakeha, but give it another hundred years and the word New Zealander will most probably be the only one to truly apply.

But all of this aside, how dare this bleeding heart academic spend little more than a week here in our country and then apart from attending a few Hui have the absolute temerity to presume to instruct us that “the playing field is not equal” that “one law for all is a recipe for making race relations in NZ worse”.

Perhaps as a sop to help quench our outrage he added, “NZ race relations are unequal but favourable”, whatever that actually means, although in comparison to the Sudan, I suppose as long as we hold short from actually hacking each other to death on the basis of race, the good Professor should smile kindly upon us.

To our Prime Minister Helen Clark’s eternal credit she reminds us that the Professor’s sub-committee is “On the outer United Nations system” but nevertheless I am reminded that her Government along with the obsequious Nats when they held office, both of these main parties, whilst no doubt attending lavish UN piss-ups, have signed us up to all sorts of bizarre conventions, treaties and the like, all, if not most of which have never been voted on by the New Zealand electorate.

Regardless, these nevertheless bind us to, and indeed place us in, the same company as some of the most repressive and wicked regimes currently in existence. That somehow we are meant, therefore, to take the visits of passing UN “officials” in any way seriously, or to even consider for a moment that with the whole corrupt and flawed background that it is now well recognised permeates the whole structure of the discredited United Nations, or that their representatives’ comments, reports or whatever are worth anything more than a pinch of possum poo, would be adding some totally undeserved credence to that morally bankrupt organisation which recent events quite plainly show it no

longer in any way shape or form deserves. The Iraqi oil scandal, as it is so delicately described by the elitist world press, is in fact, if you care to research out the details on the net, a tale of corruption of world record proportion, by United Nations officials who cynically set about to steal hundreds of millions of dollars of oil revenue that was meant to supply food and medicine to the people of Iraq. Anyone gone to Prison yet? The ever UNimpressive UN Secretary General Kofi Annan sat around wringing his hands as commander in chief of UN “peacekeepers” whilst over a million Rwandans were chopped to pieces. Now in later years he sits calmly muttering platitudes whilst essentially the same thing happens in the aforementioned Sudan, not to mention all manner of other unspeakable acts of brutality about which all this collection of abject noddies in Kofi’s inner circle ever do is to call another series of totally ineffectual meetings and conferences.

Finally, however let us quote the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan who, in a rare display of forthrightness last September, had the following to say about the UN Human Rights Commission. “It has” he said “cast a shadow on the reputation of the UN system as a whole,” which, one is bound to observe, may well make the UNHRC a whole lot worse than even I might think.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 23

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART A place for miracles

L

ast month, New Zealanders were treated to the modern equivalent of a medieval “Witchsniffing Trial”. Back in the Dark Ages, troublemakers looking for something to do on a Saturday night would go hunting witches. Anyone suspected of doing things a little bit differently from the great unwashed (and back then they really were unwashed) was fair game for a dunking and, if they survived the dunking, subsequently drying out over a nice warm fire.

Sure, these witchsniffers used the Bible to justify their choice of entertainment, in much the same way that many modern atrocities It is not wrong to pray for a are committed in the name of secular humanchild, and the hysteria over ism. But this story isn’t the Tribble case has more to about that conflict. Init’s about how do with anti-supernatural stead, witchsniffing has turned biases than justice into the 21st century media sport known as prosecuting Christians for daring to pray for miracle healings.

In the most recent case, a four month old boy named Caleb Tribble died of a kidney infection after his parents, living 70kms up a rural gravel road more than an hour from the nearest doctor, failed to take him to hospital and instead prayed for the child’s recovery.

It was a case, argued prosecutors and secular humanist media commentators, of ignorant people relying on ‘witchcraft and mumbo-jumbo’ while ‘ignoring modern medical science’. The inevitable end result, they hissed, was that baby Caleb died as a direct result of his parents’ callous, superstitious and ignorant inaction.

Sure, the Tribbles made a bad call, but they’d been visited by a public health nurse the day before who singularly failed to take positive action to save the child herself. If the nurse had really been convinced baby Caleb was in a serious way, why did she not immediately phone 24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

for an ambulance to come out? The Tribbles, at the end of the day, are not medical experts. The public health nurse had more medical knowledge, but failed to enforce it.

There are other mitigating factors for the Tribbles as well. While police and health officials are quick to prosecute the occasional parent who prays for their child and the prayer doesn’t work, we don’t see the 3,800 doctors, nurses and pharmacists who kill a patient in New Zealand each year through negligence or inattention hauled before the courts. That’s right, every year through medical misadventure or mix up, more than 3,000 innocent New Zealanders lose their lives needlessly.

For every Caleb Tribble that hits the headlines, there are 1,900 other deaths going unpunished. One could argue that parents, particularly religious parents, are being singled out because they make easy and entertaining targets.

Within hours of the Tribbles being found guilty of failing to provide the necessaries of life, atheists were all over talk radio with unmitigated venom in their voices, demanding the maximum jail term for the parents as a sign to everyone that God didn’t exist and prayers were a waste of time.

But if that’s the case, how does the NZ Association of Rationalists and Humanists explain what happened to six year old Ethan Faletaogo at Auckland’s Starship Hospital on September 11, 2001?

Ethan had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d contracted a rare secondary infection called rhizopus which was attacking his lungs and rapidly spreading. Starship Oncology’s Dr Lockie Teague told Ethan’s family there’d only been one other diagnosed case of rhizopus in New Zealand and it killed its victim, and only a handful of cases worldwide, nearly all of which had been fatal. The infection, he told them, was already the size of an egg and growing. Ethan had a “maximum” of three weeks to live based on the current spread of the infection, but

if it picked up pace, he said, he could die within a matter of hours. There was nothing Starship could do.

With nowhere else to turn, this non-religious family called a friend of a friend in the middle of the night, a Christian evangelist. While the rest of the world was glued to television screens in the early hours of September 12 watching the twin towers fall, the hand of God was at work in Starship as Josephine Martin prayed at the bedside of the dying six year old. She told Investigate in 2002 that she received a clear sense after a moment’s prayer that God intended to heal Ethan completely, and she was given a vision of a black spot inside the child reducing in size. Although Starship’s doctors were dismissive, Martin reminded them that Christ can work through both medical science and direct miraculous intervention.

After Josephine Martin left, the little boy told his mother he’d felt a strange sensation during the prayer: “I felt God come into me. And mummy, God’s going to heal me!”

Just three days later, stunned medics at Starship Children’s Hospital broke the news to Ethan’s family that for some unknown reason, not only had the rhizopus infection stopped growing, it was now shrinking in size according to the latest scans.

Within two weeks, the egg-sized infection had shrunk to the size of a shriveled pea, and was now small enough for surgeons to operate on to complete its removal.

Within four weeks, not only was Ethan clear of rhizopus, but his acute lymphoblastic leukaemia had vanished without a trace. There was not a single leukaemic cell left in his body, according to a barrage of medical tests.

News of the miracle healing spread like wildfire through Starship’s Ward 27B, both its patients and staff. The oncology experts admitted they could find no medical explanation for Ethan’s complete healing from the terminal illnesses. It was, and remains, a miracle.

So where does that leave the parents of Caleb Tribble? Why did God cure a non Christian (although Ethan and his family became Christians on the strength of what they experienced) and not baby Caleb?

It is impossible to know why God answers some prayers and not others. Miracles, by their very definition, are not part of the ordinary natural order. Sometimes it is our allotted time to die, sometimes it is not. In the Gospels, miracles were a witness of the power of God to a sometimes previously disbelieving audience. They were carried out as much to demonstrate Christ’s authority as to give relief to the recipient.

The Miracle of Ethan Faletaogo, a fully-documented case, serves as a sharp reminder to police prosecutors that basing a prosecution on the uselessness of prayer is itself a dangerous exercise, because obviously Christian prayers can and do effect healings regardless of what god-hating talk radio listeners and hosts might think. But likewise the death of Caleb Tribble is a reminder that God has also given us medical knowledge and technology for a reason – so we use it.

Caleb’s parents no more deserve the secular humanist dunking test than many of the alleged witches who died in the Middle Ages. It is not wrong to pray for a child, and the hysteria over the Tribble case has more to do with anti-supernatural biases than justice. The health nurse should have called an ambulance in my view.

Meanwhile, let anyone who denies the existence of miracles read the account of young Ethan, and ponder it well.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 25

DIARY OF A CABBIE

ADRIAN NEYLAN

Looking for trouble

A

round midnight, a fella in his midthirties hurried out of the Bondi Hotel and approached the cab.

‘Where to, mate?’, I asked, hitting the meter and easing away. ‘Where do you suggest?’, he countered. He was looking to bat on yet had no idea where to do so late on a Sunday night.

‘What are you after’, I asked. ‘Just somewhere for a quiet drink or you wanna tear it up?’. He took a deep breath and paused to consider his preferences. Finally he said, ‘I want to go somewhere there are beautiful girls dancing – somewhere dark, but not strippers. Girls I can have a drink with and talk to’.

When I suggested a men’s club, of which there are a few in Sydney, he took ofI’m a married man with three fence: ‘What, you mean kids. It’s not like I’m trying to pick lap-dancers?’

‘Yeah, in the city’, I said. up or anything. I just want to be ‘Those girls are classier close to beautiful women danc- than strippers, but do pole dancing and stuff ’. By ing. I want to watch them, you now I was guessing, havknow what I mean? ing never been inside a men’s club.

‘Nah, they’re just sluts who take your money’, he spat with some disgust. ‘I want regular women out for a good time’. I considered suggesting it was a fine distinction, but thought better of it.

‘Well, in that case you’ve got a number of choices’, I told him, ‘depending on how much money you have and the type of conversation you’re after’.

‘Put it this way’, he said, ‘I’m a married man with three kids. It’s not like I’m trying to pick up or anything.

I just want to be close to beautiful women dancing. I want to watch them, you know what I mean?’.

No, I thought, but I’ll indulge you for a $20 fare.

‘I’ll take you to the Cross’, I said, ‘there’s a pub up there with a disco on the first floor’. After heading off 26, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

I asked him, ‘You’re not from Sydney?’.

‘Yeah, I am, but I’ve been married for twelve years and never go out. I’ve got no idea about the night life’.

‘So how come you’re out tonight?’, I asked.

‘I felt like doing something different’, he replied.

After a high-profile career as a sportsman he owned and operated a chain of very successful businesses. The job exposed him to many women who thought he was wonderful, yet complained endlessly about their husbands and boyfriends. Whilst he was a good looking bloke, he had managed to stay faithful to his wife. Until he succumbed to the advances of a woman from work.

‘You slept with her?’, I asked.

‘No, but we had sex – and you know what’, he said, ‘I told my wife!’

‘Jeez, mate, you’re a thrillseeker’, I said. ‘How did she take it?’

‘Not too bad’, he said, ‘once I told her it was just sex and nothing emotional. I mean, sex on its own is simply plumbing. It’s love and affairs which threaten women’.

We approached Kings Cross in silence and I thought about what my passenger had told me. He was clearly thinking, too. A man who’d been with the one partner most of his adult life. It must feel like a betrayal of sorts I figured, no matter how one rationalised it. ‘Oh well’, I finally piped up, ‘at least you’re honest about it’.

What else could I say? It was tempting to suggest that if he was in any way fair, he must now extend the same right to his wife, though he came across as too egotistical to do so. Indeed, he never once mentioned that he loved his wife, or praised their marriage.

Whether he realised it or not, the dynamic in their long-term relationship was now altered, maybe irrevocably. Having tasted illicit sex he was now insisting he just wanted to watch beautiful women dancing. Late on a Sunday night. Yeah, right.

Good luck, mate. You’ll need it.

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

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 27

THE INVESTIGATE INTERVIEW

INSIDER’S GUIDE to

HELENGRAD Former WINZ boss Christine Rankin shoots from the lip

WHEN CHRISTINE RANKIN LOST HER JOB HEADING WINZ, THE SUBSEQUENT FALLOUT WAS A POLITICAL SUPERNOVA. NOW, IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH IAN WISHART, THE WOMAN WITH THE BIG EARRINGS IS OUTSPOKEN ABOUT HER NEW MISSION TO END MAORI CHILD ABUSE AND WELFARE DEPENDENCY, AND REVEALS FRESH DETAILS ABOUT CORRUPTION IN THE BEEHIVE RANKIN: I actually moved to Auckland in April, I’d been coming and going since February because I wanted to start a business with my son, and he’d wanted to do that for ages and I was resisting and resisting and thinking ‘Wellington will be alright and I will make it’, but there was no way that I could. I mean, the shadow of Helen sits right over the top of Wellington and people are very afraid of her. And so every time I applied for a job there was great excitement that I’d put my application in, and loads of encouragement, and then it would die.

Because people realized the implications – in Wellington – of hiring me, you know, ‘what would Helen say?’.

Auckland’s just dramatically different. And Matthew and I started a business, but what it does is we transform people in business. We teach transformational leadership, so we’ve had four contracts since April where we go into an organization and assess what their management and leadership issues are, and then we design a course specifically 28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

around those issues. There are some similarities in the four courses we’ve done, but different companies need different emphasis on specific things, and then we do high performance coaching out the other side.

We’ve just had our first graduate group, who are a real estate agency, and they’re doing fantastically, going right off the scale, they’d never been at the top of their performance before and they are now, for two months, so we’re having a ball with those things.

And we’ve got a media company, called Media Wranglers, which we’re having real fun with. We started with a couple of politicians, training a couple of politicians, and we’re doing it with Lindsay Benbrook who used to do it with Angela D’Audney, and he approached us.

INVESTIGATE: What are the issues you’re tackling that are stopping people from functioning?

RANKIN: In terms of leadership? People just don’t understand Photography: COREY BLACKBURN

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 29

what good leadership is. There’s a lot of transactional leadership, so people know how to ‘do’ things, but they don’t really know how to lead people.

It’s astonishing, you look and you think, ‘this isn’t rocket science’, but they really don’t know. And when you talk them through the process and you explain it and you give lots of examples of it, people come alive. And they go out and try it and it works, and they can’t quite believe it.

New Zealanders resist an emotional contact. I remember the Government saying I had a cult leadership. I had a leadership where I was very emotional about my people and passionate about the cause, and that’s really what we need to be. You’ve got to tap into what people are feeling to get them to produce what they need to produce, and it creates a fantastic environment. Some of them we’re teaching very practical, basic skills to, because people go into management positions because they’re good at doing things, and it doesn’t work.

INVESTIGATE: It’s the old story: promote your top salesperson to sales manager – RANKIN: And they hate it. They’re really great at sales. It often happens in real estate, they become the managers but they want to be out there selling, that’s their passion. And it is a mistake to do that.

You’ve got to be able to spot your talent and know what to do with it, that’s part of the issue as well. But I love it, and I love seeing people come alive.

And in Auckland I’ve been welcomed with open arms, if I ring someone to do my networking, which I used to hate doing and I now love, I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone say they won’t see me. Because there is a certain curiosity about what’s she really like and what does she look like, and that works for business so I’m loving it. My whole life since I came to Auckland has been fantastic, and getting this contract which is part of it has opened another dimension really, it’s something that I can be passionate about. It’s a cause and I need a cause.

INVESTIGATE: There’s a wonderful book called “Scuttle Your Ships Before Advancing” which teaches management and leadership based on the actions of great world leaders through history, and the story behind the title was that Spanish explorer Cortes forced his men to swing in behind him once they landed in Mexico by secretly arranging to sink their ships, and thus preventing a retreat back to Spain or a mutiny. His army of 400 men then defeated the entire Aztec nation.

But the book is about the difference between knowing management theory, and being able to actually lead people and take them with you.

RANKIN: Absolutely, and it is about using your personality and your passion for something. I think that people who do jobs that they are not ‘connected’ to – and some people just do a job for a particular reason – it takes away a lot of the pleasure in life. You can become passionate about anything, if you want to, it is about your attitude.

When that job first ended I did a lot of public speaking, I think I’ve exhausted every group in the country that I could possibly talk to now, but I talk about leadership and passion and the lack of both of those in NZ. And they are connected, they’re definitely, definitely connected.

We do not value leadership. We don’t encourage it, we don’t nurture it, we don’t grow it. We haven’t got a winning attitude. We’re this fantastic little country and we go around moaning and complaining about how bad it is, and we concentrate on all the negative things. It’s there for the taking. Even our government – no one’s allowed to win, no one’s really allowed to be very successful, you mustn’t stand out, you mustn’t have a lot of money. God help you, if you make a lot of money then there’s something really wrong with that.

We have fantastic people we could use in terms of leadership, and Jonah Lomu’s a perfect example of that. Here is this incredibly courageous man who has defied all the odds to achieve a hell of a lot and still won’t give in, and we make fun of him and put him down. Across the 30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

world he’s considered ‘it’ in terms of rugby, but we couldn’t care less about him at all. That’s what it feels like to me, and he’s just one example of the people that we treat so badly.

INVESTIGATE: Why do you think that is?

RANKIN: Well our whole culture, we are knockers, there’s no doubt about that, and I personally experienced that when Labour had their campaign against me and they painted this particular picture of me. I was public enemy number one, and my whole life changed. I couldn’t go to the supermarket. I traveled every week in terms of my job because I went to my frontline every single week, I had 6,000 of them, I loved them, I wanted to be in touch with what their problems were, I wanted to fix them and I did. But going to an airport, which I did every week, I had to prepare myself. Because that was the place, like the supermarket, where people tell you what they think in no uncertain terms, whoever the audience may be. It’s a very frightening situation.

People invaded my privacy, I’d have reporters – as I walked down the stairs in my fluffy dressing gown I’d have reporters standing at my front door where there was a big glass panel, waiting for me. People sitting outside my house with cameras.

And then I had my trial and the world changed. I became a celebrity overnight, which is another really strange thing to cope with, people kissing you and touching you. And because I’d been afraid of what people were going to do to me, it took a long while not to be frightened when people approached me. Because they might want to kiss you but I wasn’t sure about that. But I don’t feel like that any more, and there has been no one in the last three or four years that has done anything horrible, people are lovely now.

So we do knock people, but then there’s something in our culture that says ‘we’ve gone too far’, and it swaps over and it’s the absolute opposite of what it was. And it’s quite hard being the person who has to cope with that change.

INVESTIGATE: It’s a bit like school bullying. Once you fight back they look at you in a new light, the attitude changes.

RANKIN: And in fairness, I think my trial told a bit of the other side of the story, because there was a picture painted that I could not fight back against because I wasn’t allowed to speak to the media for such a long time. Or I would go to Maharey’s office and he would plan with me what I was allowed to say.

INVESTIGATE: Is he really “smarmy”?

RANKIN: Oh disgustingly smarmy, disgustingly so. You know when he was telling me I wasn’t allowed to wear Hugo Boss glasses, he had a Hugo Boss suit on. And I’ll never forget the time my team went in there for a meeting – he never used to speak to me during meetings, or very very rarely and he’d pretend I hadn’t spoken and ignore me – but he had a Hugo Boss shoebox and everyone was nudging each other looking at the box because the top was half off, looking at his new Hugo Boss shoes. I can’t tell you the temptation I had to say to him, ‘What are those?’

Because he said to me he was different from me, he was the Minister and he could do anything he liked or wear anything he liked. But in effect he was controlled by Heather Simpson and Helen Clark, and had it been left to him – what he said to me in our first meeting was ‘It’s over now’, he rang me actually and said ‘It’s over, go and tell your people they’ve got nothing to worry about it was just a political game, it’s all over’ – I believe that was his truth, I believe that that’s what he wanted, but he wasn’t allowed to do that.

INVESTIGATE: Let’s go back to that period, Labour had only just been elected, what was the culture you were seeing in the Beehive and public service?

RANKIN: Oh God, one of absolute fear of Helen. She was ‘it’ and everybody did what she wanted. It was bullying and extremely vindictive, and it still is. People are afraid and public servants are very afraid.

“Oh disgustingly

GETTY

ON NO PLACE TO HIDE

The free and frank advice went, the moment they came in the door. I remember Helen Clark addressing chief executives and telling them what she expected of them, and it was literally ‘Do what we tell you to do!’ and ‘There will be no backchat!’, I mean, to give contrary advice to anything they wanted was quite a frightening process.

I’ve never seen manipulation of parliamentary questions like I saw from them. We had to increase the number and change the kind of people that we had in that particular area in Welfare, and now apparently they’ve got a very big team. They just would not accept any an-

swer that they did not want to get out [in public], they’d send it back and tell you to ‘change it, change it, change it!’ until it said what they wanted you to say!

Something would have gone wrong and it would cause embarrassment for the government, and so you’d answer the question honestly. Well, they’d send it back, and say ‘that answer’s not acceptable, describe it another way, come up with something different from that’.

Because they did not want anyone to know what the real situation was. So the answer would be very cleverly manipulated to hide whatever it was. I was astonished by it, because

smarmy, disgustingly so. You know when he was telling me I wasn’t allowed to wear Hugo Boss glasses, he had a Hugo Boss suit on.

And I’ll never forget the time my team went in there for a meeting – he never used to speak to me during meetings, or very very rarely and he’d pretend I hadn’t spoken and ignore me – but he had a Hugo Boss shoebox and everyone was nudging each other looking at the box because the top was half off, looking at his new Hugo Boss shoes. I can’t tell you the temptation I had to say to him, ‘What are those?”

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 31

I had never ever seen that, in the time I’d worked in the national office, I’d never seen that happen before, and it’s a very dangerous thing.

INVESTIGATE: And this was Maharey?

RANKIN: Yes, and his office. They’d go crazy if we answered a question in a particular way that looked bad for him. There was no way that that was allowed to happen. And there’s a lot of hiding of spending and things that goes on in there. People used to come and talk to me about it for a long time, and they were shocked by the level of spending. They spent a million dollars on doing up a floor once. I had so many calls from people after that saying ‘how could this happen?

You couldn’t spend anything!’. And they were talking to me about how they’d hidden the spending so that if any questions were asked the Minister could say ‘well, that’s the Chief Executive’s responsibility’.

And no one can ever track it because of the way it’s coded – well they can, if they know what they’re asking. But things like that are so incredibly dangerous. It encourages people to find ways to hide things, and then if they are exposed the Minister denies any knowledge.

Public servants would be terrified to tell you that they’re terrified, they’d be sent out to say ‘They’re great’ and ‘No, we have no problem working for them’ – they wouldn’t dare to say anything else. But the regime has changed them dramatically.

INVESTIGATE: This comes back down to the issue of leadership, because you saw it too over some of the dramas in the police force. Why haven’t more of these public servants had the cojones that you had, and simply stood up and said, ‘Hang on, this is wrong!’?

RANKIN: Because they are fearful of what’s going to happen to them. And I came from a different place. I came from a terrible family background, and a very dysfunctional life and no success. Despite the fact that I was very bright at school I didn’t do anything and there was no expectation on me to achieve anything. My family didn’t think like that, no one cared. And so I started working for the Department of Social Welfare, and it was a dramatic thing for me, it’s the thing that’s created the way I feel about leadership. You know I’d never had any successes, I didn’t have any ambition, no self confidence. There was some spark in me that had learned to fight back because of my childhood, but I got my first promotion in the DSW after two years. Everyone got their first promotion in the DSW after two years, didn’t matter whether you were good, bad or indifferent, layers and layers and layers of management, you got your turn. And I went to the Takapuna office and from the minute that I walked through the door they kept telling they were so lucky to have me, and I was different, and I was fantastic and I was so talented and I was going to go a long way. I kept thinking, ‘you’re going to find out about me because I can’t do this job’, but what happened (and it’s so clear to me now) is that I was desperate to be what they thought I was. No one had ever said I was good at anything, no one had ever been complimentary or put me up or believed in me, and it was an extremely powerful trigger.

