Investigate, January 2007

INVESTIGATE

RICH MAN, POOR MAN January 2007:

Foreign exchange timebomb: how you will be left holding the tab

Uridashi Timebomb • Children’s Books • Taser • Public Figures

Sex-crazed Penguins, & other children’s books

Children’s author slams “social engineering for kids”

Stunning Revelations

Issue 72

$7.99 January 2007

The un-told story about police tasers

Private Lives Of Public Figures How far is too far?

Best & Worst 2006 Sporting highlights and lowlifes

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Volume 7, Issue 72, January 2007

FEATURES

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THE URIDASHI TIMEBOMB

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WHAT YOUR KIDS ARE READING...

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THE TASER DEBATE

40

THE TOUGHEST JOURNEY

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SILENT KILLER

50

PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC FIGURES

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It’s a bit like the Y2K scare for central bankers in Australia and New Zealand: up to US$40 billion worth of Japanese investments in Australasian currencies are falling due this year and there are growing fears the Japanese want their money back. SELWYN PARKER reports on the possibility of a financial tsunami that will affect all of us if it hits

Every year they announce the Children’s Book Awards, but have you actually seen what’s inside some of these award-winning children’s titles?

Children’s author AMY BROOKE has, and in this interview she comes out swinging

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With Taser stun-guns on trial by police in New Zealand and Australia, there are growing calls for tougher investigations into more than 200 taser-related deaths in the United States. As SILJA TALVI reports, there are also allegations of irregularities involving Taser International Inc

A New Zealand woman with one of the rarest cancers in the world was essentially told to go home and die by the NZ health system, because of red tape. But that hasn’t stopped the 35 year old mother of three from seizing a chance at survival in Australia, as IAN WISHART reports

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Not one child has died from SIDS on a wrapped mattress, while more than 800 have died on unprotected mattresses. MELODY TOWNS investigates

How far should the news media delve into the private lives of politicians? As IAN WISHART reports, there’s a strong ethical case for digging deep

Cover: iStockphoto

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION Volume 7, issue 72, ISSN 1175-1290

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FOCAL POINT VOX-POPULI SIMPLY DEVINE STRAIGHT TALK EYES RIGHT LINE 1 SOAPBOX

Editorial Die, slimebag!

Miranda Devine on the Greens Mark Steyn on liberty Richard Prosser on wind farms Chris Carter on MMP Dancing with the Devil Laura’s World and Tough Questions will return next month

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

Contributing Writers: Selwyn Parker, Melody Towns, Silja Talvi, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, Chris Carter, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Morrow, Laura Wilson, and the worldwide resources of MCTribune Group, UPI and Newscom Art Direction Design & Layout

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MONEY SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY SPORT HEALTH ALT.HEALTH TRAVEL FOOD PAGES MUSIC MOVIES DVDs TOYBOX 15 MINUTES

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Lighting the fuse Asteroid theory extinct?

Fires in laptops The Best & Worst of 2006 ADHD Dioxin’s deadly legacy Curacao A herb omelet Michael Morrissey’s summer books Chris Philpott’s CD reviews Deja Vu, Marie Antoinette Unfinished Life, Joyeux Noel Gotta haves The fifth Beatle

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94 80

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Heidi Wishart Bozidar Jokanovic

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SPORT WATCH SERIES

FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL

It’s just a jump to the Left...

W

hen National’s John Key swept to victory in a bloodless coup just a couple of weeks ago, the rejoicing could be heard in pubs and living rooms around New Zealand. It wasn’t that people disliked Brash, it was simply that they felt the gentle man of politics just wasn’t tough enough to mix it with Head Girl.

So with the rise of Key, long touted by the media as leadership material, many New Zealanders felt National finally had the team it needed to take on Labour and win in 2008.

It hasn’t taken long, however, for doubts to set in.

Within hours of making his first speech and giving his first interviews outlining the Key vision for National, John Key’s minders would “National strategists in the socially have been disturbed to read liberal camp reckon the party some of the comments on blogsites. strayed too close to the “religious right-leaning Those comments are right” last election which caused couched in terms like them to lose. Wrong” “Labour Lite”, and essentially reflect a frisson of fear that John Key is taking National back to the future, back to the centrist, politically correct line that saw it slump to its worst ever defeat in 2002.

Key, you see, is big on the reality of human-caused global warming, big on anti-nuclear, big on Labour’s version of tolerance and big, basically, on warm fuzzies.

Take for example the return of “Women’s Affairs” to the National portfolio lineup: “Key’s just another bloody Leftie,” commented Stan at Kiwiblog. “The more I hear about what he says and does, the more I am reminded of why as someone who knew absolutely nothing about politics until the 2002 election I ended up supporting ACT and not National.”

Over at the Sir Humphrey’s blog, meanwhile, Andrei’s view was similar: “What actually differentiates National from Labour?

Well I suppose they don’t have Helen Clark as a leader.

Time will tell if this is enough to win the next election.”

Or this comment on the same posting: “National’s new colours seem to be red and white. They sure ain’t red, white and blue. Oh well, perhaps some disgruntled National Party staffer will have to email Rodney Hide the party’s membership list.

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

“It might be the distance, but from Western Australia it looks like Don Brash has been well and truly dumped on by a party that owns him not just a great deal, but its salvation. When Bill English was in charge with the mushy policies Key seems to be announcing, National Party support was at half the level it is today.”

And in Investigate’s “The Briefing Room”, TBR.cc, one acid comment again summed up the mood: “I’m not much of a National Party supporter or a Labour one for that matter, but I think National needs to be renamed the New Labour Party!”

So what are the dangers for National and John Key? It appears the party has taken on Helen Clark’s appraisal of the Brash years as if they were holy writ, “cancerous and corrosive”, and National is now backtracking from many of its policy positions under Brash.

Left wing commentators see it as an acknowledgement

by National that it had swung too far right, and they’re welcoming a centrist National. But the problem, as the bloggers have already cottoned onto, is that National’s huge support in the polls was coming because it was right wing. From a record low of 21% support in 2002, it had surged back to almost 50% support in the polls under the “cancerous and corrosive” Brash. It came within a whisker of winning in 2005, foiled perhaps by Labour’s illegal election advertising that may have swung the final few thousand votes.

So, staring victory in the face at the next election had they held their nerve, has John Key just snatched defeat from the jaws of success by going soft on policy?

I personally have no overarching view on this, but like National I’ve been monitoring the blogosphere and conservatives are certainly reacting cautiously to the new look Nats. All it will take for the horses to bolt will be a couple of bad announcements by National coinciding with a reinvigorated Rodney Hide at the head of Act, and you’ll see National’s support slipping in the polls again.

In the US, the Republicans went soft in the last couple of years, and they too have just paid the price: conservatives didn’t trust them, and lefties didn’t trust them.

John Key would do well to ponder the mistakes of the Republicans, and not repeat them.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007,

VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES 101 USES FOR A…

My name is Dale Petersen and I read your article on Big Cats with interest. When about 15 or 16 yrs of age (19491950) I was rabbit shooting in the lower Kaimai range out of Tauranga (I think it was in Belk Rd).

I came across a massive black cat sitting on a strainer fence post. It was very threatening and being young I started shooting at it. After about 5 rounds of .22 calibre long, mostly in the head region, it fell.

I draped it over my pushbike carrier but had to tie the legs back up as it was too long and touched the ground on both sides. I took it back to Tauranga and got in touch with a man known as “Springhill Jack”. I think his name was Hoskings or similar. He apparently sent it to Wellington (Museum, I think) for identification, and from memory he said it was a Puma but he may have mentioned Panther. It was jet black with a very large head and long teeth. Estimated weight approximately 50 to 60 lbs, and at least four feet long.

Just thought it may be of interest to you.

Dale Petersen, via email EDITOR RESPONDS:

Of even more interest, perhaps, to the good burghers of rural Tauranga…

NORTH KOREA NOT A THREAT

The North Korean nuclear situation can be solved relatively easily. In the 1970’s when South Korea started to toy with nuclear weapons America soon put the pressure on them and the nonsense was stopped on the spot.

North Korea is still China’s boy. The Chinese are ostensibly not impressed by this nuclear test. All that America should do is to set a deadline that they will help arm Japan, South Korea and Taiwan with nuclear weapons if China does not sort out North Korea.

If China does not cooperate then our Asian allies will form a ring of steel around the area.

It’s my guess that China will co-operate as the thought of a nuclear armed Japan and Taiwan is terrifying for them. I suspect that “OUR DEAR LEADER” in North Korea and his Stalinist army will be flattened by the Chinese new model army, as if it were on exercises, if the atomic bombs and missiles are not discarded. The only lament will come from the Western whores who serve

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

him at the drying up of their lucrative income stream.

Iran is a different story. Here we have a cunning and resolute leader who is supported by his people. He also smells the decadent weakness of the West and may just be tempted to throw a nuke. We definitely need to flatten his nuclear facilities as soon as possible.

Yes, there will probably be high civilian casualties. So what, they voted for him!

Our lives and that of Western soldiers are more important than that of the enemy.

For us and our future generations let’s hope that the moral courage is forthcoming to carry out these operations. If it not ours will be a bitter harvest.

Derek Hadley, via email

ORGANIC BRED

Some really interesting articles in the November edition.

I appreciate the rigorous journalistic approach taken.

Well done.

Regarding your “Organic Bread” article, Phil Grainger’s assertion about Spelt being the better alternative to wheat seems questionable (and potentially dangerous?) in the light of the information at http://www. csaceliacs.org/documents/Spelt12006.pdf.

Regarding your interview with the Exclusive Brethren men, they state (p33) “The hallmark of authoritarianism is a complete disregard for the minorities’ rights of freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly.” My experience with ex-Exclusive Brethren people tells me that in this they are displaying high level hypocrisy because that statement perfectly describes their own in-house, super-strict, heartless authoritarian control over any non-conformity.

Morris Broadbent, Morrinsville VENERDI’S PHIL GRAINGER RESPONDS:

This article was not making any reference that Spelt was a gluten-free replacement for wheat as Spelt does contain gluten, all Venerdi gluten-free breads are made with: Rice, Tapiocca and maize flours and have no detectable gluten tested in a test with a detectable accuracy of 3ppm.

The reference to Spelt is that Spelt had been recognised for thousands of years as a health grain full of trace elements minerals and B vitamins and a delicate gluten very easy on our digestive systems where as the move to Wheat and the loss

of Spelt was solely for commercial reasons (money-making) with no consideration to human health at all and all the research on wheat following the industrial revolution has been to improve wheat for the automated bread making process, which sent wheat on a diverging path away from human nutrition and health.

The other consideration being is that Organic Spelt has no chemical residues whereas wheat has numerous chemical residues.

The question about wheat and cancer is really to say that ‘nutritional balance’ is the essential foundation of a healthy life, so when one food variety becomes unnaturally prominent (wheat) but its natural balance is not specific to the human requirement then we either have to add other foods to get the balance back or reduce the prominent one back to where it belongs.

We just need to get our awareness back about nutrition and change the direction of the medical fraternity to future health not being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

GLOBAL WARMING? BAH, HUMBUG!

Wayne Marsden’s contribution on Global Warming is pure science fiction! [Nov 2006, pg 65].

“One massive meteor ... 250 million years ago,” “Another meteor ... 65 million years ago” is not science – this is pure fantasy. Reads like writings of a Global Warming religious zealot.

I would rather trust David Ridenour’s piece on Global Warming, with his emphasis on honesty and open discussion.

Kerry Sharp, Palmerston North

For all the moments we’ve shared

MIRACLES? BAH, HUMBUG!

I have long ago come to treat Ian Wishart’s apologetics as simply a distraction in your otherwise very good magazine, however 14 pages in the December 2006 issue is more than the rational mind can bear.

Your cover story purports to be a report on “Real Miracles” but is in fact merely a recitation of belief from the patients concerned, with little or no reference to or citation of the medical authorities or published papers, beyond some puzzled “we don’t know what happened” quotes from doctors. (Which is hardly surprising, since a Google search on Marlene Klepees reveals many repeats of this story on Christian sites but, strangely, no published medical papers on this miraculous occurrence that allegedly “stunned” the medical profession.)

(Perhaps a follow-up feature on spontaneous remission in nonreligious patients would provide some balance and genuine “investigation”. I’m joking, of course – I know that the purpose of this sort of article is not to provide balanced investigation and analysis.)

Elsewhere we read that Antony Flew, a minor figure to most atheists until his much-publicised conversion, was “arguably … atheism’s strongest voice”. Since atheists do not rely on received wisdom or argument from authority for their position, it is hardly a body blow that one person has decided to take the religious path, not is it compelling that a philosopher (not a scientist) was ‘convinced by the scientific evidence’.

In the review of (homage to) Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box the author himself is allowed to answer the question ‘have your critics succeeded in demolishing your hypothesis?’ and – surprise – the answer is that Behe simply dismisses (and Mr Wishart ignores) all of the inconvenient facts that would provide a more rounded, and objective, assessment of the worth of this

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book. Meanwhile we are told that Darwinism (in itself a simplistic misnomer for the broad and complex field that is modern biology) “no longer has … intellectual strength”. Wishful thinking?

Yes. “Investigation” by Mr Wishart? Not even close.

I can no longer trust or take seriously a magazine that thinks Michael Behe has a scientific point to make, that the plural of “anecdote” is “data” and that asserts that “God did it” is a legitimate outcome of scientific inquiry while in the same breath (issue) bemoaning the lack of rigour and objectivity in our education system. If misrepresentation and one-sided promotion (as opposed to investigation) is so apparent in areas with which I am familiar, I doubt that I can trust you to inform me in other areas.

Richard Arrowsmith, Flagstaff Hill, South Australia EDITOR RESPONDS:

On the medical miracles issue, you ask where the scientific studies of these miracles are? Answer, as you and I both know, is that none were done. And the reason for that is that apart from assessing the data before and after, which doctors did, there is nothing left to study, and who was going to stump up the money for one? There is no doubleblind, controlled re-infection or any other daft idea like that because – having cheated death – none of those patients would want to go back through the nightmare nor would one be likely to end up with the same result – miracles being one-off interventions by definition.

What you do have in each case however is a medically documented illness which has inexplicably vanished, coincident to prayer by those involved.

Now, yeah, if one chooses not to believe in miracles on principle, and therefore take the view that there must be a natural explanation even if science doesn’t have one yet (I call this the ‘science of the gaps’ argument), one can hang back and wait for a natural explanation that may never turn up. On the other hand, those people who believe in cause and effect and that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one will look at these particular miracles and say: “people prayed, cancer/cerebral palsy/Parkinsons disappeared – most logical explanation = God did it”.

Granted, you can also argue for spontaneous remission, but the truth is science knows little about why that happens either. Given that a majority of cancer patients end up praying for their lives, according to scientific surveys, it is possible that many cases of remission are nonetheless an answer to prayer in a patient’s darkest hours.

Even so, there are no known cases of spontaneous remission of cerebral palsy in the medical literature, so such an answer still doesn’t cover the Klepees case. I’m sure if the Mayo Clinic had a better answer than miracle they’d scream it from the rooftops, but like everyone else they could see the woman had experienced a religious vision prior with a specific prophecy, and on the specific date she returned to the Clinic healed.

Again, the simplest explanation is also the most logical one.

If you think Investigate’s miracle issue devoted too much space, we’re in good company: Time magazine recently ran nearly 20% of its editorial pages on the God vs Science debate.

We trust this latest issue is more to your taste. Have a great New Year.

RETURN OF THE DON

Some glaring misconceptions in your article “Darwin’s worst nightmare” (December 2006) warrant comment. You can be assured that Darwin, if he were alive today, would sleep peacefully over the status of organic evolution. It is even more firmly

10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

established than it was in his time. He would no doubt be amazed at what we have discovered at the molecular level, and he would certainly be highly gratified to see how well these discoveries have confirmed his thesis. The view you convey that “in the past 20 years the foundation pillars of Darwinian evolution have begun to crumble as scientists broke open molecules and looked at the tiniest things that make up a single cell of life” is simply not true.

You dismiss the Dover court decision against ID as of no consequence, claiming that “ID didn’t lose the fight on the scientific evidence, but purely because the court believed anything that allowed a supernatural explanation in science broke the establishment definition of science as the search for natural explanations.” In other words, ID lost on a technicality. But this is grossly to oversimplify what amounted to a scathing 139-page rebuke to the ID movement.

True, ID does violate one of the ground rules of science by invoking supernatural causation. But the case for ID as a scientific alternative to evolution fails in other ways. For example, Behe’s failure to acknowledge exaptation as a well-documented explanation of how systems and structures with several parts could have evolved through natural means was seen for what it is – a means of ignoring abundant evidence refuting his irreducible complexity argument, ID’s so-called scientific centrepiece.

[Exaptation refers to a change, or changes, in function preceding a current function. A classic example relates to the evolution of the mammalian ear bones from jawbones.] It will be of interest to see if Behe has addressed exaptation in the new edition of Darwin’s Black Box. Warwick Don, Dunedin

ANOTHER TOLERANT LEFTIE

You Slimebag, I hope this Government steps outside namby pamby law and organizes your death by way of professional hitmen, or better still do it on the cheap and hire a Taliban woghead!

Maurie Haddon, via email

SAVE THE TREES, KILL THE CHILDREN

The worst abuse of children is in the womb. We have a Children’s Commissioner, Dr Cindy Kiro who is doing nothing for any baby/child in the womb. She says that her job begins at the birth of a child. Yet in the UNCROC preamble and Articles 1, 2, 6, and 24 it shows that the unborn should be a concern of the Children’s Commissioner. Dr Cindy Kiro should be sacked for ignoring the gross violence occurring every day of every year in this country to at least 17,000 children yearly.

Repealing Section 59 won’t stop the most gross of all child abuse in New Zealand-at least 17,000 abortions a year.

Repealing Section 59 will not stop the roughly 12 child murders a year happening in New Zealand. It has not in Sweden and it won’t in New Zealand.

These are the areas that need to be worked on, not the law abiding conscientious natural family whose desire it is to train up and correct, using reasonable force, their children to be law-abiding citizens of New Zealand.

We need to keep Section 59 as it is and not adopt the amended form that has come from the Select Committee.

Barbara Smith, Palmerston North

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EDITOR RESPONDS:

A couple of points Barbara. Firstly, I think the acronym UNCROC is delightful, encompassing as it does both “UN” and “CROC”.

Secondly, however, you are 100% correct in drawing attention to the abortion rate. The Green Party, and certainly the Labour Party, are huge supporters of the mass slaughter of unborn children on a scale any Nazi death camp would have been proud of, yet these same politicians are getting precious about a smack.

Let’s do the math again: 17,000 children killed in New Zealand each year via abortion 12 children killed each year via child abuse No child’s death is acceptable, so let’s work on reducing both.

ISABELLA WISHART

Thank you Isabella Wishart, if you hadn’t complained to the magazine I would never have known how gorgeous you really are. Your Nana & mum were my neighbours in Henderson; mum was a lovely little girl too, long dark hair. Would you complain a little more, I would like to see the rest of your siblings; do you think daddy would mind?

Thank you sweetie.

Maureen Britten, Hastings

COMMUNITY NOTICES SAVE ANIMALS LIVES!

NZ animals need just two hours of your time to help save their lives! NZ’s oldest and most respected animal welfare organization SAFE is seeking volunteer collectors for their annual street appeal against animal cruelty. This will take place on Fri 22nd of Dec and Sat 23rd of December. Please contact the SAFE office on 09 379-7749 if you want to help. www.safe.org.nz

DESPERATELY SEEKING

We would like to make contact with anyone (especially young children) who sailed on the SS Captain Hobson during her service as an emigrant carrier between the UK and New Zealand during the 1950s. Check out the website – http://www.jsites.co.nz/hobson or email us direct – hobson@jsites.co.nz.

Janet Robinson and Janet Simpson

LETTER FROM H2

I refer to your email of 18 October, in which you sought copies of “all emails regarding Taito Phillip Field or the Ingram Inquiry, all faxes, letters or internal communications on the same”. Your request was addressed to the Prime Minister’s Office.

Your request is very broad. Even so, there is very little official information that falls within its terms. As you would expect, the Office holds a copy of the report of Mr Ingram, QC. That is a publicly available document, however, and your request is therefore refused pursuant to section 18(d) of the Official Information Act. There are also a number of letters from members of the public. It is not clear whether you seek copies of these. Please let me know if you do.

The Office holds no other official information that falls within the terms of your request, which is therefore refused under section 18(e) of the Act. You may complain to the Ombudsman about this response.

Heather Simpson, Chief of Staff, Office of the Prime Minister EDITOR RESPONDS:

Mmmm, so in the entire PM’s office, ever since the Field allegations first surfaced publicly, not one email has ever flickered through anyone’s computer in the PM’s Office regarding this, even before the Inquiry was called?

What happened, has Nicky Hager been through and vacuumed up Helen’s inbox as well? Can’t wait for the book!

In the meantime, yes, we will pursue our rights of appeal.

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

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This is not philosophy, or theory, this is practical science.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 13

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE To banish poverty, ban the Greens

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t U2’s concerts last month, Bono urged the audience to text their names to a Make Poverty History phone number. Later he flashed the names on a big screen and sent a thank you text to all those mobile phones in Telstra Stadium. As an act of charity it doesn’t come much easier, unless you count wearing wristbands.

This is not to sneer at Bono for raising consciousness of the world’s poor, or his audience for making a gesture.

But as protesters and green activists gathered in Melbourne just recently to lay the usual blame for poverty on the greed of developed nations, a powerful new documentary shines light on a different villain.

Mine Your Own Business “I could put you with a family and shows that the “powgroup telling the you count how many times in a erful world’s poor how to live, day that family smile … Then I put how to work, even how to you with a family well off, in New think” are not the world leaders who gathered in York or London, and you count Melbourne. They’re not how many times people smile and even wealthy multinational corporations, but wealthy measure stress … Then you tell me multinational environment who is rich and who is poor” groups such as Greenpeace.

“Upper-class Western environmentalists” are the greatest enemy of the world’s poor, says the documentary’s maker, self-described left-wing journalist Phelim McAleer, from Northern Ireland.

He shows how environmental groups opposed to change and economic growth are trying to keep the developing world poor. “Poor but happy”, is how they see it.

Posted to Romania by The Financial Times in 2000, McAleer covered the Greenpeace campaign to prevent the opening of a goldmine in the Transylvanian mountains. It changed his views on environmental activism.

What he found in Rosia Montana was an impoverished village, with 75 per cent unemployment, little sanitation or running water and people desperate for jobs. It had been a mining town since Roman times but the last state-owned mine was closing and a Canadian company, Gabriel Resources, wanted to take over. It had promised to provide jobs, rebuild infrastructure

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and clean up pollution from old mines.

Early on McAleer acknowledges his film was partfunded by Gabriel Resources but says he retained editorial control.

He interviews Francoise Heidebroek, a Belgian green activist who says villagers are better off being farmers and riding horses. But as the villagers explain, nothing grows except potatoes, and at minus 25 degrees they prefer cars and indoor toilets.

Gheorghe Lucian, an unemployed miner, tells McAleer: “People have no food to eat. They don’t have money for clothes … I know what I need – a job.”

McAleer took Lucian to similar projects around the world, and interviewed activists such as Mark Fenn, World Wide Fund for Nature’s American representative in southern Madagascar, who opposes a Rio Tinto mine in the impoverished fishing village of Fort Daupin, which would create 2000 jobs. “The quaintness, the small-town feeling will change,” Fenn says.

Fenn insists that Lucian doesn’t really understand poverty. “How do we perceive who’s rich, who’s poor …”

Fenn says. “I could put you with a family and you count how many times in a day that family smile … Then I put you with a family well off, in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile and measure stress … Then you tell me who is rich and who is poor.”

Underlining the hypocrisy, Fenn shows McAleer the luxury house he is building and catamaran he bought for $US30,000 – “a good price”. As McAleer says, the average salary in the village is less than $US100 a month.

But, “the indicators of wellbeing aren’t housing, nutrition, health, education”, says Fenn, although he sends his own children to school in South Africa.

The villagers tell McAleer the opposite. One says she wants her children to become “a midwife, a doctor, or an engineer”.

It’s the same story in Chile where activists have halted a goldmine in the Andes. A young man tells McAleer: “I’m not asking for much, just a normal job.”

McAleer shows how progressives oppose progress and have become part of an “authoritarian world order”, telling people in the developing world how they must live.

He hopes his film will show well-meaning Westerners the consequences of their blind faith in the new “religion” of environmentalism.