So there was something in me that wanted to respond to that, as there is in everyone, and I did. And of course my career just went for it.

I was a young woman at the time and I was being promoted ahead of men who’d been waiting there 25 years to get that senior job. There was a lot of tension around that, and my career did skyrocket, I just went through those levels very, very quickly. And I did run my places differently. I had a real strong emphasis on how we treated people that we started to call clients – or ‘bennies’ as they used to call them in the old days. I believed they deserved to be treated well, that they should get the best service that they could. We created a department that delivered the best welfare service in the world. We were the best of breed, we were regarded that way by all the other countries we compared ourselves with. We regularly went to world conferences where we were held up as the icon of delivery throughout the world. People came from everywhere to see what we’d done and how we’d done it.

32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

We were a different government department. I believed in all the private sector methods of operating. The first department to ever take performance bonuses down to the front line. First department that had a commercial board, which Margaret Bazley brought in for Income Support, and I learned so much from them. They were absolutely fantastic, and then I had a board in Work and Income, but I remember my board chairman at Income Support writing about what we had done, and he said we compared really favourably with any of the commercial companies that he ran. It was phenomenal the way that place turned around, and people were expected to work. It was a tough environment but they were loved, and they were motivated and inspired to do what they did because they had a God-awful job and they were getting paid at that time around $25,000 a year which wasn’t much, to do one of the most difficult jobs. And they were passionate about it, and it took a lot of hard work to make them passionate about it, but it worked.

INVESTIGATE: Here’s the irony: you are a high powered CEO in the public service, and female, and an administration ostensibly driven by this objective guns for you. What happened?

RANKIN: I didn’t fit the mold, I didn’t fit the image. Wouldn’t you have thought I would have? I was brought up in a coal mining family where my father and mother were passionate Labour supporters. My father would die to think that I am a strong supporter of the Right. He led strike action, miners were on strike for six months, he was incredibly proud of being a leader in terms of that – my mother was not so impressed – but I was brought up on the Labour Party philosophy. I was a Labour party activist, I met my second husband, David Rankin, when he was a candidate in 1978. I worked for him as his electorate secretary and met him and I was passionate about the Labour party, I thought that was where I belonged. But the reality was, for whatever reason, I didn’t.

I’d come from the other side of the tracks, I’d worked my way up in the most difficult of conditions, wouldn’t you have thought that’s what they would admire and where I belonged? But it wasn’t them, it was National that supported me, always, and said that I was ‘the epitome of a public servant’ at the time.

I’m not a lesbian woman, and I have nothing against lesbian women at all, but that seems to be the thrust of the Labour party. I mean, they said to me it was ‘inappropriate’ that I look glamorous as the leader of a welfare agency. Says who? And why?

Is it not OK to be a role model for people who aspire to something else? To say you can come from ‘there’, where you’re battered and beaten and don’t believe in yourself, and you can get to ‘here’? No one becomes the CEO of a department like that unless you’re really good, and I had to fight the system at the same time so I had to be ultra good!

But then they painted me as a dumb blonde, that I was a ‘taker’ who’d spent a lot of money. Look, if you’d come and visited me in my offices in Welfare, I didn’t have an office, I didn’t have any of the trappings of power. I had a boardroom that I used to have my executive meetings in, or have a private meeting with anyone I needed to, I had the same desk and chair as my front line because that meant a huge amount to me. I asked them to sit in open plan, including their managers, no one was allowed an office and I couldn’t have one either. I sat out amongst my people. I didn’t have anything that was flash. You know, I’d go to visit other CEOs – major leather lounge suites, beautiful cocktail cabinets, the lot – I didn’t have any of that, but I was painted as this person using the system.

I was the first CEO ever, and it started the day I was appointed, no one had ever debated the salary of a CEO before but Labour at the time went in and said ‘it’s disgusting, how can she earn $230,000 running a welfare agency?’ The current CEO – and good on him – earns something like $430,000 under their regime. They said public service

“We do not value

salaries had got out of control and they were going to fix it. Take a look at them now!

The second tier in Social Welfare, the Ministry of Social Development, I know that they earn in excess of $300,000, some of those people. The second tier! They have a hard job, fine, but how come, how come, all of that was OK? And it certainly never would have happened to a grey-suited man. Never.

I hope I don’t sound bitter, because I’m truly not. I look back on it as some kind of experience that I still find difficult to understand. I think the public service is a mass of talent, you’ve got some of the greatest brains

in the country who are conditioned and pressured into sitting around in rooms deciding how not to do something. And the public service needs a bomb! It really does! It needs a commercial board put over the top of it and they need to be called to account. There is so much waste and this government certainly didn’t want to address that at all.

INVESTIGATE: And from the sounds of it this government still has too many tentacles reaching – RANKIN: Ha! Everywhere! I have to say with National there was a line they never crossed, and they genuinely did not cross that

leadership. We don’t encourage it, we don’t nurture it, we don’t grow it. We haven’t got a winning attitude.

We’re this fantastic little country and we go around moaning and complaining about how bad it is, and we concentrate on all the negative things.

It’s there for the taking. Even our government – no one’s allowed to win, no one’s really allowed to be very successful, you mustn’t stand out, you mustn’t have a lot of money. God help you, if you make a lot of money then there’s something really wrong with that”

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 33

line. It was like a gentlemen’s agreement, I don’t know how else to describe it. Labour jumped across that line with both feet, and they got a long way over that line. They have created such a culture of fear that there is no turning back unless there is a different government regime.

INVESTIGATE: What happens to people if they buck it?

RANKIN: They get tossed, they certainly don’t go anywhere. I don’t know any rebels in there now, look at the kind of women they’ve appointed: quiet, well-behaved, non-entities really. I don’t think younger women looking at the leaders in the public service, they’d have to say ‘I don’t want to go there’. And the men are exactly the same: grey, quiet, well behaved, do-what-they’re-told public servants.

INVESTIGATE: So moving onto the For The Sake Of The Children Trust, what are you and John Sax trying to do here? What’s the vision?

RANKIN: John’s believed for a long time that successive governments have created policies – he says ‘thirty years of cancer’ – for NZ children, and the levels of abuse are absolutely appalling. In the first instance we have to try, and we will succeed, to get New Zealanders to understand what’s really going on in our country. Because I think most people have some awareness but they don’t know what to do about it so they close their eyes and block their ears and say ‘it’s not me, it’s not my cultural group, we don’t do these things, so there’s nothing I can do, just don’t tell me about it’. The reality is that we’re in one hell of a state and our children are being murdered and sexually abused and battered in a way that most other countries are nowhere near up to the level we are. And any abuse of children is unacceptable, because the whole of society lives with the effects of what happens to those kids.

They struggle to function and they are often our criminals, our rapists, our murderers. Look at their backgrounds, time and time again they’ve been bruised and battered. It’s not an excuse, it’s just a reality.

It is not an issue of poverty, it is an issue of personal responsibility.

We’ve got so much into this mindset of ‘Me! Me! Me!’ and ‘my rights!’.

We don’t look at our children’s rights. John says each child is entitled to a mother and father who love each other and are dedicated to their children, and lots of us can’t give our children that. I didn’t. But it’s still the ultimate. For most of us, if you said ‘what do I want for my kids?’, isn’t that what you want, for them to have their mother and father loving each other and loving them? You couldn’t be brought up in a better atmosphere, and doing the positive things that come from that. The reality is that there’s no emphasis on that any more at all.

INVESTIGATE: If you look at the concept of an ultimate standard, we say to ourselves, ‘gee, we’ve failed’ and we give up. Rather than face the fact that we’ve got a problem, we simply write off the problem and say it’s not an issue anymore. We don’t hold to an ultimate, we don’t hold to a standard, we’d rather get rid of the standard so it doesn’t make us uncomfortable.

RANKIN: Exactly! And do you know that this government – and many previous governments – but I know this government has changed a lot of things in terms of recording things, but there are so many issues that we don’t keep records on nationally so you can’t tell. And when our organization was launched on September 2, there was a story on me being the CEO the next day in the Herald, and the final comment in that article was they’d asked Steve Maharey about it, and he’d said ‘I don’t know what they’re on about, there are only ten children murdered in NZ every year’.

‘Only’ ten children!

The reality is that those ten children are at the tip of a very, very ugly iceberg. I believe that those poor social workers in Child, Youth and Family are immune, because they see so much they only acknowledge the top end of the abuse scale. You’ve got to attack it at every level because the little things get bigger and bigger and bigger, and the cycle goes on. The people that do it live in a world of their own where they’re not challenged by people outside.

34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

You look at the seatbelt campaign, look at drinking and driving, look at smoking – if you start talking about it and you push the message really hard and you demand people change, they do. And that’s what we’ve got to do for our children.

I don’t yet know all the things that we will be able to do that will make a difference, but if we’re determined we can make New Zealanders aware that this is a ghastly situation that we truly have to do something about.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Muriel Newman’s website [www.nzcpd.com] but she’s encouraging people – she’s taken on this cause for children in a different way that we are, and I haven’t spent any time talking to her about it, but she’s got people contributing to that website and a Maori woman had sent her an email a couple of weeks ago and when I read it I wanted to cry. We’ve got a major cultural problem with Maori and we’re not allowed to talk about it, we must be politically correct and we can’t acknowledge it. And she raised several issues, one was that at the school she works in a six year old girl came to school with a little blanket wrapped around her and she was bleeding – she collapsed – and her brother had had intercourse with her.

She’s six!

Now she had a range of stories about how in Maoridom they say the iwi will deal with it, it doesn’t go outside these doors, but they don’t!

It just goes on. And because it’s been a perpetual cycle of abuse everyone accepts it, and people are afraid anyway.

Unless we stand up and say, ‘This is happening and it can’t go on any longer and it’s not OK’ – you know, 40% of the notifications to CYF are Maori, 6% are Pacific Island. We don’t talk about that, we don’t seem to be allowed to talk about it, but we’ve got to. That doesn’t mean there’s not abuse in the Pakeha community, there is, there’s loads of it, but Maori top the scale by miles.

Look at this weekend that John’s doing with the Mongrel Mob. It’s a risk, no doubt about it. It’s their 25th anniversary, they are for the first time inviting women and children to their gathering, they’ve got a special programme that’s being run by a church organization for their children, so they’re staying separately off the site that John’s given them down here.

They’re saying they’ve watched what happens, they’ve seen what happened to themselves, they know what they’ve done to their own children and they want it to stop. And you’ve got to respond – no matter what you think about them – John believes you’ve got to respond to their good intention, and they’ve approached him about this and so he’s given them premises to hold this. He’s tried to be supportive to them, we’re organizing gifts for the women and children, those kinds of things. It is a risk, might all go wrong, who knows? I mean, the gang culture is a frightening one in many ways and New Zealanders don’t trust it, they are afraid of it, but this group is saying for the first time they don’t want to perpetuate it for their children, ‘we can’t perpetuate this thing for them so how are we going to change it?’ You’ve got to say that’s healthy. We’ve got very sick communities in NZ and we don’t talk about it.

INVESTIGATE: In 1972 I think there were only a couple of murders in the whole country, but we put in place a whole lot of policies ostensibly to nip these social problems in the bud, what went wrong?

RANKIN: I don’t know if policies were put in place, I don’t think they were, I don’t think people understand what they’re dealing with.

I lived in a very violent environment and that was fifty years ago. I’m 51 but I was the baby of my family by a long way and it was an extremely violent family. Society has moved on dramatically since then.

Twenty five years ago I managed my first group of social workers in Grey Lynn, and the first case I ever saw was of a six year old girl who had genital warts and genital herpes. And I’ve never forgotten it because I went home that night and I was so upset and I thought ‘how

“I think Jenny

can anyone do this to one of our babies?’

Well I’ve seen things since then that would make your hair curl. That was the first thing, there were a mass of things, but that was 25 years ago. Society has moved on, it’s not better. Each time, from when I was a child, to 25 years ago, to now, it’s got worse and worse and worse. And because we don’t acknowledge it, and because we never stand up and say ‘those children are precious, they’re the future of this fantastic country’, of course we don’t have policies that change it.

Look, Child Youth and Family take children with the best will in the world, maybe, I don’t

know, but they’ve got this policy where the child gets placed back in the family. Now parents abuse the child, so they often go back to the grandparents – who have abused the parents anyway and created this whole cycle of abuse!

But hey, as long as it stays in the family it’s fine, they get sent back into disaster time and time and time again!

Sure, it’s not true of every case, but we’re so damned trendy, we dare not question anything.

And a lot of that is based around whanau support. Well, come on, what really is happening? I just think it’s a tragedy in such a fantastic country.

Shipley was hugely underrated. She was my Minister in Social Welfare, and she had the best brain of anyone I’d ever worked with in politics. She could absorb complex legislation, masses of it, and quote it back to you within hours of reading it. There were no flies on her, you couldn’t put anything past her in any way.

She had the better of public servants, she demanded a lot and she got it, whether you agreed with her or not”

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 35

INVESTIGATE: How do we change that?

RANKIN: Well I’d love to think we had a Prime Minister, whoever that may be, who believed passionately in the country in a way that encouraged people to succeed, who said ‘it’s OK to be different and it’s OK to go out there and win’. Children in our schools now, they don’t get to feel what it’s like to win or lose because they’re not allowed to, everything is smoothed out and we’re all made the same. Well the business world is one where you win and lose. We need a passionate leader who says ‘we’ve got everything and we’re going to use it and we’re going to make the most of every person, and we’re going to help them develop’. Because it’s got to come from the top somewhere.

We need a whole different attitude to being winners. Look at Australia. They think it’s fantastic that they’re as good as they are, they talk about it, they push themselves out there and they expect to win. We sulk for months if we don’t win. But we don’t put our winners up.

We don’t.

INVESTIGATE: Well this comes back to leadership skills, who would you say is the last PM we’ve had who’s been a true leader?

People talk about Helen Clark as a strong leader, but who RANKIN: Helen Clark is a great politician. She is a transformational leader but she’s transformed us in a way I don’t think we wanted to be transformed. She had a social agenda and it’s dangerous because it’s below the radar line. But she is transformational and you’ve got to give her that. Labour Prime Ministers were always transformational, I believe, and National have traditionally been the status quo – good steady hands, safe, dependable usually. I think Norman Kirk was a fantastic Prime Minister, I think he was charismatic, and he was powerful, and he had a passion for the people in the country and he made that obvious. Lange did too, but he stumbled. At the most important time, he stumbled.

I think Jenny Shipley was hugely underrated. She was my Minister in Social Welfare, and she had the best brain of anyone I’d ever worked with in politics. She could absorb complex legislation, masses of it, and quote it back to you within hours of reading it. There were no flies on her, you couldn’t put anything past her in any way. She had the better of public servants, she demanded a lot and she got it, whether you agreed with her or not. But it was that way that she came across that never showed what the woman was actually about, which was a shame, but then Helen’s not appealing, generally, either, and yet she’s done what she’s done very well.

INVESTIGATE: Are we, in a sense, electing grey, non-threatening leaders?

RANKIN: Well, no, I think Helen’s very threatening in many ways!

New Zealand is so perverse in that it wants someone who’s really strong and who is almost a bully and gets what they want and gets it done no matter what, but then they don’t really like what they do, they don’t know what to do about it.

INVESTIGATE: So does that mean we’re thick?

RANKIN: I don’t know what we are, we’re certainly passionless and hard to motivate. I look across the Tasman and if those Australians don’t like something they’re out there marching in the street. We’ve got issues for Africa that we should be out there talking about. Look at breast cancer and women, we treat women disgustingly, every woman in the country should be screaming about it, but we’re so polite. And once you’ve got breast cancer you dare not protest because you might not get the treatment you need.

INVESTIGATE: What’s the medium to long term prognosis for New Zealand?

RANKIN: I do believe we’ve got the potential to make our world fantastic, I really do, but it does depend on leadership and where is it?

Where is the hope? I mean, National are coming into their own in this three years, they have to, and the leadership has got to emerge from in 36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

there somewhere. We need real leadership, and we do need to be honest enough to face our issues and do something about them. If we could become passionate about our potential and our ability, all those skills that are out there, all those people who could contribute so much if they felt fantastic about themselves and the possibilities, then this country could stand out in the world as Social Welfare once did.

INVESTIGATE: What are the biggest issues facing us?

RANKIN: Racial issues are quite big, something else we don’t want to face really but something has to be done about that. Our welfare system is in a hell of a state, and needs a giant overhaul. Because this can’t go on, it costs a fortune and it destroys people along the way.

They don’t understand that when it’s happening to them but it does destroy people. We’ve got to be able to sustain our economic growth and we’ve got to play in the international market and we don’t. We’re insular and focused on ourselves. It’s developing the potential of our people so we capture what is there and put it to good use.

INVESTIGATE: In seeing the gang members and others you’re working with, are you seeing hope?

RANKIN: What I’ve been doing in the last three months has been going and seeing a range of groups, about 35 from memory, and looking at what they’re doing.

And people are doing fantastic work but they’re doing it in an isolated way, and they think there is no way they can have an effect on things overall. Now I don’t think we should become one big group for change but I think we need to come together at various times and stand up and say ‘it’s bad out here’.

There is hope, but everyone looks to the government, and it can’t just be the government. All of us have to take responsibility for what’s happening. And the government’s pretty tight with their funding of things that are making a heck of a difference. It depends whether you’re ‘in’ or you’re ‘out’. And a lot of the people doing fantastic work are out. If you’re labeled as Christian, you’re ‘out’ and you’ve got to fight ultra hard to get what you want. Anything that seems to focus on the family is ‘out’. They pretend it’s not, but in reality that’s the way it seems to be.

INVESTIGATE: The Families Commission was a good idea in principle, but you could always see that as long as they were relying on the Labour administration to bring it in it was guaranteed to be captured.

RANKIN: Absolutely, it is controlled. Helen’s a very smart woman and we all know she knows how to play politics very, very well. So it’s not going to make any great advances while she’s there.

By and large a lot of the people attracted to the public service are very left wing, they buy into a government’s philosophy. And that’s what’s happening down there now, absolutely. They follow the government policy line wholeheartedly and they stop anything that contravenes that. I think teachers are an example of that. There’s some wonderful teachers out there doing a fantastic job, but a lot of teachers have a left wing agenda, and that’s this government’s agenda. And that’s the way they conduct themselves, every day.

INVESTIGATE: What’s the danger for our civil service from this kind of capture?

RANKIN: It’s huge. Either they declare that it is a political organization as they do in places like America where the top jobs are politically appointed, or we go back and have it the way it used to be. Because it’s a very valuable tool, it’s an essential tool to a democracy to have a public service that gives free and frank advice. The way they use public servants now is really dangerous, they just wheel them out with an agreed line on whatever it is, and they would never step away from that – a public servant now would never step away from that.

i

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 37

Who can forget the iconic Sweetwaters music festivals of the seventies and eighties? Thousands of hippies, punks and wildeyed teenagers descending on Ngaruawahia to hear a selection of the world’s top bands at the time. The man behind the music was rock promoter DANIEL KEIGHLEY, but in 1999 his world came crashing down when the final Sweetwaters festival went spectacularly bust. Chased by gang members with a contract on his life, as well as angry creditors, Keighley did jail time for fraud.

Now in this exclusive extract from his new book Sweetwaters: The Untold Story, Keighley writes of the day his music died 38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

GETTY

T

he court bailiff guided me through the tiny door in the courtroom wall, down a series of long spiral steps, where the walls either side were less than an inch from my shoulders. The clearance above my head was less than three inches.

If I took my eyes off the next step below, my arms would grind against the sandpaper plaster surface on either side.

The trek seemed to take forever, the air getting progressively staler, my claustrophobia pushing its way closer and closer to the surface.

Years before, when I was working in London in a venue in Covent

JAILHOUSE ROCK A Kiwi concert promoter’s time behind bars

Garden, I had taken the underground to work one morning, my car being in for servicing. The trains had been full and when we stopped at the Covent Garden Station, it seemed that every person on the train was disembarking there.

The lift at Covent Garden Station is a huge one, obviously constructed to take entire trainloads of passengers in one go – possibly due to the number of people attending the opera. On this day, it was full to its 300 capacity and when it did start to move, it did so sluggishly.

The heat inside the lift was intense, a combination of the hottest

British summer on record and a full quota of overheated passengers having consumed almost every cubic millilitre of air.

Then, the unthinkable happened. Just a metre from its destination, the lift motors stopped. There was total silence and the lights all went off. We were in darkness, the only light coming through the small glass viewing slot at the top of the sliding doors that would be the lift’s exit when it got to its destination.

I felt my claustrophobia kick in and, after 10 minutes, I could not control it. I grasped the half-inch thick metal bars across the door, January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 39

which would concertina back to release us if we ever got to the top, and I started to pull them apart.

The conclusion to this story is that by the time British Rail got the lift up to floor level, I had so mangled the iron bars that everybody in the lift had to be exited through the maintenance door.

Now, as I walked my way down the thin step corridor in the court, I fought the part of me that just wanted to let go. The control side of my brain knew that the only one who would be hurt was me.

The sounds of men shouting from below got progressively closer, and I was able to concentrate on that. Eventually, stress sweat streaming from my brow, we made it into the bottom corridor.

The sound levels were horrific. Arms stretched out of barred windows all along the tiny corridor like old film images of Hades.

The bailiff unlocked a door and pushed me in. It was 10.50 am.

I was dressed in my one and only suit, and had a book in my pocket.

The room was 1.5 metres by 1.5 metres, and had a metal seat and a stainless steel toilet bowl with no toilet paper. It had a thin shelf at bed level, but no mattress.

I tried to read but the thought of the unknowns ahead of me, the constant violent shouting from the corridor and my own personal battle against claustrophobia made the concentration necessary for reading virtually impossible.

I sat and closed my eyes, willing the day away.

Every minute passed second by second.

It was 6.10 pm when my door was opened and, along with nine other prisoners, I was marched to a small police van with seats for four.

We were all packed in, the sensation much worse than a Tokyo subway, the only source of air blocked off when the door lock clicked.

Some of the other prisoners travelling lit up cigarettes immediately and the muggy, airless space became intolerable almost immediately.

We sat in airless darkness for 20 minutes before the vehicle began to move, then we were travelling at speed, around corners and over speed bumps, with bodies being thrown haplessly against the walls of the van.

The ride was brief, before we were parked in the absolute darkness of an underground garage holding area.

Finally, there was movement from the front and the locks on the rear door were opened. Untangling ourselves, we emerged from the van gulping oxygenated air, then were guided through a corridor and locked in a holding cell.

Information was not forthcoming from any of the guards or uniformed police, but murmurs amongst the other inmates suggested that Waikeria was full and that we would be spending some time in the cells in the Hamilton police station.

Processing was swift. Before long, we were moved into the exercise area – a concrete room with seating for six, a yard covered with chicken mesh that opened to the sky and an intense stench of urine. It seems that it was easier to piss in the corner than to wait for the guard to respond to calls of need.

A stale sandwich and a milky cup of tea ended this first day, after which we were pushed through to individual cells much like those beneath the courthouse. Each one had a sliding steel-bar door, a bed 18 inches wide with the head part about eight inches from the toilet bowl, a mattress an inch thick and one blanket.

I folded my jacket to use as a pillow, pulled the dusty blanket up to my chin and tried to will away my body’s need to use the open toilet. I was feeling far too fragile after my long day to cope with having to use the stainless toilet in front of the three cells directly opposite mine.

For nearly a week this was home; the smelly exercise area from 7.00 am to 8.00 pm, then the cells where your neighbour looked directly at your toilet bowl from his cell, and you at his. The screaming of drunks in the ‘tank’ went on all night, suggesting an insane level of violence unimaginable in my ‘normal’ world.

40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

At the end of the week, I was told to prepare myself for leaving.

After a week of 24 hours a day in the same clothes, I smelt bad even to myself. Luckily, I was the only one in the back of the prison station wagon, so could sufficiently anchor myself for the fast-moving trip from Hamilton to Waikeria Prison. It was almost like being free, to have that small space to myself and to see paddocks flashing by after living in fluorescently lit rooms only.

W

aikeria was all business after the Hamilton police cells. Within minutes of arriving there, I was told to strip naked and pushed into a holding cell with a pair of overalls about eight sizes too small. They covered my legs, but just barely. I had to tie the arm segments around my waist. The walls of the holding cell told sad tales of violence, betrayal and pent-up sexuality. They were all I had to read for the three hours I sat there alone – the doors and walls so thick, I could hear nothing of what was going on on the other side.

The next move was to be questioned about where I wished to be held.

An officer reading off some documents asked me if I wanted to be put with the ‘seegs’. I looked confused, and he explained to me that when people are at risk, they segregate them, for safety. He had notes that suggested that I would be at risk from the gang whilst incarcerated, and that I should “consider rooming with the kiddy f***ers” (his words).

The part of me that withered when the gang was mentioned considered the segregation section a great idea but most of me wanted to face it all, to feel okay about myself.

Shuffling from the questioning area, holding the brief overalls up to my stomach, I got moved into a solo cell with its own bed and wash basin. I stayed in this section for a week while they decided whether it was safe for me to be in the general population.

I had just splashed water in my face, the first wash in a week, when the door opened and a large prison guard entered with a food tray.

“I think you got a rough deal mate,” he said, putting the tray on the bed. “I went up to Sweetwaters, and it was a bloody good do. They’re still having a go at you in the newspapers though.”

He threw a tattered Herald on the floor. This mix of camaraderie and guard hostility was common. Even when you were considered someone worth talking to by the prison guards, they would finish the discussion by tipping over your tea or flicking your book on the floor. It was confusing, but part of the ritual.

The baked beans and mashed potato with a saveloy were heaven after the stale Hamilton cell sandwiches. And being able to use your own toilet without six sets of eyes being on you was emotional bliss.

I felt very close to human, with warm food and a two-day-old newspaper. I felt rich. The tiny window at just above head height looked out at grass and trees. I stood on my bed and gazed out for hours a day.

During this time, because of the gang threat, I was not allowed out into the exercise yard but could walk the common area when everybody else was exercising.

At the end of that week, several of us were marched out to a van, some small prisoners with huge overalls and all the big ones with tiny sets. The van moved in silence from one small Waikeria village to another.

We arrived at a section a bit like a small camp. It had an asphalt area that looked like it had been a basketball court, now truly dilapidated, and two stories of what were obviously very small accommodation rooms.

We were marched over to a ‘store’ from which each individual was given a shirt, a pair of elastic-waist jeans, a pair of socks, two sheets approximately 18 inches wide, one blanket, one plastic mug and a water jug. We were then led up to our accommodation. Each room was two metres by three metres, and had four bunks in it.

I stood just inside the door, as he turned the key in the lock, and looked at my new home.

Toilet, basin, the same bed with 18-inch wide mattress about an inch thick, my two new sheets that didn’t quite cover the mattress, a blanket, a plastic cup and a little desk I could sit on the bed to write at. It wasn’t the Ritz but I was so glad to have a room on my own with a toilet it might as well have been In the corner was a plastic bucket. The bucket was the toilet.

This made the Hamilton police cells look like the Sheraton.

From the week prior to my sentencing, the illness that had dominated my life over the two months leading up to the festival had made its presence known. The symptoms, even when I was on monster levels of anti-inflammatories and corticosteroids, were like the worst stomach bug a traveller could imagine, and they were putting me in a cupboard with three other people, with a bucket for a toilet. I had coped in the police cells by staying awake until 3.00 am, and even the rowdiest of the prisoners were asleep, before using the toilet. It was an exercise in control but it had worked for me after a fashion.

Having been ‘oriented’, we were allowed to walk around the compound until dinner. I spent an hour waiting to meet with the warden. I was desperate to arrange a room anywhere that had access to a bathroom.

Eventually, I got called into his office to plead my case. He was not a man prone to sympathy but he was also pragmatic. He had my case file in front of him and he realised that he had to find a solution. He waved me out of the room, sending a guard with me saying, “Take him to 305 in Kowhai.”

The guard walked me through the packed rooms and across the yard in silence. We arrived at a small room – one of about 70 all attached in a large square around a small grass area with two tables – and he unlocked the door.

“Your home buddy,” he broke the silence. “You’re gonna piss a lot of these bastards off for jumping the queue, but at least you’ve got a toilet.”

I stood just inside the door, as he turned the key in the lock, and looked at my new home. Toilet, basin, the same bed with 18-inch wide mattress about an inch thick, my two new sheets that didn’t quite cover the mattress, a blanket, a plastic cup and a little desk I could sit on the bed to write at. It wasn’t the Ritz but I was so glad to have a room on my own with a toilet it might as well have been.

The afternoon passed slowly. I was unsure what the feeding rituals were in the Hillary/Kowhai unit. Up to now, my status as someone whom the gang might have a grudge against had seen me being brought a plastic tray in solitary at every meal time. This new area had an obvious meal room, so I was unsure what the new method would be.

Singularly the most outstanding aspects of the prison system for me to date had been the de-humanisation of the prisoners via public January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 41

ablutions and the total lack of communication. Whenever you moved into a new situation, part of the punishment was to make you have to find out how things worked on your own. Contacting your loved ones, washing your underwear, getting needed items for cleanliness – these were all possible but nobody was going to tell you how to access the knowledge.

At 6.00 pm, when the guards opened up all the cells, I saw everyone moving towards the dining room, so joined the crowd outside the doors. A number of inmates nodded at me, and said “G’day Sweetwaters” (good old mother had made my picture a page icon).

Others just stared.

The dining room doors opened and everybody flooded to tables, leaving the occasional chair empty here and there.

Unsure, I moved towards a table on my left inside the door and just as I was about to pull the chair out, a huge brown hand grabbed me by the arm and pulled me across the room.

I looked at the face on a level with my own, and shoulders several axehandles wide, wondering what was about to happen. My captor pushed me in front of an empty seat, pulled out another seat and sat down.

“That’s the murderers’ table, Sweetwaters – you don’t want to sit there.”

He grabbed his mug and went to join the line of other inmates at an open section where plates carrying food were being passed out.

I watched him as he got his food, filled his mug with something from a large metal container, then came back to the table. “Better get some grub before it runs out,” he nodded at the counter.

Much later I found out that he was an 18-year-old Niuean man who was in for a violent crime, first offence, and that he had a name for looking after newcomers. I had much to thank him for.

The next 12 hours were a huge learning curve. The easiest time was after lock-up that initial night, when instead of the screaming and crying that had been a part of the Hamilton cells, there was the silence of the countryside, with as much security in being locked in as because others were locked out.

M

orning of the first real day saw us all out of our cells by 6.30 am, having a rapid breakfast of two Weetbix, milky tea and soggy toast, and then assembling on the asphalt for morning inspection and job allocations. It became obvious that a permanent job was a sought-after thing, earned by time inside. It was also obvious that the guards who ran the work crews were disciplinarians who wanted everybody turned out smartly. An unshaved face could see you demoted to the job nobody wanted, or even locked up for the day on half rations.

I stood in the line of new inmates and was the only one picked for a job. The guard finished his inspection, sent his selected teams off, then walked me over to the prison gymnasium.

“I want you to vacuum this place, wipe every surface, and clean out the showers,” he said. He glared at me, and left.

I felt reassured by having a task. A job with a beginning and an end seemed to give me somewhere to stand and I went at it enthusiastically.

Bending over to rewind the vacuum cord onto the machine, I thought I heard a sound behind me, half-turning to see what it was. I caught a glimpse of three men just as a large fist smashed into my mouth. I spun over a bench and down into the metal weights.

I raised my hand to my shattered face as the largest of the three reached over and grabbed my shirt front.

“We hear you’ve got some money stashed away, Sweetwaters,” he shook me like a puppy. “What about you tell us where you put it, eh?”

My head was ringing, just like they describe in comics, and I couldn’t seem to get any sounds to come out of my mouth through the blood.

I could see white flecks on the sleeve of my overalls and knew they were bits of my teeth.

The man holding me slapped my face, cursorily, and the pain that had submerged into a dull throb flared twice as bad.

As he threw me down, I flung my arms behind me and found myself gripping a small round metal weight. As he moved closer to slap me again, I swung my right arm in an arc and hit the side of his face with the metal plate as hard as I could.

Blood sprayed across the vinyl seat as I watched his jaw go out of shape in slow motion.

As he fell back into his two mates, I pushed myself back against the wall, grabbing another larger weight as I did so. I tried to say something through the spray of blood, but it was incomprehensible even to me.

I stood waiting for the other two to attack but they looked confused alongside their semi-conscious friend. They finally put his arms around their shoulders and dragged him from the room, checking left and right as they skittered out.

Stunned, I found myself picking up the larger shattered pieces of my front teeth off the carpet, wiping the vinyl bench free of the spray of blood with the cuff of my overalls.

I staggered from the room, intent on finding a guard to hear my story.

A muscular dreadlocked Maori man with a full moko stood just outside the door. “Where are you off to?” he asked.

Expecting another attack, swaying, I tried to tell him I was going to call a guard.

“You’ve got a bit to learn here, bro,” he said. “There are no goodies and baddies in here. If you’re in a fight, whether you started it or not, you go to the digger. Solitary, a blanket instead of clothes and half rations. For a week.”

He came closer, looking at my face.

“As it stands, you could be out of here in six months. But if you end up in the digger, you could end up doing the full time.”

Looking at the teeth in my outstretched hand, he guided me to his cell and taught me how to stick the broken ones back together with a kind of tacky wax mixture. A thin layer of the mixture, flattened out, is the base for the reconstructed teeth. Each piece is pressed firmly into the mixture facing forward, and then the entire creation turned around and pressed against the back of the existing teeth.

“You’ll need this in front of the screws, so they don’t know what went down. It also lets you talk without a lisp.”

Looking in the small mirror he had tucked on his basin, I saw that, apart from the blood around my mouth, the reassembled teeth made me look almost normal. I tested my speech, and he was right. Prior to putting the teeth back together with the sticky mix, I had been lisping intensely. Now, the lisp was minimal.

“You’ll want to make sure your missus doesn’t know you got the bash. This stuff will help you look normal and you’ll get better at knowing how to chew away from the broken teeth.”

I spent the next five days walking around with eyes in the back of my head. Still feeling the trauma of the attack and the sharp pain of aching teeth nerves pounding every minute of the day, there was no way I was going to be caught unaware again. I became adept at slipping each forkful of food into the far left-hand side of my mouth and chewing very carefully, so that I did not lose and swallow what I had left of my front teeth.

I served these early days either in the gym or weeding gardens, and was moved into the kitchens by the week’s end. There is an adage amongst old ‘lagsters’ that “nobody f***s with you when you’re spooning the mash”. Almost the only thing to look forward to when you’re inside, other than the possibility of a visit from a loved one, is meal

A mystery from inside NZ’s Bermuda Triangle

42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

I spent the next five days walking around with eyes in the back of my head. Still feeling the trauma of the attack and the sharp pain of aching teeth nerves pounding every minute of the day, there was no way I was going to be caught unaware again. I became adept at slipping each forkful of food into the far left-hand side of my mouth and chewing very carefully, so that I did not lose and swallow what I had left of my front teeth time. No matter how meagre the meals or how unappealing the content, you ate everything you were given.

The truly horrendous human beings were often not the inmates but the prison officers charged with the task of guarding the prisoners.

By my third week of working the kitchens, I had evolved a system of condiment preservation that worked well for special meals. Most nights, dinner was boiled cabbage, one saveloy and, occasionally, mashed potato.

On Friday nights, the special treat was a chicken patty rather than a saveloy, and in an attempt to make the meal more special, the kitchen staff would try to amass enough butter to allow each prisoner to spread some on the buns that came with the patty.

No butter was provided at night but for morning meals we were given a pound of butter that we had to cut up into 116 small pieces to allow each inmate enough butter to smear on their soggy toast. If we could create 130 small slivers of butter for the breakfast meal over six days, by Friday we had a substantial little block to give each person to have with their chicken patty.

It was a very small achievement but it seemed major at the time.

Over the period of the week, I got used to a number of the screws

drifting into the kitchen whilst we were serving the meals (we could see the other inmates through a one-way mirror and slid the plates through a six-inch servery slot). Some of the nastier ones would grab a saveloy or two and eat them in front of the kitchen staff. When you knew that there was exactly the right number of saveloys for the number of prisoners eating, you also knew that if the screw was taking a saveloy, it meant one member of the kitchen staff would go without tonight.

This particular week, we had managed to amass almost a full halfpound of butter, and things were looking promising for a great chicken patty night. We had hidden the butter well in the freezer section where the daily milk from the dairy section of the prison farm was kept.

Friday morning came, and we found in place of the half-pound of butter, so lovingly collected, a note from one of the guards. “The butter we found here was obviously excess to daily needs, so we have removed it to the guard room, and will be making a request for less butter to be allocated to this mess hall.�

We were gutted.

The most difficult part of being in prison, not just to me but to every inmate I spoke to, was not having contact with their families.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 43

Towards the end of my first week in Hillary/Kowhai, over 10 days after my initial incarceration, I was finally informed that I had to apply through the prison system to be able to call my wife and family.

I gave the prison office a form with my home number and when my wife would be available there to agree to accept my calls. This initial form, I found out after a week of asking at the office every day, was lost by the people processing it. Fourteen days in, I submitted another application form to allow me to call my family.

At this point, I had not spoken to my wife or children since the day of my sentencing. My daughter’s eighth birthday was due on the 25th March, and I was desperate to hear their voices. I had received a pile of letters earlier that week; some posted the day after my incarceration.

These had made me weak with gratitude.

Finally, on the 26th, permission came through for me to call home as well as my second lot of mail from my wife and other family members.

What I had not been informed of was that it was not possible to make collect calls. If you did not have a phone card, or an organised 0800 number on your home line, you could not call. I made the best of my letters and immediately sat down to write to everyone I knew begging for phone cards.

Within two days, I got a note from the prison office stating that I was cleared to have my first visiting day on the following Saturday and that I was to expect my wife and family at 1.00 pm.

On that Saturday, I realised that my teeth mentor was right.

With my wife and children due to come to see me in the prison, I spent the hours before they were meant to arrive ‘pasting’ my teeth in, in such a way that they looked almost perfect. I was terrified that they would see the damage and go home in fear for my safety. I laid and relaid the fragments on the tacky mat until they looked as real as I could make them.

Waiting for your visitors to arrive is a very difficult time. You sit in a waiting room, unable to see the visitors arriving, and are called out when your visitors have been through their own ordeal of having their bodies searched.

When your visitors have been cleared of carrying any contraband, they are ushered into a yard with a number of picnic tables and told to wait. At that point, you are called into a pre-entry area, searched cursorily, and then allowed access to the yard where your visitors are waiting.

Waiting for this first visit was excruciating. One o’clock came and went. So did half past one, and my worry had moved beyond desperation to fear for the safety of my family. A number of possible horrendous scenarios flickered through my mind, each of them worse than its predecessor. I knew they were coming, so any lateness must have been caused by a car accident or worse.

Finally, at 2.00 pm, I was called through. My relief must have been obvious, and we all hugged together fiercely.

Because of the re-assembled teeth, if I could have passed the time without talking, I would have, but my youngest son, in his need to normalise everything, brought a book he particularly wanted me to read, so I struggled through chapter after chapter of the Swiss Family Robinson, trying desperately hard not to lisp or spit out the neatly laid row of reconstructed teeth.

Putting aside all the fear and trepidation inherent in this visit, I came to know these Saturday afternoon times as the experiences that filled my life and gave me a reason to live.

After each visit, the family would head back out to the car, their harassment over, and each prisoner would be taken back to a small booth, usually in front of the other prisoners and with a minimum of two guards, and strip-searched. The guards would look up your backside, inside your mouth, force you to take off your underwear and turn them inside out. Every part of you that could be used to store drugs was checked.

44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

It was the final humiliation. Each man there felt humanised by his recent connection with those he loved, and the prison system then worked immediately to remove this sliver of humanity.

The screws were not of a kind. A few were quite sadistic, obviously employed for this trait, but some were reasonable human beings. One of the women guards was renowned for the ‘wooden aspirin’. She carried around a heavy table tennis bat, home made, without the rubber overlay, that she would use powerfully against the side of an inmate’s head if she felt he was not listening when she spoke. She wielded this bat without any fear that an inmate would complain. She ordered prisoners to the ‘digger’ (solitary confinement with no clothes, one thin blanket and half rations) in the middle of a King Country winter for looking at her wrongly.

And yet, she was well known for her curious compassion for monarch butterflies – she would have as many as 20 prisoners foraging for plant matter to feed the caterpillars that had stripped every swan plant in the compound.

She was someone to avoid.

I rapidly came to the conclusion that every inmate struggles to make their time go easier or faster whilst in prison.

When I first arrived and was placed in Hillary, it was in the section that had held Borstal, or underage, prisoners, in the 1960s and 1970s.

These kids had slept four to a room with a bucket for a toilet and now, in the new millennium, the same was available to adult prisoners. You got to crap in a bucket less than a foot away from the heads of two of your roommates.

K

owhai was the Ritz section of the prison. Even though the rooms leaked and water lay in stagnant pools outside each cell after the rain, every inmate had a toilet and a small sink to wash at. At one point, under an earlier warden, television cables had been laid to Kowhai. A later warden had had these disconnected from each room, to have them deemed a privilege rather than a right. If you had enough money, either via your friends and relatives outside, or you had earned (at an average of $5.50 per week) whilst inside, you could apply to have your cell ‘connected’.

This involved passing $150 to one of the guards, directly from your prison account’, and it saw the television that your benefactor had left at the prison, often some months ago, released into your room. Then with luck, an aerial connection would be passed through your barred cell window. The payment to the guard was called an electrician’s fee.

Nobody argued. Waikeria nights were boring and some prisoners were looking at several thousand of them.

The prison hierarchy was based on a number of things. If you were part of a gang – Black Power had the highest numbers in Hillary/ Kowhai whilst I was there – your position was reasonably secure. The gang leader highest on the totem was treated with a strong degree of deference even by the guards. Without his cooperation, the prison authorities would get little work out of the inmates. If the authorities treated the leader and the gang members with a degree of respect, the gang members would be told by their leader to cooperate. This made the prison ‘farm’ run smoothly.

Certain work positions within the prison offered the workers more authority and respect than others. In the kitchens, although we had the respect of fellow prisoners, the guards would abuse us whenever they felt like it. Conversely, the dairy teams, those who were trusted to run the commercial part of the prison venture by milking the cows night and morning, were given a wide berth by the prison guards. The dairy teams were skilled and the authorities needed them functioning.

The kitchen teams were always kept from eating breakfast until the dairy teams were in and fed, and sometimes they would arrive back from morning or evening milking very late. Irrespective of when they

arrived, dairy were always afforded a full hot meal much heartier than anything the rest of the prisoners were ever offered.

Breakfast for dairy was often baked beans and eggs on toast, when the general population were dished up a piece of limp toast with Weetbix and colourless tea.

A

t the end of every week, the kitchen teams would stay behind for a further half-hour to secretively load 44-gallon drums of kitchen waste onto the tray of one of the local guard’s trucks as food for his pigs. The upside of this, I found three weeks into kitchen duty, was when he placed two dozen eggs and a kilo of bacon into my hands one morning, and grunted, “Give your boys a good feed. Don’t get caught.”

The entire kitchen staff felt repaid that morning for every time they had gone without because a screw had taken a loaf of bread or half a dozen saveloys or a pound of butter. That morning, as we mopped up our eggs with slices of bacon wrapped in bread, we were all kings.

I had often heard, before actually being in one, that prison could be like a course in ‘Criminality 101’. Proof of that was obvious from virtually my first day in general population. Whenever two or more prisoners sat together to talk, the subject usually came around to the particular crime each was in for. While I was inside, the majority of the young prisoners, substantially Maori, were doing time for growing, selling or possessing marijuana.

An evening discussion often centred around the best ways to grow a good sinsemilla marijuana crop using ‘clones’ and hydroponics. A large percentage of the young growers were IT savvy enough to set up a growing situation in what could seem like an abandoned house, programme a computer to deliver liquid food, additional oxygen or carbon dioxide and to vary the light hours provided by grow lamps to emulate season changes. They could persuade the cannabis plants that they had gone through an entire season in just six weeks to generate up to six full crops a year.

I was stunned by the in-depth knowledge each grower had and the dedication they had to their ‘industry’. I was also amazed that they could accept their sentences, and some were in for up to four years, as part of their business.

Prior to being imprisoned, I had been a person who worked a 12hour day, then returned home to young children who needed parental input. There never seemed to be enough hours in the day to undertake any of the study that really attracted me.

I had always been enthusiastic about information technology, and often took books out of the library on the subject, only to pay a fine on them overdue some months later after they had sat unopened beside my bed.

Now, sitting in Waikeria Prison, I was ‘locked down’ at 8.00 pm, having only myself as company until four in the morning. I had every evening to myself, with no way to read to my children or do any workrelated tasks. I had time on my hands, literally, for the first time in my adult life.

Recognising this opportunity for what it was, I queued to call my wife on the 0800 number a few days before I knew she was going to visit and asked her to take all of the books on visual basic, HTML and XHTML programming out of the local library, and to bring them in to me. For the rest of my time in prison, I studied the programming and design of websites whenever I had any time alone. I consumed the last of the books and was itching to get my hands on a computer to test my knowledge by designing a site.

The following day, I read a notice on the office window offering the opportunity to take a computer course in the prison library, run by the prison computer specialist. Here, I thought, was an opportunity to access a machine to see how well I had assimilated the programming knowledge.

Thrilled with the outcome, I barely had a chance to hug my wife and brother before the guard dragged me off back to Hillary/Kowhai.

Though I had a form of freedom from actual imprisonment ahead of me, the screw made obvious on the walk back to our section that the last of my time was not going to go easy I was amazed when I was given permission to attend the library with the other 45 interested inmates, to find that the prison’s ‘computer suite’ was one very old machine with insufficient RAM to run any version of Windows, and with no hard drive to speak of.

To use any programme on this computer, it was necessary to insert the two programme disks, complete your document, then eject the disks to enable a file save on another five-inch floppy.

I had not seen such a system since the mid 1980s. Realising that I was not going to be able to achieve anything on this computer, and that whatever the other enthusiastic inmates learned on this machine was going to be worse than useless when they were released (many of them saw this course as a means to increase their value in the workplace), I decided to attempt to re-equip the prison with better workstations.

While working with the liquidator at the end of the festival, I had January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 45

noted that he had amassed a large number of low-level Macintosh computers that I knew he was keen to get out of his overladen storage space. I believed I could persuade him to donate these dinosaurs to a better cause. Even though they were of little use in the commercial environment, they were perfect for teaching modern versions of Microsoft Office.

I approached the head warden of Hillary/Kowhai with the idea, sure he would be pleased with the concept and what it would offer to his charges. He was not pleased. Having little computer knowledge himself, he was sure that if better computers were offered to his prisoners, they would access the Internet in some way and bring the sky down on his head. I attempted to show him that without a modem and phone connection, these computers were unable to connect with the outside world but there was nothing that would persuade him to take the chance.

I would not be surprised to hear that Waikeria still boasts the same ancient and useless system, and that any thought of prisoner rehabilitation is given lip service only.