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STRAIGHT TALK

MARK STEYN Philosophy of small government

I

f Milton Friedman had to die, then a week after the defeat of a Republican Congress that had apparently forgotten every lesson Friedman taught in Free To Choose is eerily apt timing. As it happens, had ill health not intervened, Professor Friedman would have been disembarking round about now from a National Review post-election cruise with yours truly and various other pundits and commentators. Instead, we were obliged to sail without him, and in the days that followed I found myself wondering what the great man would have made of the most salient feature of our deliberations: On the one hand, there are those conservatives for whom the war trumps everything and peripheral piffle like “No Child Left Behind” can be argued over when “Promoting liberty and democracy, the jihad’s been seen off. even if they ultimately fail, is still On the other, there are those conservatives for a good way of messing with the whom the war is peripheral thugs’ heads” and, insofar as it exists, it doesn’t begin to mitigate the abandonment of Friedmanite principles on public spending, education and much else. There is a huge gulf between these two forces, to the point where the War Party and the Small Government Party seem as mutually hostile as the Sunni and Shia on their worst days.

If the Republicans can’t re-unite these two wings before 2008, they’ll lose again and keep on losing.

Take, for example, Ward Connerly, whose Michigan ballot proposition against racial quotas was one of the few victories conservatives won on election day.

(Needless to say, most GOP bigwigs, including washedup gubernatorial loser Dick DeVos, opposed it.) In a discussion of conservative core values, Connerly suggested it wasn’t the role of the Federal Government to impose democracy on the entire planet. And put like that, he has a point. However, I support the Bush Doctrine on two grounds: First, for “utopian” reasons – if the Middle East becomes a region of free states, it will have been the right thing to do and the option most consistent with American values (unlike the stability fetishists’ preference for sticking with Mubarak, the House of Saud and the other thugs and autocrats). But secondly it also makes sense from a cynical realpolitik perspective: promoting liberty and democracy, even if they ultimately

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fail, is still a good way of messing with the thugs’ heads.

It’s one of the few real points of pressure America and its allies can bring to bear against rogue nations, and in the case of Iran the one with the clearest shot at being effective. In other words, even if it ultimately flops, seriously promoting liberty and democracy could cause all kinds of headaches for the mullahs, Assad, Mubarak and the rest of the gang. However it turns out, it’s the “realist” option.

The President doesn’t frame it like that, alas. Instead, he says stuff like: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Really? It’s unclear whether that’s the case in Gaza and the Sunni Triangle. But it’s absolutely certain that it’s not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, Toronto and New Orleans. The story of the western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom – the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff.

I would welcome the President using “Freedom is the desire of every human heart” in Chicago and Dallas, and, if it catches on there, then applying it to Ramadi and Tikrit.

Meanwhile, from the War Party’s point of view, the Bush Doctrine is beginning to accumulate way too many opt-outs. For example, a couple of weeks back, US forces in Baghdad captured a death squad commander of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army only to be forced to release him on the orders of the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki. When I had the honor of discussing the war with the President recently, he was at pains to emphasize that Iraq was “sovereign.” That may be. But, at a time when a gazillion freelance militias are running around the joint ignoring the sovereign government, it seems a mite pedantic to insist that the sole militia in the country that has to obey every last memo from Prime Minister Maliki are the US armed forces.

Moqtada al-Sadr is an emblem not of democracy’s flowering but of the arid soil in which it’s expected to grow.

America would have been better off capturing and executing him two years ago.

That’s not the worst mistake, alas. The crucial missed opportunity (as some of us pointed out at the time) occurred five years ago, back when the President still had

his post-9/11 approval ratings. You can’t hold them forever, obviously, but, while he had them, George W Bush could have used them for a “teaching moment.” As we can see in Europe every day of the week, Big Government is a national security issue – for all the reasons Milton Friedman understood: in diminishing individual liberty, it transforms free-born citizens into nannystate charges to the point where it imperils the existence of the nation. If ever there was a time for not introducing a new prescription drug entitlement, wartime is it. Yet the President and Congress apparently decided that they could fight a long existential struggle abroad while Big Government continued to swell and bloat at home.

It has been strange for me in these days since the election to spend so much time with so many figures I admire and to find that each group barely recognizes each other’s concerns. The War Party is the War Party, the Small Government Party is the Small Government Party, and ne’er the twain shall meet apparently.

That way lies disaster: you can’t be in favor of assertive American foreign policy overseas and increasing Europeanization domestically; likewise, you can’t take a reductively libertarian view while the rest of the planet goes to pieces. Someone in the GOP needs to do what Ronald Reagan did so brilliantly a quarter-century ago – reconcile the big challenges abroad with a small-government philosophy at home. The House and the Senate will not return to Republican hands until they do.

“As we can see in Europe every day of the week, Big Government is a national security issue – for all the reasons Milton Friedman understood: in diminishing individual liberty, it transforms free-born citizens into nanny-state charges to the point where it imperils the existence of the nation. If ever there was a time for not introducing a new prescription drug entitlement, wartime is it. Yet the President and Congress apparently decided that they could fight a long existential struggle abroad while Big Government continued to swell and bloat at home”

© Mark Steyn, 2006

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Pentax Optio W20 New 7.0 megapixel email pentax@irl.co.nz Available from all leading Camera Stores INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 17

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER When the wind blows

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pring is over, and this writer for one glad to see the back of it. While it might be nice to see the trees greening up and the snow receding after the bleak privations of winter, for many people who work outdoors, muggins included (at least most of the time), spring can be a frustrating and uncomfortable season. It is alternately hot, cold, wet, dry, chilly, humid, stifling, and windy, and on occasion, most of them at the same time.

This season, for grapegrowers and orchardists, has been a diabolical one in terms of frost, and probably less wet than many others, certainly the farmers, would have liked. But what grates most about spring, is the wind.

In the autumn we have “Once upon a time, when we the equinoxial gales, but were the owners, that profit they don’t last for very long, and while they may carry went back to the nation, in the off the odd elderly shed or form of cheap electricity; now, in ailing barn roof, and knock over a few macrocarpas, our brave new world of privatised they also provide some welpower, it goes largely offshore” come respite from the burning heat of summer.

In the springtime, however, it just blows. It blows every day, from nine in the morning till nine at night, regular as clockwork. It’s blowing even as I sit and type. Every year it starts blowing at the beginning of spring, and every year everyone says it’ll be over by Christmas, and every year it isn’t. Most years it’ll blow till the end of January, by which time the wind has turned from cold southerly to hot nor-wester, sapping the will and stretching the patience, and driving grown men into licenced premises in search of a little cool amber relief.

And then it stops; and almost the next day, is forgotten…and come the heat of summer, when it’s forty degrees hereabouts and dead calm, and a gentle breeze would actually be quite nice, it’s almost forgiven.

That’s the thing about the wind, you see; it doesn’t blow all the time, at least not always in the same place.

Not even in Wellington – just like it isn’t, in fact, always raining on the West Coast. Certainly, in this long narrow country of ours, there will almost always be somewhere where it’s windy. And the wind is a completely free and ever-renewable resource, which we as a nation could and

18, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

should be harvesting, because right now, as some of us cranky doomsayers have been grizzling about for years, New Zealand is running out of electricity.

As I write, both Meridian Energy and Trustpower are planning on building large wind farms in the heart of the Central Otago tussock country. They’ll be just the ticket, we are told; cheap, clean, green, renewable energy, which will save the lakes and cut the carbon emissions, light the lights, slash the power bills, drive the heat pumps of a new and wood-fire free world, and generally herald a glorious age of eco-friendly, low-footprint humanity.

Nice theory; what a shame it’s a load of rubbish. About the only truth in the propaganda is that the wind does blow, and will continue to, for free – some of the time.

This is fine if you have a mobile wind farm which can be transported to wherever the gusts are gathering; unfortunately, such technology is probably still a little way off, and we will have to make do with fixed installations for the time being. These fixed installations are a long way from having a low environmental footprint, and their construction is a very long way indeed from being clean or green.

Power companies and the supporters of windfarms have spent inordinate amounts of money on producing splendid brochures and photo-shopped montages of the planned turbines, elegant structures sweeping majestically against a backdrop of empty skies and wide open country, within which they are scarcely visible. And, true enough, from Auckland, or Wellington, or Christchurch, or anywhere else whose back yard they’re not in, they won’t be visible at all. From the farms and tourist trails of the Otago back country, however, (or the Manawatu, or the Wairarapa, or the Hawke’s Bay, or anywhere else earmarked for despoliation, come to that), they’ll stick out like the dog’s proverbials; garish white pylons nearly twice as high as a rugby field is long, and covering almost as much sky as one and a half times its area, spread out by the hundred across the roof of what little remains of our wilderness country, and with the rotor tips lit up at night to warn aircraft of their presence, beneath the glittering heavens which till now have remained as free from light pollution as ever they were when dinosaurs walked the earth.

So much for the emotional argument. It is true, as a wise man said to me on the subject, that these ugly, noisy,

monstrosities don’t have to be there forever. Unlike a hydro dam, if and when something else comes along, we can always take them down again (though probably not their 650 cubic metre concrete foundations). Economic reality, however, says that we won’t be able to. These windfarm projects will cost billions, and that money must be recouped over the coming years, not only to pay for the development, but to return the owners an acceptable profit. Once upon a time, when we were the owners, that profit went back to the nation, in the form of cheap electricity; now, in our brave new world of privatised power, it goes largely offshore.

Hilariously, in the case of the Government’s own state-owned generators, the profit from the sale of electricity – the price of which has doubled since the “market reforms” – is delivered directly into the Government’s coffers, where it is now called a dividend instead of a tax! (How’s that surplus, Dr Cullen?)

Factor into the equation the reality that the turbines will only be producing at capacity for a fraction of the year – between a quarter and a half of it, depending on whose global averages one chooses to believe – and the anything up to 30% transmission loss suffered in delivering the power to market, and it becomes apparent that the precious kilowatts which do actually reach the customer, will need to be very pricy indeed, in order to make the exercise a successful one for our admirably capitalistic generation industry.

On top of that, the National Grid is already stretched, and new infrastructure to carry the increased generation will be neither cheap, nor paid for by anyone other than the consumer. Either way, it is likely that we will be locked into using, and paying for, the power from these windfarms for at least a half century.

No electricity generation is actually clean, and we are foolish to believe that it is. Hydro dams built from concrete by definition require cement works, no turbine or generator in the world can be manufactured without steel refining and heavy engineering, photovoltaic panels use more energy in the refining of their selenium cells than they will produce during their serviceable lifetimes, and even the good old Kiwi DIY rooftop black alkathene solar water heater depends on polyethylene pipe, which is made from oil. This oil doesn’t just dig itself up, ready-refined, and transport itself around the world unaided. It needs ships, which need shipyards, and vehicles, and pipelines, and the same goes for the construction machinery needed for building dams and thermal stations and even wind farms.

The 60m blades of the proposed Otago turbines will be manufactured in Denmark from carbon fibre and carted halfway around the world in diesel powered cargo ships, then trucked from the port, over 150km of new roads, to sit atop 100m steel towers – most likely forged in the smoky foundries of China or Germany – which are transported the same way. And when they finally get here, the first thing they will do is push the power prices up.

In spending the aforementioned billions on the wind projects in question, we are ensuring that this money is not available for anything else. We need more electricity, certainly, but at the same time, there are, with a little lateral thinking, some ways in which we could both reduce growing electricity demand, and localise its production.

As I may have mentioned before, about a quarter of New Zealand’s electricity generation, and around half the average

household power bill, is consumed by domestic hot water heating. The money spent building the Clyde dam, for example, would have paid for almost half a million domestic solar water heaters.

A company in Scotland (see www.renewabledevices.com) manufactures domestic wind turbines, which are almost silent, and produce about 1.5kw of power – when the wind is blowing, of course. Perhaps a large number of small turbines, say on the roof of every house (and owned by the homeowner), in cities and towns where the power is needed, would make more sense than a small number of large turbines out in the backblocks, where it is expensive to produce, wasteful to transport, and detrimental to tourism. Think about it; the structure to get the turbine up in the air is already there – it’s called a house. Ditto the access roads, and on top of that, we won’t need to upgrade the Grid, because we’re making the power where we need it.

Of course, such a solution is not likely to find favour with either the Government or the power companies, because it means a whole lot less money for both of them. But at the end of the day, it’s our money they’re spending, and our wild open country which they’re hell-bent on wrecking in so doing.

If our Governments’ lunatic adherence to the crackpot Greenhouse theory hadn’t convinced them that CO2 was evil, we could build thermal power stations, quickly, cheaply, and handy to town, and run them on some of the 2000-years’ worth of free coal supply, with which Mother Earth has blessed our fair land, or fit every house and commercial building with a gas-fired cogeneration unit (and a dozen energy-saving lightbulbs).

Maybe we could tap the hot air which emanates from the Beehive, or make biogas out of the base material from which the attitudes of Kyoto believers are formed; but until we can find a way of storing the wind, or turning it on and off as demand dictates, the large remote windfarms currently being suggested by the greedy and the powerful (no pun intended), are never going to deliver on the promises of their promoters. It will be an ill wind indeed which blows them our way.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 19

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER The problem is MMP

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nd thus it was, that despite the continual casting of the runes by the legion of doom-sayers so beloved by ‘desperate for a headline’ media outlets, that we in New Zealand never the less are passing quite safely into yet another New Year.

Certainly 2007, as it stretches out before us, will very likely have all manner of surprises to both delight and perhaps horrify most of us, but here’s hoping that at least this time around we will be a whole lot less inclined to being so easily manipulated by politicians and their subservient media scribes. These people have, in recent years, turned misinformation and the manipulation of the New Zealand psyche into an absolute art form. In many respects it’s “If as many people now seem very hard to cogently nail to believe MMP has in effect down in an easily understandable fashion just what altered, well beyond the pale, our has been happening to us whole democratic process, should and our society over the decade. Admittedly, not this simple, single issue be last an increasing number of resolved prior to the thinking New Zealanders next election?” who still chose to stay and tough it out in Godzone are still trying to work out how we could lose so much and in such a short period of time, and perhaps worst of all, to have no real say or even recognition of an apparently carefully planned process as it has inexorably unfolded.

In any society there have always been people genetically predisposed towards the seeking of absolute power.

Naturally enough these folk in company with those of a similar disposition usually gravitate into politics and indeed, right around the globe through various means they invariably end up as the Government or ruling faction. OK, here in NZ we thankfully adopted the civilised process of ridding ourselves of leaders who had proven to be incompetent or perhaps less than honest by the use of the democratic process, in other words by simply holding an election we removed from power those that we no longer wished to lead us. As the years rolled by and elections came and went this system by and large served us pretty well, the politicians being kept in some sort of check from wilder excess by the sure knowledge that the ultimate power in the land still was held by the common

20, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

voter, who, every three years could in effect lop off their political heads with a simple mark on a ballot paper. This was quite obviously a system that did not settle at all well with those sharing the gene pool of absolute power and dictatorship, indeed a method had to be devised whereby with seeming “fairness”, on the one hand the voters were persuaded to believe that the democratic process could be enhanced, whilst on the other it would become virtually impossible to remove from parliament those determined to stay there.

With inspired Machiavellian planning and eventual super salesmanship the NZ public were persuaded to buy the very rope with which our democratic process would be hanged with, we, stupidly thinking, in our innocence that accompanying promises of a future referendum to possibly reverse this legislation were somehow valid, we allowed the ogre that is MMP to come into being. Did any of us for a moment even consider the future impossibility of removing from parliament say even an Adolf Hitler clone should he also be favourably placed on a party “list”? Did we realise that henceforth our entire system of future governance in canine terms would enthusiastically rely on the tail wagging the dog, whereby small, completely unrepresentative and frequently lunatic fringe political parties would be bribed by a larger party to form, in effect a Government of political prostitutes. That inevitably, list MPs from these same minuscule parties would have the opportunity to inflict on all of the people of this country, ideas and eventual legislation that not that many years back people received psychiatric care to overcome!

Certainly in all democratic fairness it could well be considered that those unfortunate enough to be a trifle weird or perhaps even slightly unhinged, should be represented in the overall political process, but to be allowed, by common political whore-trading to assume full ministerial powers would, I have thought, been an entirely different matter. That Helen Clark and her acolytes have managed to almost entirely reshape this country for good or for bad depending on an individual’s personal view is scarcely the point, the fact that this has been done purely and simply as a result of the essential support provided by the purchase (political Bribery) of the parliamentary votes of those that are now in parliament though MMP has in fact and in essence all but destroyed our

democratic process. There would be no good purpose in falling into the trap of denigrating the Greens, New Zealand First or even Peter Dunne’s party of one; they, along with all of us, have become simple pawns in a process long ago cooked up by those completely obsessed and indeed entirely corrupted by the drug of political power. Long since has departed from our political scene any semblance that legislation is passed or political decisions taken for the common good, even the most charitable amongst us now being well aware that the primary concern of Government today is simply to get back into power at the next election, at all costs, to which end there are no political or moral depths to which they will not descend.

Which brings me to how we might extradite ourselves from what at the moment seems to be a now entrenched MMP system which it appears an increasing number of Kiwis are most unhappy with? Firstly, it is an undeniable fact that we were clearly promised an opportunity to re-visit this system by means of a nationwide referendum. This has not happened and even more importantly, why not? Indeed, if as many people now seem to believe MMP has in effect altered, well beyond the pale, our whole democratic process, should not this simple, single issue be resolved prior to the next election? Short of an armed insurrection, which happily is not really the New Zealand way in any case, how do we set about telling, not asking, this present Government that we require immediately or certainly within the next couple of months, a properly run, official referendum (without incidentally taxpayer funded propaganda ads), that purely and simply fulfills the “hands on heart” promises that we the voting public were originally given. While we’re at it and without complicating things too much, many of us would also like to see the further establishment of regular “Binding” referenda whereby really important social or moral decisions are increasingly removed from the grubby hands or “consciences” of politicians and given back to the people of this country, where in fact, in a democracy, is where these decisions should really be made!

Naturally, we would quickly hear the same old chant, that a “Government is there to Govern”, apparently saying in effect that whilst the public can be trusted to vote us into power, from then on in the public doesn’t have the brains to make any further decisions until the next election. This of course is sheer arrogance and absolute nonsense. The Swiss have enjoyed, for years, regular referenda as an integral part of their political process, which probably explains their wealth and apparent happiness as a people, along perhaps with their Government’s caution in upsetting their voters too much, in that every Swiss home is required to have by law, readily available arms and ammunition for their citizen army! So the question I guess that we should all be pondering is how do we set about frightening our Politicians into doing the right thing? Look at it this way, if most of us really do want to have a healthy democracy where the continuing input of the wants, needs and desires of the people of this country are paramount, then it surely is in all of our interests to wave a fond farewell to this series of three year dictatorships, whereby we have all become little other than slaves to the ideology of a handful of people in parliament who not only do pretty much as they please but, through low animal cunning, have made it near impossible for us to ever get rid of. Every so often in any society there comes a time for major political reform. In the view of many

“The Swiss have enjoyed, for years, regular referenda as an integral part of their political process, which probably explains their wealth and apparent happiness as a people, along perhaps with their Government’s caution in upsetting their voters too much”

New Zealanders, that time is long overdue because regardless of what ever else we may do in this land to advance our society, if our system of management is rubbish, ordinary people are not included or even consulted in the decisions that effect us all, then to even consider that we have a democracy, is simply an exercise in self delusion.

Or, do we simply want to look forward, after the next “election” to another display of essential political prostitution as various parties sell their souls to gain that which they hold most dear...and that you can be most assured of is neither the well being of you or your family, our country or its future.

Chris Carter appears in association with www.snitch.co.nz, a must-see site.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 21

SOAPBOX

KEVIN McCULLOUGH

R

ick Warren, the best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life and senior teaching pastor at Saddleback Church in California, invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak to the congregation of the faithful on Dec. 1, 2006. In doing so, he has joined himself with one of the smoothest politicians of our times, and also one whose wickedness in worldview contradicts nearly every tenet of the Christian faith that Warren professes.

So the question is “why?”

Why would Warren marry the moral equivalency of his pulpit – a sacred place of honor in evangelical tradition – to the inhumane, sick and sinister evil that Obama has worked for as a legislator?

“Sen. Obama does not share with According to press evangelicals a belief in moral reports, it is because of a mutual respect that each absolutes. Right and wrong are feels towards the other over terms of humour to Obama. All the HIV/AIDS pandemic the African continent. issues are shades of gray” on That rationale, however, is not only dishonest, but is not even logical given the two distinct positions that the men come to on the matter.

Because of this supposed shared concern, Warren is ready to turn over the spiritual mantle to a man who represents the views of Satan at worst or progressive anti-God liberals at best in most of his public positions on the greatest moral tests of our time.

Warren’s stand on the matter in this instance is what is in doubt – not Obama’s!

Barack Obama has a long history of defying the intended morality of Scripture. As a state legislator, he actively worked to preserve availability of abortion in all nine months of pregnancy. He opposed parental notification. He opposed any and all bans on partial-birth abortion (an act that includes delivery of the baby up to the head, the crushing of the baby’s brain, the suctioning of the brain matter, and then completed delivery of the child’s deflated cranium). In his run for the U.S. Senate, Obama even asked his wife to pen a letter to Illinois voters that reassured them of his commitment to fighting for the right to butcher children in the womb.

Barack Obama has long supported the advance of the radical homosexual activist lobby in its pursuit to destroy

22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

traditional marriage. He supported the creation of “special rights” for people who engage in homosexuality for the sole purpose of putting them at the front of the line on issues of employment, housing and litigation. He has also solidly backed the advancement of all “hate crimes” legislation, which ultimately may be used to silence clergy who believe according to their own convictions that homosexual behavior is wrong and preach so from biblical texts. Obama has a perfect voting record against the defense of marriage.

Barack Obama advocates continued funding for Planned Parenthood clinics in our nation’s inner cities, which are performing genocide against the populations of African Americans living there.

And most damnable of all, when a brave nurse named Jill Stanek brought about national awareness to a practice at a local hospital in suburban Chicago that allowed the starvation and neglect of newly born children who had survived abortion procedures – Obama opposed her.

He opposed the right of those children to be given the chance to live and he advocated against a ban on such procedures – then known as “born alive abortions.”

Even if they share a professed concern over the AIDS pandemic, what difference would Warren and Obama’s union actually make?

Sen. Obama does not share with evangelicals a belief in moral absolutes. Right and wrong are terms of humour to Obama. All issues are shades of gray.

So how does Rick Warren believe their efforts can legitimately be joined? And what does he have to give up to do so?

By scriptural standards, Rick Warren is to be bound by the biblical text and its teaching on morality. Obama would pursue and has pursued mass distribution of condoms.

If you say to a society, as Uganda has, that the only way to be sure of not getting AIDS is through “abstinence until marriage,” then they will be likely to believe you. (It’s scientifically provable. And it explains Uganda’s unique improvement on the African continent in the number of people contracting the virus.) On the other hand, if you say to a culture, as has happened in more than one African nation, “Try abstinence – but if you can’t remain abstinent then use a condom,” what do you think the likely outcome will be?

Warren’s reasoning might be similar to other leaders of doctrinally weak seeker churches like Willow Creek

Soapbox is an occasional column in Investigate. If you have an issue you’d like to sound off about, email 750 words to editorial@investigatemagazine.com

Why is Obama’s evil in Rick Warren’s pulpit?

“There is definitely something for Barack Obama to gain by appearing in Rick Warren’s pulpit – the implied endorsement and blessing for the 2008 presidential race. There is definitely something for Rick Warren to gain in promoting Obama and giving him time behind the altar of God’s word – power and access to a future heavyweight contender for the highest office in the land”

Community Church in Illinois. Senior Pastor Bill Hybels first invited an unrepentant then-President Bill Clinton to attend his pastor’s conference, and proceeded to pitch him one softball after the next in an interview before the gathered masses. Hybels’ idea was to allow Clinton to “teach pastors” ideas about what “true leadership” was all about. (At what? Adultery? Lying under oath?

Oral Sex?) Clinton was at least smart enough to be able to play the game a bit and profess certain vagaries about a “life of belief in God.” Obama doesn’t let such nonsense get in his way.

Barack Obama is likely to run for president in 2008, and speaking from the pulpit of one of America’s most well-known evangelical churches is likely to be footage that could be used over and over in trying to dissuade Christians from thinking about moral issues that real Christians truly value.

It should also be noted that Rick Warren knows better. Both he and his wife, Kay, have appeared on my broadcast in days gone by.