After I had been inside for a month, I received a visit from the probation service. The judge who had sentenced me had also granted me the right to apply for home detention. Sadly for me, the right to home detention did not exist anywhere near the part of the Coromandel I lived in.

Actually, the only home detention option I had was to persuade a family member in or around Auckland to take me in. The first person to offer me a part of his home was my big brother, JK. He had a garage downstairs that had been converted into a sleepout, and if we could persuade the circuit judge that I was worthy, he had said I was welcome to this space.

Once you have the possibility of leaving prison for home detention as an option, the days spent waiting for a hearing stretch interminably. I would go to the prison office every day to enquire after the hearing date.

The probation officer, a compassionate young Italian woman, had informed my wife that she had left the probation report with the prison office, and that it would be given to me at least two days before the hearing to allow me to prepare my plea. On this basis, I expected to know about my hearing at least two days before it happened, because the documents would arrive.

It was a shock then, albeit a positive one, when I was informed that my home detention hearing was due to be the next day at the small courtroom in another section of the prison. I was to make sure that both my wife and my sponsor (my brother) were at the hearing, or it would not proceed. The next one was a month away.

I asked for my probation papers to allow me to prepare my plea. The guards informed me that they knew nothing of probation papers.

With the 0800 number now set up at home in Coromandel, I spent what time I had between meal preparation queuing in an attempt to call my wife to make sure that she and my brother would be at the hearing.

There was no reply. Again and again, every time I called the number, right up to lock-down time at 8.00 pm, there was no reply.

I had not given up entirely. My unlock time for breakfast preparation was 4.35 am, and if I could call home then, there was a possibility that I could still have my support team at the prison by 10.00 am.

With still no reply at 5.00 am, I knew my chances of gaining home detention this month were now fairly slim. I worked through morning meal preparation and serving in a daze.

Part of my new group of connections was the man who handed out clean clothes, sheets and blankets. Being part of the kitchen team ‘entitled’ me to clothes that were the right size, sheets that covered the mattress and socks with no holes.

46, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

On this morning, the man who ran the clothing section dropped some clean clothing off to me at the kitchen by way of offering his solidarity at my hearing. (The downside to food preparation was how quickly your clothes became dirty.)

With orders to present myself at the main prison office at 9.00 am, I showered, dressed in the clean clothing and seated myself outside the office at 8.55 am.

At 9.10 am, the guard who was due to take me over to the courtroom came out of the office and beckoned me to follow him. He was known as a particularly nasty screw, one of those who often stole prisoners’ food and had been seen to spit in the food of prisoners who had particularly irritated him. He was carrying a sheaf of papers with my name at the top.

As I walked behind him across the compound and into another section of the prison, then unknown to me, I asked him if the papers he was carrying were my probation papers. He told me to “shut it”.

I was stunned and elated as I followed the guard through the car park and saw my wife and my brother sitting in a car just ahead of us.

Somehow, they had been given the information that the hearing was on today. Even if I did not have my report to prepare my plea, at least now I had a chance.

I was told by the guard to stand inside the gate of the courthouse entrance; my wife and brother had their identification checked at the gate. At that point, my wife asked one of the courtroom guards if she and my brother could see a copy of my probation report.

The courtroom guard seemed a little stunned that a copy had not been provided and turned to the prison screw who had marched me over.

The guard walked to where I was now standing beside my brother and wife, both of whom were seated outside the courtroom. He stood looking down at my family support team and dropped the sheaf of papers into a puddle at my wife’s feet.

“This must be what you are after,” he said, smirking.

We had barely five minutes to read the wet probation report before I was called before Judge Deobhakta – but this was, in fact, irrelevant.

The judge had already decided on the basis of my medical situation that I should be released into home detention, and instructed that 10 days from the hearing date, I should travel to home detention at my brother’s home in Massey to serve the rest of my sentence.

Thrilled with the outcome, I barely had a chance to hug my wife and brother before the guard dragged me off back to Hillary/Kowhai.

Though I had a form of freedom from actual imprisonment ahead of me, the screw made obvious on the walk back to our section that the last of my time was not going to go easy.

The next 10 days passed more slowly than any in my life. It seemed that the judge’s decision that I be allowed home detention was a personal affront to each and every guard in Hillary/Kowhai. Screws would be waiting outside the kitchen when I had finished the five-hour breakfast duty to drag me over to mop out the guard’s lunch room and prepare them a meal using the prisoners’ rations. I would then be marched on to one task after another, being passed on from one guard to the next.

Sometimes this would not finish until an hour after I was due to start in the kitchen, and the lateness of dinner would be blamed on me.

When the novelty of this wore off, I would be chosen as the only person to be locked down from just after breakfast until dinner duty this would go on for two or three days.

Finally, the day in May arrived for my departure. The night before, the guards had thrown me the inevitable pair of white overalls three sizes too small and taken every other piece of clothing and bedding off me. It was going to be a freezing night, but I was on my way.

Sweetwaters: The Untold Story, by Daniel Keighley, $34.99

i

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ne hundred thousand dollars a year may sound like a lot, but for Melodie Darmody and her husband, Mick, it’s a struggle to make ends meet on that sort of combined income. They don’t lead a flash lifestyle, carry huge credit card balances for luxury purchases, drive expensive cars, or live in a what newspapers refer to euphemistically as a ‘leafy suburb’. Instead, they live near Campbelltown in Sydney’s sprawling western suburbs in a house they bought before the property market took off like a rocket, and their driveway is home to a 1983 Ford Fairlane and a 1997 Falcon Futura. Family holidays are spent with relatives in country New South Wales, and they haven’t been to the dentist ‘in years’.

She’s a reporter at a community newspaper, he’s a teacher, and with bills to pay and two kids in childcare, they have precious little in their pockets at the end of a fortnight.

‘We do our budget fortnightly’, Melodie says, explaining their situation. ‘We pay $1000 on the home loan, $155 on the car loan and $600 on childcare. Groceries are only about $100 and the fuel bill at the moment is around $100. That’s really it. There’s not much to spare - when insurance and things like that pop up it’s a big stretch. We’ve got to save up for those costs for a few pays.

We’ve got a payment now for the car insurance and we had one for house insurance a while back, and they’re about $600 each.’

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Like millions of others, the Darmodys’ lives are very price-sensitive.

Which is why the prospect of inflation, spurred on by rising petrol prices – which make the costs of transporting raw materials to factories and finished goods to market that much more expensive – is so daunting. Already, the prices of some key staple items such as milk have gone up, with two of Australia’s biggest dairy concerns, Dairy Farmers Group and National Goods, hiking prices in September. And Aussie Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens recently indicated that the biggest threat to Australia’s economy, which has over the past decade weathered American recessions and Asian meltdowns with aplomb, is inflation.

‘The issue before us in the next year or two is whether the world and Australian economies can adapt to higher energy and resource prices without a significant bout of inflation’, he said. Commonwealth Treasurer Peter Costello has echoed Stevens’ concern, and – even more worryingly for mortgage-holders like the Darmodys – indicated that increasing inflation could lead to higher interest rates as the government attempts to put on the brakes.

Which is exactly the scenario New Zealanders are facing this summer.

NZ Reserve Bank Governor Allan Bollard has raised the official cash rate to highs not seen in years, in a bid to dampen demand for new housing and consumer spending.

“Today’s increase in the OCR,” said Bollard at the end of October, “combined with higher world interest rates and pipeline effects from the re-pricing of fixed rate mortgages, are expected to slow the housing market and household spending over the coming months.”

Which is fine in theory, except that New Zealand’s interest rates are now amongst the highest in the world, encouraging international speculators to not only invest in NZ dollars for the high yields, but also for local speculators to buy large amounts of US currency in the expectation of making a financial killing when the Kiwi dollar eventually heads south. In other words, NZ’s inflationary spiral is now – in part – being caused by the very central bank policies that were supposed to rein it in.

In short, it seems like a sure bet that prices on both sides of the Tasman are heading north, and everyone will, quite literally, be forced to pay the price. As John Edwards, Chief Economist at HSBC Australia says, ‘there’s no doubt that we’ve had a big hit [from fuel prices] recently’, and that there’s also ‘no doubt it’s going to turn up in higher prices for a wide range of goods’.

HOW BAD? BAD. In terms of how far the average family’s budget could be forced to stretch, it is crucial to note that oil prices are not yet at all-time highs.

Worse price spikes have been seen – especially in the 1970s, when inflation was such a world-wide problem that it arguably brought down two U.S. presidents (Gerald ‘Whip Inflation Now’ Ford and later Jimmy Carter, whose opponent, Ronald Reagan, popularized the idea of the ‘misery index’, or the sum of the then-double digit unemployment, inflation, and interest rates). On 17 October 1973, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, OPEC cut off supplies to Israel, the United States, and its allies. As a result, the price of oil surged by about 135% in the Christmas of 1973. After adjusting for inflation, the price of oil increased by almost 220% between 1973 and 1974.

As a result of this, Australasian inflation rate began to accelerate. Higher prices at the pump led to higher prices for just about everything else, and inflation reached an Australian peak of 17.6% per annum in March 1975.

In New Zealand, inflation peaked at more than 19% in June 1987.

In the 1970s, the Government of the day controlled the interest rate, and as increases were unpopular – as they are today – the Government was slow to act when oil started pushing prices skyward. The wrong decisions were made, and inflation got out of control. Today, the RBA would increase the interest rate as inflation pushed up prices, and thereby limit how far the inflation infection could spread.

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In the 1970s, when inflation was such a world-wide problem that it arguably brought down two U.S. presidents (Gerald ‘Whip Inflation Now’ Ford and later Jimmy Car ter, whose opponent, Ronald Reagan, popularized the idea of the ‘miser y index’, or the sum of the then-double digit unemployment, inflation, and interest rates).

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Since 1990, the RBA has kept the rate of interest about 3.6% higher than the rate of inflation – so 17.6% inflation might have meant interest rates at 21.2% per annum. At that rate, repayments on the average Australian mortgage of $230,000 would rise to a little over $4125 each and every month for 20 years.

If such astronomical interest rates seem unlikely, they have precedent. After the second oil shock in 1979 – this time the result of the Iranian Revolution – US monetary policy was handed over the modern breed of central banker. As Chairman of America’s Federal Reserve Bank, Paul Volker (Alan Greenspan’s predecessor) oversaw an increase of 6.5% from the time of his appointment to April 1980. The US saw rates peak at around 17.6%, and brought the economy to the brink of recession. Rates were cut to prevent recession, however when it became clear that inflation had not been beaten rates were push up still farther, to a peak of 19.1% in June.

Speaking on oil prices and the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, research director at economic analysis firm 4Cast, Alan Ruskin, commented that ‘it would not be surprising if oil prices had now spiked by so much that they would not be absorbed by the profit margins of firms, but rather would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices’. He added that ‘it is fear of such an inflationary spiral that encourages central banks to increase rates, in the knowledge that the more they respond now, the lower the risk from inflation in the future’.

FUTURE SHOCK So what is the risk to inflation rates, the our economy, and families like the Darmodys? The increase in Milk and Dairy prices appear to be the thin end of the wedge, with the increase in oil prices and associated costs flushing out the usual suspects.

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New Zealand’s Council of Trade Unions has been pushing all year for five per cent wage rises to compensate for inflation, and on September 21 the ACTU called for a four per cent increase to worker’s minimum wages because ‘petrol prices and other rising costs (were) putting working families under pressure’. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) immediately countered this suggestion, calling it ‘Whitlamesque economic mismanagement’.

‘The ACTU somehow seem to have forgotten that one of the most significant economic mistakes of the 1970s was to index wages to changes in prices in the context of the then-oil price shock’, ACCI chief executive Peter Hendy said at a conference in Sydney.

‘This is the type of thinking can kill an economy stone dead, end economic expansion and doom a society to inflation, recession and major job losses.’

Hendy has a point. It’s widely accepted by economists that the problems associated with the oil shocks of 1974 and 1979 were exacerbated when governments around the world gave into public pressure and accommodated unions’ (understandable) attempts to restore the value of the average pay packet. The majority of businesses were doing it just as tough as workers, and were forced to increase prices so they had something with which to fill those (now fatter) pay packages. This led to an inflationary spiral, where workers asked for more money to make up for the increased cost of living, and firms increased prices and laid off workers to make up for the increased cost of labour.

It is widely accepted that the Government erred in leaving rates too low for too long; and by failing to take steps to counter inflationary wage claims. Artificially propping up the wages of average workers ensured that demand for oil and other goods remained reasonably strong, despite skyrocketing prices – the tonic of higher prices was resisted and the market was prevented from correcting itself.

Another bout of such mismanagement would meet with resistance from the RBNZ or RBA. Interest rates would be increased until folks with loans were so broke that firms would not be able to sell much if they kept putting prices up. The threat of bankruptcy would force firms to refuse claims for an increase in wages that could only be funded by increasing prices.

Central banks have already been forced to re-assess their inflation outlooks in the light of Hurricane Katrina. Oil prices were rising before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita severely damaged oil production and refining capacity in the Gulf of Mexico. China’s (and to a lesser extent, India’s) voracious appetite for all kinds of commodities, and particularly energy, has driven the sustained increase in the price of a barrel of oil.

But while the demand the demand for oil is higher than it has ever been, the true bottleneck is in refining capacity. Oil needs to be turned into petrol or gasoline before it becomes useful to your average family downunder.

And right now, it’s easier to take extra oil out of the ground than it is to build the extra refining capacity required to transform that oil into something usable. As a result, refiners are able to charge a little more for their services, and the price of fuel has risen by still more than the price of oil.

The consequence is that the threat to inflation from more expensive oil is greater than is suggested by the increase in oil prices alone.

HEADING FOR A SPIRAL? The Reserve Bank of New Zealand was among the first central banks to sound the inflation alarm. It warned, in September’s Statement on Monetary Policy, that rates may have to rise as a result of increased fuel prices; it upgraded its inflation forecast to 4% by the end of June 2006 as a result (its upper limit is 3%, like the Reserve Bank of Australia). In anticipation of the RBNZ increasing the rate of interest, financial markets have responded by increasing the rate of interest of Kiwi debt by about 50 basis points (0.5%), suggesting that they expect the RBNZ to increase its rate to 7.25% by Christmas.

It is ffear ear of suc la tionar al tha suchh an inf infla lationar tionaryy spir spiral thatt encourages central banks to increase rates, in the knowledge that the more they w er the risk frfrom om inrespond no w, the lo low now flation in the future

Other central bankers have lately joined the chorus. The US Federal Reserve’s Richard Fisher said that the Fed is watching for inflation pass-through to prices, and the European Central Bank’s Bini-Smaghi signalled that the ECB also has concerns about Oil, commenting that the Bank is ‘closely evaluating how the European economy is reacting to oil prices’.

The latest inflation data suggest that Australian interest rates may also be about to rise. TD Securities supplies the main monthly estimate of Australian inflation; their estimate of inflation for September suggests that inflation has broken above the RBA’s 3% upper target.

Stephen Koukoulas, Chief Strategist at TD Securities, highlighted the advance of another inflationary spiral, telling Investigate, ‘it is important to note that the inflation acceleration is spreading beyond the direct and clear effects of higher petrol prices.’

‘Inflation is accelerating to worrisome levels and is above the top end of the RBA target range. With the economy also picking up and wages growth rising, the RBA will be increasingly keen to increase interest rates to guard against an even more dramatic inflation problem in 2006. An interest rate rise before year end is now on the cards.’As a result of this, TD Securities expect that the RBA will increase interest rates to 5.75% before Christmas.

The risk of inflation from higher oil prices has shifted sentiment back toward an increase in Australian interest rates. Over the past few months, the bias of professional opinion has shifted from a cut over the next six months, to expectations of an increase in interest rates.

In the Australian Financial Review’s most recent regular survey, only one economist said they expected rates to fall over the next six months, while eight expected rates to increase, while the remaining 18 expect rates to remain at 5.5%. If the horizon is extended to the end of June 2006, 10 favour an increase, and 16 see no change. More might be expected to tip an increase once data covering the period with the biggest increases in fuel costs are released.

Ray Attrill, research director in 4cast’s Sydney office, agrees that the pressure is on the RBA. He says that ‘the RBA will be under pressure to increase rates, as higher energy prices boost both inflation and growth’, adding that ‘the RBA should be comparatively free from concerns about choking growth, as Australia benefits from higher prices via exports and investment, as it is a net energy exporter’. As a result, 4cast predicts that ‘the RBA will increase rates to 5.75%, by March 2006’, and that there is a 40 per cent chance rates will increase further, to 6% by the end of June of next year.

UBS Senior Economist Scott Haslem is more pessimistic, and tells Investigate that ‘the re-emergence of inflation risks in the September and December quarters [will] lead to rate hikes [at the] end of 2005/ early 2006’. He nominates 5.75% by Christmas, and 6% before the end

of March – an increase that will see average mortgage rates hop from 6.8% to 7.3%.

A quarter-point increase in the rate of interest adds about $35 per week to the average $230,000, 20-year mortgage. An increase from 6.8% to 7.3% would therefore add about $70 per month to average mortgage repayments. But this is not where the pain of higher oil prices stops. Between June 2004 and June 2005, the average price of petrol was about $1.20. The average household spends about $35 per week, or about $160 per month on fuel, so unless people drive their cars less this year, petrol prices of $1.32 per litre will add about $40 per month to the average fuel bill – the equivalent of another quarter-point increase in the interest rate.

Though many see this worst-case scenario as unlikely, US investment banking behemoth Goldman Sachs recently released a research report that predicted that oil prices may rise as high as US$105 per barrel. They believe that ‘oil markets may have entered the early stages of … a “super spike” period’.

Oil at $105 per barrel would result in pump prices of about NZ$2.15 per litre. Assuming that they don’t make major cutbacks to their driving, this will add about $170 per month to an average household’s fuel bill – the equivalent of more than a one percent mortgage interest rise.

Central banks would increase interest rates, making mortgages more expensive. And companies would have to pass on increased costs to customers and workforces, which would surely be forced to absorb budget-cutting layoffs. In sum, it’s a recipe for the ‘misery index’, and something that would be devastating to families like the Darmodys.

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THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ROD An interview with the late Rod Donald To his critics, Green party co-leader Rod Donald was the devil incarnate, wanting to force NZ business back into the dark ages, they claimed. To many others, Donald was a visionary trying to lead the country to an enlightened and sustainable future. Somewhere in between was a husband and a father. GREG MOON carried out one of the last interviews with ROD DONALD, exploring what he stood for and why

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Photography: NZ HERALD

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GREG: How can NZ maintain sustainability in light of increased overseas ownership and what’s your position on overseas ownership?

ROD: Starting with the last question, our position on overseas ownership is straightforward – we are opposed to any more land being sold to foreign corporations and non-resident foreigners. One of the reasons for that stand is because of the threat to our sustainability. I would have to say we don’t think the NZ lifestyle is sustainable right now. On the surface everything looks reasonably OK – there are obvious exceptions but there are also the less obvious exceptions. So our concerns stem from both the equity point of view of New Zealanders not being able to afford to buy their own land – whether it’s for farming or for their home or a bach at the beach – and from an environmental point of view in terms of the pressure that escalating property prices places on businesses, particularly farmers, to increase productivity and the impact that that in turn has on the environment.

There’s a major report that’s just come out from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment that expresses the very concerns that we hold, which is that in order to generate profits the very ecological infrastructure is being undermined right at the moment so that the balance is out of kilter and we need to restore that balance so that we can produce food and other needs from the land without diminishing what’s known as our natural capital – in other words, we need to live within our income.

The foreign ownership impact has been to drive up the price of land which is putting more pressure on both domestic and foreign owners to extract more out of that land than it can sustain. The non-land foreign ownership: We’re not opposed to foreign investors investing in the business sector providing they’re not just buying up an existing business and milking that dry. So there would be a national interest criteria for any business sale to make sure it really is in the country’s interest that there is going to be new technology, new jobs, new capital invested not just replacing existing capital and sacrificing existing jobs.

GREG: Following on from that, you mentioned escalating property prices and the pressure that puts on the rural sector, what is your policy regarding a way to safeguard that and do you see a safeguard could be construed as protectionism that would mean that you aren’t creating an even playing field, and does that concern you?

ROD: Well, fundamentally we have to protect our planet, and in the NZ context we have to protect the land, the rivers and the seas surrounding our islands, and if we don’t protect them, if we allow them to be exploited without any regulations then we are going to face extinction, quite frankly. So protection is actually at the center of what we’d want to do. In that sense, it doesn’t matter whether the owner of the land is a born and bred New Zealander or foreign investor, there still need to be rules around the behavior of business people to make sure that they don’t destroy literally the goose that lays the golden eggs. Picking up again on that parliamentary commissioner’s report: Intensive farming at the moment is simply not sustainable in ecological terms, so we need to bring some controls in on all intensive farming to reduce, for example, the amount of nitrate pollution into our waters so that we don’t have the situation we have now where a very high proportion, I think its around 90%, of our lowland rivers are polluted to such an extent that they’re not safe to swim in. That is just not an acceptable situation to be in, that business practices, in this case agri-businesses have had such a negative effect on the environment.

And it’s not just on the environment in a touchy-feely way, it’s not just about the aesthetics, it’s about our quality of life – that we can’t actually go and enjoy those rivers without risking some illness as a result of the high nitrate and the high fecal-coliform counts and that in turn has an impact on the tourist industry so there’s an economic cost to one sector of the economy as a result to the excesses of another sector of the economy.

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GREG: I assume you’ll be supporting economic growth – We had a report saying we were number one in the OECD for lowest unemployment. So we’ve experienced a lot of growth in NZ and it just seems to keep going even when other countries are faltering. Is that all as positive a picture as it may seem? Do you support economic growth and what policy do you have to control overseas ownership whilst supporting that growth if you indeed do?

ROD: I think I have covered the controls we’d have on overseas ownership of land, businesses and buildings. As far as economic growth goes, we want a quality economy rather than a quantity one. So in essence we do not support economic growth for growth’s sake, we challenge the model that’s used because we don’t think it’s a very good measure of growth - it only counts where money changes hands, which means it ignores a lot of productive activity that doesn’t involve a financial transaction – for example, parenting. But more to the point what it does count is what we would call negative economic activities, for example, the diesel spill in the Heathcote river in Christchurch.

Because of how we measure GDP that will cause an increase in the size of our economy. Whenever there’s a crime-wave and a lot of burglars break into people’s homes and somebody has to come and fix the windows. That increases economic growth, so it’s not a very smart measure of economic activity. We want what we call genuine measures of progress that assess whether we are actually depleting our environment in pursuit of expanding the economy or whether we are restoring and enhancing the environment. So some sectors of the economy we are dead keen to see grow. We want to see solar hot-water available in every home, so that means the big expansion in the manufacture and installation of solar hot water systems. We want to see a lot more public transport, both buses and trains, so that involves manufacturing rolling stock, but we want to see fewer cars on the road. We want to see less in the way of coal-fired power stations but we want more in the way of wind turbines. So it’s not a quantity issue, it’s a quality issue. We want an economy that is built on a solid environmental foundation rather than actually mining that foundation to the point where the whole thing collapses. So in a nutshell we do not support conventional economic growth. Taking it to the issue of unemployment: On the face of it, NZ’s unemployment is dropping which is a good thing but if you look into that you will see that a lot of the new jobs that have been created in the last quarter have been part time jobs, that’s come through in the statistics. There’s some suspicion that quite a lot of the jobs have been ones taken up by the students over the summer and those jobs will disappear when they go back to polytech and varsity. The other issue is that for the last two or three years there have been more part time jobs, more casual work measured as part of the growing job market and the official figures do not include the jobless who aren’t regarded as actively seeking work as in out knocking on doors – it’s not good enough just to be checking the paper a couple of times a week and applying for the jobs that you see there. And there’s also a lot of New Zealanders who would like more work than they’ve got because they’re only employed part-time or they’re in casual jobs, and that doesn’t show up in these figures either. So, I’m not sure whether the measure that’s used to give us the number one ranking is properly comparative compared to how other countries measure their unemployment.

GREG: You said you’d dealt previously to the definite policies – ROD: Let me quickly say it: No foreign ownership of land. Controls on sales of businesses and buildings: They have to meet a national interest criteria and the key features of that criteria will be job creation; new technology; new capital and the application kicks in at 10% or more foreign ownership and we would load the threshold to sales that involve $10 million whereas the government’s proposing to lift the current $50 million to $100 million. We would want to see a code of

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corporate responsibility introduced because in our view there is a contradiction between the attitude that we have towards people immigrating to NZ and how we can put restrictions on them and throw them out if they don’t meet certain standards or break the law, but at the moment there isn’t a similar test applied to the corporations and neither is there the sanction of evicting them if they don’t play by the rules.

GREG: And what about the existing companies and corporations and their level of ownership – obviously they might have a lot of foreign ownership involved in them.

ROD: We’re stuck with them, at the moment, we don’t intend to throw them out but over time we would envisage requirements such as through the resource management act will get more stringent on all owners whether they’re local or foreign which the foreign owners would have to comply with.

GREG: Do you think that this might lead to foreign investors just pulling their money and time out of NZ and actually if this policy was enacted on it might lead to a recession?

ROD: It would lead to those foreign investors who are only here to speculate leaving, but those who were here for the long haul, who are interested more in making a profit from productivity rather than capital gains or from asset stripping will stay and continue to contribute.

This is not a policy that’s going to come in overnight so I think there would be a phase-in period that would only scare those who have good reason to be scared. I don’t think it would lead to a recession. I think at the moment I think our economy is very vulnerable or fragile because of the extent of foreign ownership and if you look at figures now our total overseas debt is around $190 billion. It means that for the year to September the payments to foreign investors were $8.2 billion in the form of interest and dividends on shares. Now not all of that money left NZ, quite a bit of it was re-invested but the problem with the re-investment is that it just means there’s more capital invested here which means next year there’s even more dividends or interest to be paid. So I see the level of foreign investment as a drain on NZ’s economy right now and it doesn’t need to be that way if the government brought in programs to encourage more savings; if they provided some incentives for work-based superannuation there would be more domestic capital available to invest in our economy without needing to bring in foreign capital and all the complications that creates.

GREG: Now you mentioned some alternatives to gross domestic product, economic growth figures and unemployment figures as truer measures of how an economy is doing within its environmental context and its natural resource bank, so can you talk more to that please.

ROD: Well in terms of economic measures we do need a different measure of Gross national and Gross domestic product that treats as negatives the bad economic activity that takes place. We also need some social indicators that take account of non-economic activity including the contribution that volunteers and parents make to the workforce and factors like whether our life expectancy and mortality are going up or down, - obesity levels, adult literacy, home ownership – all of those social indicators ought to be measured as part of deciding whether we are progressing as a society. Similarly we need an environmental stocktake to measure whether or not air pollution and water pollution are going up or down and also what we would call natural resource accounts, so that we know to what extent we are depleting fossil fuels like gas, oil and coal; the extent to which we are undermining our soil; the capacity of our oceans to produce food and so forth.

GREG: Now some of those things you can plug back into a monetary equation. For example if you take a longer stretch of time you could calculate that at the present rate of resource depletion you could ascribe monetary values to those resources. However some of the 58, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

other things you mentioned, such as the happiness of the human – well you didn’t mention that, but things in that direction – ROD: Happiness is a good measure. I think, as I understand it, the Bhutanese have a happiness index. Happiness is what we’re talking about, in a way. It’s quality of life, and that’s what, at the end of the day, people are more interested in – yes, they want some money in their pocket, but they’re actually much more motivated by the quality of their relationships with other people and their surroundings.

GREG: But when you’re assessing policy, how on earth do you bring such things into the equation?

We want to see solar hot-water available in every home, so that means the big expansion in the manufacture and installation of solar hot water systems. We want to see a lot more public transport, both buses and trains, so that involves manufacturing rolling stock, but we want to see fewer cars on the road. We want to see less in the way of coal-fired power stations but we want more in the way of wind turbines. So it’s not a quantity issue, it’s a quality issue January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 59

ROD: With difficulty, but you’ve got to do it because money is not the only measure of anything, certainly not the measure of happiness and not the measure of our progress as a society. So it’s more complicated, but it’s more real. Just sticking to the environment for a sec: You can’t put a price on the environment, in one sense. In another sense, people have tried because they’ve said “Well, the financial gain of chopping that forest down is x, the financial benefit of leaving it standing is y, therefore we should leave it standing. Because by leaving it standing you might earn some money from tourism or the biodiversity might have a future benefit, there might be some rare insect that excretes some chemical that might solve some health concern.” But that’s not good enough for me. It’s not good enough to say that a forest’s only worth saving because there might be a net economic benefit. The forest has an intrinsic value, it actually exists for other species and not just for our pleasure or profit. That’s effectively what I’m saying, you can’t put a dollar on everything. There are cliches and mantras all over they place about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, or lots of old Indian sayings talk about how you won’t realise how little value money is until the last tree is chopped down or the last fish is caught.

GREG: After hearing that I think about Gaia, the concept of the living biosphere, and I’m just curious as to how closely the Greens take that concept on board, if you’re familiar with that, and to what extent is that just a pipe-dream or is there some kind of groundswell to move towards that kind of idea of us being guardians of the biosphere rather than sheerly exploiting our natural resources?

ROD: I’m no expert on Gaia theory, I can’t say I’ve read very much of it, but we certainly see ourselves as being guardians of the earth rather than masters of it. For a start, Nature is far more powerful than us, the tsunami demonstrates that, but secondly, and more importantly, we have had a very destructive influence on the planet, particularly in the last century or so, particularly because of how we have exploited and consumed fossil fuels and the consequences of that.

Initially it’s simply environmentally damaging in terms of extraction, and then the large scale transport in tankers that ran aground caused a lot of pollution, but now we are starting to really see hit home the impacts of global warming as the result of that fossil fuel extraction and along the way a lot of good agricultural land has been paved in motorways to transport the vehicles that use the fuel. So we need to look at the planet in terms of a guardian role rather than an exploitation role and we need to think in terms of what sort of world are we leaving for our children and their children because the way we’re working at the moment is not sustainable. It’s totally unsustainable to be so oil-dependent, simply because the stuff is going to run out. It doesn’t actually matter when it runs out, the fact is, it’s going to run out at some point and in the meantime our whole economy is structured around oil.

GREG: You spoke in broad terms about those things that we should be valuing that we can’t ascribe a price to but is that an area that you’re developing policy on because what you’re saying to me makes sense in an environmental sense, but in terms of the real life policy things that are happening in the Beehive and making economic decisions and regulating things and bringing things up in terms of parliaments and is there much happening – ROD: Well I think our environmental policy says it all in terms of what our goals are and we take every opportunity we can to try and implement those policies through the parliamentary process. Often we get knocked back by the government rather than being able to move forward, but our policies are around protecting the environment, there’s no doubt about that. There has to be a good reason to exploit the environment or destroy it, otherwise our approach is to conserve and preserve.

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ing to other countries? Do you have good links in terms of these things we’ve been discussing? For example, you mention your idea for no foreign ownership. Are there other countries with similar policies you are using as models?

ROD: There are other countries which have either bans on foreign ownership or certain types of foreign ownership or much tighter restrictions than New Zealand has. I can’t quote you chapter and verse a list of them but despite increasing globalization of the economy there are still places that recognize the need to have very tight rules around that. On trade, there are other green parties that have similar policies to us but there are no countries that take exactly the same line as we do because again a lot of countries have got sucked in by the globalization agenda and somehow say that opening up their borders to free trade is a good thing, but what countries do is often quite different to that because the biggest advocates of free trade particularly the Americans and the European Union are also the biggest protectionists. We’re committed to fair trade, we oppose so-called free trade. We think there do need to be very clear rules governing international trade and they should be developed internationally, but we don’t believe the World Trade Organization is a fair and democratic means of doing that because it’s very much controlled by the big Western powers – they’ve let a few other countries in the door, but it’s still dominated by the West and there is undue influence by the big corporations. So while we support in principal the development of international trading rules, in practice we’re not at all happy about the controlling role that the WTO has and we certainly don’t want a situation where a trade organization has control over environmental and labor standards and human rights.

So our position is that any trade rules that are agreed to must be subject to international human rights conventions, to international labour organisation standards, to international environmental treaties and other environmental standards that we think need to be brought in to provide a balance. Because at the moment the advocates of free trade effectively want open slather, they don’t want restrictions on their trade, they don’t want any acknowledgement of the negative impacts that trade can have on society or on the environment, and we don’t think that’s a level playing field. Having said all of that, there are some things about the government’s agenda which we support. We don’t oppose for the sake of it, we look at what the government wants to do and determine between the good and the bad, and the stuff that is good is around persuading first world countries like the US and the EU to remove domestic production subsidies and export subsidies because we think both of those distort the market and cause production to take place where it is not sustainable and certainly undermines the food security and sovereignty of developing countries who face pressure on them to open their domestic markets to give access to the foreign corporations, but they can’t compete with the goods coming in from overseas because those goods have been subsidised through the production and export subsidies. So that’s got to stop and we support the government on that. What we don’t support is the NZ government demanding that all countries, including third world ones, should have to open up their borders to NZ exports because while as a nation, most people would say they want us to export more, that shouldn’t be at the expense of domestic self-reliance in other economies, and we also have a broader environmental concern that if we did get big expansion in export markets for the likes of dairy produce, that’s going to mean more intensive utilisation of land to produce that dairy produce and more conversions of native bush and dry-land farming into intensive dairying with all the environmental side-effects of that.

GREG: Which are?

ROD: Intensive dairying directly involves a lot of irrigation. That means extracting water from underground or from around a river.

Both have an impact, one on the water table, one on what’s flowing

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 61

through a river which has a localised environmental effect on the other species that live in that river and also human amenity. The groundwater problem – we haven’t got salination difficulties like Australia but that could well come if we keep taking out more water than is being replenished. At the same time the application of fertilizers and the waste from the dairy animals adds nutrients to the soil and often land that’s been converted to dairying simply doesn’t have the capacity, they’re not the right soil types to absorb those nutrients so they go quickly into the groundwater and that ends up in people’s well water downstream and so that water is no longer able to be drunk as is the case now for a lot of households around Ashburton – the nitrate levels in that area are just too high to be drinkable. Another thing that’s been happening as the result of dairy conversions and the push for more efficiency, shelter belts have been removed so that there isn’t the species diversity, even though it was limited, on that land – it’s just basically turning farms into what they call dairy platforms. Then beyond the farmgate, you’ve got the impact of the extra irrigation on energy demand, pushing up use of coal and pressure on damming more rivers or building more schemes like Project Aqua because of the energy demand. Greater cost of freighting the products of these farms both domestically and internationally. So all in all there are some real question marks about intensification of farming and the impact it’s having on the environment.

GREG: What does sustainability mean for you and the Greens, and how does that fit into your vision for New Zealand?

ROD: Sustainability means living within the ability of the planet to meet our needs while being able to replenish ourselves. It means living within our natural capital rather than depleting it. In other words, we live off the income of the planet rather than the capital of the planet. In terms of how it fits in with New Zealand it’s that our unique selling point to the world is our clean green image and that image is somewhat false or hollow and therefore we face the real risk of losing the edge we have, in fact, losing our credibility. We think it can be reclaimed, we think our way of life can be changed so that we are genuinely clean and green, so that when our produce reaches the world markets, it’s genuinely what it says it is, and when tourists come to New Zealand we are genuinely what we claim to be, which is 100% pure. And that’s the way we’re going to earn our living in the world – living up to our own rhetoric rather than risk losing our credibility because we don’t live up to it.

GREG: Now we’ve got some free-trade agreements being worked out at the moment. What are your thoughts on those?

ROD: We’ve had one with Australia for 20 years now and for 18 of those years we’ve been in deficit with them. So the apologists for the agreement would say the deficit would be even worse if we didn’t have a free trade deal, I would question that. The fact is, while we’ve opened our borders to Australia, they’re much smarter about protecting their domestic industries and providing them with subsidies. So I don’t think CER has been to the net benefit of NZ. The second trade agreement we have is with Singapore, that took effect about three years ago.

The time it took effect our trade deficit was $24 million, it’s now well over $200 million, I don’t have the figure off the top of my head, but basically the trade deficit with Singapore is 10 times what it was before we opened our borders. That’s partly because we’ve imported a lot of oil from Singapore which is a substitution for crude from elsewhere.

But even if you leave that oil aside, our exports have gone down in the 3 years we’ve had a free trade agreement. Free trade agreement was meant to open doors, lead to a boom to export into that country, it simply hasn’t happened – they’ve bought less from us, we’ve bought more from them. That is exactly what is going to happen with Thailand. I can’t see our exports to Thailand going up – I don’t think they’ll necessarily shrink, but what will happen is our imports from Thailand will rocket because Thailand is a sweatshop economy. The removal of the last tariffs on the last electronics goods, textile clothing 62, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

and footwear will mean a big influx of those products from Thailand, which, in turn, will put New Zealanders out of jobs. What actually happens with free trade is that New Zealand tends to export jobs and because we’re importing those goods, it exacerbates our trade deficit.

Our trade deficit last calendar year was over $4 billion which is pretty close to an all-time record. We’ve not had $4 billion trade deficits until the last few months and I would maintain the more the government pushes for free trade, the worse our trade deficits get. Of course those trade deficits add to our balance of payments deficit and that has an overall impact on the economy. The way most people feel it is through their interest rates, they’re paying at least 1% more interest on mortgage rates because that’s the risk premium that foreign investors charge to lend us the mortgage capital because of our high balance of payments deficit. So free trade agreements have not been good news for New Zealand and the worst one is the one that’s now proposed, which is the one with China, because whatever impact Thailand has on New Zealand will only be a fraction of what happens with China. Already

unions and large manufacturers are talking about 300,000 jobs being affected as the result of the China deal. They won’t all be lost (although quite a few of them will be) because we can’t compete against what I would call slave labour, because that’s effectively what happens in China – people are treated like slaves whether they are political prisoners or child labour or even adults who are paid below the cost of living. So here we have in NZ a situation where businesses are required by the government to pay a minimum wage of $9.50 per hour; required to provide safe working conditions; required to meet environmental standards. But the government takes no responsibility for ensuring those businesses can compete fairly against importers who can bring in goods that have been made in sweatshops where the wages are terrible, the working conditions are appalling and there are no decent environmental standards. So that’s got to change in our view and that’s what we want to do – move from this so-called free trade to fair trade.

GREG: What about the idea that rather than isolate a large economy such as China because you don’t agree with their environmental or

labor policies, that it’s better to try and encourage them and that requires some amount of trading with them.

ROD: Well we would encourage them, and I’m a big fan of fair trade, so if China wants to produce goods under fair trade conditions then we should be importing them. I used to work for an organisation called Trade Aid that works with co-operatives in developing countries, so my job for six years was as an importer. But giving China a preferential trade agreement that basically says we think that China deserves a preference over all other countries except for Australia and Singapore is actually telling them the opposite of what you’re suggesting, its telling them its OK to carry on exploiting your labor and environment because we’re going to give you a better deal than any other country. Far better that we say to China, you stop your human rights abuses, you lift your wages and working conditions, you respect your environment, and we’ll look at opening our borders a bit. At the moment we’re sending them the wrong signals.

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EDUCATION

Is Intelligent Design the answer to the holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution? Or is it a rear-guard action by fundamentalists to mix religion with science? And why are its supporters so scared of speaking up? JAMES MORROW looks at the latest front in the culture wars

GOD IN THE MACHINE T he voice on the other end of the phone is sounding panicked.

A researcher and scientist at one of Australia’s sandstone universities, he had just been told that Investigate magazine had dug something up about his past –and wanted to have a chat about it.

“Please”, trembled the academic. “You can’t use my name in this.”

What was the terrible secret in this man’s past? Sex, drugs, and rock & roll – or some combination of the three? An illicit relationship with a student?

A lurking plagiarism time-bomb somewhere in his doctoral thesis?

No, nothing like that.

The sordid episode which threatened to run a promising young talent off the academic rails involved his public support a few years ago for Intelligent Design, the controversial new rival to Darwin’s teachings on evolution that has made great gains in the United States and has recently become a hot-button topic in Australasin universities and education ministries. While this lecturer was happy to talk off the record – on what

journalists like to call “deep background” – about the topic, the message was clear: Do not identify me, my field of study, or my support for Intelligent Design, or you will wreck my career.

In interviews with both pro- and anti-Intelligent Design (or “ID”, for short) professors, researchers, and lecturers across the country, one theme emerges: There is a new academic orthodoxy afoot in universities which says that ID must be uniformly and roundly condemned, and that anyone who even suggests that the theory get a hearing be publicly exposed and denounced like a capitalist roader in Mao’s China. Yet that is not to say that there are not a few big-name scientists who support Intelligent Design in Australia: Dr. Graeme Clarke, inventor of the bionic ear, has publicly pledged his belief that ID demands further research, saying “I want to put a scientific hat on, I want to be fair to the discussion”, adding that there is “a sort of rogue element in me that likes to see if there are other ways of thinking things through”.

Despite Clarke’s endorsement, the subject is still taboo. In the words of

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 65

one biologist whose research has convinced him of the rightness of Intelligent Design as a way to fill the many still-unfilled holes in Darwin’s theories, “it would be professional suicide for an academic to come out in support of ID, or even advocate that it receive a fair hearing, in a modern science dominated by scientists whose personal philosophy is scientific naturalism”. It’s not hard to believe him, given that on the very public antiID side of the debate are an army of academics who march in lock-step on the subject.

“It’s not a theory in any scientific sense – it’s not a scientific idea. It’s not science”, says Prof. Jack DaSilva, professor of molecular evolution at the University of Adelaide says when asked about Intelligent Design, echoing the sentiments of the vast majority of academics who are willing to go on the record publicly on the topic of ID. “It’s just creationist religion trying to pass itself off as science. Suggesting that there is some magical supernatural behind it all is simply talking about magic”.

While normally one would be tempted to chalk this sort of intellectual in-fighting up to the nature of university life (as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once famously quipped, “academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small”), the Intelligent Design debate – and the meta-debate over whether it should even be debated – is actually a vital one. Because beyond of the merits of Intelligent Design versus Darwinism are much bigger questions about the ultimate purpose of education, and whether science should exist in a materialist vacuum or admit larger questions of spirituality and that ultimate barbeque stopper, Why are we here?

YOU’LL NEVER MAKE A MOUSETRAP OUT OF ME… So what exactly is Intelligent Design? The phrase, and its initials, have become freighted with meaning over the past few months, ever since the Orlando, Florida-based Campus Crusade for Christ blitzed the country’s schools with a mass-mailing of 3,000 DVDs entitled, Unlocking the Mystery of Life: Intelligent Design. The issue was given a further shot in the arm when Australian Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson suggested that ID could have a place in the country’s science classrooms. These two events sent the scientific community into an uproar.

And, of course, the fact that ID comes out of the United States and is supported by the likes of George W. Bush plays into the hands of normally open-minded academics who worry that their classrooms and laboratories are about to be busted up by gangs of knuckle-dragging Biblethumping rednecks – DaSilva’s “creationists” – who believe that the Earth is 4,000 years old and that the carbon dating of dinosaur bones is the greatest hoax since the government’s cover-up of flying saucers and the UN’s plan to take over the world with black helicopters.

In fact, according to its supporters, Intelligent Design is a very calm, sober, and scientific way of looking at the world that simply admits the possibility of a sentient creator into the continually-vexing problem of how life began on this planet and why it developed as it did.

Michael Behe, Ph.D., teaches in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, birthplace of the American Revolution. He is also the author of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, one of the seminal works on ID theory.

And because he has tenure, his career and position is secure, allowing him to speak freely and even testify in court on behalf of Intelligent Design.

“When Darwin first proposed his ideas, he said that evolution had to work through numerous successive slight modifications – in other words, tiny steps over periods of time”, Behe told Investigate when asked to explain the basics of ID. “If things happened too quickly, it would look like something other than random mutations were involved. Darwin insisted that evolution came about by gradual improvement, but if you look at a molecular level you see a number of components that have to work together in order to produce the function – I call these things ‘irre66, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

ducibly complex’, in that if you take away a part the system won’t work.”

“I make an analogy with a mousetrap. It’s made up of several parts, and all of those are necessary. If one of the parts were missing, it doesn’t work, and it’s hard to see how that would come together otherwise.”

“So there’s this big problem staring Darwinian evolution in the face and no one has explained how these could have come about. If you look at the sort of things that intelligent agents design, they put together things like that all the time. It’s clearly a signature of some sort of intelligence.”

This “mousetrap analogy” is like a red cape to a bull for Darwinists, who say that all the structures the professor describes are simply the result of random chance – a criticism that Behe is familiar with, and which can be easily dealt with by simply crunching the numbers.

“People try to claim these things could happen randomly all the time – it’s a variation on the idea that if you put a million monkeys on a million typewriters, eventually one of them will hammer out the Complete Works of Shakespeare”, says Behe.

“But if you do the math you see it’s mathematically impossible – the time it would take for the ‘random occurrences’ we’re talking about with molecular structures to occur would require time well beyond the lifetime of the universe”.

Beyond of the merits of Intelligent Design versus Darwinism are much bigger questions about the ultimate purpose of education, and whether science should exist in a materialist vacuum or admit larger questions of spirituality and that ultimate barbeque stopper, Why are we here?

Behe’s “irreducible complexity” – and its intellectual cousin, “specified complexity” and the idea that we live in a “fine-tuned” universe – is just one side of the Intelligent Design argument.

The other side of the coin is the fact that there are indeed large holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution – holes which, depending on which side of the Intelligent Design camp one sits, are either windows into the transcendent or gaps in the knowledge which simply require more research to fill.

As the anonymous professor cited at the beginning of this article explains, “the word ‘evolution’ is pretty misused. Evolution is really a hierarchy of three theories: at the top of the pyramid is microevolution, which involves variations within species. No one disputes this, and agriculturalists have been using this for centuries.

Then at the next level is macroevolution, which is the view that life as we know it on this planet

arose from simple life forms over the course of some slow, gradual process – it’s a working hypothesis, though there is a lot of evidence that throws doubt on it. Finally, at the bottom of the pyramid is chemical evolution” – the level at which Behe studies things – “which suggests that life arose by a natural mechanism and that a soup of inorganic chemicals became life somehow. In the1950s everyone thought this stage of evolution had been conclusively proven by the works of Stanley Miller, but now his work has gone into a sad state of decline.”