Through some of our combined efforts with World Vision, my radio listeners have raised literally millions of dollars towards the AIDS crisis in Africa. And the truth be told, evangelicals in North America contribute more monies toward the very issue Warren professes worry over than the whole of Barack Obama’s liberal friends combined.

There is definitely something for Barack Obama to gain by appearing in Rick Warren’s pulpit – the implied endorsement and blessing for the 2008 presidential race. There is definitely something for Rick Warren to gain in promoting Obama and giving him time behind the altar of God’s word – power and access to a future heavyweight contender for the highest office in the land.

There is also something definitively risky for me in drawing attention to the matter, but because I am compelled to do what is right – and not what is expedient – I cannot refrain from asking the question.

My listeners feel the same way. They feel even more so that way when they are hung up on when dialing Warren’s church at +1 949609-8000 to express their concerns. (That was +1 949-609-8000.)

Whatever the forthcoming explanation is from Rick Warren, it will be impossible to counterbalance the rock solid truths about Obama and what he stands for.

And for the scripturally literate among us, Ephesians 5:11 says, “Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.”

You can read more of Kevin McCullough’s views at http://muscleheadrevolution.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 23

The a r 24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

n e y f o t

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And disa how N ppe e ar w Z do e w a

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Financial commentators like Investigate’s own Peter Hensley have been warning for months we’ve been living on borrowed time.

Now, as SELWYN PARKER discovers, a 40 billion dollar chicken might be coming home to roost Down Under and it will hit homeowners and workers alike with eggs that are anything but golden

Selwyn Parker is a former senior writer for Metro magazine, now based in London.

His last piece for Investigate was on John Hood, the Oxford Vice-Chancellor

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 25

M

r. Watanabe is a well-paid, middle-ranking executive in a foodstuffs distribution business in Nagoya with a lot of disposable income. Like most of his compatriots and unlike most New Zealanders, he’s a saver who likes to invest some of his money in liquid assets such as bank deposits, Bank of Japan bonds and other conventional instruments.

Trouble is, for the last four years, it’s hardly been worth Mr. Watanabe’s while to put his spare cash into his own country’s banks. Interest rates on deposit accounts are low and the Bank of Japan, alone among the big central banks, has paid practically nothing on its bonds. Its governors have their reasons, as we see later, but the Bank of Japan’s zero-rate policy left Mr. Watanabe and millions of other thrifty Japanese with a problem. Namely, how to get a decent return.

A big part of their solution, as finance minister Michael Cullen knows only too well, was to buy New Zealand dollars in what we call uridashi – or ‘bargain basement’– bonds. It’s known as the yen carry trade. By borrowing yen at a paltry rate of around 0.30 per cent and buying kiwis paying around seven per cent, Mr. Watanabe and his fellow retail investors are clocking up a handsome 6.7 per cent return before transaction costs.

Until three years ago, nobody worried too much about uridashi kiwis. Indeed Mr. Cullen and the Reserve Bank welcomed these torrents of yen; all small countries need as much foreign investment as they can get. But as the uridashi flows grew bigger and faster, they prompted well-publicised panic visits to Tokyo to try and stem the torrent. But still it’s kept on coming, like the overflowing water in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. At November, about NZ$40bn was held in uridashis. It’s nearly all short-term money with a life of one to three years. Over NZ$10bn worth of uridashi bonds are due to be redeemed – effectively cashed in – during 2007. A Herald report in October suggests up to US$29 bn maybe vulnerable in Australia..

These are uncharted waters. New Zealand has never been in this situation before, and nor has the rest of the world. Reading between the conscientiously objective lines of a central banker, Reserve Bank governor Dr. Alan Bollard and other senior staff are worried. Citing the “high level of ‘cyclical’ liquidity” in our foreign exchange markets, Dr. Bollard explains how delicately balanced is the situation. “Given the reliance on foreign capital [i.e. uridashi kiwis and the related but longer-term eurokiwis], any rapid change in global perceptions of New Zealand’s credit-worthiness would dramatically alter the cost of capital” he warned in November’s financial stability report.

That’s central bank-speak for “there’s a problem out there”.

In short, uridashi bonds are hot money and, when or if they turn, they will likely turn fast with dramatic consequences for New Zealand. As the Reserve Bank points out, just one consequence would be higher interest rates all around on everything from mortgages and credit cards to farm loans and hire purchase. Another would be a sharp fall in the equity markets.

Beyond New Zealand, some even forecast a melt-down as the yen carry trade runs out. “It’s going to be ugly” predicted David Bloom, a currency expert with HSBC bank not nor-

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mally noted for his gloomy views, earlier this year. Political economist Lyndon LaRouche, who is known for a degree of pessimism, fears the worst, foreseeing “a hit with a magnitude far beyond any individual nation or currency”. Even sober pundits like Morgan Stanley chief economist Steven Roach sees bubbles resulting everywhere from the global, carry-trade borrowing that has blown out prices for assets – that’s, everything from kiwi dollars to commercial property in central London.

In the City of London, where many billions of cheap yen have been converted into sterling and other currencies and reinvested in these assets, you can sense the growing nervousness.

“Yen carry trades are a risky game”, warns currency market expert John Authers of the Financial Times.

Another small nation has already been through it. Iceland had run short-term rates even higher than New Zealand, up to 10.75 per cent, and been flooded with yen-based speculation on its krona. When credit-rating service Fitch down-graded Iceland’s sovereign debt in March, in part because of concerns about the carry-trade, the money promptly fled. As a result the stock market plunged 20 per cent in a day and the krona collapsed eight per cent in 48 hours.

There’s hardly a single respected authority in The City or in the central banks who doesn’t think the yen carry trade will unwind sometime next year. The question is when, and how violently. The big worry is that nobody knows the size of the yen carry trade and therefore the effects of a collapse are unpredictable. Measured in US dollars, it’s certainly billions and possibly trillions. Most authorities hope for an orderly phase-out but some fear the worst. “The entire global financial system is on the verge of disintegration, as a result of the imminent collapse of the yen carry trade”, predicted the Daily Telegraph, not normally a doom-saying newspaper, back in February.

But let’s get back to Mr. Watanabe and New Zealand.

It all started soon after the millennium, almost imperceptibly.

To fire up a chronically flat economy after nearly a decade of deflation, the Bank of Japan, the main culprit, started handing out what was effectively free money. The intention was benign but nobody expected the result. Quick to spot an opportunity in the currency markets, the relatively new breed of investors, the hedge funds or “hedgies” in the trade’s parlance, started borrowing yen at give-away rates and buying up higher-return assets elsewhere. In effect, the Bank of Japan became unofficial lender of first choice to the world.

The hedgies and other big borrowers weren’t however just buying toll-roads, commercial property, ports, airports, commodities such as gold and silver and other normal assets with this cheap money. They also began to purchase and hold as assets great swathes of higher-rate currencies. Foreign-exchange traders, the reef fish of the banking sector, have done this on a daily basis for years, but the actual holding of currencies as an asset class was an alarming new phenomenon for many central bankers. At first the currency of choice was the greenback in the form of US treasuries – T-bills in the trade. But the “spread”, or margin, on T-bills was only a few basis points and, ever opportunistic, the hedgies looked elsewhere and started gobbling up bonds in high cash-rate countries such as Iceland, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. The carry trade had reared its head.

About the same time, uridashi investors like Mr. Watanabe entered the scene, often holding only a few thousand dollars individually but collectively adding up to billions.

Ma and Pa investors in the suburbs of Tokyo and across Japan hold $40 billion worth of NZ currency falling due in the next three years, and if they want it back all at once…

The kiwi soon acquired the doubtful accolade of one of the carry-trade currencies of choice, largely because of its high official rate. This is largely driven by New Zealand households’ insatiable appetite for debt but uridashi investors don’t really care about the factors that create high official rates. They are just looking for high-yielding assets in a world of low inflation. By late 2004, about NZ$4bn worth of uridashis had been issued. In general the Reserve Bank still welcomed the foreign investment. After all, Japanese investors had been here before

with the samurai bonds of the mid-nineties. And it’s generally good for debt markets to be liquid.

But in 2005 it all started going through the roof. By the middle of the year, the value of uridashis was approaching NZ$8bn.

By the end of 2005, it was NZ$10bn. Over August, October and November, more uridashi bonds were issued in kiwis than in any other currency, more even than the mighty greenback and the much more stable Aussie dollar. In October alone, an incredible NZ$2.5bn of uridashis were snapped up, the highest INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 27

monthly amount on record. Clearly, something was going on; foreigners were hardly buying the kiwi dollar for its long-term prospects and underlying strengths.

It was about now that the Reserve Bank began to worry about the de-stabilizing effect of all this short-term money. By the end of 2005, nearly NZ$45bn of uridashis were outstanding. And half of that was in the hands of Japanese retail investors like Mr. Watanabe, a class of investor prone to sudden changes of mood.

As the Reserve Bank noted with typical understatement: “Given the small size of the New Zealand government securities markets relative to those of the major economies, flows of these magnitudes stand out”. The problem was that all this attention is driving up the kiwi to abnormal levels relative to other currencies.

A

cross the Tasman, the Reserve Bank of Australia has been tracking a phenomenon that, technically speaking, isn’t meant to happen. As Guy Debelle, head of the RBA’s international department, remarked in November, the carry trade flies in the face of accepted theory. This says that any positive interest differential between two currencies is generally negated by the risk of the currencies moving against each other over the life of the investment. Remember, the carry trade is built around holding the currency, not flicking it on overnight. As Debelle said: “In contrast, those who undertake carry trades do not expect the exchange rate to wipe out the interest differential [and] sometimes they even expect the converse, namely that any exchange rate move will increase the value of the investment”.

The Aussie dollar has survived four years of exposure to the yen carry trade without suffering in general the degree of volatility that has characterized the kiwi. This is partly because uridashis represent a much smaller proportion of the Australian economy than they do in New Zealand. However between April and June of 2006, even Australia got a glimpse of what can happen. That occurred when the Aussie depreciated against the yen. Almost immediately, there was a sharp sell-off of uridashis by nervous Japanese investors.

What makes the kiwi more vulnerable than its big brother across the Tasman is New Zealand’s massive current account deficit, standing at 9.5 per cent of gross domestic product.

Even the Reserve Bank calls it “very substantial”. Some of the worst savers in the western world, New Zealand residents have spent – and, admittedly, in some cases invested -- more than they have saved in every single one of the last 33 years. Like any household that has overspent and faces a “funding gap” in finance talk, this hole has to be filled somehow and it’s foreign debt that has done it. By November, New Zealand’s net foreign liabilities stood at around 80 per cent of gdp, a truly alarming number by the standards of conventional economics. And the percentage continues to rise.

As the Reserve Bank and everybody else acknowledges, this puts New Zealand in a precarious position from what is known as “rollover risk”. What if all those uridashis are not refinanced at more or less current rates? An added danger is that a lot of our foreign debt is short-term. “Around half of all New Zealand’s debt liabilities have maturities of less than one year”, noted the Reserve Bank’s financial stability report in November. Right

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now, there’s an overhang of uridashis looming over the market, with about NZ$10.2bn of uridashis coming due over 2007.

It’s not all bad. About 40 per cent of all that foreign debt is held in New Zealand dollars, which protects the kiwi somewhat against the vagaries of international currency movements.

Also, some of the debt has been raised by the overseas-based parent banks of our local institutions and they are skilled at managing down interest rates to competitive levels.

But the important point is we’re in the hands of foreigners.

If in the coming months, they take a view that lending to New Zealand is a riskier proposition, we have to expect an abrupt, possibly crippling, rise in domestic interest rates as uridashi investors take fright.

But just what factors would conspire to scare Mr. Watanabe?

The most important one by far is a change in the policy of the Bank of Japan that would make yen more expensive to borrow, threatening the interest-rate gap between the yen and the kiwi. And it’s already happening. The Bank of Japan has started tightening money, draining out of the system the liquidity that has sustained the carry trade. By some estimates the central bank has sucked up 20 per cent of domestic money supply since March when it first signaled an end to the weak yen. The last thing a yen carry-trader wants is a stronger yen, but ominously the Japanese economy is growing again.

Interest rates are also rising, albeit slowly. In July, the Bank of Japan hiked base rates to 0.25 per cent, the first increase in six years. However as currency market expert John Authers points out, “only a brief pick-up in the yen can inflict nasty losses”.

But there’s a bigger and more menacing picture and it’s called leverage. The yen carry trade is based on it. Mr. Watanabe may be quite happy with his six per cent margin between the yen and the kiwi, but the hedgies aren’t. They “gear up” massive yen borrowings to multiply the interest-rate margin in the search for “alpha” – vastly superior – returns. Assume a hedge fund has US$100m in capital to invest and it borrows US$1bn, giving it a ten-fold increase in available funds. The financial scientists now buy their US$1bn worth of yen at, say, 0.35 per cent and buy kiwis at 7 per cent for a return before charges on swaps and other instruments of 6.65 per cent. Multiply that by ten and you get 66.5 per cent. That’s leverage.

But of course, leverage applies in reverse. When the worm turns, massive gains turn into massive losses. And that also could already be happening, as the relationship between the yen and the greenback shows. This link is a big factor in the carry trade, even for uridashis, simply because so much of it is based on the US dollar. Since the beginning of 2006, the yen is up 1.9 per cent against the dollar, which erodes much of the carry-trade profit.

That makes it hard for hedge fund managers to sleep, especially after the Amaranth hedge fund dropped US$5bn in October by betting wrong against natural gas futures prices.

Similarly, a drop of a percentage point or two in the value of the kiwi would make Mr. Watanabe nervous.

The picture will become clearer for New Zealand from early 2007 when the NZ$10.2bn worth of uridashis are due. That’s when we confront the rollover-risk that so concerns the Reserve Bank.

Meantime there are tremors in this increasingly nervous market.

That creaking and grinding sound you hear could be the breaking up of the world’s financial ice floe, with important consequences for over-borrowed, big-spending New Zealanders.

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From tHe MoUtHS of babEs

The indoctrination of NZ youth through children s books

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY THAT NEW ZEALAND'S MOST FÊTED CHILDREN'S AUTHORS ARE ACCUSED OF PRODUCING BOOKS WHICH MAY NOT BE IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF CHILDREN. BUT THEN AGAIN, IT'S EVEN MORE REMARKABLE THAT THIS SERIOUS ALLEGATION IS BEING LEVELLED BY ANOTHER CHILDREN'S WRITER, AMY BROOKE. IN THIS INTERVIEW, BROOKE EXPLAINS WHY SHE BELIEVES BOOKS BY WRITERS LIKE TESSA DUDER, MAURICE GEE AND OTHERS, MAY BE QUESTIONABLE IN THEIR EFFECT ON OUR YOUNGSTERS

Q: What is your overall opinion of NZ children’s authors?

A: They set their sights too low, on the whole. They’ve been persuaded that they should be writing on politicized themes, or those of social realism. Or that they should be writing “contemporary,” “relevant” stories teaching youngsters what to think about social or problem issues, and/or preferably, focusing on issues which relate to what’s been called “our national identity”. These are a politicized addition – or even a replacement – for what should be the only criteria for the awards: a great story, very well written.

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What is happening is that writers who want to win the awards and be publicized are tending to conform to these criteria laid down by those within Booksellers Association who pick the judges. The latter seem almost cloned as they recite the same PC mantras about writing for youngsters. This is a practice that has been going on for some time now.

In other words, there’s a children’s literature establishment in this country with entrenched practices, vying for grants, funding, awards, fellowships. It has all the faults of a self-serving monopoly, as this controlling core either knows of or knows

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 31

one another. Some of them have worked together collaborating on books or side by side on grant committees, and perhaps next year, the recipients themselves of those same grants. When these people are selected as judges to pronounce on others with whom they’re competing in the same field (or help to choose the judges) we have to question what’s happening. They claim “peer review” is necessary.

Q: Peer review?

A: This notion is a feel-good one. It can be cogently argued that writers are the very last people who should be involved in judging others in the same field. Our awards systems then become as unreliable as the Oscars – cronyism has a lot to do with them. It’s one of the few explanations that can fit books being judged award-winners that simply don’t fit the criteria of excellence. In many cases, they’re arguably not even literature.

New Zealand children’s writers are also being restricted by publishers and the children’s writing establishment calling for edgy, gritty stories that would make a lot of parents uneasy if they read them. There’s a great deal of controversy overseas about writers such as Philip Pullman, Melvin Burgess, John Marsden, all what can be called subversive writers invading the children’s book world with aggressive and disturbing themes – some blatantly anti-Christian, taking for granted liberal sex or casual promiscuity for the young (some of Burgess is really foul: See (Rachel Johnson’s piece, or check him out on the web) and brutal violence, black magic, drugs, etc. I can’t see why its worst excesses won’t reach here – their books have.

Some of Maurice Gee’s children’s books, for example, have been disturbing, black and bleak. Dorothy Butler joined me, at the time Gee’s The Fat Man was published, in questioning its suitability for children. A young mother recently told me she found it sinister and depressing. It’s practically sacrilege to say these things – so strong a stranglehold has the in-group writing establishment on New Zealand fiction. But I described it in a former Dominion column as a disturbing, unpleasant read. It was defended by the ubiquitous Tessa Duder – then convener of the 1995 Aim judging panel – as “a superb children’s book” – with the farcical claim that “It is clearly written to children – and is therefore for them”. Make sense of that.

I noted these in-your-face descriptions: “Black hair on his chest pasted down like slime…He squirted creek water from his mouth like a draught horse peeing…He brought the chocolate close to his mouth and dropped a gob of spit on it. ‘Okay, kid, there you are. Eat it all up.’ … The fat man grinned at him. The scar curled. It was like a worm living in his cheek.” I don’t read Gee now. But I noted at the time that he is extremely good at describing the nasty, the depressing, the pathologically bizarre. The ending of his books, even where evil is defeated, is still often bleak, giving the child reader a sense of loss, of unpleasantness still looming around the corner.

Q: Do you think NZ authors are guilty of reflecting children’s lives back to them rather than encouraging them to use their imagination?

A: Yes – I do think “NZ authors are guilty of reflecting children’s lives back to them rather than encouraging them to use their imagination. I’d add – to use their minds as well. The judges actually specify that they’re looking for authors who do just this – so it’s no wonder the would-be award-winners writers are obliging.

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Our awards are state-funded, and the writing establishment pushes left-wing themes.

I’ve noted the criteria the judges set down each year, and the corresponding trends, and I’ve written fairly extensively in the past arguing that the outcomes are not good for children.

When mediocre work is foisted off on them, accompanied by much hype, because it reflects the PC criteria laid down, children who find it boring and unsatisfying – and it certainly is basically non-memorable writing – start to creep away from reading. They somehow think it’s their fault if they don’t feel enthusiastic about the books their teachers and librarians recommend to them.

This year I again noted what the judges said they expected in books and read all the award-placed books in the junior section. Writers were basically doing what they were told. Writers in the USSR did the same, to meet the state’s criteria. I can’t see any of these books being classics.

Q: Do you have any examples of this?

A: Brigid Lowry’s With Lots of Love from Georgia caters to the current teen angst scene. It won. I haven’t read the senior section, but all the themes, as with writers like David Hill, even Margaret Mahy, Bernard Beckett and Clare Knighton, together with Phil Smith’s The Unknown Zone – all of them, from their descriptions, have New Zealand-related troubled teen fiction interwoven with politicized issues – the whole, supposed social realism scene.

In the junior section – Joy Cowley’s Hunter, which I did read, was politically correct with a rather manipulative introduction.

She made a play about how much the book was “important” to her, because she suspected she had a Maori ancestor who was a slave. This claim wasn’t followed up in later interviews she gave – it was very much played down. He became possibly Portuguese, from memory!

Cowley is competent. She knows the formula for writing a book, but she’s not a great writer, though she’s certainly prolific. There’s a difference…quantity doesn’t always equal quality. Her writing is fairly pedestrian and some of her language is crude. I whizzed through some of the others, just to get their flavour, but didn’t find any of them good enough to persevere.

They were all New Zealand-centered, from memory, for obvious reasons. None of them were award-worthy, if you’re looking for really good books, well written.

One of the biggest changes in the junior and even senior book awards in recent years has been that from a good story in its own right (as with the New Zealanders Joyce West’s and Mary Scott’s writing, for example), to the emphasis on boy-girl relationships at every level. Richmal Crompton, the author of the great William books, has observed that American children now progress from babyhood to dating – skipping childhood.

It can be argued that we’re now virtually doing the same thing and the formula for children’s writing is encouraging this Q: What would you say to the claim that it is inevitable and irreversible that children today are growing up faster and so they need to be equipped with the information and, in some instances the tools, to cope with ‘adult themes/problems’ (i.e. anorexia, divorce, the fragmented nuclear family, sexual abuse, school bullying, racism) which are increasingly becoming children’s themes/problems whether we like it or not?

A: This is an expert’s area. Are children’s writers trained soci-

ologists, psychologists, psychiatrists? What makes these propagandists think that writing about these areas in stories “gives children the tools to cope”? This is just jargon talking.

I could say just that you’ll always find someone to defend the indefensible. Moreover, it may be that some of the inappropriate reading we are pushing onto children is pushing them too soon into an adult world they are not yet equipped to cope with. This is what has always been meant by the world of childhood. It is not the adult world. And children can be defenceless against this sort of invasive writing.

When a writer decides to be a do-gooder, dealing with circumstances of supposed oppression, the result can be very negative, the content depressing. Which children are these books meant to be addressing? An underclass? Some disadvantaged youngsters?

Comic type books for young readers who aren’t thought capable of reaching outwards, rather than inwards, and of reading really great, worthwhile stories which leave them wiser, better informed about worlds other than their own rather myopic ones?

Who is there who will maintain that the children’s writer is an expert on dealing with issues which are problematic and intrusive and can damage children if not properly handled?

This whole idea of the children’s writer as a sociologist, there to address teenagers’ problems, has been a very negative influence on children’s writing. It’s produced formula-written stories, often poorly written with teen argot, to show how trendy and “relevant” the writer is. When dealing with issues like homosexuality, lesbianism, sex and dating, fragmented or extended

families, ethnic and environmental even political issues, such as supposed “questions of national identity”, it’s also been producing books that are written from an anti-parent, or overly liberal view which doesn’t represent probably the majority of mainstream parents’ values. A lot of children’s writing, as The Economist has pointed out, like a lot of the school curriculum in schools, has been and is being used for propaganda purposes.

It’s interesting, too, that Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop international cosmetics chain, said in 1996 that she encouraged her daughter to grow up too fast by showing her the realities of life at too young an age. She said, “I should have preserved her sense of awe and wonder for longer.” (PA 16/11/1996).

Q: What would you say to those who would challenge you saying that we shouldn’t protect and shelter children from the real world and its problems? (within reason).

A: Whose “real” world? Most of the problems usually understood in this sense belong to the adult world, with all its complexities. Some argue with reason that we are intruding these more and more into the children’s world, laying on them burdens of understanding and anxiety that are too heavy for them to carry. These are burdens adults should be addressing rather than dumping them on children. Issues revolving around war, the environment, divorced parents, sadness, death, abortion, homosexuality and lesbianism and “gay rights”, etc – all sorts of spin-offs from the adult world are being deliberately foisted off on children, and they’re being indoctrinated with what sort INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 33

of views they should hold on these. We’re certainly prematurely sexualizing them.

There’s always this sort of argument, by those with vested interests, or by those who simply don’t think very deeply, that we shouldn’t be over-protecting children. Who establishes the “over-protecting part”? Most parents would rather have their children kept as safe as possible, would rather have them enjoy the short world of childhood without having determined adults pushing their own issues or problems or radicalized views into them – using them as weapons, in a sense.

Many children can’t just cope with these. They can be shocked, depressed, prematurely sexualized, embark on inappropriate relationships – part of childhood is still about being defenceless, in so many ways. The role of parents is to make decisions about their children’s readiness to take on some of these issues. But of course, now almost every aspect of our life is being politicized, parents are under attack, too. And the state, the education establishment and the children’s writing establishment have decided they know best what size fits all children – each child? There’s an extraordinary arrogance here – and a determination, on the part of these people to have their own way with regard to what will be taught other peoples’ children. Why? But as I wrote elsewhere, a decade ago now (Otago Daily Times, 30/9/96) in response to a letter claiming “Shielding children from realities of life regarded as futile”: “Those endorsing children’s too precipitate exposure to a disturbing underworld often naively wonder, too late, why so many of them cannot cope. Our disturbingly high teenage suicide figures suggest we have been over-casual about influences on children. The Economist claims that the world of children’s writing has become “a matchless form of propaganda for grown-up prejudices”. Certainly, children are vulnerable, deeply impressionable and highly susceptible to being propagandized – one reason why parents are still useful.”