GOD IN THE MACHINE, OR GOD OF THE GAPS? So much of the debate around Intelligent Design is not about the merits of the theory, or the holes in the Darwinist model that it is meant to fill. Instead, with very limited understanding of either side of the scientific argu-

ment, the ID controversy has – with the help of journalists sympathetic to the academic community – become a stalking horse for so many other issues, and opened up another front of the culture wars that have been raging for years now. The idea of mentioning God – or some sort of supernatural creator – is anathema for scientists who, even if privately religious, exist in a professionally post-Enlightenment environment that believes the lab is not the proper place to examine larger questions of humanity’s origin or place in the universe. Still smarting from what happened to Galileo, the Western scientific establishment is one of the most anticlerical pockets of thought this side of the French Revolution. And again, the fact that ID comes from the United States and has the support of George W. Bush (a man as hated in academia as Marx and Che are exalted; a recent poll showed the US president polling with six percent approval figures among scientists and engineers in his home country) does not help it any on Australian or New Zealand campuses or among notoriously left-wing educators. As Laurie Fraser of East Kurrajong, NSW, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald recently, “Like many other teachers I know, I have begun to teach a response to the Campus Crusade for Christ’s DVD on intelligent design. I am simply instilling in my students the notion that it is impossible to believe in God, that such a belief is irrational and hence intelligent design doesn’t even get a leg-up. Sounds harsh, I know, but if the loonies want to fight dirty, I’m willing to respond in kind.”

This is not to say, of course, that all teachers and academics are anti-ID, or that all Christians are in favour of it being taught. Tim Hawkes, January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 67

headmaster of the prestigious King’s School in Sydney, told the Melbourne Age recently that after viewing the Campus Crusade for Christ’s DVD, he thought it was “quite legitimate to challenge students to think through the implications of there being a ‘grand architect’ of the universe…there are undeniable weaknesses within Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and these must be acknowledged openly.” Meanwhile, more than one Christian academic Investigate spoke with said they did not believe Intelligent Design should be taught – not necessarily because it was bad science, but because it could ultimately be damaging to the cause of faith.

“The problem with ID is that it is in danger of turning into a ‘God of the Gaps’-type idea”, explains Dr. Robert J. Stenning, a physicist at the University of New South Wales, who is also a believing Christian.

“What we’re saying is that we can’t understand how something works, so let’s put God in there and say He must have designed this specifically, and that it can’t have come about by natural processes, that He must have stuck his fingers in somewhere”, Stenning continues. “My worry is that ultimately this will be detrimental to faith. If Christian kids learn these ideas in school, and then some scientific explanation comes about to change the thinking, it could be very challenging.” ne educator who is convinced of the merits of Intelligent Design is Stephen O’Doherty, CEO of Christian Schools Australia – an association of about 150 schools across the country. O’Doherty believes that ID should be available as an option to be taught in Christian schools (he makes no claim about what government schools should or should not do) not just because of the flaws in Darwin’s theories, but because it allows students to grapple with larger questions in the science classroom – an intellectual activity with a long and noble history in the Western tradition, dating all the way back to ancient Athens. And he believes that the kneejerk prejudice against Intelligent Design, or even against questioning Darwin, is just as bad science as teaching that the Earth was literally created in six days.

“I was reading an editorial in New Scientist, which is a magazine I really enjoy, incidentally, and they published this editorial recently that conflated Intelligent Design with neoconservatism, and essentially said that these twin forces were going to bring about a new Dark Ages”, chuckles O’Doherty, musing on the current state of the debate. “But it’s really a different story. In our schools, for example, we have the state curriculum which we teach, but we also have the freedom to explore other dimensions to life within the classroom.”

O’Doherty says that “the science teachers association has already compartmentalized life in a way that keeps kids from thinking bigger than themselves, and says that such questions belong in a separate classroom”, a fact that he claims explains the reason why public school enrollments are flat-lining as parents flock to put their children in lowcost religious schools, be they Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. “In a religious school, these questions can bleed through and be discussed, which is really the original point of education”.

One of O’Doherty’s biggest quibbles with the anti-ID crowd is the way the Enlightenment tradition that modern science is an heir to has become so actively hostile to spiritual questions – and answers. It’s a useful perspective, because it shows that the roots of the still-unsettled fights over Darwin and his theories pre-date the man who explored the world on the Beagle.

“At some point, the scientific community took on a view of evolutionary humanism that has become almost dogma, and if you follow evolution backwards this way, eventually you just say, ‘there is no God, it had to have been chance’. But a Christian sees that same process and says that the evolutionary process shows us the law of God. His character shows through.”

“But this is also the same problem that people who talk about a ‘God

O

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of the Gaps’ get into. You’re still talking about a dichotomous arrangement which arrays science and reason against darkness and hocus-pocus.

One’s view of the universe has to be big enough to understand one’s place in it”, says O’Doherty, which is why he thinks Intelligent Design is a good option to have in the classroom.

“You can’t divorce this discussion from kids, whether it happens in a science classroom or not. If you take a dogmatic view that you cut children off from the search for meaning is a violation of the meaning of education, which ultimately has to do with the question of what it is to be a human being”, he adds.

“The empirically-centered educationalist who says it is about downloading a certain set of idealized facts has a very narrow view of education. In the view of Christian schools, education is about the growth of all facets of the individual, including the spiritual dimension. This is an idea that goes back to ancient Greece.”

While Intelligent Design has a long way to go before it is taught in government-run classrooms – Brendan Nelson’s hat-tip aside – it will surely be a touchstone for the culture wars for some time to come, regardless of its scientific merits. But supporters of ID believe that it is only a matter of time before establishment academia opens its doors to the possibility of a creator who has revealed Himself through the laws of the universe and the development of life on Earth.

“When the Big Bang theory was first proposed in the 1930s, an awful lot of scientists thought it smacked of a religious idea, and really hated it as a result”, says Michael Behe. “It might have had religious overtones because it dealt with the origins of the universe, but it was based on observable data. I see Intelligent Design as being in the same ballpark: it may have religious overtones, but it is still based on data.”

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LIFESTYLE

MONEY

THAR BE GOLD Pick some up as you run for them thar hills when the sharemarket crash comes, says Peter Hensley

I

t is different this time. There was no internet in 1929, directly forcing lending managers to lend on marginal propno hedge funds, little day-trading and, if you were erty deals where the future looks bright. The law of supply unable to read the ticker machine, you had to wait for and demand has once again seen the intrinsic or real asset the next day’s newspaper to find out share market values. values detached from reality. Prices are going to the moon Oh, and by the way, taxi drivers and shoe shine boys were and beyond because of one thing, demand. handing out investment advice free with each ride or shine.

The American, Australian, Kiwi, Canadian and English The roaring 20s got its name because of the economic dream of home ownership is now slowing turning into a boom that presented itself after World War One. Capital- living nightmare for many. Wages have not increased with ism, entrepreneurs and economies thrived in the post war the same intensity as house prices. The price of oil has environment. This enthusiasm spilled over into the stock increased transport and heating costs. Increased house prices market and demand pushed stock prices to unprecedented have created larger loans. Meddling government officials levels. The basic law of supply and demand did not take increasing official cash rates has resulted in the innocent into account intrinsic value. Demand and the supply of punter being squeezed tighter than ever before with mortcheap money forced prices up. The good times were ex- gage rate increases. And on top of that, the traditional pected to last forever. They didn’t. annual silly season is upon us. The season’s success is measThe angst and anguish of buying by using borrowed ured by increased use of credit cards where punters wake money only to lose eveup in the New Year with rything when things a credit hangover.

In the late nineties the number of turned sour gave way to Sooner or later the mutual funds (unit trusts) exceeded a generation who swore free-spending consumer, that it would not hapwho has been selflessly the number of companies listed on the pen to them twice. They extending the economic US market learnt their lessons the boom by using their five hard way. Foreclosures, plus credit cards per day bankruptcies, widespread unemployment, and continu- will suddenly realise that sooner rather than later, they have ous bank failures proved to be hard task masters. As ex- to retire their debt prior to them being able to retire. pected, our forefathers were tough and resilient. They were The simple solution is to curb or slow down their spendalso diligent students who graduated from the University ing. It may seem a simple solution, however this decision of Hard Knocks with honours. They taught themselves is likely to have worldwide economic implications. A change thrift and how to fend for themselves. They also shunned in the spending & saving habits of 77 million plus baby credit and expounded to their children the evils of debt. boomer aged consumers will impact the GDP of most It took another world war to create the circumstances Westernised countries and the listed companies dependnecessary to put the spring back into dormant economies. ent upon these credit addicted consumers.

Three and four generations later, the lessons our forebears The free market cheer leaders suggest that the methods had forced upon them are hidden away in text books and utilised by the authorities have cleverly avoided a share are now the subject of history documentaries. market crash and successfully paved the way for continued Baby boomers, procreated by the survivors of WW2 are prosperity. They declare that it is different this time around. now self-proclaimed property magnates using cheap money That those in charge of our economic future have learnt supplied by lending institutions buoyed by strong eco- from the mistakes of our forefathers, thus creating an endnomic tides and prosperous times. Shareholders of these less economic summer. institutions, expecting a return on their investment are inThey are correct, it is different this time. Debt levels have

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far exceeded previous records. Saving rates in most western countries are either zero or negative. Share markets have remained overvalued for longer than ever before. Banks are lending 100% + mortgages. None of this has happened before and so it is different this time.

In the late nineties the number of mutual funds (unit trusts) exceeded the number of companies listed on the US market. Day-traders were able to buy literally millions of dollars worth of shares they never expected to pay for. If they felt that the market was drifting up, they would buy them in the morning and sell them in the afternoon. On a million shares, if the price moved $0.01 their profit was $10,000. After paying a flat brokerage fee of say $30 each for the buy and sell, they made $9,940 per day. It was easy in the late nineties when the market was drifting up; however, since the turn of the century it’s been tough. The market stopped going up and instead has been stuck in a trading range. It just can’t seem to gather enough support to break out on the upside, nor can it seem to retreat to levels that real investors expect it too.

Today the number of hedge funds exceeds the number of companies listed on the US stock exchange. Hedge fund managers are really daytraders who wear Gucci suits and Armani shirts. They still buy and sell millions of shares daily, however they do it with other people’s money.

They also charge huge performance fees and reward themselves handsomely when they get the trades right: when they go the other way, the investors suffer via a reduced unit value.

Technology has also played a big part in changing the investment playing field. The internet allows prospective punters to view markets in real time and news is reported on the hour by CNN. In the late 1920s company and share market information suffered from printing delays; nowadays books can be printed in a fraction of the time.

Amazon.com lists over 450 references to investing in a bear market.

Books like, “Conquer the Crash”, “Financial Reckoning Day” and “Empire of Debt” have all been bestsellers. Concerned authors (in the US) have actually sent free copies of their books to every congress representative to ensure that they at least have had the opportunity to appraise themselves of the dire economic situation they believe the country is facing.

Astute market watchers know that even if the overall market is locked in a trading range, select groups of shares will be experiencing solid demand and show an increase in price. Over recent months the obvious ones have been oil company shares and energy stocks. The less obvious ones are those that deal in precious metals such as copper, silver and gold. Richard Russell who has been a market commentator for longer than most of the hedge fund managers have been alive recently suggested that he expects to live to see the price of gold in US dollars match the value of the Dow Jones index. His pick is 3,000.

The above suggests that he believes that gold will reach US$3,000 per ounce, (it is currently approximately US$475) and that the Dow Jones Index will also reach 3,000, (it is currently 10,500). Mr Russell is not an off the wall analyst, his subscription-only daily newsletter is the longest running and has the largest continuous readership of all investment newsletters. He has been writing since 1958 and publishes his comments daily via his website www.dowtheoryletters.com. Mr Russell does not know when it will happen, however he firmly believes that it will.

Should Mr Russell’s prediction come to pass then those with debt and other financial liabilities have cause to be concerned. If you are debt free with a well diversified conservative mix of investments then you should start planning your next holiday, the resort is unlikely to be overcrowded.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 71

LIFESTYLE

TOYBOX

GIVE ME A RING More Christmas attractions

T

he Epson Stylus Photo R350 is based upon the highly successfully Stylus Photo R310, and offers many new features including an easy to use control panel, a high quality 2.4: LCD screen, numerous cards slots and PictBridge and for PC free printing directly from digital cameras.

The Stylus Photo R350 prints directly onto compatible CDs and DVDs to produce professional looking, easy to organise home videos or photo albums, prints iron on transfers for T-shirts, and can create fun photo stickers.

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The Epson Stylus Photo R350 is $399 RRP (including GST) and is available for purchase from Epson resellers For full product specifications including light fastness please refer to www.epson.co.nz.

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Jewelry masters Guthries reckon diamonds are Santa’s best friend, and Valentine’s Day isn’t far away either. Visit www.guthries.co.nz

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he special NZ version of the Cordless DUALphone connects to a telephone line to make normal telephone calls, and to a USB port on a PC to make SkypeTM, SkypeOutTM and SkypeInTM calls. The handset display shows your on-line SkypeTM, contacts. If they are, you simply press the green PC Key button and talk to them for free – no matter where they are in the world.

You can also make high quality Internet toll calls via SkypeOutTM to ordinary phones around the world for just a few cents per minute.

For more details visit www. dualphone.co.nz 72, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

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eed a way to ferry your mountain bike to the great outdoors this summer? Thule reckons its new ProRide 591 Bike Carrier is the trick, with a completely new, self-adjusting frame holder allowing easier and quicker loading and unloading of bikes. Constructed with an aluminium tray, the bike carrier is lightweight and easily installed. For those other items you need to stow, Thule’s Atlantis roof box has a low drag co-efficient and a spoiler, as well as a new Power Grip mounting system that Thule claims makes the box easier to load than ever before. Comes with central locking and the option of four sizes.

For detailed specifications call 03 360 2550.

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his universal fitting wall bracket from Pivotelli is designed to mount to plasma screens and LCD TV’s. This wall bracket is truly universal as the mounting frame is adjustable to fit the mounting holes on the TV regardless of their configuration.

The bracket can be adjusted so that the screen is tilted or flat against the wall.

Installation of the bracket is as simple as screwing the base frame to the wall, screwing the body frame to the TV and then mating the two together and inserting the final bolts. There are a number of different mounting options available, including from the ceiling, on a swing bracket and so on. All necessary screws and bolts are included in the box.

More details available on Pivotelli’s website, www.pivotelli.co.nz

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 73

LIFESTYLE

TECHNOLOGY

ALL I WANT FOR XMAS… Still looking for the Christmas gift but unsure how whether you know what you’re doing? Here’s our guide to becoming a hi-tech Santa Claus

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echnology gifts are among the most popular, and with good reason. They’re easy to give, and they’re fun to receive. But with more tech gadgets on the market this year than ever before, you’ll need to enter your gift-buying adventure with some knowledge that will help you focus your search. Here are some tips on what to look for – and what to avoid.

Canon Digital Rebel, Nikon D70s, and Olympus E-500, for example, are priced just above last year’s good quality compact digital cameras, and they offer much more.

If a digital camera is out of your budget but you’re shopping for a digital photo enthusiast, consider picture frames, flash memory cards, photo paper, or other photo accessories that are always in demand.

MP3 PLAYERS INEXPENSIVE PORTABLE COMPUTER These tiny digital music devices are hot gift items. There Desktops are out. Notebooks are in. And the good are two types of MP3 players: those based upon flash news is that notebooks are getting very inexpensive as a memory, which has no moving parts, and those that result. For as little as 800 dollars, you can pick up a nouse a tiny hard drive on which to store music files. frills notebook computer suitable for a student or someFlash-based players are almost indestructible, and this one who needs a machine primarily to do word processyear 1 GB flash-based players are the ones to buy, as ing or check e-mail. they’re less expensive than last year and have ample space The one thing that a notebook computer must have is to hold a decent number of good-quality MP3 files. wireless Internet connectivity. This option should be Hard drive-based playbuilt in to most noteers can hold even more books you’d look at, The Canon Digital Rebel, Nikon music, but they’re susbut if not, the option ceptible to breakage if D70s, and Olympus E-500, for exam- should generally only they’re dropped or misadd about 50 dollars to ple, are priced just above last year’s handled. Many of the the purchase price. good quality compact digital cameras, most popular iPod MP3 Shopping for someplayers are hard diskone who already has a and they offer much more based. notebook? Look for If you’re getting an notebook accessories MP3 player for a sports fan or someone likely to drop that many don’t have but could use, including a headset the device, look at flash players. If purchasing a hard microphone that can be plugged in to the notebook disk-based MP3 player, focus on the 4 GB models. and used for Internet telephone calls, speech recogniThey’re currently the best value. tion, as well as listening to music. Or consider a notebook computer carrying case for the person who may DIGITAL CAMERAS not have one already.

The tiny pocketable digital cameras of last year have given way in popularity to digital SLR cameras in the 6 to 8 WIRELESS GEAR megapixel range.

There’s no better way to share an Internet connection and These interchangeable lens cameras - from names like files within your home than with a wireless Internet setup.

Nikon, Canon, and Olympus – provide stunning qualLook for 802.11 pre-n routers and wireless cards. ity, as well as the flexibility offered by an entire system 802.11g models are still widely available, but they offer comprising lenses, flashes, and other accessories. And less speed – often half as much – than 802.11 pre-n they’re hot because prices have fallen precipitously. The models, and they do not cost much less.

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LCD TVs Last year, LCD TVs were prohibitively expensive, and quality left something to be desired. This year, all of that has changed. The prices of today’s LCD TVs are falling almost as quickly as prices of notebook computers. And these thin, sleek replacements for your old cathode ray tube television set offer picture quality that’s so good you’ll never want to watch television on a standard screen again.

Within the budget of most people are LCD TVs of 32 inches or smaller. Some of these cost no more than a good-quality computer monitor. These are perfect for an office or family room.

LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT There are plenty of very affordable tech gifts that will please anyone with a computer. Everyone, for instance, eventually needs more writable CDs and DVDs. You can purchase these singly or in packs of 10, 50, even 100. They cost next to nothing per disk now, and they’re always in demand.

Thumb-sized USB-based flash drives can be carried on a key chain and plugged in to any USB port for the purpose of copying or transferring files. They’re indispensable, and they come in a range of capacities and prices. USB drives of 128 MB are very inexpensive, while 1 GB drives can cost 150 dollars.

Have an iPod owner on your list? Cases for iPods, amazingly, do not come with some of the units themselves, but they are available as accessories, as are plenty of other iPod doodads.

Young people on your gift giving list will almost certainly have a gaming console of some kind. If that’s the case, find out which console it is – Xbox or PlayStation, for example – and look into an electronic store for a suitable game for the platform.

The range of tech items on the market today makes these gifts suitable for just about anyone. And with more time on their hands around the holiday season, the recipients of your gifts should have plenty of opportunities to enjoy them.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 75

LIFESTYLE

FOOD & DRINK

TALL OR TOSSED? Summer means salads with the BBQ, and a chance for Jacques Windell to test his dodgy sense of humour at the same time

I

thought I’d initially give a bit of a different spin on these stories had any ounce of truth in them, but who things and share some very interesting salad related knows, right? I had a good chuckle when I heard them stories I have found in my travels, which I thought and thought you might enjoy them too. It’s interesting you would find astounding, as indeed I did. however, how believable a half-truth can be in the midst According to my sources Caesar Maximus was a veg- of some fact. I suspect The Da Vinci Code author, Dan etarian and a pretty crazy one and that. He thought up Brown knows that all too well. all sorts of ideas to generate attention and become popuMy Vietnamese friend would of course argue: “A(n lar. One such idea was building the Coliseum. He took ma(.n no’i ngay ho*n a(n chay no’i do^’I” - It’s better to his creation a step further by inviting people to throw eat salty food and speak the truth than to eat vegetarian vegetables at the deer, giraffes and monkeys he would and tell lies.” release into the arena every Sunday afternoon. Couldn’t But, seriously gone are the days when green salad meant have been fun for the animals being pelted by apples, iceberg lettuce. Today, most supermarkets and green gropears and who knows what else. His soldiers would cers offer many different types of greens. There’s red leaf, then round up all the un-eaten veggies, mix them to- red and green romaine, mixed greens, butterhead, spinach, gether into Caesar’s salad and serve it to his guests. kale, watercress and arugula. Generally speaking, the darker But the Roman the leaf, the higher the populace weren’t enternutrient content.

Vegetables are also one of the tained by this for long Various colored vegbest sources of fibre, which help and soon attendance etables add texture and waned, until lions and interest to salads. These reduce blood cholesterol levels, the the idea of making also provide healthrisk of heart disease and cancer. The Christians the main promoting plant meal was introduced. As chemicals called daily recommended intake is one of my Vietnamese phytochemicals. Red, between 25 to 30 grams, so eat friends would say: yellow and green pepyour greens “Co*m thi` rau, ddau pers, beets, broccoli, thi` thuo^’c” – When cauliflower, red cabyou eat, it’s vegetable, when you are sick, it’s medicine.” bage, green peas, red onions and radishes all make tasty No wonder Caesar liked vegetables. He needed lots of it. additions. Vegetables are also one of the best sources Vincent Van Gogh apparently served the nude women of fibre, which help reduce blood cholesterol levels, the he painted a delicious salad during his frequent “breaks”, risk of heart disease and cancer. The daily recommended salad he apparently prepared himself. I guess that was intake is between 25 to 30 grams, so eat your greens! one way of keeping his models at their very best.

Adding fruit to a green salad is a great way to add Then of course there was Leonardo Da Vinci who is color and texture along with extra vitamins, minerals reported to have been a great consumer of salad. He and fiber. Pineapple, orange and melon chunks, raisins, was apparently extremely popular among the virgins of berries and grapes compliment any green salad.

Florence. It is said he had so many virgins waiting for Garbanzo beans, kidney beans, tofu, lean ham, turhis favours at any one time that he routinely sent his key or chicken strips, or canned tuna in spring water also extra virgins out to pick olives from his olive grove. work really well.

By now you’ve probably realized that I’ve been messCroutons, bacon bits and chow mein noodles aren’t ing with your head… I seriously doubt whether any of always the healthiest options. Low-fat shredded cheese,

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hard-boiled eggs or ground flaxseed make excellent substitutes.

One also has to be careful how one dresses one’s salad, because this is where the fat and calories can add up. No more than two tablespoons should be used as that will add roughly 150 calories and 15 grams of fat to the salad. If you’re trying to lose weight reduced fat and calorie dressings should be used. However, the amount you use is still important. And as that very good Vietnamese friend of mine would say: “Mot mieng khi doi bang mot goi khi no - One piece of food while hungry equals a big box of food while full.” I think what he’s trying to say is that green salad without dressing is salad not worth consuming. I mean you have to at least enjoy your food, right? I mean one dry piece of greenery equals the same taste in my mouth as an AB loss to the Wallabies.

If you love the “real” thing, consider vinaigrettes made with olive or canola oil. These oils are high in mono-unsaturated fats that can also help lower blood cholesterol levels. For an almost no-calorie, no-fat topping, splash your salad with lemon juice or flavored vinegar, add salt and pepper and enjoy!