Unfortunately, parents are fighting a losing battle on this front. The situation has got worse, not better. And many parents have simply not realized how the reading and instructions fobbed off on their children have contributed to this.

Q: You are frustrated and alarmed by the inappropriate content and ‘adult” problems and anxieties which are increasingly intruding into areas of childhood’ through children’s literature – how do you reconcile this with your feeling that the NZ Post Book Awards judges short-change children and underestimate their intelligence?

A: Not sure what you mean by ‘reconcile this’. The NZ Post Children’s Book Awards encourage this. I think they work against the interests of the child reader by endorsing shortsighted, even wrong aims. Children don’t need them to propagandise them – often with potentially worrying results.

“New Zealand writers are tackling a brave new world in terms of content, style and issues covered in their new works….” Since when were children’s writers mean to be writing about today’s “issues”? As Dunedin teacher Brian Miller said (July 29, 1995 The Evening Post)….” teachers were fed up with bad language in many books.… “Almost every New Zealand fiction author seems to have a big issue to write about. Kids don’t want to read about incest or anorexia in every second book they pick up.

They just want a good read.”

The book in question was Maurice Gee’s The Fat Man. At the 34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

time the past president of the Wellington Children’s Literature Association Judith Holloway, said: “It’s the sort of novel (sic) you would read to children to start discussion about issues…”

However children, and very probably their parents – if they knew what was going on – don’t want to be indoctrinated with issues. As Mr. Miller noted: “They just want a good read.” It’s the adult propagandists who’re keen on the “issues”.

And the award-placed children’s fiction writers have certainly got the message about what gets preferred. Ms Holloway continued: “Jack Lasenby’s novel (sic) Dead Man’s Head, which deals with sexual abuse and suicide and Gee’s novel (sic) were both more unsubtle than usual for children’s books in showing the bad side of human nature.”

She claimed, too, that that “Most authors want to present a sanitized view of the world.” What nonsense. Most good children’s writers know that the world of childhood isn’t the adult world, and don’t lay too heavy burdens on the shoulders of those not yet adult enough to cope with them. We are irresponsible if we ignore this – The children’s world is not the adult world.

“This year’s finalists demonstrate a pride in our country and heritage,” said Julie Harper manager of Jabberwocky Children’s Bookshop and convenor of this year’s judging panel.

“Tales included cannibalism, Maori land and environmental issues and smart young characters taking on international corporations.”

I bet they did. And the teen angst, “rebel-of–the-moment youth culture” thing is something to be milked, too. The result is basically superficial, formula-written books.

The writers know that these are the kinds of “issues” the judges require from those who hope to be taken seriously in the book awards. Is this what children’s writers are meant to be doing?

Harper again. “It is apparent,” she said, “that the age of political correctness is over [! – mine] with our children’s writers becoming more confident in writing about, in particular, issues relating to race and Maori land.”

What planet is she on? These are politically correct issues.

They’re very much part of the politicized issues of the day. I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t acknowledge this! She continues: “Some people might (sic) be concerned with the content and language used in some of the novels [actually, they’re not novels, this terms is constantly misused – mine] but it seems writers and publishers are really beginning to ask what, exactly our young people want to read about. ” Nonsense. This is all they’re being offered, on the whole.

Writers and publishers are taking on her message and that of those within Booksellers NZ who choose the judges and make the decisions about what they’re looking for. The “acceptable”, i.e. the same, and very often the worst, authors are supplying these. Some of these writers are even running courses on how to write for children, are sent around schools and libraries to readings all over New Zealand. The others aren’t invited.

My conclusion is that these awards and judges are the biggest impediment to good outcomes for children’s writing in this country. The literary cliques are running a well-financed, closed shop in a very small country – and their criteria are exclusionary.

Q: How does one strike the balance of writing about themes that are interesting and challenging enough for young readers but avoiding delving in to adult themes?

A: Some themes are universal, and children who read the

classic English writers and their passing on of the great stories of the past, from other cultures, understand this very well, at one level. But the young haven’t the life experiences the years bring, and we shouldn’t be foisting them off on them before they can cope with them intellectually and emotionally. It’s like introducing factual issues about sex alone too early to children, telling them how to use condoms, and expecting them to cope – when I can’t think of more painful and problematic, and at times even for adults, almost unendurable consequences from failed relationships.

We know now that some children commit suicide because a sexual relationship ends, one-sidedly. Children often don’t have the coping mechanism of adults, but we’re prematurely thrusting them into the complexities of the adult world, particularly in regard to social and political issues. We used our common sense in these areas once, by doing our job as parents and steering them away, as much as possible, from areas into which they shouldn’t be prematurely pushed. Now, of course, that we’ve removed the intellectual content, that is, the really interesting content from so much of their schooling and reading we have a bored witless generation, turning prematurely to the ephemera of the pop, rock drug world, to premature and inappropriate sexual relations, the full catastrophe.

So we think children’s writers should give them more of this? Why don’t we give them a break – introduce them to real adventures, the adventures of the mind…give them an escape route from the self-absorption scene?

The world is full of wonderful things, fascinating history, myths, legends and stories that tell what our great writers and thinkers and explorers etc. discovered – themes and ideas and adventures still to be written. I remember getting happily lost in Arthur Mee’s children’s encyclopedias on rainy days when I was a little girl. And we require youngsters to read books on how to cope…What sort of bleak message about the world is that?

Q: Are we being realistic about the average child’s reading capabilities? Surely we must cater to the ‘average’ child and then work with the less and more able outside of this?

A: I don’t think there’s such a thing as the average child.

Children are all different, all individual. We’re not talking about formal academic achievements. We’re talking about writing great stories, adventure stories, full of possibilities – some in the here and now, some elsewhere – and the what ifs? Very capable children’s writers such as C.S. Lewis, Arthur Ransome, W.E. Johns were quite adamant that it’s wrong to write down for children. Enid Blyton was read with huge enjoyment by both very able and less able readers. The Japanese have a theory that all can get there – it just takes the less gifted ones a little longer. I agree – unless they’ve been turned off, discouraged and bored out of their minds by banal and boring reading material given to them because they’re thought less able. I’m sure this has happened to a large extent. I’ve been involved with children who were turned off reading because of the essentially trivial books they were told were good reading – and which certainly weren’t.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 35

“Most parents would rather have their children kept as safe as possible, would rather have them enjoy the short world of childhood without having determined adults pushing their own issues or problems or radicalized views into them – using them as weapons, in a sense”

Q: Do you agree that our children’s reading ages are perhaps worsening because of the impact and increase in gaming consoles, increased TV and Internet consumption, poor diet, bigger classrooms, working parents, poor parenting, increasing rates of ADHD? Perhaps it is time to take these things into account and adjust the ‘normal’ reading ages?

A: None of these things have anything to do with reading ages.

Bright children will always read far ahead of their nominal age – at least as it’s assessed. But it’s really a matter of intelligence, and interest – not age. You’re really talking about attention spans.

Children used to being offered sound bites and quick, slick results can get hooked onto these sorts of reactions, and begin to expect them. But when their interest is aroused – why, 10-11year olds can tackle Tolkien’s Rings trilogy – three long, very complicated books. They can read J.K. Rowling’s 600-700 page stories more easily than many adults. Their concentration can be more focused, more intense, when their interest is aroused.

Yes, a lot of children do have the dice loaded against them in reading because they were poorly taught, had poor reading theories like Whole Language Reading – the ridiculous Lookand-Say methods foisted off on them – and thousands, literally, of our NZ children have had to have remedial reading classes as a result – something unthinkable in my parents’ generation. (N.B. California dropped its imported Whole Language Reading practices, imported from NZ, after it came last of the 48 states in a US reading assessment. We still retained them.)

Those who had withheld from them the tools of reading, phonic teaching, when it was out of fashion, still do have trouble reading, even a large percentage of adults. But we can’t set a dumbed-down standard to accommodate this! We should be doing the opposite: giving them the tools and encouragement to raise theirs.

Q: You are concerned that “the step from the writer as sociologist to the writer as propagandist is a very small one – and one that’s now been well and truly taken”. You feel that many NZ children’s authors have political agendas and are intruding their liberal and politically correct views into children’s literature, can you provide some examples of this?

A: Paula Boock on lesbianism; William Taylor on gay issues and teen precociousness. His Jerome was described “New Zealand Gothic – stark, gay Gothic.” I recall the sexual innu36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

endo and crudeness in Break a Leg, and others, such a Making Big Bucks. Taylor has been very much part of the writing establishment. There’s always David Hill, writing perennially on teen angst and PC issues. Tessa Duder’s slick, fast-paced teen boy/girl books – she’s been criticised for bad language – and I can think of one recent teen story where apparently her heroine’s big aim was to land a role in Shortland St. Shortland St! New Zealand’s very own pulp soap opera, which basically deals with who’s having an affair with whom. This is what youngsters are being offered as admirable reading?

Kate de Goldi has been criticized for her dark, sexualized stories. Closed, Stranger portrayed betrayal, incest and death, with her male characters described as “super-conscious dudes: too sophisticated, too knowing by far”. Norman Bilborough is himself, as in Birdman, a casually crude, even childish writer.

“You’re pissed off, aren’t you.” “I hate you Toby. You’re a shit.”

He also “teaches” writing for children, and has himself been an award judge.

I recall I noted Maurice Gee’s anti-English simplifications in The Fire Raiser, which I wouldn’t recommend, after I reviewed it. It was dark and disturbing (as was The Fat Man) and I noted that the BBC (1987) chopped scenes from the TV series because they were considered too violent for young watchers. Producer Ginette McDonald predictably said that she did not know what scenes the English could possibly have found disturbing...Jack Lasenby I found clever and funny but crude. He’s also written on incest and suicide. Some of Margaret Mahy’s writing is politically correct in the sense that it’s over-liberal for children – I remember the one in which the boy was interested in astronomy, and some older female whose function I forget was digging naked in the garden (at midnight – was it?) and boy/ girl teenagers slept over in the same bedroom. I’ve mentioned that, like Betty Gilderdale, I think her short stories are better than her longer works of fiction. The Box in the Air and Other Stories had some very good ones in it. The World of Art was very funny and I recall a lovely little story, “The Bridge Builder”.

Ruth Corrin’s Secrets (finalist for the Story Book Category) and required reading for my son’s English class at a local college in the 90s served as a tool for in-depth, class discussions of sexual abuse, incest etc. I objected on the grounds that I didn’t believe this was relevant to the study of English language and literature. He was relieved not to have to attend. Youngsters are often very glad to escape these “discussions”.

In 1991, the judges’ spokesman Michael Keith applauded “the huge emphasis put on New Zealand children’s books by teachers and librarians…” He also appeared to applaud the fact that more children’s story books were dealing with “serious social issues – issues that were previously considered to be more suitable for adult books”. He apparently regarded these books “as an excellent form of cultural diffusion.”

“Diffusion”? What exactly did he mean? And whose culture? That of a semi-literate underclass of teen dropouts, or the troubled, disturbed and deprived? A virtual sub-culture? What about the danger inherent in locking them back in to their own narrow, myopic worlds – or giving these prominence?

What of the disadvantages for children in substituting the politically correct, the second rate, for the first-rate? Books restricted to teen problems? No mention was made of these considerations.

Basically fast-paced, market-orientated books for children are

not necessarily the same thing as children’s literature. The former are oncers – books that children tear through, feel vaguely dissatisfied, and don’t want to re-read.

In 14.5.02, local teacher Patrick McGrath wrote a letter to the Nelson Mail quoting from the winner of the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year – The Plight of the Penguins, described as “raunchy birds.” “ ‘Penguins are no less prone to relationship break-ups, a quick one on the side, or sexual perversion…Seals bully other seals out of their fornicating ways…Male penguins try to copulate with toy penguins…Males fire sperm all over the place and over the female…After two weeks of unadulterated sex and adultery…’

“Is such a book suitable for our kids? No wonder our youth gets more corrupted and violent.” Most parents would think Mr. McGrath had a point. But not the judges, obviously. They loved it.

Q: Are we depriving children of a cultural heritage?

A: Yes. We are. We’ve been doing so for some time. And I’d like to quote from a letter to the Weekend Herald 12-13 August 2000)

by Harold James, Tauranga. It says it all, really. He writes: “A powerful prescription for educational underachievement lies in the remarks of Christine Rubie, deputy director of primary teacher education at Auckland University in her article headed ‘Achievement gap promises disaster.’

“Her complaint is that ‘the books a teacher chooses to read are not always relevant to students’ experiences.’ Overlook the sneer in her chosen example: (‘a book on skiing at the weekend is unlikely to reflect the experiences of many children’) and examine the proposition for what it’s worth.

“It has to be equally true that books about pirates or Romans, West African village life, Troy, or Thomas Edison, for example, are unlikely to be “relevant” to the experiences of many primary schoolchildren. That may be their value.

“Without exposure to things beyond immediate experience, children are denied the imaginative, emotional and intellectual tools to understand life at large, realize their own potential or extend their humanity, “This is a second punishment inflicted on many children.

Many are denied much enriching experience (and this is emphatically not a financial issue) within their given environments or upbringings. They are then, under such limited educational strategies, even more firmly denied this experience in their schooling.”

Q: You have asserted that “the current crusade for today’s writing to reflect our “cultural directions” our “national identity” and “modern relevance” is a restrictive parochial edict, an attempt to cramp the writer within politicized boundaries.”

What does NZ children’s cultural heritage look like to you?

A: Pretty lean pickings. Our children have been taught almost nothing of the great intellectual heritage of the West – about what our great writers, poets, thinkers and philosophers have to tell us. They’re extraordinarily ignorant about our history, about where we as a people came from. The Maori people’s (somewhat bowdlerised) heritage and all Maori things have been given pre-eminence in our education system – as we now see in the demands in the children’s book awards, too.

However, there are probably almost no full-blooded Maori left in this country – so well did the two races assimilate and intermarry, before the radical reinventions of the 60s.

“I have been attacked for references to Greek mythology which quite naturally formed the background of two of my stories in particular. I was told I should have made them Maori – though this cultural reference had nothing whatever to do with these stories”

Maori themselves, being part European – indeed most of their activist spokespersons are in fact predominantly European – share in the great cultural and intellectual heritage of the West, brought to us through the arrival of the British in this country.

We never hear any acknowledgement of this. It doesn’t bring big paychecks, or play on liberal guilt. Yet they’re dishonouring their forebears if they don’t respect the good and brave men and women from the other, even greater part of their ancestry.

Of course part of the trouble is our education system, and those neo-Marxists who have so long been determining its directions. New Zealand youngsters have not and are not being offered the great intellectual gifts of the West, drawn from the discoveries and thinking of so many races – Greek, Roman, Sumerian, Arabic, Nordic, Celtic- the heritage of the mind, passed down to us via the civilizing philosophy of the JudeoChristian tradition. This always emphasized the importance, and the worth of every individual – and the golden rule, which no other religion or culture has bettered – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yet if this philosophy were universally applied and accepted, the world and the world for children, would be a far better place. Instead, this philosophy has been not only neglected – it’s been actively disparaged in a breathtakingly successful attack on Western values as “colonial” and oppressive.

The children’s writing scene has shared in the devaluing of our culture. I have been attacked for references to Greek mythology which quite naturally formed the background of two of my stories in particular. I was told I should have made them Maori – though this cultural reference had nothing whatever to do with these stories!

Q: You lament the demise of classic children’s literature – what would you say to people who argue that some of those stories are out-dated, culturally irrelevant and difficult for modern NZ children to identify with? Many of these books are about white, middle-class children. What about our children who don’t fit this profile?

A: Good writing and great stories are never difficult for children to identify with. The real issue is – are they interesting?

Will they draw a child in? Children everywhere, and down through the ages, have far more that unites them than divides them. The great themes are universal. Good adventure stories INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 37

are universal. Moreover, most children prefer to read upwards, rather than downwards. They’re curious about other worlds, what others have, and what they do.

As a child from a family of nine children that certainly wasn’t well-off I couldn’t have afforded a boat. But I simply loved Arthur Ransome’s great stories (Swallows & Amazons, etc.) about children boating on the Lake District in England. The important point about good children’s stories wasn’t that the children were sometimes white, middle-class children – politicized adults have hung this tag onto them, as an excuse for rejecting them.

The point was that the stories themselves were really interesting, enchanting, riveting or appealing, often very well written.

The American black educator Marva Collins objected strenuously to this notion that we have to confine children to their own supposed “class” or ethnic groups by restricting their access to other possibilities. (She took her black children back to Plato and the Greek philosophers, to show them other worlds, other peoples, other times, and to extend them intellectually). And should we shamefully make the social status of the children concerned a criterion for not offering great stories to our children? Not offer bright Maori readers the opportunity to see other children, in other cultures?

These arguments are very familiar – and they’re essentially Marxist. The influential leftwing educationist Liz Gordon used to maintain that it’s wrong – “inauthentic” to teach children from Sydenham, for example, to speak well – an offence again their lower class culture. These are pernicious ideas. The best thinking is to open up windows for all children everywhere – not to dumb things down to the level of the underachievers or to a supposed underclass, and not offer children writing that doesn’t reflect this. This is rubbishy thinking.

Q: You say that Witi Ihimaera’s Whale Rider is “embarrassingly silly, its farcical combination of propagandizing and mythmaking at odds with the novel’s claim to realism.” But isn’t this exactly what you are suggesting more children’s books should be like? Fantastical? Whimsical? Mythical? How is this any different to The Sword and the Stone or the Lord of the Rings trilogy?

A: Both these are set within an entirely different, given world.

Ihimaera’s book (which made a very moving, if politically correct film) mixed realism with fantasy, uncomfortably. For example, whales with mokos on their forehead were taken as a given – in today’s world – not in a mythical past – bikies clearing sixfoot high fences. I’d have to check back and find my review, but I thought the language crude and a lot of the book cringe-makingly silly – written like a kind of comic book, from memory. I recall a major NZ author writing to me at the time and saying if I found it preposterous (I can’t remember his exact words) I should read The Matriarch – even worse, I gathered.

Children will happily take on the rules of a fantasy world.

They recognize it as such. But there has to be an out – that it is read on that level. Mixing a real world with a fantasy world has to be done carefully. But basically the writing lacked class.

It was embarrassingly farcical – it degenerated from a fantasy story to something else. Perhaps it was just that it was badly written. It certainly wasn’t literature.

Q: How can the thousands of Whale Rider, Keri Hulme, Joy Cowley, Maurice Gee and Tessa Duder fans be so wrong?

A: Quite easily. It’s called marketing – and hype. Very many people read uncritically, and many believe what they are told.

38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

“Children will happily take on the rules of a fantasy world.

They recognize it as such.

But there has to be an out – that it is read on that level.

Mixing a real world with a fantasy world has to be done carefully”

Very many nowadays simply haven’t been exposed to anything better. If one has, one knows that the second and third-rate is replacing the first-rate. And this is dismaying.

Some children, too, like to please their teachers, and will write and say what’s expected of them. Others will just start to tiptoe away from reading books, bored by what they’ve encountered.

It’s also called expectation – and monopoly markets – excluding access to children’s writers who don’t conform to what is required by those who run the awards and influence the librarians, booksellers and teachers.

What we don’t hear about (but I do, in my job as a commentator and reviewer – and parent) – is that bright readers are turned off by each of these writers for pretty much identical reasons in each case. A now grown son reminded me today that he and his brothers used to steer clear of contemporary children’s writers – that they were “just not interested in their often darkly-modern day settings/topics.”

The Bone People is an excellent illustration of the power of media hype and marketing. Thousands and thousands of NZers loyally bought and sent it to one another as Christmas presents that year. Although I got blacklisted by the literary establishment for apparently providing the first critical evaluation of it in this country, I’ve met very few people who ever managed or bothered to finish it – or who’ve disagreed with my assessment at the time. It went down like a lead balloon in Britain, incidentally. Joanna Lumley, on the judging panel, wrote to disassociate herself from the decision. But then a lot of people are highly skeptical about awards – including about the Booker Prize as an indicator of good reading. It, too, is regarded as having been captured and politicized.

We could be doing better – a lot better. And abolishing the administered awards for children’s writing would help us move towards this. Arguably, these have now become the biggest obstacle to achieving better outcomes for children’s writing in this country. Their policitised agenda are being fobbed off by a controlling in-group on writers, publishers and children alike, promoted over quality writing – and real stories.

Amy (short for Agnes-Mary) Brooke is the author of numerous acclaimed books for children, such as The Duck Who Went To Heaven, The Mora Stone and Night of the Medlar. To read more of Amy Brooke’s views, visit her blog at http://brookeonline. livejournal.com

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Stunning Revelations The untold story of deaths by Taser

With New Zealand three months into a year-long trial of Taser stun guns, there’s growing controversy here and overseas about whether Tasers are as safe as claimed, and whether the company itself has cut corners. SILJA TALVI backgrounds the anti-Taser mood

T

aser International Inc. maintains that its stun-guns are “changing the world and saving lives everyday.” There is no question that they changed Jack Wilson’s life. On Aug. 4, in Lafayette, Colorado, policemen on a stakeout approached Jack’s son Ryan as he entered a field of a dozen young marijuana plants. When Ryan took off running, officer John Harris pursued the 22-year-old for a half-mile and then shot him once with an X-26 Taser. Ryan fell to the ground and began to convulse. The officer attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but Ryan died.

According to his family and friends, Ryan was in very good physical shape. The county coroner found no evidence of alcohol or drugs in his system and ruled that Ryan’s death could be attributed to the Taser shock, physical exertion from the chase and the fact that one of his heart arteries was unusually small.

In October, an internal investigation cleared Officer Harris of any wrongdoing and concluded that he had used appropriate force.

40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

Wilson says that while his son had had brushes with the law as a juvenile and struggled financially, he was a gentle and sensitive young man who always looked out for his disabled younger brother’s welfare, and was trying to better his job prospects by becoming a plumber’s apprentice.

“Ryan was not a defiant kid,” says his father. “I don’t understand why the cop would chase him for a half-mile, and then ‘Tase’ him while he had an elevated heart rate. If [the officer] hadn’t done that, we know that he would still be alive today.”

Ryan is one of nearly 200 people who have died in the last five years after being shot by a Taser stun gun. In June, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it would review these deaths.

Over the same period, Taser has developed a near-monopoly in the market for non-lethal weaponry. Increasingly, law enforcement officials use such weapons to subdue society’s most vulnerable members: prisoners, drug addicts and the mentally ill, along with “passive resisters,” like the protesters demonstrating against Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s attendance of a Rick Santorum fundraiser in Pittsburgh on Oct. 9.

Taser has built this monopoly through influence peddling, savvy public relations and by hiring former law enforcement and military officers--including one-time Homeland Security chief hopeful, Bernard Kerik. And now that questions are being raised about the safety of Taser weaponry, the company is fighting back with legal and marketing campaigns.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 41

Birth of a Taser In 1974, a NASA scientist named Jack Cover invented the first stun gun, which he named the TASER, or “Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle,” after Tom Swift, a fictional young inventor who was the hero of a series of early 20th century adventure novels. Because it relied on gunpowder, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms classified Tasers as registered firearms.

That changed in the early ‘90s. According to Taser’s corporate creation story, co-founder Rick Smith became interested in the device after friends of his “were brutally murdered by an angry motorist.” Smith contacted Cover in the hopes of bringing the Taser as a self-defense weapon to a larger market. In 1993, with money from Smith’s brother Tom, they created Air Taser Inc., which would later become Taser International Inc. When Tasers were re-engineered to work with a nitrogen propellant rather than gunpowder, the weapon was no longer categorized as a firearm. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department adopted the guns, but they were not widely embraced by other departments.

Taser’s fortunes improved in 1998, after the company embarked on a new development program, named “Project

countries use Taser weaponry. In the past eight years, more than 184,000 Tasers have been sold to law enforcement agencies, with another 115,000 to citizens in the 43 states where it is legal to possess a stun gun.

When the electricity hits, Taser’s stun guns are designed to shoot a maximum of 50,000 volts into a person’s body through two compressed nitrogen-fueled probes, thereby disrupting the target’s electromuscular system. The probes are connected to the Taser gun by insulated wires, and can deliver repeat shocks in quick succession. The probes can pierce clothing and skin from a distance or be directly applied to a person’s body--a process known as “dry stunning”--for an ostensibly less-incapacitating, cattle-prod effect.

“The impetus for Tasers came from the often communityled search for ‘less-than-lethal’ police weapons,” explains Norm Stamper, former chief of the Seattle Police Department and author of Breaking Rank. “[There were] too many questionable or bad police shootings, and cops saying, correctly, that there are many ambiguous situations where a moment’s hesitation could lead to their own deaths or the death of an innocent other.”

According to Taser’s promotional materials, its stun guns

Stealth.” The goal was to streamline stun gun design and deliver enough voltage to stop “extremely combative, violent individuals,” especially those who couldn’t be controlled by non-lethal chemicals like mace.

Out of Project Stealth, the Advanced Taser was born. When the weapon premiered in 2000--a model eventually redesigned as the M-26--the company brought on a cadre of active and retired military and law enforcement personnel to vouch for the weapon’s efficacy. The new spokespersons ranged from Arizona SWAT members to a former Chief Instructor of handto-hand combat for the U.S. Marine Corps.

Taser began to showcase the Advanced Taser at technologyrelated conventions throughout North America and Europe, billing it as a non-lethal weapon that could take down even the toughest adversary. Soon to be among those “dangerous” opponents were the protesters assembling in Philadelphia for the 2000 Republican National Convention.

By the following year, 750 law enforcement agencies had either tested or deployed the weapon. Today, more than 9,500 law enforcement, correctional and military agencies in 43

are designed to “temporarily override the nervous system [and take] over muscular control.” People who have experienced the effect of a Taser typically liken it to a debilitating, full-body seizure, complete with mental disorientation and loss of control over bodily functions.

Many Taser-associated deaths have been written up by coroners as being attributable to “excited delirium,” a condition that includes frenzied or aggressive behavior, rapid heart rate and aggravating factors related to an acute mental state and/or drug-related psychosis. When such suspects are stunned, especially while already being held down or hogtied, deaths seem to occur after a period of “sudden tranquility,” as Taser explains in its CD-ROM training material entitled, “Sudden Custody Death: Who’s Right and Who’s Wrong.” In that same material, the company warns officers to “try to minimize the appearance of mishandling suspects.”

Taser did not respond to requests for an interview. But its press and business-related statements have consistently echoed the company’s official position: “TASER devices use proprietary technology to quickly incapacitate dangerous, combative

42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

or high-risk subjects who pose a risk to law enforcement officers, innocent citizens or themselves.” Another brochure, specifically designed for law enforcement, clearly states that the X26 has “no after effects.”

Ryan Wilson’s family can attest otherwise, as can many others.

In the span of three months this year – July, August and September – Wilson’s Taser-related death was only one among several. Larry Noles, 52, died after being stunned three times on his body (and finally on his neck) after walking around naked and “behaving erratically.” An autopsy found no drugs or alcohol in his system. Mark L. Lee, 30, was suffering from an inoperable brain tumor and having a seizure when a Rochester, New York, police officer stunned him. In Cookeville, Alabama, 31-year-old Jason Dockery was stunned because police maintain he was being combative while on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Family members believe he was having an aneurysm.

And Nickolos Cyrus, a 29-year-old man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was shocked 12 times with a Taser stun

down. Since that time, Taser deployment in jails and prisons has become increasingly commonplace, raising concerns about violations of 8th Amendment prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment.

This summer, the ACLU of Colorado filed a class action suit on behalf of prisoners in the Garfield County Jail, where jail staff have allegedly used Tasers and electroshock belts, restraint chairs, pepper spray and pepperball guns as methods of torture. According to Mark Silverstein, legal director for ACLU of Colorado, inmates have told him that Tasers are pulled out and “displayed” by officers on a daily basis, either as a form of intimidation and threat compliance, or to shock the inmates for disobeying orders.

A recent report from the ACLU’s National Prison Project (NPP), “Abandoned and Abused: Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina,” concerns the plight of the estimated 6,500 New Orleans prisoners left to fend for themselves in the days after the monumental New Orleans flood.

The NPP’s Tom Jawetz says that the organization has been looking into abuses at Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) since 1999,

gun after a Wisconsin police officer caught him trespassing on a home under construction. An inquest jury has already ruled that the officer who shot Cyrus – who was delusional and naked from the waist down when he was stunned – was within his rights to act as he did.

Although the company spins it otherwise, Taser-associated deaths are definitely on the rise. In 2001, Amnesty International documented three Taser-associated deaths. The number has steadily increased each year, peaking at 61 in 2005.

So far almost 50 deaths have occurred in 2006, for an approximate total of 200 deaths in the last five years.

Amnesty International and other human rights groups have also drawn attention to the use of Tasers on captive populations in hospitals, jails and prisons.

In fact, the first field tests relating to the efficacy of the “Advanced Taser” model in North America were conducted on incarcerated men. In December 1999, the weapon was used, with “success,” against an Oregon jail inmate. The following year, the first-ever Canadian use of an Advanced Taser was by the Victoria Police, on an inmate in psychiatric lock-

but that the incidents that took place in jails and prisons in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were unprecedented.

Take the case of New Orleans resident Ivy Gisclair. Held at OPP for unpaid parking tickets, Gisclair was about to be released on his own recognizance when Hurricane Katrina hit. After languishing with thousands of other prisoners in a flooded jail, Gisclair was sent to the Bossier Parish Maximum Security Prison. Once there, Gisclair apparently had the nerve to inquire about being held past his release date. Gisclair has testified that he was then restrained and stunned repeatedly with a Taser, before being thrown, naked and unconscious, into solitary confinement.

“I can’t imagine any justification for that,” says Jawetz. “[Prison guards] were kicking, beating and ‘Tasing’ him until he lost consciousness. A line was crossed that should never have been crossed.”

In March, Reuben Heath, a handcuffed and subdued Montana inmate, was shocked while lying prone in his bed.

The deputy involved – a one-time candidate for sheriff – now faces felony charges.

Casualties and Cruelties

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 43

Gisclair and Heath are among the inmates who have survived in-custody incidents involving the abuse of Tasers.

Others haven’t been as fortunate. This year alone, those who have died in custody in the aftermath of being stunned by Tasers include Arapahoe County Jail (Colorado) inmate Raul Gallegos-Reyes, 34, who was strapped to a restraint chair and stunned; Jerry Preyer, 45, who suffered from a severe mental illness in an Escambia County, Florida, jail and was shocked twice by a Taser; and Karl Marshall, 32, who died in Kansas City police custody two hours after he was stunned with PCP and crack cocaine in his system.

Appropriate uses “We are seeing far too many cases where Tasers are not being used for their intended purposes,” says Sheley Secrest, president of NAACP Seattle. “And many of these cases don’t end up getting reported or properly investigated because people are so humiliated by the experience.”

Former U.S. Marshal Matthew Fogg, a long-time SWAT specialist and vice president of Blacks in Government, says that if stun guns are going to be used by law enforcement, training on their use should be extensive, and that the weapons should also be placed high up on what police officers call the “use-offorce continuum.”

Fogg isn’t alone in calling for such measures. In October 2005, the Police Executive Research Forum, an influential police research and advocacy group, recommended that law enforcement only be allowed to use Tasers on people aggressively resisting arrest. The organization also recommended that law enforcement officers needed to step back and evaluate the condition of suspects after they had been shocked once. Similar recommendations were included in an April 2005 report from the International Association of Chiefs of Police. That report also urged police departments to evaluate whether certain vulnerable groups – including the mentally ill – should be excluded altogether from being shot with Tasers.

Although Fogg’s organization has called for an outright ban of Tasers until further research can be conducted, Fogg says

that he knows responsible members of law enforcement are perfectly capable of using the weapons effectively. Officers who are willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of the community, he emphasizes, must be given the tools and training to be able to minimize harm to themselves and to others.

Fogg, who also serves on the board of Amnesty International USA, says that too many members of law enforcement seem to be using them as compliance mechanisms. “It’s something along the lines of, ‘If I don’t like you, I can torture you,’ “ he says.

S

ome law enforcement agencies have already implemented careful use policies, including the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, which selectively hands out Tasers to carefully trained deputies. The department also prohibits use of Tasers on subjects already “under control.” According to Sheriff Michael Hennessey, deputies are not allowed to use stun guns in response to minor ineffectual threats, as a form of punishment, or on juveniles or pregnant women. Within the department, stun guns are purposely set to turn off after five seconds. Additionally, every use of the weapon in a jail facility must be videotaped.

“I authorize Tasers to be used on people who are at high risk of hurting themselves or deputies,” Sheriff Hennessey emphasizes. “Without options like these, the inmate and the deputies are much more likely to get seriously hurt.”

But when stun guns are used on people who don’t fit that criteria, Secrest says, the public should be asking serious questions about the efficacy of Taser use, particularly because of the emotional trauma related to Taser-related take-downs.

“When a person comes into our office after they’ve been [Tased], it’s not as much the physical pain they talk about as much as the humiliation, the disrespect,” she says. “The people [who are stunned by these guns] talk about not being able to move, and thinking that they were going to die.”

As for actual Taser-associated deaths, Secrest believes that they should be investigated just as thoroughly as deaths involving fire-

TITLE XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX Here in New Zealand, a 12 month trial of the Taser X26 began in September, but curiously Police have not deployed the units with the optional video camera attachment. The video camera, or VDPM as Taser calls it, was introduced two years ago so that police forces could record actual video and audio from the units themselves when they were being used. The logic behind this was that the actions of officers using Tasers would be completely transparent and available to view after the event.

For the most part, Tasers used so far in the trial have achieved success with no serious harm, although one officer stunned himself and an innocent bystander while trying to stun an offender.

“A constable who took a Taser to a central Auckland domestic dispute wound up shocking himself and a 16year-old and later pepper-spraying an innocent 21-yearold woman,” reported the NZ Herald mid November.

“The constable accidentally blasted himself with the Taser’s 50,000 volts as he reloaded the weapon while trying to stun a man at the centre of the domestic incident on October 1. One shot accidentally struck the man’s teenage son.

44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

“After five attempts to hit the man, the officer eventually used pepper spray. This hit the man’s 21-year-old daughter, also an unintended target.

“The man eventually gave himself up. The constable, who had had Taser training, was not injured.”

Although Tasers may be ideal for many confrontational situations, they’re not ideal for all of them. When US federal air marshals shot and killed a mentally ill man on an American Airlines flight a year ago, many people argued Tasers should be used on planes instead of guns. But a test by one metropolitan police force in the US found that a Taser fired into a backpack containing a homemade bomb caused the backpack to “disappear in a cloud of nylon, flame and dust”, whereas the same bomb was not triggered by being shot with standard bullets.

New Zealand Police report that most alleged offenders appear subdued when confronted by a Taser, and the device has only been fired a handful of times. Despite that, lobby groups like Amnesty and the Greens are pushing for the trial to be suspended pending the outcome of official inquiries into Taser deaths in the US.

arms. Instead, Taser injuries and deaths are typically justified because officers report that the suspect was resisting an arrest.

“That’s the magic word: ‘resisted,’” says Secrest. “Any kind of police oversight investigation tends to end right there.”

One such case is that of Tianesha Robinson, a Kansas woman pulled over for an outstanding arrest warrant in late September.

Five months pregnant, Robinson admits foolishly trying to run.

“I ran, that’s true,” Robinson told a local TV station. She then said the deputy caught up with her and tased her.

“The guy tased me in the arm first,” Robinson said. “He said, ‘get down, get down!’. I said, ‘I’m pregnant!’. He said, ‘lay on your stomach’, so I laid on my stomach he tased me again in the back and I said ‘I’m pregnant!, I’m pregnant! and then he tased me again in the side.”

A few days later while on remand, Robinson miscarried and her baby was born dead.

Capitalizing on 9/11 Despite these concerns, Taser International Inc. has thrived.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks sent the company’s profits soaring.

Many domestic and international airlines--as well a variety of major law enforcement agencies--were eager to acquire a new arsenal of weapons. Homeland Security money flooded into both state and federal-level departments, many of which were gung-ho to acquire a new arsenal of high-tech gadgets.

In 2002, Taser brought on former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik as the company’s director. Kerik had attained popularity in the wake of 9/11 as a law-and-orderminded hero; the company had seemingly picked one of the best spokespersons imaginable.

With Kerik’s help, company’s profits grew to $68 million in 2004, up from just under $7 million in 2001, and stockholders were able to cash in, including the Smith family, who raked in $91.5 million in just one fiscal quarter in 2004.

Unbeknownst to most stockholders, however, sales have been helped along by police officers who have received payments and/or stock options from Taser to serve as instructors and trainers. (The exact number of officers on the payroll is unknown because the company declines to identify active-duty officers who have received stock options.)

The recruitment of law enforcement has been crucial to fostering market penetration. For instance, Sgt. Jim Halsted of the Chandler, Ariz., Police Department, joined Taser President Rick Smith in making a presentation to the Chandler city council in March 2003. He made the case for arming the entire police patrol squad with M-26 Tasers. According to the Associated Press, Halsted said, “No deaths are attributed to the M-26 at all.”

The council approved a $193,000 deal later that day.

As it turned out, Halsted was already being rewarded with Taser stock options as a member of the company’s “Master INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 45

Instructor Board.” Two months after the sale, Halsted became Taser’s Southwest regional sales manager.

In addition, Taser has developed a potent gimmick to sell its futuristic line of weapons. In 2003, Taser premiered the X-26.

According to Taser’s promotional materials, the X-26 features an enhanced dataport to help “save officer’s careers from false allegations” by recording discharge date and time, number and length and date of discharges, and the optional ability to record the event with the Taser webcam. The X-26 also boasts a more powerful incapacitation rating of 105 “Muscular Disruption Units”, up from 100 MDU’s for the M-26.

The X-26 is apparently far more pleasing to the eye. As Taser spokesperson Steve Tuttle told a law enforcement trade journal, “It’s a much sexier-looking product.”

Lawsuits jolt Taser As increasing numbers of police departments obtained Taser stun guns, the weapons started to be deployed against civilians with greater frequency.

Many of the civilian Taser-associated incidents have resulted in lawsuits, most of which have either been dismissed or settled out of court. But there have been a few exceptions.

In late September, Kevin Alexander, 29, was awarded $82,500 to settle an excessive force federal lawsuit after being shocked 17 times with a Taser by a New Orleans Parish police officer.

The department’s explanation: the shocks were intended to make him cough up drugs he had allegedly swallowed.

One recently settled Colorado case involved Christopher Nielsen, 37, who was “acting strangely” and was not responsive to police orders after he crashed his car. For his disobedience, he was stunned five times. When it was revealed that Nielsen was suffering from seizures, the county settled the case for $90,000.

An Akron, Ohio, man also recently accepted a $35,000 city settlement. One day in May 2005, he had gone into diabetic shock and police found him slumped over his steering wheel.

Two officers proceeded to physically beat, Mace and Taser him after he did not respond to orders to get out of the car.

Taser’s lack of response to the misuse of the company’s weapons is troubling. The company relentlessly puts a positive spin on Taser use, most recently with a “The Truth is Undeniable” Web ad campaign, which contrasts mock courtroom scenes with the fictionalized, violent antics of civilians that prompt police to stungun them.

The campaign involves print ads, direct mail DVDs and online commercials that “draw attention to a rampant problem in this country: false allegations against law enforcement officers,” according to Steve Ward, Taser’s vice president of marketing.

“We’re going to win” The lawsuits have scared off some investors, making Taser’s stock extremely volatile over the years. But press coverage of the company this past summer largely centered around Taser’s “successes” in the courtroom. In addition to settling a $21.8 million shareholder lawsuit revolving around allegations that the company had exaggerated the safety of their product (they admitted no wrongdoing), Taser has triumphed in more than 20 liability dismissals and judgments in favor of the company.

And the company’s finances are on the upswing: Third-quarter 2006 revenues increased nearly 60 percent.

46, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

Taser International's slick marketing campaign mixes sex appeal and pain

Regardless, CEO Rick Smith claims his company is the target of a witchhunt. “We’re waiting for people to dunk me in water and see if I float,” is how he put it during a March 2005 debate with William Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International USA. Last year, with 40 new lawsuits filed against it, Taser dedicated $7 million in its budget to defending the company’s reputation and “brand equity.” The company has also gone on the offense, hiring two full-time, in-house litigators.

At one point, Taser hinted that it might sue Amnesty International for taking a critical position regarding Taserassociated injuries and deaths. In November 2004 Smith announced that the company’s legal team had begun a “comprehensive review of AI’s disparaging and unsupported public statements [to] advise me as to various means to protect our company’s good name.”

In one of the company’s brashest legal maneuvers to date, Taser sued Gannett Newspapers for libel in 2005. The lawsuit alleged USA Today “sensationalized” the power of Taser guns by inaccurately reporting that the electrical output of the gun was more than 100 times that of the electric chair. This past January, a judge threw the case out, saying that the error in the article was not malicious, and that the story was protected by the First Amendment.

The company remains unwavering and aggressively protective, even as Taser-associated deaths mount each month. As Smith told the Associated Press in February, “If you’re coming to sue Taser, bring your game face, strap it on and let’s go.

We’re gonna win.”

From Jack Wilson’s standpoint, citizens are the real losers.

His son Ryan lost his life in a situation that could have been handled any number of other ways, and no amount of legal posturing can bring Ryan back.

“I still can’t believe my son is gone,” he says. “The fact is that these Tasers can be lethal. No matter how they’re categorized, Tasers shouldn’t be treated as toys.”

Thanks to the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund for research support, and to David Burnett for research assistance.

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TOUGHEST JOURNEY A story of one woman’s courage

When a young mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, the result can often be disarray and tragedy. As IAN WISHART discovers, Tiffany Tiplady’s case is, instead, inspirational

I

t was one of those moments Tiffany Tiplady will never forget: shopping for a swimsuit in mid-September, her fingers brushed against what she describes as “a slight hardening” under the skin above her pelvis. The schoolteacher and mother of three children, the youngest born earlier in the year, Tiffany initially brushed off any fears with an assumption it was just her body getting back into shape after the birth. But the hardening was enough to nag her, and she eventually conceded to a doctor’s visit.

The initial diagnosis was a benign ovarian cyst, but with radiologists on strike in her region Tiffany, her husband Darren and three children loaded some overnight bags in their car and drove to Auckland for an MRI scan.

“When I first went to see my GP he said ‘Look Tiffany, you just have to take your turn, these things take weeks to sort out, you can’t expect everything to happen straight away,’. But I had a feeling we really needed to move quite quickly on it, so I said to him, ‘Look, I don’t want to put you in this position, but if this was your wife and you had small children…’ and we basically talked to him at an emotional level.”

The GP pushed buttons. When the radiology lab in Auckland said it would take two weeks for a specialist to interpret the scan results, the GP asked to be notified himself, rather than a specialist. He assured Tiffany the lump was likely to be benign, and told her he would ring once the results were through.

Tiffany and Darren didn’t expect the news that came through.

“Our GP was mortified, really upset, he said ‘I’m really sorry, it’s actually malignant and it doesn’t look very good’.”

The MRI had only picked up a lump on the ovary, how-

48, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

ever, which medics did not feel was “acute”. While Tiffany and Darren pushed for an operation the next day, a Saturday, the private hospital initially refused.

“They said ‘We only do operations on a Tuesday’.”

Tiffany, a Christian, felt like she’d been hit by a hammer and retreated to the bathroom while her husband argued the case with a specialist.

“I just fell on my knees right there in the bathroom,” she remembers, “asking God to turn it around.”

When she came back out, her prayer had been answered. An anaesthetist had called in and, after discussing Tiffany’s case with the specialist, agreed to make himself available for the weekend operation.

When they began operating at 8am the next day, the gynaecologist was shocked to discover not an ovarian cyst but a cancer that had consumed the entire ovary. The cancer was secondary, however, and had spread from Tiffany’s appendix.

Extra specialists had to be called in to assist on the operation.

“They found a stage four, highly malignant, very rare tumour, lots of cancer everywhere. It had started in my appendix and showered cells all through my abdomen.”

Tiffany’s ovaries, womb, appendix and part of her intestines were removed, and the oncologists told her afterward they knew of only five occurrences of this particular cancer in New Zealand over 25 years.

Officially known as a signet-ring-cell adenocarcinoma, the tumour is almost always fatal.

Tiffany remembers waking briefly in post-op, where the oncologist told her the worst.

“He just looked devastated, he just said to me, ‘I’m really sorry, it didn’t go well, the cancer has spread everywhere and it’s affected your lymph nodes, and it doesn’t look good for you’. Then I just fell back to sleep!”

A short while later, as Tiffany regained consciousness with her parents, sisters and husband by her bed, she asked the surgeon the hard question: “He just looked at me, and said, ‘I believe you will not survive this. There is no chance you will survive. I believe you will die from this’.”

While her family were stunned, Tiffany refused to give in to her fate – not without a fight.

Doctors gave her “up to a year” to live, but warned her not to “search the world for answers”. Regardless of that warning, the Tipladys googled for anything they could find on the appendix cancer, and located a specialist in the US who had a radical surgical and chemotherapy regimen that was achieving success.

But the rarity of the cancer counted against Tiffany in the NZ health system. The Tipladys found they could have an operation either in the US, or in Australia, but the health bosses in NZ said ‘no’.

“The NZ government will not fund it, and they will not even encourage it or refer me. I can’t get an oncologist here to refer me, and the reason they won’t refer me is they believe the operation is too dangerous and non-proven.

“It’s crazy. I’m a 35 year old mother of three who wants to live desperately and they don’t expect me to live out the year, but they won’t send off for an operation because it is too ‘dangerous’! And the operation only has a five percent mortality rate.

“Darren spoke to our surgeon, who said ‘Tiffany’s cancer will never be proven, the NZ government will never recognize it’, because apparently you need 10,000 people, and 5,000 need to have had the treatment and 5,000 not, in order for them to prove the treatment. And of course they’re never going to get that many in the whole world because it is so rare.”

With the motto, “Never say Die”, and only the love of family and friends and her faith to comfort her, Tiffany Tiplady opted to begin a fundraising drive to cover the minimum $150,000 cost of the operation in Australia plus post-op care.

“The operation, they think, will take about 12 hours, but it depends what they find when they get in there. These operations have been known to take 30 hours.”

Because of a refusal to help in any major way with her “unrecognized” treatment, Tiffany has had to do much of the donkey work of arranging medical tests, couriering the results to Australia and America herself. There is no liaison official attached to her local district health board who can even help with the paperwork and logistics.

“You ring up someone and you can get a wedding organized, or a holiday organized, but you get a terminal illness and no one can organize anything for you?”

By refusing to “go home and die”, Tiffany has nonetheless been abandoned by most of the NZ health system, although admittedly not her bowel surgeon.

“He has been really supportive, and he’s the only one who ever talks to me in a future tense,” she says.

“The team in Sydney believe that unless I have the operation before Christmas the cancer will take hold and it will be too late.”

In their home town of Taupo, the Tipladys’ plight has

Investigate invites readers to support Tiffany this Christmas for her operation. To make a donation in New Zealand, please either: • Make a deposit into the “Support Tiffany” bank account: Account name: “Support Tiffany” Account number: 03-0430-0381368-25 Bank: Westpac; Branch:Taupo • Send a cheque made out to “Support Tiffany” to: Tiffany Tiplady, PO Box 1874, Taupo, New Zealand.

If you are in Australia and you would like to send a cheque to a local address (in Australian Dollars), please make it out to Jennifer Baker (Tiffany’s sister) and send it to: • Jennifer Baker, c/o Our Lady Help of Christians 49 Nicholson Street, East Brunswick, VIC 3057, Australia

made the family local celebrities. Radio stations have swung in behind fundraising, as have local businesses, churches and people across New Zealand and around the world – as Tiffany’s website, www.supporttiffany.co.nz shows.

Auctions, charity hair-shaving, anonymous donations – one person gave $25,000 from the sale of a property – have shown a tremendous community spirit and support for the mother who refuses to give up.

“I felt this amazing peace, that I’ve never felt in my life, and a joy that I’ve never felt in my life, and I thought, ‘gosh, this is what it feels like to be so loved’, and I said to Darren, ‘how can we look upon this as a curse?’ This is a blessing.”

As she kisses her three children – Joshua, 5, Nathaniel, 4 and Grace, 11 months – in bed each night, Tiffany Tiplady prays for a miracle and that when surgeons do open her up in Sydney as this magazine goes on sale, they’ll find the cancer has vanished. But either way, she says it has been an incredible journey.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 49

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The Silent

Killer With SIDS silently killing thousands of our babies, this is a threat that needs to be stopped. So why are our children continuing to die? Melody Towns reports

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 51

“ W

e had put him to bed at around 3.30am after his middle of the night feeding. I thought something was wrong with him that night because he was really cranky. I laid him down next to me for him to go to sleep. As the alarm went off the following morning, my husband turned over to Braydon to give him a kiss and tell him good morning. Realising that something wasn’t right, he picked him up and turned him over. He was blue”.