SWISS BROWN, SPINACH & BACON SALAD 12 Meadows Swiss Brown Mushrooms 225g fresh small leaf spinach 175g streaky bacon 1 avocado Juice of 1/2 lemon 15ml snipped fresh chives or chopped spring onions 3 small tomatoes quartered Dressing: 60ml olive or salad oil 15ml dry sherry 15ml lemon juice Grated lemon rind Pinch of castor sugar Pinch of dry mustard Freshly ground black pepper Wash spinach in cold water and drain. Grill the bacon until it is really crisp. Leave to cool and then cut into small pieces. Arrange the spinach in a large salad bowl. Halve the avocado slices on the spinach. Add the meadows Swiss Brown mushrooms and sprinkle with bacon and chives or spring onions. Mix all the dressing ingredients in a screw-top jar and shake well. Just before serving pour over the salad. Serves 4.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 77

LIFESTYLE

HEALTH

CRASH AND LEARN Medical experts are only just beginning to understand what makes some people clumsy

I Claire Morrow

have the legs of a child. A quite tall and large child, shoelaces become important, and the child who is yet to but a child nonetheless. It’s because of the bruises. I ride a bicycle becomes aware that they are different. Eilook like I spend my days scurrying up trees and ther the classmates or the child notice, and the child falling from them, and although this may happen occa- stops trying. They may become withdrawn and isolated sionally, it’s not the whole story. I have no serious neuro- and sometimes appear to have another learning or logical condition, no muscular problems, no other symp- behavior problem, which may exist in tandem, or may toms, no clotting disorder, no nothing. I’m just clumsy. mask the original problem. These children are surprisClumsiness is not the medical term, but it does best ingly no more afflicted by accidents than other children. describe the state, and the other authorities can’t agree Although they are far more likely to fall off a bicycle than on what to call it. The Yiddish word klutz describes other children, they are certain not to be riding it down clumsiness with a negative connotation, and really, there a hill with no hands. is no good connotation. We like to avoid pejorative Accident-prone children and adults are not the same words to avoid being unkind, but clumsiness is incon- thing as clumsy children – or clumsy adults, for that venient, dangerous and not very well understood. Clum- matter. Accident-proneness can be a warning sign or siness is not the same as being accident-prone, although side affect of various medical and social problems in one can be both. adults; for example if there is a neurological problem or Experts cannot agree on what to call clumsiness; a a muscle weakness, there may be rather a lot of dropcontender is “Clumsy Child Syndrome”. Well, it’s de- ping of things. The bruised child may be abused, or scriptive. “Gross Motor Dyspraxia” is a common term have a clotting problem. A sudden increase in accident used to describe clumproneness can be resiness in the medical lated to fatigue, stress or The socially responsible, dependcommunity, praxis bea new medical problem. able type is unlikely to ride a shoping the ability to plan Some people, howgross motor moveever, are just accidentping trolley down a hill. People who ments. Many experts prone. In more controdo reckless things get hurt more do believe that the “unversial research, there are coordinated” child has thought to be certain some kind of problem with the planning part of ac- personality types that are more prone to accidents. A tions. They can’t quite figure out how to do it. Others, large UK study published in 2001 found that ‘dependhowever, contend that the problem is in the carrying ability’ (conscientious and socially responsible behavior) out of the action. It’s not so much that it’s splitting and ‘agreeableness’ (a lack of aggressive or self-centered hairs as that this is all known – or disputed - at a theo- tendencies) were the most important personality traits. retical level. Aside from trying to stick to non-offensive To my own clumsy self ’s dismay, these traits are more descriptions, the treatment is about the same whatever present in the less accident-prone. No more Mrs. Nice you call it.

Guy. Luckily for my self-esteem high levels of “openBetween 5 and 10 per cent of children are thought to ness” (the tendency to learn from experience and to be have Clumsy Child Syndrome, only about 2% are open to suggestion from others) are also linked to inthought to be so affected that it warrants concern. The creased risk of accidents. Perhaps the definition should typical clumsy child is of normal intelligence, and doesn’t be tweaked, as – on the face of it – people who learn have too much trouble until they get to school. But at from experience shouldn’t keep having accidents, right? school throwing and catching, handwriting, and tying It seems obvious that the aggressive, reckless and

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THE CLUMSY CHILD DOES LEARN AND CAN BECOME COMPETENT IN THE USUAL GROSS MOTOR TASKS THAT MATTER. THESE DAYS THEY ARE OFTEN REFERRED TO OCCUPATIONAL THERAPISTS, WHO WORK OUT WHERE THE ACTION IS GOING WRONG AND THEN PRESCRIBE PRACTICE – AND MORE PRACTICE

socially irresponsible are more at risk for accidents. The socially responsible, dependable type is unlikely to ride a shopping trolley down a hill. People who do reckless things get hurt more. “Open” people, though, tend to be a bit dreamy.

They are simply not paying attention. Children and adults with Attention Deficit Disorders are often accident prone for the same reason. It should be obvious that there is no point exhorting someone to pay more attention. If behavior modification was going to work, you wouldn’t need to try nagging, the pain of injury would be enough. Of course, like the legendary surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome, the clumsiness/ accident proneness can be controlled with concentration.

When performing surgery and crossing busy roads. Some would suggest that the accident prone could learn to pay more attention to what they’re doing, but most of our actions aren‘t like that. Unlike the clumsy child who is still learning, we do not have to concentrate on many of our actions. We ride the bike, drive the car, make the coffee without thinking too much about it. It’s that “having learnt” bit that makes us competent at tasks yet conversely prone to distraction and accidents. Driving like one is still on L-plates prevents carelessness, but it is not easy or intuitive, and performance is affected.

The clumsy child does learn and can become competent in the usual gross motor tasks that matter. These days they are often referred to occupational therapists, who work out where the action is going wrong and then prescribe practice – and more practice. The reason for the professional involvement comes from their more specialised awareness of what is going wrong, and also because most parents – reasonably, but not necessarily kindly – find themselves exasperated trying to teach these children, who then get nervous and less competent. Call it a cycle of klutziness.

Research would tend to indicate that each task must be painstaking learned. Finally mastering the bicycle does not correlate to catching the ball. That too must be practiced over and over. However, enough successes encourages more effort, more successes and so forth. The clumsy child may be a slightly clumsy adult; but if all goes well they will be confident, willing to try and well adjusted. And have the legs of a child, just quite tall and large ones.

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January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 79

LIFESTYLE

ALT.HEALTH

HOMEOPATHY – THE FACTS In the battle between big pharmaceuticals and alternative medicine, the fight is getting dirty, writes Tauranga homeopath Clive Stuart

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n August of this year the medical journal The Lancet modern medicine where disease is generally reduced to published a study suggesting that any positive ef- one dysfunctional organ or system. fects from Homeopathic treatment were due to a Little research has been carried out to explain just how placebo response, in other words a person gets better homeopathy works but its efficacy is well documented. because they believe in the medication or the practitioner This is borne out by many high quality studies pubor both. The study was a meta-analysis. This type of lished in peer reviewed medical journals showing the study is a comparison of many clinical trials carried out positive effects of Homeopathy above and beyond those in the past. An editorial in the same journal titled “The of placebo. Just one month before the negative Lancet end of Homeopathy” advised Doctors to be “bold and paper was published a study appeared in the European honest” with their patients about Homeopathy’s lack Journal of Paediatrics giving scientific evidence that Hoof benefit. Strong stuff indeed, especially as the last ma- meopathy was effective in the treatment of ADHD (Atjor meta-analysis of Homeopathy published in the same tention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). journal in 1997 concluded that the positive effects of HoShould Doctors not be “bold and honest” with their meopathy were not down to the placebo effect. Why then patients about this fact? As Homeopaths we see our the mad rush to declare the end of a system of medicine patients with ADHD respond well to Homeopathic that has shown it’s effitreatment but our ancacy in many high qualecdotal evidence means Homeopathy has been around for ity studies? nothing to convena couple of hundred years. Widely Homeopathy has tional practitioners been around for a couwithout scientific fact to used in America and Europe in the ple of hundred years. back it up. That scien1800’s, it has enjoyed a spectacular Widely used in America tific fact is now available and Europe in the in this latest study. Docresurgence in the last twenty to 1800’s, it has enjoyed a tors therefore owe it to thirty years spectacular resurgence in their patients to acthe last twenty to thirty quaint themselves with years. In the UK where it is recognised by Act of Parlia- the ADHD research and recommend Homeopathy as a ment there are a total of four Homeopathic hospitals. safe and effective alternative to amphetamine based drugs In India it is practised almost as widely as conventional such as Ritalin. medicine. Studies have shown it to work equally well for One month before the ADHD research a German animals with many veterinarian surgeons using it for comparative cohort study of 493 people was published their patients. in Complementary Therapies in Medicine. The aims of this One of the reasons for its popularity is that it is a very study were to evaluate the effectiveness of Homeopasafe form of treatment. This is due to the fact that the thy versus conventional treatment in routine care. The remedies used are highly dilute and thus free of any study concluded that patients on Homeopathic treattoxic side effects. It has been postulated that Homeo- ment had a better outcome overall compared with papathic remedies stimulate the body’s homeostatic or self- tients on conventional treatment. With this in mind balancing mechanism. The choice of Homeopathic rem- why then did the editor of the Lancet Dr. Richard edy is based on a totality of the patient’s symptoms Horton lock on to one negative study among many including mental and physical symptoms. The philoso- positive ones to launch a highly vehement attack on phy is very different to the reductionist approach of Homeopathy? Surely a balanced statement calling for

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THE PUBLIC NEEDS TO BE MADE AWARE WHEN BIAS AND SELECTIVE RESEARCH ARE FED TO THEM UNDER THE GUISE OF MEDICAL SCIENCE. HOMEOPATHY DOES NOT FEAR SCIENTIFIC SCRUTINY AND EVALUATION AS LONG AS IT IS CARRIED OUT ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD WITH TRUTH AND INTEGRITY. I HAVE MUCH RESPECT FOR MODERN MEDICINE BUT IT IS BY NO MEANS THE ONLY WAY TO RESTORE THE SICK TO HEALTH

more research into Homeopathy would have been more in keeping with good science.

Horton is well known for his opposition to Homeopathy as is one of the principal authors of the paper Prof. Matthias Egger. Egger stated at the outset that he did not expect to find any difference between Homeopathy and placebo. It now appears that he found what he wanted to find. As scientists from around the world dissected the study more disturbing facts came to light. Only 8 out of the 110 studies on Homeopathy were used. The authors admitted that many of the 110 studies showed positive results for Homeopathy, yet these studies were thrown out after the authors had decided they were “lower quality.” Respected scientists subsequently branded the paper “junk science” saying it was deeply flawed and biased but by now Horton and Eggers hatchet job on Homeopathy was beginning to bear fruit. News media around the world were awash with “Homeopathy no better than dummy pills”, all the while fuelled by journalists of a sceptical bent who were keen to offer misplaced reverence to the Lancet study.

Unfortunately the rebuttals and rebukes of the study by those in the scientific community never got the same publicity as the Lancet soundbites. These critiques included letters to the Lancet itself that were rejected for publication. Medical doctors who had objections to the methodology used in the study asked for the identification of the eight trials used in the final analysis but the authors explicitly refused.

Added to this was the fact that the journal had recently refused to publish a large UK study which showed high levels of effectiveness for Homeopathy and you have all the transparency of a brick.

One has to wonder if there was some agenda behind all of this.

Could pharmaceutical companies have had some influence? It would hardly be a surprise as these companies are losing huge chunks of market share to Homeopathy and Complementary medicine in general. Then again it could just be actions borne out of sheer frustration at the success of Homeopathy, frustration that will no doubt be enhanced by the recent 6 year study from the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital in the UK. This was the study that the Lancet would not publish.

6,500 patients took part in the study which was published in the peer reviewed JACM (Journal of Alternative and Complementary medicine). Seventy percent of patients with chronic diseases such as arthritis, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, and severe eczema reported that Homeopathy had a positive effect on their symptoms. This figure rose to 89% for young asthma patients who experienced an improvement in their symptoms. Overall 75% of patients reported feeling “better” or “much better.” Although this was an observational study and not a double blind trial it is of great importance in showing the effectiveness of Homeopathy. It can also be said that conventional medicine would be greatly pleased with outcomes similar to these.

Sceptics have always used the argument that Homeopathy can only

work by placebo because the remedies are too dilute to have any physical effect. If there was any credence to that argument then the patients in the Bristol study must have been on “extra strength” placebo because of the sheer volume of positive results. Certainly ultra-dilutions have been a major stumbling block for Homeopathy being accepted by conventional scientists despite there being research suggesting the contrary. One such scientist was Prof. Madeline Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University Belfast and an avowed sceptic of Homeopathy. She published a paper that was based on a high quality and groundbreaking study that tested ultra-dilute solutions of histamine and its effects on certain types of white blood cells called basophils. When the histamine was diluted to homeopathic levels and past the point where any molecules of histamine could remain, the ultra-dilutions still had an effect on the basophils. The results were replicated in 3 other laboratories across Europe and published in the respected “Inflammation Research” (vol 53, p181). Ennis would have to concede that she had failed to disprove Homeopathy. She said in her paper “We are unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” Ennis is to be commended for her integrity in publishing findings that were difficult for both her and science to accept and explain. Others in the same field could learn from her example and remove themselves from the comfort zone of accepted scientific fact to embrace new possibilities.

As stated previously the bulk of clinical research shows the placebo argument to be an erroneous one. To the research can be added the fact that Homeopathy has been shown to be effective for babies and animals. Here the chances for “power of suggestion” would seem remote. For animals to be susceptible to the placebo effect, their vets would need to develop the same powers of communication as Doctor Doolittle. As Homeopaths we see many patients who have come to us after not having had improvement from other medical treatments. If these people were susceptible to the placebo effect, why then did it not happen with the other treatments? I have been a Registered Homeopath in full time practice for 10 years in the UK and New Zealand. Nearly all of my work comes from referrals. This is because people recommend what has worked for them personally. If the opposite were true, Homeopathy would have died a death a long time ago.

The public needs to be made aware when bias and selective research are fed to them under the guise of medical science. Homeopathy does not fear scientific scrutiny and evaluation as long as it is carried out on a level playing field with truth and integrity. I have much respect for modern medicine but it is by no means the only way to restore the sick to health. We all need to work together for the good of the patient.

Doctors, Osteopaths, Homeopaths, Acupuncturists etc. all have their place and need to work with each other as parts of a cohesive whole.

Divisiveness and one-upmanship have no place in healthcare.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 81

LIFESTYLE

SCIENCE

CATCHING SOME RAYS Scientists seek the source of 160/kmh billiard balls from outer space, reports Ronald Kotulak

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osmic rays, the highest-energy particles in the Cosmic rays are protons that have been accelerated to universe, are being pitched at Earth from speeds approaching the speed of light, or 186,000 miles some place beyond our galaxy. And for more per second. Among the contenders as their source are than seven decades no one has been able to figure out super-massive black holes, gigantic exploding stars, dewhere they are coming from. caying mysterious dark matter or the hyper-magnetic Now, armed with a cosmic ray catcher’s mitt that is fields of neutron stars spinning at 3,000 revolutions being inaugurated Thursday in Argentina on a site half per second. the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island, scientists Cosmic rays come in all types of energies and confrom the University of Chicago and Fermilab, along with stantly bombard the Earth. An ultrahigh-energy cosmic more than 250 other scientists from 16 countries, hope ray slams into oxygen, nitrogen or other atoms in the to solve one of astronomy’s biggest mysteries.

Earth’s atmosphere with the power of a billiard ball In addition to searching for the source of cosmic rays, traveling at more than 160 kph, but with its mass conresearchers will use the observatory, which consists of densed into the size of an elementary particle. hundreds of small detectors spread over 3,100 square The energy of the collision creates showers of other kilomtres of ranch and farm land, to explore the uni- particles which, when they hit other atmospheric atoms, verse in ways they couldn’t before. The $75 million ob- break up into even more particles, eventually producing servatory is named afa cascade of hundreds ter Pierre Auger, who in of billions of particles.

Cosmic rays are so powerful that 1938 discovered particle Sometimes, theorists showers on Earth when they collide with air molecules believe, such powerful caused by cosmic rays. collisions might create in Earth’s atmosphere they can temHe later studied cosmic miniature black holes. rays at the University of The black holes would porarily produce energies similar to Chicago using a hot-air pose no danger because those that existed right after the balloon. they quickly evaporate, Big Bang Cosmic rays are so but they may leave bepowerful that when hind subatomic debris they collide with air molecules in Earth’s atmosphere that scientists plan to study to learn more about these they can temporarily produce energies similar to those puzzling gravitational mighty-mites. that existed right after the Big Bang, the explosive beFor the most part, cosmic rays are harmless because they ginning of the universe some 13 billion years ago. are slowed down while passing through the atmosphere, “We want to understand how nature reaches these and even the strongest of them are greatly weakened. energies”, said University of Chicago astrophysicist Yet some get through, and scientists speculate that Angela Olinto. “The energies of the particles that we’ll they may play a role in evolution by causing genetic be observing with this detector are millions of times mutations. Cosmic rays are also thought to cause some more powerful than we can produce with particle accel- cancers because of the damage they can do to DNA. erators on Earth. In principle these particles will give us Scientists have been frustrated in their attempts to the possibility of testing physics that we can’t test in our discover where cosmic rays originate because they appear laboratories. What happened at the beginning of the to come from all directions. No matter where most of universe is the same that you could try to probe by them start, their direction is frequently changed as they reaching higher and higher energies.” pass through magnetic fields in space.

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Cosmic rays from the sun hit the atmosphere above the South Pole, causing the Southern Lights (Aurora Australis), in this photo from the space shuttle. NASA To solve the riddle of their origin, scientists built the large observatory at Malargue in western Argentina to capture the most energetic cosmic rays. These rays are so powerful that they are not affected by magnetic fields and follow a straight line from their source to the Earth.

A large observatory is needed because that kind of cosmic ray is rare, hitting an area slightly larger than half a square mile once a century. An even bigger cosmic ray observatory, which would be 10 times bigger than the one in Argentina, is in preliminary planning stages for Colorado.

The Argentine observatory has two types of detectors, one that picks up the last stages of a cosmic ray breakup as it hits the ground and another that can detect the rays when they first hit the atmosphere.

By using both together for the first time, scientists believe they will be able to track the direction of the most powerful cosmic rays back to their source.

The ground detectors consist of 1,600 plastic tanks spaced a mile apart. Each tank is 4 feet high, 12 feet in diameter and filled with 3,000 gallons of purified water. As the breakup particles from a cosmic ray

pass through the water in the darkened tanks they emit bluish streaks of light, which are recorded around the clock.

The other detectors are 24 fluorescence telescopes that only work on clear, dark nights. As a cosmic ray shower erupts in the atmosphere it produces streaks of ultraviolet light, which are captured by the telescopes.

“This is the largest cosmic ray observatory ever built,” Olinto said.

“By using both detectors together we can try to figure out where these ultrahigh energy particles come from. What’s exciting is that we may find that there’s more physics going on than we know about.”

The idea for the large cosmic ray observatory was initiated by Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago physicist James Cronin and Alan Watson of the University of Leeds. Two smaller observatories are located in Utah and Japan, but they have failed to pinpoint the source of the rays.

Argentina was picked for the site because it had space available, was willing to participate and is in the Southern Hemisphere where little work has been done on cosmic rays arriving in that section of the sky.

January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 83

LIFESTYLE

TRAVEL

INTO THIN AIR Tyler Bridges and Michael Green report on the highs and the not so highs of a trip to Bolivia

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A PAZ, Bolivia. This city kicks my butt every cobblestone streets, the other half you’re walking up, time. It is the highest capital in the world, about unless you wimp out and take a taxi. OK, I’ll admit it. I wimped out a few times. three kilometres above sea level.

The altitude is often blamed for Bolivia’s chaotic I felt the lack of oxygen as soon as I stepped off the plane here recently to cover Bolivia’s latest politi- political situation.

No government seems firmly entrenched here, escal events.

While others rushed to the front of the immigra- pecially after street protests last year overthrew the tion line inside the airport terminal, I walked as if I hated president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

I asked everyone I met how they cope with the am 83, not 43. Those who strode past me, I figured, altitude. A diplomat offered the best advice. He said, must have been La Paz residents.

Upon arriving at my hotel, I drank mate de coca, “Walk slowly, eat lightly and sleep alone.”

They call La Paz the City of Contrasts, and with which is hot tea legally brewed from the raw ingredient illegally used to make cocaine. Mate helps combat good reason. Modernity blends with antiquity, and visitors have a range of choices from native Indian the altitude.

Still, the next morning, I was winded after climb- markets, “witchdoctor” stalls and the Moon Valley, through to a tour of ing two flights of the Tiwanaku ruins. stairs. And I work out The latter hit the headthree times a week.

I asked everyone I met how lines just a couple of They have a name they cope with the altitude. A months back amid for the altitude sicknew archaeological disdiplomat offered the best advice. ness: “soroche.” coveries there.

Guidebooks to BoHe said, “Walk slowly, eat lightly In essence, the livia recommend that and sleep alone Tiwanaku empire, for visitors rest upon arlack of a better word, riving and drink plenty is described as the craof fluids because the dle of civilization in the Americas. It rose somewhere thin air causes dehydration.

On this visit, I didn’t have the headaches or sleeping around 1600 BC, around the same time the Israelites problems that the altitude can cause, probably because were enslaved in Egypt, and lasted two thousand years. It was the forerunner of the Incas, the Mayans I took anti-soroche pills the day before arriving.

I also drank mate de coca a couple of times every and others.

At its peak, Tiwanaku covered an area around twice day in La Paz. One afternoon, I even chewed coca leaves proffered by Indians engaged in a hunger strike. the size of New Zealand and boasted what may have The green leaves numbed my mouth and made me been the largest city in the world at the time, with around 100,000 inhabitants. Now, all that remains is forget that I hadn’t eaten lunch. the ruins: Akapana pyramid, the Gate of the Sun, the I just hope I don’t have to take a drug test soon.

Despite my best efforts, I found myself trudging Underground Temple of Kontiki to name a few.

If you think the Kontiki name is familiar you’d be everywhere in La Paz. right. Visitors are reminded of the links between this The city’s strange geography also factors in.

La Paz occupies a giant bowl-shaped canyon. So ancient civilization and Thor Heyerdahl’s daring voywhile half the time you’re walking down one of the ages in Ra II and Tigris to try and prove the ties

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between South America, Africa and the Pacific. Leaving La Paz, we choose in a side excursion to traverse what is reputedly the world’s most dangerous road, a single lane virtual goat track carved in the cliffs (imagine Lord of the Rings) on the road to Coroico that must first rise to a 15,000ft mountain pass (that’s 3,000 feet higher than Aoraki Mt Cook), before plummeting 11,000ft down the other side over a distance of about 70kms, at which point you’re back in the tropics.

At Sucre, Bolivia’s old capital, it is the Spanish influence, rather than Indian cultures, that first strike you. Baroque architecture is everywhere. San Francisco Xavier is the second-oldest university in South America, and the cathedral is not to be missed. At the House of Liberty is the spot where Simon Bolivar signed the Declaration of Independence. For one of the most comprehensive collections of its type in the region, visit the Museum and its collections of anthropological and archaeological import tracing the history of human settlement of the Andes and their lowlands.

Potosi, another highland town, is built on the side of arguably the world’s motherlode mountain of silver. Stretching back 400 years, Potosi’s silver mines helped keep the Spanish armada afloat and rumour has it that enough silver was extracted from here to build a solid silver bridge from Bolivia to Spain. Mining continues to this day, under very exacting conditions.

For traditionalists, a trip to Bolivia should always include the highest navigable lake in the world, Lake Titicaca, or the chance to sit down on the world’s largest salt lake, Salar de Uyuni. At the centre of the lake, la Isla Pescado boasts a range of wildlife you wouldn’t expect to find in such a hostile environment, and there’s also the option of overnighting in a hotel made entirely of salt.

For thousands of years, Bolivia has captured human hearts with its diverse landscapes, fauna and flora. It continues to do so.

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LIFESTYLE

BOOKCASE

SUMMER PAGE -TURNERS Michael Morrissey is stumped by cryptic crosswords, and find’s Celia Lashlie’s new book simply stunning

MORE CURIOUS CROSSWORDS

By David Tossman, HarperCollins, $22

Michael Morrissey

Common family pet – 3 letters = DOG. That being about my level of crosswords, I picked up this book with a feeling of intimidation. To be candid, I’m even more intimidated now I’ve perused it. Mayan Codexes, Sanskrit, Finnegans Wake, higher math, cryptic codes and cryptic crosswords – they’re all beyond my reach. My lexicographical disability admitted, David Tossman’s introductory chapter “The Tricks of the Trade” has thrown a goodly amount of light into a dark corner.