The death of little Braydon to SIDS is only one account of the trauma and loss that thousands of families all over the world experience on a daily basis. In the United States alone, an estimated 7000 babies die each year of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In fact, according to Marla Courtney Wood, a mother who lost both her twins to SIDS, more children die of SIDS than Cancer, AIDS, Cystic Fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy and child abuse combined.

SIDS. These four letters can raise a considerable amount of fear in many parents, yet what it actually is remains a blur and the cure seems like a far-off answer to prayer. The number one cause of death for infants under one year of age, SIDS or cot death has killed over a million babies, with 90% of deaths in children under 6 months old.

With half a century of research and millions of dollars spent, science and technology still can’t tell us why, instead offering only the hope of preventative measures and again more research and more money to fund that research. But what if there was already a cure? What if thousands, if not millions of children could have been saved if their parents had been told everything that they needed to know about this ‘syndrome’ and had been able to make up their own minds?

As a first time mother-to-be, this is an issue that I have been in complete ignorance about. Already overwhelmed with a growing body, queasy pregnancy and advice from every man and his dog about raising children, it wasn’t until I started researching this story that the four letters SIDS even entered my thought paths. But glad to be woken from my ignorant slumber, it is with concern that I research a topic that many parents don’t receive all the information they should be entitled too. A topic that needs to be discussed with every parent to allow them to make an informed decision regarding what could be the life or death of their child.

SIDS is defined as the sudden death of an infant under one year of age that remains unexplained. A silent killer, SIDS victims usually show no symptoms except for maybe the signs of a slight cold. The death rate for SIDS nearly doubles in the winter months and increases from the first child in the family, to the second and the third and so forth.

Most people know about SIDS through campaigns such as Red Nose Day and the ‘Safe Sleeping Program’. Developed in the early 1990’s by SIDS and Kids, the promotion aimed to raise awareness of methods that may reduce the risk of SIDS. Since then SIDS rates have dropped by 84% and the lives over 4000 babies have been saved in Australia alone.

From promoting the need to sleep a baby on its back from birth with its face uncovered, to avoiding cigarette smoke near children and using only firm, clean fitting mattresses, the ‘Safe

52, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

Sleeping Program’ is based on strong scientific evidence. But although definitely helping the cause, it still does not provide a cure to eliminate it completely. With more than 24 babies dying from SIDS by the time you read this article, a cure is still desperately needed. “��������������������������������������������������������� Tracy got up did their normal morning routine, took Noah to his daycare worker’s home… and off to work she went... The day-care mom went about the day as normal... laid Noah down for his late morning nap... and went about with the other kids... looked up at the clock it was 11:45am and she thought, ‘Oh Noah will wake up soon. Gotta make his bottle’. She made the bottle and went to the room he was sleeping in... She told me that as soon as she opened the door to the room she knew something was very wrong... she ran over to Noah and he was blue... and very cold! She panicked and called 911... a neighbour down the street was an EMT… he heard the call over the dispatch radio in his home... and ran straight over to the house... when he got there Noah was not breathing and had no heartbeat... but he tried CPR to bring him back... Tracy and Ryan were both called by the day-care mom when Noah was on the way to the hospital by ambulance... Ryan reached the hospital first... and was told that Noah was already gone... He was in shock... Tracy arrived a few minutes later... and knew what happened as soon as she saw Ryan’s face... She instantly fell apart. Noah was gone”.

Written by an Aunty on a website for SIDS victims, Noah’s death is one of thousands that continues to affect families across our nations. Parents offer each other hope and grieve their lost ones, but what many of them remain unaware of is all the research that has been conducted into stopping the heartbreak.

What most parents don’t know is that a claim of cure has been made that could possibly eliminate SIDS from our children’s bedrooms. In fact, elimination has already begun, as the knowledge of this ‘cure’ has been spread throughout New Zealand. Over the past 11 years, there has not been a single SIDS death reported among over 100,000 New Zealand babies whose parents followed the advice of a ‘cure’, that has not been recognized as having significant evidence to support it by SIDS organizations, the medical community and the government.

Dr. Jim Sprott, OBE, a New Zealand scientist and chemist, claims he has found the cure to cot death and, with 11 years of practical proof that his cure works, says, “withholding publication of [these] findings from the public is no less than an absolute scandal”.

Stating with certainty that crib death is caused by toxic gases generated from a baby’s mattress, Sprott claims that if a simple mattress protocol is followed then we could see SIDS virtually eliminated. Sprott’s hypothesis is that a form of nerve gas that can be generated from mattresses and certain other bedding; the cure, in simple terms, is to prevent exposure of babies to these gases.

At present it is hard to tell which mattresses do and do not contain these gases. As an immediate precaution, Sprott recommends that cot mattresses and any other mattresses a baby sleeps on should be wrapped in thick, natural colour polythene sheeting. This sheeting prohibits both the flow of gas and the growth of fungus. Available from garden centers and hardware stores, this fabric has also been made into a mattress cover called Babesafe at the direction of Sprott who, it should be noted, is not accepting any royalties from its sales.

“The active advice of midwives and other healthcare professionals encouraging parents to wrap mattresses has meant that not a single child has died on a wrapped mattress compared to the 810 babies who reportedly died on mattresses that were not wrapped�

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 53

Advising parents to use a fleecy cotton under-blanket and to steer clear of a cot mattress protector altogether, Sprott emphasises that babies should never be put to sleep in the cot of another baby or older child unless the mattress is wrapped. Likewise, if a baby sleeps with adults the mattress also needs to be wrapped.

With a 100% successful crib death protection rate, mattress wrapping has been proved more than successful in the eleven years it has been running in New Zealand. The active advice of midwives and other healthcare professionals encouraging parents to wrap mattresses has meant that not a single child has died on a wrapped mattress compared to the 810 babies who reportedly died on mattresses that were not wrapped.

Sprott claims that chemical compounds containing phosphorus, arsenic and antimony have been added to mattresses as fire retardants and for other purposes since the 1950’s. Combined with a fungus that commonly grows in bedding, these chemicals can interact to create poisonous gases that either concentrate into a thin layer on the baby’s mattress or gather in the surrounding atmosphere. If breathed in or absorbed by the baby, these gases can poison the baby by shutting down the central nervous system, stopping breathing and heart function.

As a result there is no struggle from the baby, in fact it wouldn’t even wake and a normal autopsy would not reveal that the child had been poisoned.

In a media release regarding US research into brainstem studies concerning cot death, Sprott states that research claiming that there is a brainstem abnormality in SIDS children can be “refuted in a few sentences”.

“Since cot death is caused by highly toxic nerve gases, this finding is entirely to be expected in cot death babies. The US researchers have not found a cause of cot death – what they have found is a neurological outcome of the nerve gas poisoning which does cause cot death”.

The rising rate of cot death from one sibling to the next disproves that the theory that cot death is caused by a brainstem abnormality in the newborn baby, says Sprott, “Quite obviously whether or not babies are born with a brainstem abnormality is not linked to whether or not they are first, second or third babies in families”.

While some researchers also suggest that the increase in risk among siblings may be linked to exhaled carbon dioxide and the size of babies’ airways, Sprott says that the answer is much simpler and only confirms his findings. As cot death is caused, according to Sprott, by toxic gases, then quite obviously reusing the same mattress amongst siblings increases the chance of poisoning from one baby to the next.

“If a mattress contains any of the chemicals concerned and fungi have become established in the mattress by previous use by another baby, generation of toxic gases commences sooner and in greater volume when the mattress is re-used. This accounts for the rising rate of cot death from one sibling to the next. It also accounts for the very high cot death rate among babies of solo parents, who for economic reasons are more likely to sleep their babies on previously used mattresses that they have acquired secondhand”.

Supported with independent research by British scientist Barry Richardson, combined with the practical proof of the New Zealand experience of mattress wrapping, Sprott’s findings are too significant to be ignored.

54, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

Since 1989, Barry Richardson has claimed that chemicals in PVC and the fire retardant that is routinely added to cot mattresses give rise to toxic gases. His findings, like Sprott’s, refute every proposition that cot death has a medical cause, and that the toxic gases increase as the mattress is passed on from sibling to sibling thus answering the reason as to why the risk of SIDS increases from one baby to the next.

A

publication by a German doctor concerning the results of the New Zealand mattress wrapping campaign showed statistics that the proof of the validility of mattress wrapping for crib death prevention was one billion, billion times the level of proof generally accepted by the medical community as proving a scientific proposition. Yet, the National SIDS Council of Australia still says that it strongly disagrees with the theory and considers it unsupported by evidence. And Dr Pat Tuohy, the New Zealand Chief Advisor on Child Health refuses to provide parents with information regarding mattress wrapping.

The National SIDS Council of Australia states there is insufficient evidence to support Sprott’s and Richardson’s theory.

Parents are advised not to “address this factor until other independent research has confirmed this result”. Quoting the 1998, Limerick report, SIDS for Kids writes on their website that “there is no evidence to suggest that antimony or phosphorus containing compound such as fire retardant in PVC and other cot mattress materials are a cause of sudden death”. Attributing the sources of antimony to the common element that is found in household dust, the report claims that the concentrations of this gas was no different in the tissues of SIDS infants than to those who died from known causes.

Professor Ed Mitchell, Associate Professor in Pediatrics, University of Auckland also argues that the Richardson theory does not meet the characteristics of scientifically valid research.

He further intimates that SIDS has occurred long before those chemicals were used and that SIDS babies have died wherever they sleep, including car seats and parents arms.

Likewise, the New Zealand Ministry of Health stated on 13 October 2006 that they are “unaware of any published studies in peer reviewed journals which demonstrate the safety and efficiency of mattress wrapping in the prevention of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Accordingly, as the Ministry’s policy recommendations are expected to be evidence based, they are unable to recommend mattress wrapping as a method for preventing SIDS”.

With evidence to refute any fact from the opposition, Sprott claims that there may be more reasons behind their non-recognition of his theory than meets the eye. He states on his website, www.childbirthsolution.com that firstly, “Cot death research has been a big gravy train for medical researchers. In Britain it continues to be so (although not in New Zealand, where research funding has nearly ground to a halt as people have become aware that mattress wrapping is easy, cheap and 100% successful in preventing cot death).”

He then goes on to say that, “The toxic gas theory has been� publicised������������������������������������������������������ since 1989 (first in Britain), but it has been hotly denied by researchers and������������������������������������� organisations����������������������� responsible for advising parents. In the intervening period, many thousands of

Photography: Levi Gruber

babies have died of cot death. But the New Zealand experience shows that those deaths were avoidable – and that raises the prospect of legal liability for babies’ deaths”.

With complicated ideas presented from both Sprott and the opposition, SIDS suddenly becomes even more confusing. But what isn’t confusing is the fact that whether you agree with this theory or not, every parent should have the right to make an informed decision regarding SIDS and how it will affect their babies.

Whether it is advice from the government, SIDS and Kids, or information regarding mattress wrapping and the toxic gas theory, every parent has the right to all information that is available to them. Addressing the core of the issue, Sprott says, “Instead of putting unnecessary hurdles in the way of a harmless and potentially live-saving product, why don’t authorities endorse mattress wrapping in the US to see if the results achieved in New Zealand could be duplicated there? The score in New Zealand is now 810 deaths (orthodox crib death prevention advice) to none (mattress wrapping). With so many more babies born in the US than in New Zealand, the potential to save lives is dramatically greater –thousands every year.

Why should even one baby be denied something that could potentially save his or her life?”

That is the thought that comes to my mind as a mother-tobe. In the search to save lives, any prevention seems to be better than not offering it at all. And if the loss of only one baby could be prevented from mattress wrapping wouldn’t it be worth it?

I’m sure this father who wrote a poem on the First Person SIDS website about his son, would think so.

“������������������������ When will the pain end? When ���������� will I�� see ����������������� my son again?

I see his face in the clouds as I look to the sky He’s looking way down and he’s starting to cry.

He cries and he screams – he wants to come home!

Then the wind moves the clouds...once again I’m alone.

I hear the sound of his voice in the wind in the trees I feel the touch of his hand in the touch of the breeze.

He’s everywhere I look, he’s in everything I see He’s everywhere I go, he means so much to me.

He’s all my hopes and dreams – his father’s dreams as well He made our life pure heaven; now it seems a living hell our dreams, our hopes, our wishes, left one early dawn.

Our joy, our light, our laughter, our little boy is gone.

Now all that’s left are memories, and the pictures that we’ll save.

An empty crib, a lonely house, a newly dug small grave.

When will the pain end? When I see my son again”.

REFERENCES www.healthychild.com/cribdeathcause.htm www.pnc.com.au/-cafmr/sprott/success.html www.childbirthsolutions.com/articles/news/cotdeath.php www.pnc.com.au/-cafmr/sprott/avoid.html http://www.sidsandkids.org http://sids-network.org/stories.htm Special Report, Cot Death Cause and Prevention Experiences in New Zealand 1995-2004, T. James Sprott, OBE MSc PhD FNZIC Letter to the Prime Minister, Parliament Building Wellington, T. James Sprott, OBE MSc PhD FNZIC, 19 October 2006

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 55

when

PRIVATE becomes PUBLIC

How far should the media go into the lives of public figures?

A few days ago Investigate Online posted a restricted access story on its website making fresh and serious allegations about Social Development Minister David Benson-Pope. The story was published online because its content is R18 in nature, and by requiring a credit card purchase for a nominal one dollar fee children can be prevented from accessing it. The decision to publish the story was not taken lightly, nor was it taken because of any prurient interest in the subject matter. Our journalistic colleagues in Washington, London or Sydney would make exactly the same call – on the grounds that a Minister’s private life becomes public when he makes it relevant. The full reasons are contained in the online edition, but what follows is a summary of the international debate on media ethics, and how far it is appropriate to go when investigating public figures seeking public office. IAN WISHART reports 56, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

UPI

I

n a story like the Benson-Pope case, perhaps the biggest question any news organization faces is an ethical one: is this sufficiently relevant to be in the public interest? Contrary to popular misconception, the news media knows far more about most public figures than it ever publishes, because it correctly deems that much of that information has no bearing on how the person does their job.

For example, the fact that a politician may be gay is irrelevant to whether they’re a good Minister of Transport or Minister of Finance. The fact that another politician is a strong Christian is irrelevant to their performance as Minister of Health. It is only where one’s private life intersects with their public one that issues of relevance and/or the voters’ right to know surface.

Take those two previous examples: that same gay politician chooses to champion a bill favouring gay adoption of children, but without disclosing his own sexual preferences. Voters should be able to see whether he has a personal, rather than professional, interest in the subject matter. By choosing to become involved in a political issue dear to his heart and which challenges the normative situation, the politician makes his private life relevant.

Likewise, a strong Christian appointed as Minister of Censorship might make decisions that many agree with, but his beliefs are indeed relevant to how he performs in that particular portfolio and should be disclosed. On the flip side of that coin, the same applies to raging social liberals occupying powerful positions.

In the essay, “Can Public Figures Have Private Lives?”, Harvard University’s Frederick Schauer has contributed significantly to the debate.

“In most of the debates about the issue of disclosing facts about the lives of candidates or office holders that those candidates or office holders would wish to keep secret, the issue is framed around the question of the relevance of the fact at issue.

“Typically, as with the debates about the extramarital sexual activities of President Clinton or about past drug use or other allegedly “minor” crimes that took place in the distant past, it is alleged that the facts ought not be disclosed because they are irrelevant to the performance of the job. Regardless of whether people want the information, the argument goes, information that is not relevant to job performance has no place in the public electoral discussion.

“Such claims of irrelevance mask a host of deeper and more difficult issues. Chief among these are contestable issues about what the job actually is, and equally contestable empirical issues about the relationship of some fact to that job.”

Illustrating that point, Schauer raises the example of US judge Douglas Ginsberg whose nomination to the US Supreme Court was spiked in 1987 after reporters, using unnamed sources, disclosed that Ginsberg had been a frequent user of marijuana in the past. Leaving aside the medical argument over whether marijuana would have dulled his wits sufficiently to make him a liability on the Supreme Court bench, Schauer concentrates INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 57

more on the fact that as a person supposed to uphold the law in one of the supreme positions available under the US constitution, Ginsberg simply couldn’t measure up: “The fact of past disobedience to law was material to Ginsberg’s qualifications”.

J

ust as it was, of course, in the fall from grace of New Zealand’s Attorney-General David Parker, after he was caught by Investigate filing false returns to the Companies Office.

“My point here,” Schauer continues, “is that a claim of ‘irrelevance’ presupposes some standard of relevance...denials of relevance often mask narrow conceptions of the positions and its responsibilities, conceptions with which others might reasonably disagree.”

This is one of Professor Schauer’s central themes: that even if a majority of voters might believe something is “irrelevant” or out-of-bounds, a functioning democracy requires that the interests of a minority who might want to hear that information be protected.

“When such disagreement does exist, however, the issue becomes more difficult, because there is now the question of when it is appropriate to make widely available a piece of information that some voters might think relevant to their voting decision, under circumstances in which the information is indeed relevant to their voting decision based on criteria that they take to be relevant.”

Schauer draws on the Monica Lewinsky affair to illustrate the tensions at play: “The claim that marital infidelity is irrelevant to the office of President of the United States presupposes that the role of President should not include the role of being an exemplar of marital fidelity. For many people it should not, but for many others it should, and debates about relevance to the job are commonly smokescreens for debates about just what it is that the job really entails.

“It is widely known that President Clinton cheats at golf.

Although it is clear that playing golf is not part of the job description of President…many people believe that maintaining certain high standards of veracity are indeed part of that job description. And if that is the case, then the empirical question is presented whether evidence of cheating at golf is some evidence of (or relevant to) a likely failure to maintain high standards of veracity in public pronouncements.”

And if New Zealand readers are suddenly sensing a merging of Paintergate, Speedogate, Doonegate and Pledgegate, read on: “It is possible that the answer is no,” continues Schauer, “and that there is neither a causal relationship or even a correlation between the existence of the trait of cheating at golf and the existence of the trait of being abnormally dishonest in one’s public and political dealings. But it is also possible that the answer is yes, and that a cheater at golf, holding everything else constant, is more likely to be dishonest in public statements.

And if this latter alternative is in fact the case, then the argument that golf behaviour is ‘private’ or none of the public’s business becomes a somewhat more difficult one to maintain.”

Cheating, however, is a personality trait that many people can agree is relevant. What about the grey areas of sexuality?

After all, we all have sex lives.

“No less real is the example of the disclosure, against the pre-

58, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

“The awkward truth is that the way people live their private lives does tell us things that can help to make judgments about them as public people…this is not the same as saying that the world will only be put to rights if it is run by certified saints”

sumed wishes of the candidate, of the sexual orientation of a candidate for public office. Although many of us believe that sexual orientation is both immaterial and irrelevant to job performance in all or virtually all public sector and private sector settings, it is unfortunately (from my perspective) the case that not everyone agrees.

“For a not insignificant proportion of the population in most countries in the world, having a gay, lesbian or bisexual orientation is immoral, and having a heterosexual orientation is not only morally commanded, but is also a necessary qualification for holding public office.”

Schauer’s view is that like it or not, you can’t have a meaningful public debate on these issues in a general sense but only on a case by case basis – the circumstances of each politician being different.

Voters may decide that sexual behaviour is irrelevant in one case but exceedingly relevant in another, because of the different personalities or responsibilities of the politicians in question.

“It may turn out that disclosure of traits that some deliberators believe to be morally immaterial or empirically irrelevant will nevertheless properly be part of the process by which [the public] decides collectively…what its moral criteria will be.”

And again, the Harvard professor returns to the checks and balances necessary in a democracy. Even if only ten percent of the electorate believe the private life information should be disclosed, he says, and the other 90% believe it shouldn’t be, publication is justified.

“Under these circumstances, it is tempting to conclude that the majority should prevail, and that disclosure should be deemed inappropriate. But given that we are discussing the topic of the information necessary for exercising [the vote]… there is something deeply problematic about majorities deciding that information relevant to the voting decisions of a minority ought in some formal or informal way be made unavailable to that minority.”

Although Schauer hears the argument often used in New Zealand politics – that raking over the coals of politicians’ private lives will discourage good people from standing for election – he disagrees with it.

“There are moral arguments on the other side as well,” he acknowledges. “Chief among those is the argument that control over the information about one’s life is itself a central part of what is sometimes referred to as personal autonomy, and that there is no good reason why a person should be required to relinquish that right simply to enter the public domain.

“Yet if personal autonomy is the basis for the countervailing right of non-disclosure, it may be hard to distinguish this right from all of the other autonomy rights that one must forgo to enter the public arena.

“One has the right to speak or to remain silent, to live where one pleases, sometimes to work where one pleases, and a host of other rights that are commonly and properly thought relinquishable by one’s voluntary decision to stand for public office or to operate in the public domain more generally.”

In other words, what makes a public figure’s right to privacy sacrosanct when they may give up a whole lot of other rights as part of standing for office?

Naturally, Professor Schauer is not alone in his assessments of the reduced right to privacy of public figures. In a major editorial two years ago this month, Britain’s Guardian newspaper tackled the issue in the wake of the David Blunkett affair.

“The awkward truth is that the way people live their private lives does tell us things that can help to make judgments about them as public people…this is not the same as saying that the world will only be put to rights if it is run by certified saints.

This country was seen through two world wars by leaders who would certainly not qualify on that score; but whatever the human failings of a Lloyd George or a Churchill, they did not include an inability to get the job done.”

It’s a comment that echoes the earlier ones on relevance. Are the personal failings relevant to the particular job they have?

The San Francisco Chronicle’s test in regard to public figures is this: “Personal conduct may have a bearing on public roles and public responsibilities. The degree to which a public figure voluntarily conducts his or her life in public or the degree to which private conduct bears on the discharge of public responsibility should guide the publication of personal information.”

Journalist turned lawyer Hal Fuson, now the chief legal officer at America’s Copley Newspaper Group, told a panel discussion journalists should not pull back from disclosing facts about elected officials just because of their own worldviews.

“Worry about the facts, folks, and let the truth take care of itself. Truth is like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder. And facts depend on verifiability. Verifiability depends upon being able to get your hands on lots of information that people don’t want you to have, because they want to shape their stories to suit themselves, not to suit the interests of society, and certainly not to suit your desire to inform your communities.”

The American Press Institute has published an ethics “checklist” for journalists weighing up publishing private information on public figures. They include: Does this matter affect the person’s ability to do his job?

Does this matter reflect on the person’s conduct in office?

Does this matter reflect on the person’s character?

Does the matter reveal hypocrisy?

“Character matters for public officials,” says the Press Institute. “They publish family pictures on campaign brochures and proudly reveal private matters that reflect positively on their character. Private matters that reflect negatively on their character matter to readers as well.”

The Institute concludes: “Don’t look for easy answers. Many stories involve consideration of more than one of these questions. However you decide, you can’t ensure that you will please all your readers.

If you write the story, some readers will say you are prying into matters that should be private. If you don’t, some readers will say you are covering up for people in power…Sometimes the proper decision is to publish the story along with an expla60, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

“It is widely known that President Clinton cheats at golf. Although it is clear that playing golf is not part of the job description of President…many people believe that maintaining certain high standards of veracity are indeed part of that job description”

nation of your reasons for publishing and your consideration of various factors. Most readers understand that these are not black and white decisions.

“You might decide that a long-ago consensual affair between adults is no one’s business, and some readers will decide that you’re covering up. Or you might decide that criminal conduct is newsworthy whenever it occurred and some readers will think you are dredging up mud about youthful mistakes because your editorial page opposes the candidate.”

Australian political reporter Peter Cole-Adams was quoted in one ethics discussion this way: “Elected parliamentarians were, he said, the paradigm of the public figure: each chose to enter politics; was paid by the public; spent public money; lived by publicity; enjoyed perks; and had the right to defame anyone he chose from the sanctity of the parliamentary privilege…in this sense, the public, as the hirer and firer, has a right to know what its representatives are up to. ‘If they are not going to be honest…they should be careful’. The questions the press has to ask are: is it true? Is it interesting? Is it in the public interest to disclose? He noted Lord Northcote’s dictum: ‘News is what someone wants to suppress.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 61

thinkLIFE money

KiwiSaver lighting the fuse?

Peter Hensley argues compulsory superannuation schemes might be the straw that breaks the financial markets’ back, ironically

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common question that regularly comes up for discussion is what does the future hold? It is asked in emails, letters to the newspaper, and during daily interaction with people in general.

My response is always the same, “Noone can say for certain”. It is impossible to predict the future and one should not try.

That does not mean that we should not plan for the future because we are committed to living in it.

The above queries generally result from the discussion points raised in previous columns. In several previous columns the topics have suggested that investors could be wise to adopt a conservative investment style because various economic fundamentals indicate that the future could take a turn for the worse.

History suggests that the business cycle operates in a similar manner as the tide.

Scientists have long recognised the link between the moon and the tides and have proven that the moon influences the ebb and flow of the oceans. The evidence and subsequent debates suggest that the moon is the dominant party. Either way it is clear that a relationship between the two exists.

62, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

The same could be said about the boom and bust business cycle. Business, countries and regions have for centuries bumbled along and experienced good times and bad. Over time and with diligent research economists have linked the concept of credit expansion with economic growth. History shows that as surely as night follows day that every increase in liquidity or money supply has been followed by a credit squeeze.

For decades the US authorities have reported the money supply figure to the market. The official term is M3. In laymen’s terms it shows how many dollars are in circulation at any one point in time.

Early in 2006, the Federal Reserve Board stopped publishing the figure. They provided little justification for their decision.

The conspiracy theorists have suggested that the large numbers have the potential to spook investment markets.

The late 1990’s saw a huge run up in the US share market. The dot com boom took many by surprise and the foolishness that pervaded the market was recognised by none other than Alan Greenspan then President of the US central bank. In 1996

he spoke of irrational exuberance in the markets. His comments were discounted/ ignored by the stock market and prices rose to unsustainable levels.

Six years later he and his colleagues were faced with a huge problem. The potential for a stock market crash was staring them in the face. Then 9/11 compounded their problem enormously. The US authorities, led by Greenspan, proceeded to implement a daring economic experiment. Their goal was to stop the stock market from crashing and avert the expected recession that would normally follow a sustained period of economic growth.

They quickly reduced the price of money by aggressively lowering the Federal Reserve Interest rate. The Fed rate is the rate of interest charged by the Federal Reserve for money lent to banks overnight to assist with settlements. The rate was dropped to 1% and held for longer than most commentators thought possible.

One result was that it flooded the market with liquidity. Money was cheap, encouraging corporations and individuals alike to borrow heavily. And why not, home mortgage rates dropped below 5% pa. US home owners saw that the banks were having a sale and did what many saw as their patriotic duty and borrowed heavily.

Whilst many spent their new found wealth on SUV’s and holidays, others started dabbling in the property market.

The river of cheap money turned into a flood, which in turn converted into a sonic boom in real estate prices which was felt around the western world. Demand outstripped supply and prices went through the roof. Prices rose because of demand fuelled by cheap money.

The experiment worked and the pending economic tsunami was avoided. The new problem that now faces the authorities is that the world has moved on and the excesses are still in the system. In the olden days the share market would have been allowed to correct (drop) and individual share prices would revert to a level which could provide some attraction to a seasoned investor. This cleansing is yet to occur.

The system now has a huge hangover and many commentators are trying to work out what is in store for a debt ladened society which is dominated by aging baby boomers who have an expectation of a long retirement.

An Australian newspaper recently reported that the real estate madness has

finally reached Broome, a frontier town on the remote north west coast of Western Australia. It states that in the last twelve months the average home price has more than doubled in value from $230,000 to $500,000. It also goes on to say that the average mortgage has increased from $50,000 to $300,000.

The Australians are also adding petrol to the raging New Zealand market and it is coming from an unsuspecting source.

Readers would be aware that Australia introduced compulsory superannuation over a decade ago. The amount of money in savings vehicles has grown like the proverbial snowball. In the early days the money went into the Australian share market which in turn increased the overall value of the market by the sheer volume of money.

The river of money has not decreased and with the recent hike to 9% the investment managers are chasing investment opportunities anywhere they can.

A recent example of the impact of this is as follows. A local finance company made a loan to a rest home provider. In order to protect their investment they insisted in taking an equity stake in the operation.

They outlaid approximately $1.5 million in buying the shares. Less than twelve months later they were bought out by a Australian Private Equity Fund Manager who paid over $13 million for the same stake.

KiwiSaver is due to commence in less than six months time and the custodians of our retirement savings are likely to face similar challenges. Initially the funds will filter into the NZ equity markets, however one cannot ignore that our share market is already reasonably/over valued. The fund managers have no alternative but to invest in the market as it is their duty to do so. Their Ozzie colleagues are doing the same and in doing so are compounding a world wide problem.

They are compelled to continually add new money to overvalued markets, making them more over valued.

Because of compulsory superannuation, Australians as a nation have the highest per capita ownership of managed funds in the world.

Compulsory saving schemes are adding to the flood of money into investment assets, thus compounding the problem of gaining reasonable access to risk adjusted returns. Surveys indicate that Baby boom-

ers are not yet assuming full responsibility for saving for their retirement. The family home is looking increasingly attractive as a source of funds and reports suggest that attitudes towards legacies and inheritances are changing.

What will happen in the future is anybodies guess. The flood of new money into the economic system normally fuels inflation. Western Governments are compelled (in many cases by statute) to control inflation. History has shown that property (as an investment asset) tends to be a good hedge against inflation, however general property values could currently be described as stretched or expensive.

History shows that a credit squeeze or tightening always follows a period of credit expansion, however Government regulators will struggle in raising interest rates (which would tighten credit) for fear of causing a recession or worse a depression.

It is impossible to predict the future, what will be will be. My advice is to own your own home without a mortgage, invest conservatively and own a little gold. Remember that those who understand interest collect it, those that do not pay it.

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thinkLIFE science

Dinosaur extinction theory bites the dust?

Scientists debate the demise of the dinosaurs at a major US conference, as Tom Avril reports

P

HILADELPHIA – As most everyone knows, a meteor struck the earth with violent force 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. The crater was discovered in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula barely 15 years ago, but the easy-to-grasp notion is already so ingrained that it is routinely taught to schoolchildren.

Problem: Gerta Keller thinks it is flatout wrong.

Keller, a Princeton University geoscientist, is continuing her contrarian quest against the scientific mainstream, presenting new evidence she says paints a more complicated picture of the dinosaurs’ demise.

Addressing scientists at a national geology conference in the US recently, Keller says new rock samples from Texas, taken not far from the Bush family ranch, confirm her previous assertion that the huge meteor hit 300,000 years before the mass extinction.

The real culprit, she argues, must be some other meteor or meteors whose impact craters have yet to be discovered – coupled with dramatic global warming wrought by volcanic gases.

Keller did not provoke angry shouts, as she has in the past, but there was vigorous skepticism from some in the audience of several hundred scientists.

Drexel University paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara, who moderated the session at the Geological Society of America conference, joked beforehand that he was thinking of wearing hockey pads.

Why the resistance?

Keller, a determinedly independent native of Liechtenstein, thinks she knows why.

“So many people have invested so much time on one theory,” she says of the Mexicometeor concept. “It was a very sexy, very nice theory. . . Everybody can identify with it. Except the details don’t fit.”

The dinosaur debate is among hun-

64, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

dreds of topics at the four-day gathering of 6,000 geoscientists. Like the ultimate in cold-case detectives, they probe the earth for clues to what transpired thousands and even millions of years ago.

Traces of manure help show that horses were domesticated in Asia 5,600 years ago, one team reported. The Amazon River once flowed in the opposite direction, said another.

In a nod to Philadelphia, the conference even had a session on Wissahickon schist, the source of building material for so many houses in the region.

But mass extinctions, such as the end of the dinosaurs, have claimed an especially big chunk of the annual conference.

Researchers first proposed that a meteor

“

pearance. But Keller has maintained the two are not closely related.

In two locations – first in Mexico and now in Texas – she and her colleagues say they’ve found spherules in sediment that was deposited 300,000 years before dinosaurs went extinct.

Moreover, Keller says she found fossils of microorganisms in layers above and below – both after and before – the telltale spherules from the Chicxulub meteor.

“We cannot see any extinction or even any significant abundance change due to this impact,” she told the audience as she breezed through her slides.

Her conclusion: Other meteors must have decimated the dinosaurs.

Peter Dodson, a prominent University

No one disputes either the meteor’s impact or the dinosaurs’ sudden disappearance. But Keller has maintained the two are not closely related killed the reptiles in 1980, when 65-millionyear-old rocks were found to have high levels of iridium – an element plentiful in meteors.

But where was the crater?

Its underground signature – perhaps 160 kilometres in diameter – was discovered more than a decade later near the Mexican coastal town of Chicxulub (pronounced CHIX-uh-loob).

Scientists have since found remains of the molten debris that was cast across the Western hemisphere by the meteor’s impact. At the conference, Rutgers University’s Richard Olsson related how some of these “spherules” have been found in Bass River, New Jersey.

No one disputes either the meteor’s impact or the dinosaurs’ sudden disap-

”

of Pennsylvania paleontologist, then asked the obvious question. If there was another meteor, where’s the crater?

“We don’t really know where it is,” Keller admitted.

Rutgers’ Olsson then asked if the Texas location had been tested with sensors that send vibrations through the ground.

It has not, she said.

“I think you need them,” he responded during a testy exchange in which the two interrupted each other.

At most study sites, spherules from the Chicxulub impact have been found near the iridium layer that is linked to the dinosaurs’ extinction, said William Gallagher, a New Jersey State Museum paleontolo-

gist who co-moderated the session.

What Keller sees as 300,000 years of sediment between the spherule and iridium layers is likely the result of a tsunami or flood that was touched off by the meteor, he said.

Keller knows this is what many of her numerous detractors believe; she dismisses it as a “so-called tsunami.”

Raised in Switzerland, the sixth of 12 children whose parents did not have much money for schooling, she is used to striking out on her own.

She came to the United States in 1968 and worked her way through college,

eventually winning a fellowship for graduate study at Stanford University. She began teaching at Princeton in 1984.

“I basically made my own way,” she says, before dashing off to another session.

Keller notwithstanding, Drexel’s Lacovara estimates that perhaps 95 percent of the paleontology community believes the dinosaurs were felled by the Chicxulub impact – though many agree with her that volcanic gases also played a role.

Some say reptiles died from the force of the meteor itself; others believe debris kicked up by the impact killed plants and

upended the food chain.

But as Lacovara readily admits, science is not conducted by majority vote. The truth emerges when a researcher’s results are repeated.

He directed his Drexel graduate students to attend Keller’s session so they could see science in action.

“This is really the scientific process,” Lacovara says. “Gerta may be wrong.

Most people say she’s wrong. But you put it out there, and the community decides...

I may not agree with her, but I think it’s great what she’s doing.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 65

thinkLIFE technology

When laptops go bang

Alex Goldfayn assesses the risks of inflight fires caused by laptop batteries

D

istraught and scrambling off the United Airlines plane, the man ran out of the jet bridge past passengers waiting to get on board, clutching his laptop. Smoke poured from it.

He ran to a relatively unoccupied area of the gate and threw the Lenovo computer on the ground.

It ignited, shooting a 60cm flame upward.

“A few people yelled ‘terrorist,’ and ran away,” said Tom Mustaine, 30, who was sitting at an adjoining gate and witnessed the event at Los Angeles International Airport.

“The thing gave off a terrible, chemical smoke. It burned for about two minutes before they extinguished it. The whole gate area filled with noxious smoke.

People were gagging.”

This incident, which occurred in September, was the latest, most public, and perhaps the most dramatic in a string of laptop battery fires.

It prompted Lenovo to recall more than 500,000 of its notebook batteries worldwide.

So far, more than 5 million notebook batteries in the United States – and nearly 10 million worldwide – have been recalled this year by manufacturers including Dell,

66, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

Apple, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba.

Every one of the recalled batteries has one thing in common.

“They were all Sony batteries,” says Richard Stern, associate director at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (www.cpsc.gov), the government agency that oversees consumer product recalls.

The recent spate of battery recalls falls under Stern’s jurisdiction. The problematic units appear to have come from the same rather large “batch.”

“It’s a quality-control issue,” Stern explains. “Sony has reported that for a certain batch of their lithium-ion production, there were metal particles located in a certain part of the battery cell that, under certain circumstances, could penetrate the insulating material inside the cell and create an internal short circuit.”

Last month in Japan, a laptop battery sparked in a Fujitsu employee’s hands as he was retrieving the battery from a user’s home as part of the company’s recall.

In June, a Dell laptop ignited in a conference room.

The United Airlines passenger’s laptop that went up in flames at LAX started giving off

smoke when he was seated on the plane.

My burning question is, what would happen if a laptop ignites in flight?

“On the plane, it would have been catastrophic,” says Mustaine, who witnessed the LAX laptop fire. “I think there would have been an enormous panic. The smoke filled a large part of the terminal. It definitely would have filled the plane. It’s an extreme fire causing an extreme inability to breathe.”

What if a laptop ignites in an overhead compartment? Or under the seat in front of you?

Or worse, in the baggage compartment of the plane?

United Airlines, apparently not eager to discuss this issue in detail, responded to my inquiry with this e-mail: “When it is safe to use electronic equipment in-flight, for example not during take-off and landing, our customers can use their laptops.”

But several non-U.S. airlines, including Virgin Atlantic and Korean Air, have been checking laptop battery serial numbers before passengers board.

Virgin’s cabin crews, for example, check all batteries on Apple, Dell and IBM-made laptops. If the battery is on the recall list,

it must be placed in checked luggage.

Airlines in the United States, however, provide no such safety checks.

“Airlines aren’t allowing Scope and Crest on board, but they’re allowing these batteries through,” says frequent flier David Millman, chief executive of Rescuecom, a computer repair and support firm. “So far, we’ve been lucky, but it’s a real danger.”

Adds Mustaine: “I’ve thought about this a lot since seeing that laptop on fire. The laptop’s going to burn until it’s done burning (through the battery fuel cells and plastics). You have to let it do its thing. If there’s fire on a plane, it makes people panic.”

In a 2003 report, Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority found that a lithium-ion battery fire “will almost certainly cause severe harm to any passengers in the immediate vicinity. There is also a risk that the fire will spread to adjacent flammable material, e.g. clothing, newspapers, rugs, carpet.”

It went on to cite a “risk of harm from smoke inhalation to passengers and crew members, particularly if the electronic

device is inside a carrying bag.”

The Federal Aviation Administration, which is responsible for determining what can and cannot come on board U.S. flights, has not issued a ruling on the safety of passengers’ laptop batteries.

But experts urge to keep the problem in perspective.

“There are well over 250 million laptops in use in the world,” says Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Californiabased Creative Strategies Inc. “And we’ve had less than 50 (battery fire) incidences recorded worldwide.”

Adds the CPSC’s Stern: “I assume risk every day. I can’t control my environment unless I stay in my house.”

Even Mustaine is going to keep flying – with his laptop.

“I think the airlines just need to be smart about it. This is obviously a bad batch of batteries. Just keep track of the known bad batteries and check for them before people get on board.”

Here’s hoping the airlines get the message.

“

In a 2003 report, Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority found that a lithium-ion battery fire “will almost certainly cause severe harm to any passengers in the immediate vicinity.

There is also a risk that the fire will spread to adjacent flammable material, e.g. clothing, newspapers, rugs, carpet

”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 67

feelLIFE

sport

Sport 2006: A year of treats and cheats

MCT

F

rom the incredible highs of Roger Federer, Tiger Woods and the All Blacks to the dodgy lows of athletes ingesting performance-enhancing drugs for a living.

The last 12 months have been jam-packed with enough sporting drama and controversy to fill a new set of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

It’s a gruelling, rewarding and entirely subjective job to boil the whole show down to the best of the best, and the chief offenders.

Investigate sports editor Chris Forster rattled his brain cells, dusted off a pile of manila folders and scanned the infinite wisdom of the internet for his highlights – a six-pack of treats and half a dozen cheats.

TREATS THE ALL BLACKS DOMINATION OF WORLD RUGBY King Henry and his merry band of selectors defied the critics of their rotation policy to pull off an astonishing series of results. They dominated the Tri Nations, with the lone blip against the Springboks in the rural backwater of Rustenburg, and the trophy already in the bank.

There were a couple of rusty early season

68, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

wins over the determined Irishmen and a 25-19 scrape in Argentina with an experimental line-up. But by year’s end two different combinations blitzed England and France in consecutive weekends. Less than one year out from the World Cup and the critics are already talking New Zealand first, daylight second.

ROGER FEDERER AND THE QUEST TO BE THE BEST Still only 25 years old the Swiss magician’s all-round brilliance netted him three tennis Grand Slams in 2006. He waltzed to a fourth straight Wimbledon title, dropping just one set along the way. Clay court prince Rafael Nadal denied Federer at Roland Garros again and the only gap in his superlative CV is still the French Open title. The Fed Express was named Laureus World Sportsman of the Year, has been number one in the tennis world since 2004. He possesses the gifts and poise to be the greatest ever.

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER’S STUNNING LAST RACE Statistically the greatest ever driver in Formula One, with seven world champion-

ships and 91 Grand Prix victories – 37 year old Schumacher timed his retirement to near perfection. Only an engine failure in the penultimate race of the season put the brakes on his charge at defending champ Fernando Alonso. The ice-cold German’s made plenty of enemies over the years with his win-at-all-costs attitude. But in his last Grand Prix in Sao Paulo, Schumacher proved his undoubted pedigree. A burst tyre sent him plummeting from challenging the frontrunners to dead last. The German billionaire relished one last challenge in a stunning drive to fourth place.

TIGER WOODS’ TRIUMPH OVER LOSS At just 31 Tiger’s already rounding-up Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer as the most gifted golfer to ever stroll an immaculately prepared fairway. In 2006 Tiger’s added two majors to bring his tally to 12, topped-up with 8 PGA Tour victories and 6 other golf titles. Shortly after accepting an offer from good friend and caddie Steve Williams for a Kiwi holiday, including a blat on the Huntly speedway – in May this year, Woods’ father Earl lost a long battle with cancer. Tiger emerged from an eight week hiatus to dominate

the British Open at Royal Liverpool, tearfully dedicating the title to his Dad. MAHE DRYSDALE – BACK-TO-BACK ROWING GOLD The powerful 2 metre-tall Aucklander has made the most of his late start in the sport.

Converting to the single sculls after a stint in the fours at the Athens Olympics, Drysdale was part of the awesome foursome on New Zealand Rowing’s haul of World Championship gold at Gifu, Japan in 2005.

His feat of snatching back-to-back

gold – with a desperate late lunge at this year’s Worlds in Eton, England showed Drysdale’s guts and class and proves he’ll be a frontrunner in Beijing in 2008.

THE RISE AND RISE OF AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL The Socceroos impressive run and unfortunate exit was one of the undoubted highlights of a clinical World Cup in Germany.

In pool play they beat Japan 3-1 – were unfortunate to lose 2-nil to the Brazilians then snatched an incident packed 2-all

“

draw with the Croatians, to qualify for the next round. A dubious penalty with the last move of the game gave eventual champions Italy an undeserved passage into the quarterfinals. But the Australians had proved a point far above their lowly 37th world ranking. The 35 thousand fans who packed out Aussie Stadium for a recent Asian Cup qualifier – and the bumper crowds attracted by the state-based A-League shows Football (or soccer) is now rivalling the established codes of league, rugby and Australian Rules in the sports-mad country.

Clay court prince Rafael Nadal denied Federer at Roland Garros again and the only gap in his superlative CV is still the French Open title

”

CHEATS FLOYD LANDIS – FROM HERO TO VILLAIN Without doubt the biggest and most bizarre scandal of the year. A couple of days after the most amazing turnaround in Tour de France history, the American cyclist from an ultra-religious background was exposed as a drug cheat. Landis recorded abnormally high levels of testosterone from a compulsory drugs test after an heroic solo ride through the mountainous stage 16. The 31 year old is fighting an inevitable ban and stripping of his tour title. Since the tour he’s had a hip replacement for an arthritic condition. His family – who are part of the obscure Mennonite cult in Pennsylvania, are adamant their son is innocent.

JUSTIN GATLIN – SPEED FREAK CAUGHT OUT The 24 year old New Yorker laid claim to the accolade of quickest man on the planet, until a drugs test exposed him as a cheat for the second time in his career.

Gatlin matched rival Asafa Powell’s time of 9.77 seconds but was then bundled into the excessive testosterone camp. The Athens gold medallist is serving an eight year ban for a second offence, after serving a three year ban for taking the drug speed, in 2001.

“

WORLD CHAMPION BENDS THE TRIATHLON RULES Tim Don is in the innocent until proven guilty category. But the revelation he missed three drugs tests has cast a shadow over his greatest achievement. Don outstripped New Zealand’s Olympic Champ Hamish Carter for gold at Lausanne in Switzerland. The 28 year old Englishman maintains he never deliberately, or even considered, taking performance-enhancing drugs. Triathlon’s world body has given Don the benefit of the doubt and issued him with a mandatory 3 month ban.

PAKISTAN CRICKET’S YEAR FROM HELL International cricket was plunged into crisis mode after two scandals involving Pakistan. First there was the sensational ball-tampering allegation at the Oval in late August. Bolshy Australian umpire delivered an instant penalty, sparking captain Inzamam Ul haq to march his players off the field and refuse to comeback. It was a first for test cricket, and prompted a ban for the Pakistan skipper – and the demise of Hair’s international umpiring career. A few weeks later serial bad boy Shoaib Akhtar and fellow fast bowler Mohammad Asif tested positive for nan-

Landis recorded abnormally high levels of testosterone from a compulsory drugs test after an heroic solo ride through the mountainous stage 16

”

drolone. The two year ban’s probably terminal for 31 year old Akhtar after a career marred by faking injuries, tantrums and yes, ball-tampering.

AUSTRALIA’S ROLE IN LEAGUE’S GRANNYGATE AFFAIR Sure Nathan Fien is a born-and-bred North Queenslander and his only link to New Zealand is that he plays for the Warriors and his great-grandmother was born in Wanganui. But the Australian League bosses’ significant role in his exit stage left from the Tri Nations and the Kiwis’ potentially fatal loss of two points smacked of hypocrisy. Chairman Colin Love’s denied any hidden motives, but there’s the suspicion of still hurting from the humiliation the Kiwis dished out in last year’s final in Leeds.

THE FIFA WORLD CUP’S FAILURE TO DELIVER It’s the planet’s most-hyped sporting event, but again fell short on two crucial fronts – goals and entertainment. After a promising start and some classic football tales – the tournament in Germany fizzled into a battle of defensive wits, professional fouls and endless dives. It was win-at-all-costs typified by Switzerland’s play for a goalless draw against the Ukraine, only to lose on penalties. The final was memorable for Zinedine Zidane’s inexplicable head-butt and sending off. Italy had the last laugh – playing for penalties at the end of extra-time and holding their nerve to beat the French.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 69

feelLIFE

health

The case for ADHD

Claire Morrow examines the Attention Deficit controversy

Q

: How many kids with ADHD does it take to change a light-bulb?

A: Let’s ride our bikes!

Of course children like to ride bikes (a great mystery), and they are rarely called upon to change light-bulbs. But what happens to the kids in the joke when they are old enough to change light-bulbs? “OK... here I am...I’m at the shop...I’m going to buy light-bulbs and milk...great...I can do this.” By some miracle the adult with ADHD has their bank card with them and it’s not maxed out. Gleefully arriving home – stopping briefly at the neighbour’s to pick up the spare keys so they can let themselves in (stepping carefully around the pile of junk in the hallway) – with bread, eggs and all the things to fix that crack in the wall and...no light-bulbs.

Everyone has those “senior moments”

70, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

from time to time, and most of us can say “oh, that happens to me too”. But for some people it happens...a lot. Too much.

Even if you haven’t been paying attention, you could hardly have failed to notice that there is a condition called Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder. It is the most common psychiatric diagnosis in children (in adults, depression is the most common) and it receives the kind of media attention that your average cancer charity would kill for. Not normally positive media attention though.

Not your Here-are-the-warning-signssee-your-doctor-now-for-help-thanks-to the-miracle-of-science kind of publicity, as a general rule. More your bad-kidsor-bad-parents-you-be-the-judge kind of attention. Children do not have ADHD because their parents smack them, or don’t

smack them, because dad’s not around, because they’re poor or because they eat too much sugar/wheat/dairy products.

True, the odd child who is badly behaved, impulsive and super-active may be misdiagnosed with ADHD when there are in fact “problems at home”. But a good, thorough assessment would rule that out. An ADHD diagnosis is usually made very, very carefully with the involvement of several specialists, teachers and parents.