That the answer actually lies within the clue I was dimly aware of. What I didn’t know was there are two clues (how kind!) which makes it sound easier than I first thought.

Solve the two clues and you’re home and hosed. This temporary surge of hope was dashed to smithereens when I learnt that the concealed clues may he cloaked by 10 different disguises. These are: Double Definition, Anagrams, Hidden Answers, Charades, Acrostics, Containers, Homophones, Deletions, Reversals and Indirect Definitions.

In case you’re wondering, a homophone is not a new 3G mobile for gay users, but words that sound the same, e.g. too or two – yet have different meanings. Charades – which I have only played drunk (I cannot understand it while sober) – includes abbreviations and a compendious sampling is included. The abbreviations, alas for the simpleminded souls such as myself, can be drawn from everywhere under the sun (son?) – maps, points of the compass, Greek alphabet, dates, cricket, the Bible.

In a thoughtful act of compassion for the uninitiated, Tossman takes one solution ROSE and uses it to illustrate all of ten strategies listed above. Thus, under Anagram, ROSE becomes “This thorn might make you sore if fiddled with” where sore is an anagram of rose. In Hidden Answers, ROSE is rendered as “A bit of hero sent out for pink wine”. Here Rose (pink wine) is hidden in heRO SEnt. Simple, huh?

Gleefully, I flipped through the book at random and came across

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DOWN 2: Comatose (11 letters. It came to me in a flash – HOMOPHONE! Comatose = Coma toes. My toes are asleep ...unconscious! Unconscious had 11 letters and therefore fitted the spaces. Victory was mine! Then I noticed this was a “quick” crossword – not cryptic at all. I was so upset I had to eat four chocolate biscuits (bizz kits?).

No cheating this time. ACROSS 21: Eat away in Frankfurt der Oder. I had the feeling “der Oder” was trying to tell me something ... but what? I couldn’t figure it out. Ok, so I did cheat – the answer was ERODE. Once I knew the answer, the clue made sense. But isn’t it supposed to be a Reversal of this? I took another look at “eat away”. It gradually dawned on me this wasn’t gastronomy in German but a synonym for erode – just as Tossman indicated in his introductory chapter. This weird cryptic crossword world was beginning to make sense though not quite enough for me to be a total convert. Not YETi. Hopefully, one day when I read Goliath Slayer throws up Cro-Magnon (5,7), I’ll know the answer.

WHIM WHAM’S NEW ZEALAND: The Best of Whim Wham 1937-1988 Edited by Terry Sturm, Vintage, $34.95 Whim Wham always sounded like a breezy up-tempo way of hinting at violence on impulse. And so it was in a curious kind of way – Allen Curnow, our greatest poet, living or dead, took a subject and satirically laid into it. Over 50 years, he contributed a weekly column to the New Zealand Herald and the Christchurch Press consisting of straightforward rhyming verse commenting on current social and political issues. These verses – read by hundreds of thousands if not millions of readers over the years – contrasted strongly in tone, depth of meaning, and complexity of syntax with his serious poetry – which also was prolific, composing over 20 volumes.

Though it was well known in literary circles that the breezy Whim Wham was the high-minded and serious poet Allen Curnow, this was little known among the general public.

From a total of 2250 poems, Sturm has selected 200 and these alone make up a volume of over 300 pages. A collected Whim Wham would top 3000 pages! This is the kind of verse – with its adroit scanning and rhyming that looks easy but there’s a lot of hard-earned poetic and metrical skill in evidence. As Sturm outlines in his excellent introduction, the range of verse forms reveals wide influences from ballads of nursery rhymes, from the nonsense verse of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll to the serious satire of Pope and Byron.

Whim Wham was in the vanguard of protest against racism. There can’t have been many New Zealanders in the general populace concerned about the non-Maori Rugby team sent to South Africa in 1960 – but Whim Wham opposed it.

The satiric versifier wrote many poems on the subject including, of course, the notorious 1981 tour. Similarly, in 1946, probably most New Zealanders supported nuclear testing because the American nuclear umbrella had protected us against Japan. Not Whim Wham – he took a dim view of the plan to move out 145 Eniwetok islanders in 1947 to make way for a nuclear testing. Eniwetok, sans the 145 inhabitants, saw the first hydrogen bomb test in 1952.

While politics and social issues dominated, Whim Wham occasionally took “time out” to consider more whimsical topics. A comment that 90 per cent of musical examination competitors were pianists prompted the satirist to ask where were the future violinist, cellists, oboists, clarinettists and shouldn’t there be piano-zoning?

Perhaps my favourite was a reaction to improve lighting in the Waitomo Caves: Sir, I’ll be content to be cave-guided When CENTRAL HEATING is provided, A subterranean BAR, and All Is CARPETED from Wall to Wall.

(CAPITALS were all part of Whim Wham’s inimitable style.)

For that unsuspecting golf or rugby player expecting a book on how to improve their technique, this book is an appropriate New Year present to introduce them to SATIRIC POETRY.

THE HIGHEST TIDE

By Jim Lynch, Bloomsbury, $35 Who, at 13 years of age would not want to find a giant squid washed up on the beach? What’s even more exciting it was alive, or at least on its last gasp. When Miles hears “an exhale, a release of sorts,” he initially thinks it was made by a stranded whale. Such was the mediagrabbing discovery made by young Miles O’Malley. Giant squid have been a lot in the press and media lately

and this opener had me by the short and curlies.

Even before the startling discovery of the giant squid, Miles was hooked on discovering marine life along the shores of Skookumchuck Bay in Puget Sound. Unlike less observant or fate-gifted mortals who might only see clams and crabs, Miles finds all kinds of exotic critters nudibranchs (“butterflies of the sea”), barnacles with 16-foot long penises, ragfish, peacock flounders, Chinese mitten crabs, moon jellies, sea lemons, mola molas and grunions and many more – a splendid marine lore dazzle which Miles’ golly-gee-whiz fever turns into an infectious National Geographic learning curve for the less than aquatic.

Though Miles seems to make discoveries galore, the squid naturally seizes most of the limelight – or should that be salt light? Hey presto, Miles is a media celebrity and before long the site of his discoveries become a Lourdes-like spot for New Agers hoping for a cure. Miles remains remarkably unspoiled by all the fuss perhaps because he is that rare thing, the true nature lover, obsessed by phenomena and not by what cause it might suit.

Kenny Phelps, his initially sneering buddy, is won over and becomes a loyal and protective friend – it’s a change of heart we’ve seen in many American films and though it’s corny and predictable, it’s hard not to be warmed by it. There are some tender scenes between father and son, which alas, seem increasingly a rarity in fiction. In a refreshing and not overly subtle way, this book is a revisit (of sorts) of Huckleberry Finn without the dark overtones plus a different way of viewing the wonders of nature.

While Lynch at one level mocks New Agers and their beliefs, he makes Florence, the old and not so reluctant prophet of nature, a kind of New Age guru who predicts a freak tide. In the end, it is perhaps a disappointment, though a nice one, to have a naturalistic explanation of the freak occurrences in Miles’ bay. As enjoyable as a cooked crab, this first novel leaves a pleasantly salty taste in the mouth. I wonder if world famous giant squid expert Steve O’Shea has read it? Probably he’s out at sea too busy out trying to catch one.

HE’LL BE OK: Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men

By Celia Lashlie, HarperCollins, $35 Gorgeous boys? That doesn’t seem to describe the sullen-faced louts in ridiculous “shorts” slouching along the street in my neighbourhood but then I’m a male looking at other males. Celia Lashlie clearly sees something infinitely more attractive.

Overhearing an interview

with the author while radio channel surfing in my car at a tardy red light led to me acquiring this book. The author sounded confident, articulate and, surprising to male ears, seemed to like men and even approve of them. What really strained credulity was the suggestion – directive – that women should stop talking for a bit and actually listen to what men are saying; that mothers should stop interfering with the dialogue going on between father and son – vital in her view to youthful male development into full male adulthood. She alluded to subtle male hand signals and cues without words.

This is a book quite unlike any other around at the present – hence its value as an antidote to the vast anti-male literature written by biased feminists. Lashlie is someone who clearly has given the important issue of gender relations considerable thought – as well as much observation – and come up with some challenging conclusions. She observes, for instance, that girls tend to work on school assignments steadily whereas boys tend to leave it to the last minute.

Why? Apparently the boys simply don’t regard an art assignment as a sufficient challenge in itself. When they were told they had five days to complete it and informed that failure to do so would mean they couldn’t do artwork the next year the lads stopped slouching and began moving at breakneck speed – in the teacher’s words they went from 5 per cent effort to 250 per cent.

In other words, boys (soon to be men) like real challenges not a “pretend” one.

Lashlie’s assertion that sport is a vital part of boys’ school upbringing may sound old-fashioned to some but she makes a good case for it – all that burgeoning testosterone-driven energy has to be expressed physically. She is also firmly in favour of single sex schools to help build boys’ male development. The most alarming aspect of the book was the boys who now feel there’s “no point in competing against a girl because she’ll win anyway”. Some boys even feel dumber than girls, a view as Lashlie notes, reinforced by media advertisements. I believe nearly all of Lashlie’s challenging assertions to be true and their truth can be readily observed in the feminist-dominated world of contemporary New Zealand. Part of the problem is that as Lashlie acutely observes that instead of women thinking they can do anything (not true), they can do everything (also not true).

It would be fascinating to discover who reads this book – probably, if current statistics tell the truth, women – but I hope some men read it as well. Lashlie has several important things to tell us and two of the most important are let men do it their way and tell boys what they need to know when they ask. Though I found the concluding chapter, “Characteristics of a Good Man” uplifting in its hopefulness, being an abstract list, it is less inspiring than the pertinent, January 2006, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 89

intelligent and accurate observations throughout the book. Highly recommended for fathers and mothers, teachers and those least likely to read it – the boys themselves.

THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES

By Paul Auster, Faber & Faber, $35.

A recent article in the Listener claimed that Paul Auster was America’s greatest living novelist. It may be so – certainly he would be on any short list along with Phillip Roth, John Updike and Don DeLillo. Unlike certain French thinkers who seem to want to do our thinking for us, I do not believe that the author is dead (Barthes) or the Great Writer is defunct (Foucault) and this sombre but very alive Brooklyn boy may well be the best America has to offer in the literary stakes.

Certain it is, anyone who wants proof that a high standard of living and rampant materialism does not breed happiness need go further than reading Auster’s eleven novels – their melancholia and general malaise will wipe senseless smirks from many junk food-filled faces.

No surprise then, that the first line of Brooklyn Follies reads, “I was looking for a quiet place to die”. In fact, most of Auster’s protagonists are psychologically, if not spiritually, comatose, latter day urban zombies adrift in a cold twilight of the heart while their minds remain hectically, perhaps neurotically, active. Why should we read such books? Because they are honest, haunting and compellingly contemporary. When a ray of light appears – as it does, at this book’s conclusion, it has the power of a searchlight even though on one level we may suspect it is a brief respite in a grim Prozac-less existence. Like Kafka, to whom he is an American cousin of sorts, Auster’s novels are compulsively readable. I found it hard to put down this gloomy tale of failure and misfortune.

On centre stage is narrator Nathan Glass, former life insurance salesman and aspirant author who is “enjoying” a remission from cancer and his nephew Tom Wood. The latter is an A plus student of American literature, author of a paper entitled “Imaginary Eden: The Life of the Mind in Pre-Civil War America” who, despite the promise of a brilliant career, loses his way and winds up driving taxis. (Next time you catch a taxi talk to your driver – very probably he comes from Mumbai and has a PhD in chemistry.) The dazzling passage in which Tom explains the spiritual improvement that such a dreary existence brings is a stunning admixture of absurd rationalisation and partial truth. Spirituality often flourishes amid boring routine – ask any monk.

Enter Harry Brightman, rare bookshop owner, who as it were, rescues Tom 90, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

from his taxi-driving limbo by hiring him as an assistant but who becomes a party to a lucrative art forgery fraud and later an attempted literary forgery, which cruelly rebounds on him in the form of blackmail. One of the compelling characteristics of Auster’s novels is that just as you think it is sinking deeper and deeper into an actionless existential void, the plot suddenly livens up and offers some startling dark Kafkaesque twists. There is, in fact, an anecdote about a humane and thoughtful Kafka that is a surprise as is another story about a bullying Wittgenstein bashing school children and not being forgiven.

Without checking, I’m not sure if either of these potted biographical episodes are true – quite possibly they are – but they have an ambiguous quality prompting the reader to suppose that the Austerian character is making it up. It’s this true-or-false-you-can’t-be-sure quality that gives Auster’s novels – despite an apparent transparency of style – an additional layer of ambiguous meaning that intrigues and suggests a re-reading. In a sense, his books are psychological thrillers albeit with a cool tone.

Though no one could accuse Auster of Dickensian exuberance, he shows here a penchant for Dickensian names – Stanley Chowder, David Minor, Al Junior, Henry Peoples, Tina Hott.

Corny though this might have been in the hands of a less gifted writer, it is not so here, given Auster’s coolly confident approach. That Nathan should find himself working along a street in Brooklyn under a beautiful blue sky – just before the first plane hits the World Trade Centre disease-free and happy, is the kind of quiet miracle that brings us a welcome frisson of relief.

Thanks Paul, I look forward to your next sombre but satisfying tale.

THE FRUITS OF WAR

By Michael White, Simon & Schuster, $39.99 Does any good come out of war? Unfortunately – horribly – the answer is yes. White’s dazzling overview does not survey the human benefits eg stopping the Nazis from tyrannising the world but the way Military Conflict Accelerates Technology (to quote the subtitle of the book).

Sometimes the techno-spurt occurs during a hot war (Atomic bomb, World War 11), sometimes during the Cold War (Space Race, Soviet Union v America). These are well-known recent examples which naturally enough are detailed here.

While some might not consider the subsequent nuclear power stations a benefit, the fact is “By 2004, 335 reactors in thirty-one countries supplied 16 per cent of the world’s energy needs”. Then there is nuclear medicine – not just the

obvious radiation therapy used for the treatment of cancer but radioisotopes used to study fractures, investigate blood or lymph disorders and digestive tract problems.

White also sees long range effects of nuclear technology flowing from the post-Bomb foundation of the Sandia National Laboratories.

Though the primary responsibility of this organisation is to manage the American nuclear arsenal, White lists advanced monitoring, surveillance systems, cryptic code construction and the “entire technology of computer modelling”.

Right now they are developing robugs or nanomachines, insect-sized machines to carry out surveillance on the battlefield.

Looking to the future, White predicts “vast numbers of robot devices no larger than a human cell” will locate and remove cancerous tumours and heal wounds and broken bones.

Nanotechnology is very much in the future but for the last ten plus years the world has been revelling in that most spectacular military development: the Internet, originally created in 1969.

It is boggling to think that in 1991 there were just 600,000 using the Internet while the latest figure is nudging one billion. (Mark of the Beast?) Gordon Moore, pioneer of the microchip, contends that the number of transistors in a machine doubles every 18 months and, remarkably, such has been the case. White asserts that if “Moore’s Law” holds, a natural physical limit will occur when chips shrink to the size of molecules around 2020. Let’s see, shall we?

Though White has much to tell us about the recent past, the present and the future, the majority of the book is more historic. When you drive your automatic car down the road in (say) Britain you might not think you are making use of a militarily-accelerated piece of technology but (as White reminds us) you are – the Romans built roads to expedite the movement of their well-disciplined armies and their roads either remain or have been built upon. White also remedied my historic naivete several times, e.g. I vaguely thought of the Montgolfier brothers’ first balloon flight as pure scientific experimentation, (which in part it was) but what actually it sparked off was the contemplation of the “humiliating military situation Gibraltar” which the Brits had cheekily grabbed.

In recent times, I have become a keen reader of grand overviews (eg Jared Diamond’s books) and White’s history of war-boosted technology is an outstanding example. I did, however, detect one glaring error – the British empire at its height is stated to be 50 million square miles whereas the true figure was 14 million from a world total of 56 million. Also the Mongol empire is stated to have been larger (60 million?) than the British whereas it was smaller. Minor flaws in an extraordinarily well-detailed overview of military-technohistory which has transformed planet earth.

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LIFESTYLE

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CATALOGUE

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LIFESTYLE

MOVIES & DVDs

ONE-JOKE WONDER The Aristocrats provides some seriously funny adults-only laughs, while Brokeback Mountain is surprisingly touching

The Aristocrats Release: January, 2006 Rated: R

✯✯✯✯

T Shelly Horton

he Aristocrats is a one-joke film. Literally. Over 100 comedians tell the same joke over and over.

The joke isn’t even that funny. But the people telling it are hilarious.

Now I can’t tell you the joke. But rest assured it is the filthiest, most offensive, politically incorrect, distasteful, gobsmackingly obscene joke I’ve ever heard.

Yup, I loved it.

The joke is called The Aristocrats and it’s almost like a Masonic secret handshake among stand up comedians.

Passed on carefully and quietly from generation to generation. And joy of it is that it’s got a really simple setup and a really quick punch line – but what happens in the middle that is the equivalent of comedy jazz. Comedians improvise the middle, and the raunchier and more depraved it gets the funnier the joke is.

It seems every professional stand up comic in the world knows it and they all wanted to be part of the documentary. So viewers see it told by Drew Carey, Paul Reiser, Robin Williams, Billy Connelly and Whoopi Goldberg – all with their own twisted interpretation.

And it’s not just told through stand up. It’s done as a card trick, a mime routine, a ventriloquist act, part of a physical comedy schtick, and even animation (by the South Park boys of course.)

You think you’d get sick of it. Nope. The Aristocrats uses the joke as a way of exploring the nature of comedy, its philosophy and psychology, and the mechanics of making people laugh.

It’s shot on crummy cameras, no lights were set up and sometimes the vision shakes and you can even hear the director (comedian Paul Provenza) laughing. But that all adds to it. And when the comedians make each other laugh, it’s impossible not to fall apart too.

There are a couple of stand out moments – both good and bad. Bob Saget finally shakes of his whole-

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some Full House persona and hilariously lets rip; Eddie Izzard falls flat but that could have just been the substance abuse; and Sarah Silverman makes the joke personal and creepy.

But the whole doco is stolen by an unlikely comedian – Gilbert Gottfried. Gilbert is known for his rapid-fire train of thought comic delivery. Perfect for this joke.

But when he is the first comedian to perform The Artistrcrats in public, all other comedians bow to his genius.

It has an “R” rating for a reason. Not really a kid’s school holidays film. But if you’re over 18 prepare to be shocked and amused.

Brokeback Mountain Release: January, 2006 Rated: M

✯✯✯✯✯

B

rokeback Mountain is one of the most beautiful and poignant love stories I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s an achingly sad tale of two damaged souls whose life-long love is never resolved. I just hope audiences accept that the love is between two men.

One might glibly call this a gay Western but that detracts from the depth of the story. Director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) has sensitively and gently crafted this film so it’s both visually stunning and emotionally rich.

Heath Ledger deserves an Oscar for his portrayal of Ennis del Mar, a typical monosyllabic Marlboro Man. Jake Gyllenhaal is also superb as the doe-eyed yet bushytailed Jack Twist. They are both hired to tend to sheep on Brokeback Mountain in 1963 and an unexpected summer romance blossoms. After the job finishes they run back to their previous lives. Ennis is desperate to marry his fiancé Alma (played by Heath’s real life love and mother of his child, Michelle Williams.) While Jack falls for a rich country gal Laureen, played by Anne Hathaway (who after The Princess Diaries has chosen the perfect anti-Disney film to prove herself.)

The men move away from each other and try to forget, but are drawn back together even if it is for irregular “fishing trips”. These are two simple, inarticulate men, yet they are driven by complex emotions and longings that even they could not hope to explain. We watch them over decades of angst and as they age, the weight of their compromises weighs on their faces.

I know it’s a subject matter that won’t be comfortable for everyone but perhaps if more people saw a film like this they’d understand love knows no gender.

It’s a heartbreaking love story that should sit beside other classics romances like Gone with the Wind or An Affair to Remember.

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DVDs

THE SEA INSIDE M, 122 mins, Roadshow The LA Times called it “one of the most profound and uplifting dramas of the year”. Uplifting? Get real, it’s an advertising campaign for Euthanasia. Directed and written

by Spaniard Alejandro Amenabar, The Sea Inside is based on the true story of Ramon Sampedro (played here by Oscar nominee Javier Bardem in a deserving performance) who broke his neck diving into shallow water as a young man and fought for 30 years for the “right to die”. While the movie attempts to canvas both sides of the euthanasia debate, it is only a half-hearted effort. Those opposed to Ramon’s campaign are played as one-dimensional caricatures with unpersuasive arguments: a quadriplegic Catholic priest who comes across as overbearing and impersonal with no answers to Ramon’s pro-euthanasia anti-Christian rhetoric, or Ramon’s older brother, a seaman turned farmer who seemingly sees Ramon as a burden but wants to keep him alive on principle. Anyone daring to begin to offer any real rebuff to Ramon’s reasoning is quickly cut off at the knees by the writer/director.

And so, we have a film that is a loving and faithful rendition of the Sampedro story, with fantastic performances by all involved. Yet by the end I couldn’t get past the reality that our world is composed of optimists and pessimists, and that a pessimist with no religious faith – as Ramon was – is a lost soul indeed. If this film was the best of Sampedro’s logic in favour of euthanasia, then it is little wonder he lost his campaign and had to kill himself illegally. All that aside, The Sea Inside is thought-provoking and worth a punt.

ALLO ALLO, SERIES 1 & 2 PG, 448 mins, Roadshow The series that lasted four years longer than World War 2, set in a French café during the height of the Nazi occupation. Gordon Kaye and team are still a barrel of laughs 23 years after the pilot episode first screened in 1982. The show didn’t begin its full run until 1984, when the episodes featured in this DVD (including the pilot) screened on the BBC and later TVNZ. Allo Allo was unusual in that it is a serialized sitcom, so episodes 96, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2006

need to be viewed chronologically in order to gain the full benefit of ongoing plot lines. The show nearly died in 1990 when Gordon Kaye’s car hit a fallen tree during a winter storm, giving him a massive head injury and brain damage. But he recovered sufficiently for film for two more seasons, and tour with the stage show during the mid 90s. For fans of British comedy, there is little that beats Allo Allo. It is must-see material, especially if you never saw the original telecasts.

FOOTROT FLATS: A DOG’S TALE G, 71 mins, Roadshow As a teen I grew up with a Footrot Flats cartoon annual for Christmas every year, but by the time Wal and Dog and co finally made it to celluloid in the mid 80s, I was too busy (and too bored with the hype at the time) to go and see it on the big screen, despite Dave Dobbyn’s classic kiwi soundtrack. So I confess viewing the DVD this month was my first ever exposure to Murray Ball and Tom Scott’s film effort. It has lost nothing to time, and its reflection of rural life is as true today as it was then. John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg) as the voice of Wal was an inspired, if inevitable, choice, and Peter Rowley as Dog captures the comic strip star’s personality to a woof. This is a great kids’ stocking-filler. Special features include commentaries from Ball and Scott, a ‘making of ’ featurette and music video clips.

POLAR EXPRESS G, 96 mins, Warner Imagine, a train that takes young kids to the North Pole to meet Santa. That’s the premise of the children’s book that became the movie. Tom Hanks plays several characters in this, most notably the train conductor on the Polar Express, taking a number of lonely kids on a ride to rekindle the magic of Christmas. In an allegory to the real story of Christmas, the movie’s central theme is that the spirit of Christmas is found in your heart, “if you just believe”. Of course, in our postmodern world, kids are more likely to believe in a commercial Santa Clause than they are in the guy who put the “Christ” in Christmas. Go figure. Stunning animated effects will keep the whole family entertained.