One cannot simply front up to the family doctor, complain about the child and get a pill to make it go away.

Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder is primarily a disorder of attention. It comes in 3 flavors – hyperactive, inattentive and mixed (one scoop of each). The primary symptoms revolve around the ability to focus, concentrate, remember, control impulses and do what needs to be done. Inattentive type (with the clumsy diagnostic label “Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder – without significant hyperactivity”) results in a daydreamer who may not be diagosed until later because their inattentive style is hard for them, but doesn’t disrupt the class. Hyperactive type...well, we know hyperactive when we see it. A hyperactive child is not merely a colossal pain in the backside to take care of (babysitters-won’t-return syndrome) – they need extra time, love, humour, consistency and attention from someone who understands them. And to be protected from themselves – because impulse control is poor, they are not deliberately doing foolish things, they are just so focused on getting their ball that the “don’t go on roads” bit drops out of their mind. Which is very normal at 2 and 3 years old, not so normal in an 8 or 10 year old. And these kids have to grow up.

Although it used to be thought that children grew out of ADHD, increasing numbers of adults are now being diagnosed with the condition. You do not catch ADD at 30, of course, it is a pervasive, perhaps lifelong neurological condition. Adults with ADHD are either people who were diagnosed as children or who – later in life – hit upon some hopefully friendly person who said “Could you have ADD?” You might get through school because your parents are supportive, and you are yourself very bright, even though you constantly lose the things you need for your assignments. Maybe even with good

marks. But when you enter the less structured, less supported, more competitive environment of work or university, things start to fall apart. Many adults with ADHD have been under the impression for most of their lives that they are lazy, stupid, space cadets. If one of their children is diagnosed with ADHD suddenly the light-bulb (which they have finally remembered to buy) goes on – “They can’t have ADHD...I was exactly the same as a child...still am like that... and I don’t...unless...?” (ding!).

Some people object to ADHD on religious grounds – Scientologists for example do not believe in psychiatry at all. Others are worried about “labeling” children. Children are smarter than you think, in that case. Labeling a child as “A wonderful, artistic sensitive little person who happens to have ADHD, a neurobiological condition which sometimes causes her to have problems that we can work out together” is a whole lot better than the labels a child will apply to themselves if they don’t have a clear understanding of why they have trouble in class, forget things, and ‘drift off”. You don’t want a label; “stupid”, “space cadet”, “thoughtless”, “lazy”, “bad”. If not enough information is given about what’s happening and why, these are the labels children with ADHD come up with by themselves (with a little help from their friends).

Correctly diagnosed ADHD is caused by insufficient dopamine in the brain. That is all. The synapses in the brain need dopamine. If you have enough dopamine, then taking amphetamine will make you have too much and you will become edgy, difficult and anxious. Too little and you have ADHD. Stimulant medications such as amphetamines (and drugs such as ritalin are no more closely related to ice or speed, than codeine is related to heroin) increases the amount of dopamine in the brain – focus improves. At any age, Attention Deficit Disorder is managed, not cured. It can be managed through cognitive behavior therapy (using a day planner, timers, alarm and so forth), and some people find special diets help a little (if they have food intolerance in addition to their ADHD). There are (aren’t there always?) a great number of unproven treatments, exercise has proven to be fairly helpful.

Newer medications are not as well established, but there are long-acting and non-controlled medication treatments now available. Medication, particularly the stimulants, far and away outperforms any other treatment. Just as no one expects the severe diabetic to control their sugar level without insulin, children and adults with ADHD have some control and can exert some effect on their behavior, but medication does have a significant place in treatment.

If you think you may be an adult with ADHD or you would just like to know more about the condition, you can find information and a self assessment scale at: http://www.addresources.org. As always; exercise more, and see your doctor if chronic lateness, underachievement and disorganization persist. Oh yes, make a list. Lists help a great deal. Light-bulbs.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 71

feelLIFE

alt.health

A toxic legacy

UPI’s Christine Dell’amore profiles new research on Dioxin’s reproductive dangers

N

ew evidence on the effects of dioxin in the Vietnam-era herbicide Agent Orange suggests the chemical interferes with the reproductive systems of men. The research, led by Dr. Amit Gupta, is one of the first studies to find that men exposed to a type of dioxin called TCDD experience smaller prostate glands and lower testosterone levels – even at minimal exposure to dioxin.

“Now we now know dioxins have an effect on the prostate, and it’s somehow affecting normal development,” says Gupta, a urologist at UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.

The study, published in the November issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, also offers new insight into whether lower doses of dioxin are dangerous to human health. Previous studies have observed dioxin’s effects only in highly exposed populations; some research has found a link between these populations and development of cancer.

However, because the study was not a true experiment, it’s not known whether it was really dioxin that led to the effects.

Gupta and colleagues followed participants of the Air Force Health Study for more than 20 years, beginning in 1987.

The study had two groups: About 1,200 ranch hands, or veterans who sprayed Agent Orange in Asia between 1962 and 1971, and a comparison group of about 2,400 Air Force veterans not involved in herbicide spraying during the war, says coauthor Dr. Arnold Schecter, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Dallas. The two groups were matched on age, race and military occupation.

The researchers examined the men in 1982, 1985, 1987, 1992, 1997 and 2002, recording their prostate and reproductive health. In 1987 the research team measured the level of TCDD dioxin in their blood.

As expected, the levels of TCDD – the

72, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007

most toxic form of dioxin – were higher in the ranch hand group than the comparison group, although both groups in the study experienced changes in their reproductive function. These higher levels were associated with a lower risk of diagnosis of a prostate condition called BPH, in which the prostate grows in size. TCDD somehow inhibits the prostate from growing, although scientists are unsure of the mechanism of how it happens, Gupta said.

Of course, most men would want to avoid BPH, since a larger prostate can create several uncomfortable side effects, such as frequent urination.

Yet dioxin’s ability to thwart prostate growth isn’t exactly cause to celebrate, says Gupta – rather, it’s a worrisome indication that dioxins are altering the reproductive system’s natural course.

A reduction in testosterone due to dioxin can also cause several health problems, such as loss of muscle strength, infertility, drop in sexual function and depression.

Since the comparison group had exposures consistent with the exposures of the general American population in 1987, even lesser amounts of dioxin present in the United States may impact Americans who never stepped foot in Vietnam.

“Most of the 30 types of dioxin produced in the United States come from industrial processes such as waste incineration, chlorine bleaching of pulp and paper and other chemical processes. It’s also a component of pesticides and herbicides, which move up the food chain from contaminated crops, to poultry and beef, to humans. Once inside the body, the chemical settles into the fat. That’s why, sadly, human babies get dioxin from their mother’s dioxin-laden milkfat,” says Gupta.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency – which is close to issuing a new scientific reassessment of the health risks of dioxin and dioxin-like compounds exposure – has successfully cut

down on much of the dioxin pollution since the 1970s. In fact, quantifiable industrial emissions of dioxin in the United States have fallen more than 90 percent from 1987 levels, according to the EPA. Since Gupta and colleagues used a 1987 marker of TCDD in their research, the risk could have gone down for the U.S. population exposed to dioxin.

In addition, it may be difficult to compare one type of dioxin – TCDD – to the effects of other types of the chemical. “In the case of Vietnam, where people were exposed almost exclusively to TCDD through Agent Orange, it’s reasonable to attribute any irregularities in the reproductive system to that chemical,” says Dr. John Constable, a former surgeon at Harvard Medical School and one of the first Americans to study the effects of herbicides in Vietnam in the 1960s.

“But if someone has a ragbag of chemicals in their bodies, as Americans likely do, it’s harder to parse out which dioxins really caused the abnormalities.”

Indeed, the number of male reproductive tract disorders, such as testicular cancer, has risen sharply over past decades.

“Some scientists have suggested dioxins might be partially responsible for the spike,” the authors wrote. But there could be other endocrine disruptors at play, substances that have already been shown to alter reproductive processes in rat models.

“Although more research could help in nailing down some of the causes of dioxin, the government has decided to discontinue the Air Force Health Study,” Schecter says.

The next 20 years will answer the question as to how much damage Agent Orange did to our Vietnam vets, says Schecter. “With the program now out of existence, that’s really most unfortunate for the health of our vets, and for anyone exposed to dioxins – which is anyone in the industrial world.”

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tasteLIFE

TRAVEL

Under the peel in Curacao

Toni Salama discovers an unspoilt Caribbean paradise

W

ILLEMSTAD, Curacao – Curacao (kur-a-SOW) is an odd cobble of contrasts where bright Caribbean colors splash across stalwart Dutch row houses, and Venezuelan farmers hawk the fruit of their labors in a floating market next to a plaza where Afro-Caribe artists sell their wares. It’s a place of stray goats and oil refineries, cactus forests and synagogues, secluded beaches and international banks. It’s crawling with lizards, croaking with frogs, brimming with smiles, dripping with history and comes to a standstill during Saturday night traffic jams.

You wouldn’t think so, but you can learn some lifelong lessons from a place like this.

The distillery is as good a spot as any to start.

LESSON 1: If life hands you larahas, make a liqueur The Spaniards arrived on Curacao in 1499, and their plans for the island soon included planting groves of oranges, sweet Valencias, in fact. But Curacao’s desert climate and stubborn soil transformed the foreign fruit into a bitter mess. It took a Frenchman to unlock the potential of what had come to be called the laraha orange. Later, the Senor family, now Senor & Co., entered the picture with a closely guarded liqueur recipe and an 1896 copper still, both of which the company uses to this day.

The entire distillation process takes only five or six days and is carried out in a space no bigger than a two-stall garage, at the back of what once was the manor house Chobolobo. I happened to drop by on my own just as a shore excursion of Americans from the Princess Star arrived.

We watched a laraha-cutting demonstration and were then given free reign to sample the 31-proof end product from little plastic cups. You can taste for yourself that there’s no flavor variation among the shocking red, electric green, hypnotic gold or crystal clear permutations of this drink. Close your eyes, and they all taste just like the original, spicy orange with a satin finish, colored an irresistible Caribbean blue.

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Even so, it’s hard to spend more than half an hour here, no matter how many samples you try.

LESSON 2: Any day you don’t have to eat an iguana is a good day Manor houses, a.k.a. plantation houses or landhuizen in the island’s official Dutch, are from another of Curacao’s passing eras.

Like the Spaniards’ orange trees, they’ve survived, but not as originally intended.

I counted 27 of them scattered around the island, though there are bound to be more. The easiest to find, as long as you’re doing the driving, are between the capital city of Willemstad and Westpunt, the westernmost tip of the island.

I wish I could give you a highway number. But Curacao is only 40 miles long and 10 miles wide. The locals, population 135,000, don’t need numbers; and foreigners can just follow the signs. The best I can tell you is that the two-lane pavement rides the island’s spine.

The back story on Landhuis Daniel is that it was built by a shipwrecked Englishman in 1650 or so. Things didn’t work out – the things being farming and ranching – so the place was abandoned to the cactus and the trade winds. Its current owner, a Dutch biologist-turned-innkeeper/chef, restored the place in 1997. He transformed the plantation house and slave quarters into a complex of yellow ochre facades, white trim and terra cotta roof tiles.

There’s lodging in the main building or in the former slave quarters, swimming in the pool and dining on the terrace, all in a setting very much the-middle-of-nowhere.

Farther along the road to Westpunt, the former plantation house of Dokterstuin, restored in 1996, is now a restaurant that serves authentic Curacao cuisine. Like most of its kind, the plantation house was built on a hilltop to catch the breeze and keep an eye on its neighbors and on the plantation itself, meaning its slaves. After emancipation in 1863, the former slaves leased the farm plots – long since overgrown – from the government.

Most people you’ll encounter on Curacao will speak English, but the openair restaurant on a shaded back porch is an inconspicuous spot to eavesdrop as the servers talk among themselves in Papiamentu, a rhythmic “stew” of a language derived from the melding of several African and European tongues.

Dokterstuin’s menu is truly Curacaoan: cabbage, squash, cucumbers, papaya, spinach and plantain, served alone or in concert, vegetarian style or with pork tail, or as a side to stewed goat meat. These stickto-your-ribs dishes come accompanied by a sizable mound of funchi, a cornmeal staple. They were out of yuana stoba, stewed iguana, when I was there.

Keep following the road to Westpunt and you’ll discover that the route works out to be a scenic loop that eventually reconnects to itself near Landhuis Daniel.

You can head back to Willemstad from the intersection. But before that, you should spend some time in nature exploring the western end of the island.

LESSON 3: You don’t have to climb every mountain ...

Driving on Curacao is an adventure. You can count on dodging a herd or two of stray goats, perhaps half a dozen iguanas and innumerable whiptail lizards of varying sizes. But at least you don’t have to worry about hurricanes. Curacao is so far south and west, so close to South America (on a clear day you can see the mountains of Venezuela) that most tropical storms figure it’s not worth the bother.

Consequently, the weather here is the active traveler’s best friend.

Rugged outdoorsmen can tackle Christoffel National Park. Several companies run jeep tours or you can drive it yourself and stop at any of eight trails for hikes and nature walks. Those who get an early start can make the estimated twoto three-hour climb to the island’s highest point, 1,230-foot Mt. Christoffel, before the day gets too hot.

The park was once a group of several

plantations, and ruins from those days remain. Along the hikes you also might see petroglyphs, mahogany trees, sabal palms and wild orchids – rare things all. There’s even a place from which you can spy on the Curacao white-tailed deer (some 250 of them), believed to have been brought here from South America centuries ago by the Arawaks, the same pre-Western-contact Indian tribe that left the petroglyphs.

Travelers saving their best efforts for the beach will be satisfied with a couple of lowimpact land treks: the Hato Caves, which have formed natural pools and waterfalls, and/or Shete Boka Park. A short walk at Shete Boka leads to a damp and slippery sea cave where runaway slaves once hid. There’s also an area where you can feed the iguanas.

The bottom part of that scenic loop I mentioned includes the short drive between Westpunt and Soto. It runs through a landscape worthy of “The X Files,” a bizarre forest of multi-branched cactus, whose gray-tinted limbs rise eerily above a deep

green tangle of tropical-looking vegetation. This drive also puts you on the southern coast of the island, the entire length of which is set with small beaches, some of which have facilities and rent palapas, beach furniture, floats and snorkel gear.

All this stuff is west of Willemstad. That means there is also a part of Curacao that is east of Willemstad. But with the exception of the area round Jan Sofat, the eastern end of the island is best left to those who live there.

You’re better off spending the rest of your time in Willemstad.

LESSON 4: If your building gives you a migraine, paint it blue Willemstad is a city divided. The local population probably wouldn’t make this comparison, but, like Paris, Willemstad has a Left and a Right Bank. They’ve just given them Dutch names: Otrobanda on the left, Punda on the right and the long channel of St. Annabaai between them.

It’s Punda’s St. Annabaai waterfront that you see on all the postcards: a chorus line of respectable Dutch row houses flaunting a fruit-cocktail of colors. The buildings got their paint jobs, so the story goes, after the sun glaring off the oncewhite surfaces gave his lordship the governor a headache. Turns out the old dude held stock in a paint company.

By day, there’s shopping: duty-free and local crafts and tacky souvenirs and Venezuelan produce right at the boat. By night, when the buildings are outlined with lights, there’s music, a world beat of styles that flow from the open-air bars and karaoke cafes.

The whole area is a historic treasure – officially a UNESCO World Heritage Site – compact and easily explored on foot. In no time, you’ll find Mikve Israel-Emanuel, the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas. Founded in 1732, its interior is flush with mahogany furnishings, appearing all the richer in the wonderful

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 75

golden light that streams through renovated windows. The Jewish Historical & Cultural Museum is right next door in another historic building, where a mikvah, or ritual bath, was uncovered after years of disuse. Who knew that at one time half the white population here was Jewish? Some of the items displayed in the museum are even older than the synagogue itself: a Torah scroll that may have left Spain in 1492, a silver spice box from 1704. You can buy locally made mezuzas in the gift shop.

Compared to Mikve Israel, nearby Fort Church is a Johnny-come-lately, having been built only in 1769, though its Dutch Protestant congregation began meeting more than 100 years earlier. This, the oldest church on Curacao, is no slouch in the mahogany and silver-vessel departments, either, and has the further recommendation of being part of a real fort, Ft. Amsterdam.

This town has fortifications all over the place. Also in Punda, a structure called the Waterfront Arches, part of Water Fort, built in 1634 and replaced in 1827, now houses bars and eateries. Following St. Annabaai inland, you’ll find Ft. Nassau, built in 1797 on a peninsula in Schottegat Bay. Except for the restaurant and bar, which afford grand views in all directions, this coral stone fort hasn’t changed much in the intervening years. It even has

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its original toilets – square holes cut in an overhang. Don’t worry. Nobody is expecting you to use them.

When you are ready to cross over to Otrobanda, you can drive across the modern Ring Road bridge, board a free passenger ferry or hoof it across the 700foot-long Queen Emma Pontoon Bridge, reputedly the largest floating pedestrian bridge in the world.

Otrobanda’s 1828 Riffort, yet another fort, rises at the foot of the pontoon bridge. Far from intimidating people, Riffort now is home to shops, a radio station and a small French/Swiss restaurant, Bistro Le Clochard, with barrel vaulted ceilings, rustic chandeliers and a waiter who sheepishly apologized to me that the catch of the day was “only” red snapper steamed in a banana leaf.

LESSON 5: If you ever get locked in a museum at closing time, enjoy the sculpture garden till help arrives It’s hard to imagine any place upstaging a bunch of old forts. But you never imagined any place like Hotel Kura Hulanda.

This is a restored neighborhood, in fact another of Curacao’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It’s also a hotel, one that takes the form of a village where you can walk the original lanes and alleys, relax in open courtyards and stay in rooms or

suites that would have been shops and homes a couple of hundred years ago. It’s also a complex of some of the island’s finest and most expensive restaurants. And it’s home to the largest African history museum in the Caribbean.

I spent four nights at Kura Hulanda.

The room was spacious and air-conditioned, the bed comfortable, the bath large, the television already tuned to Law & Order.”And I scarcely slept a wink because of the frogs. I never actually saw the frogs. They made their presence known by their infernal, diabolical, incessant croaking through the night.

You’d have thought the frogs were problem enough. But then I got locked in the African History Museum because I underestimated the time it would take to see all the exhibits. The woman there tried to tell me that I should come back in the morning, but I wouldn’t hear of it. All she could do was shake her head as I paid the admission. How was I to know that this tiny island, and this neighborhood within a neighborhood, could fill 15 buildings and 16,000 square feet with artifacts and displays? It turned out to be one of the finest small museums I’ve ever visited.

Exhibits trace African history beginning with ancient artifacts from Mesopotamia and Egypt all the way through 19th century wood and bronze sculptures from a rainbow of West African nations. I especially remember a bust from Benin.

Special displays follow the trans-Atlantic slave trade from captures in Africa to sales in the New World, and the museum doesn’t gloss over Curacao’s grim role as one of the Caribbean’s largest, if not the largest, slave markets.

In fact, the museum sits on the site of a former slave yard, and one of its most wrenching exhibits is a reconstruction of two pillars where slaves newly arrived from Africa would have been sold, and where any who objected to their lot would have been whipped.

I think the place must have closed for the day while I was either going down inside the re-created hold of a Middle Passage slave ship or when I was fitting my wrists into rusty slave manacles in another display.

The irony of my situation grew even stronger as I peered through sturdy iron fencing asking passersby to send for help.

As I waited, I was just glad that the admissions woman couldn’t see me. She’s probably still shaking her head.

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IF YOU GO High season rates generally prevail midDecember through mid-April.

GETTING AROUND: Curacao is well suited to exploring on your own, so rent a car.

Road signs are in English, and Curacao drivers are extremely patient and courteous. But stray goat herds may take over the roads at any time, even in populated areas.

A four-day Alamo compact on Curacao cost me US$132 last November. You may pay more in high season. When you are ready for a rugged outing, you can join

one of several four-wheel-drive tours that operate here. Most cost less than US$50/ person.

CURRENCY: U.S. dollars are accepted everywhere.

STAYING THERE: Travelers who enjoy “collecting” hotels will find great variety here.

Hotel Kura Hulanda (www.kurahulanda. com), in Willemstad’s Otrobanda district, is a member of Leading Small Hotels of the World and offers unique lodging in the buildings of a restored historic district,

from US$240 in high season (I got a standard room for nearly half that in low season). It’s within walking distance of all the historic sites of Willemstad. There’s a sister property, Lodge Kura Hulanda and Beach Club (same contact info), on the far western tip of the island at Westpunt. Set apart from the rest of Westpunt, it’s a rather new, breezy resort with a small beach and rates from $225 in high season.

You can have your history and a pictureperfect secluded beach at Avila Beach Hotel (www .avilahotel.com), on the less pedestrian end of Willemstad. Rooms in the historic main building start at US$120 in high season (there’s a catch: modern plumbing but no hot water). Completely modern rooms in other parts of the resort start at $260 in high season.

Landhuis Daniel Country Inn & Restaurant (daniellh@cura.net; www. landhuisdaniel.com) is one of the island’s oldest plantation houses. Its eight rooms have private baths and start at $35 with fan and $45 with air conditioning. Add $6/person for breakfast or $25/person for half-board (breakfast and dinner).

Larger chain hotels include Hilton, Howard Johnson and Marriott. Other small – to midsize properties cater to scuba divers. And there are several B&Bs and vacation rentals.

Expect to pay 19 percent in lodging taxes at most places.

MORE INFORMATION: Curacao Tourism Corporation, www.curacao.com

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tasteLIFE

FOOD

Good herb

Eli Jameson says its time to freshen up

O

ne of my greater failings in life is my utter inability to deal with the world of plants. A green thumb I have not.

Even the most supposedly indestructible houseplants get a severe case of depression and commit arboreal suicide as soon as they find themselves in my care. The happy-looking ficus that was living in the back yard of our house when we moved in two months ago now looks about as lush as Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. And speaking of Christmas trees, last year we set up an artificial number in the lounge and it started shedding its plastic leaves as soon as it realised it was notionally in my care. The floor had more little needles scattered around it than the footpath outside the “safe” injecting room in Sydney’s Kings Cross.

No wonder the Green Party held a week’s worth of demonstrations outside my house when they found out I’d requested brochures on a Tasmanian holiday. They figured I’d take one step off the

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plane and all the old-growth forests on the Apple Isle would decide to finally give up their respective ghosts.

Which is why I cannot have something I have always wanted, both for reasons aesthetic (read: reasons of ego – “why, yes, I do grow these myself”) and financial: a proper herb garden. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve bought basil planters by the pallet-load, visions of pesto-filled summers dancing in my head. Two days after installation the leaves wind up withered and charred by the sun, even if they were placed in the shade.

Instead, I have to go to the markets and buy my herbs, which is tedious, inconvenient and expensive. How my local supermarche can get away with charging $2 for an anemic bundle of parsley is beyond me; the margins on such a product have more in-built fat than Dom Deluise. Either that, or the parsley farmer lost a lawsuit and needs the extra money because his wages are being garnished. (Ba-da-BOOM!) Hopefully you do not have this problem.

But either way, fresh herbs are as indispensable to good cooking as proper sea salt (always Maldon, and no, they don’t pay me a cent to say that, though yes, I’d be happy to take any spare inventory care of this magazine’s Sydney bureau) and extra virgin olive oil. All those jars of dried herbs that everyone keeps in the back of their kitchen cupboards are, for the most part, the enemy of taste. Although recipes typically tell readers to use less dried herbs than fresh because the power is supposedly concentrated, it is not long before, once unsealed, they quickly become deadly stale and add about as much oomph to a dish as a scant teaspoon of sawdust. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule: I find dried tarragon doesn’t hang around my house long enough to go off, and somehow retains more of its integrity than other herbs in the jar. And it means one can always knock up a bearnaise sauce on short notice, an event that happens with heart-stopping regularity around the Jameson chateau.

“

A handful of chopped basil (or something else if you like) makes something even as simple as a warmed-up bowl of tinned tomato soup into something else entirely, especially if you finish it with a drizzle of cream

”

If you can possibly manage it, grow your own herbs to avoid the extortionate prices charged by the grocer. A handful of chopped basil (or something else if you like) makes something even as simple as a warmed-up bowl of tinned tomato soup into something else entirely, especially if you finish it with a drizzle of cream.

And especially if you have the time and patience to do it in a mortar and pestle rather than in a blender or food processor a fresh, home-made pesto – basil, pine nuts, parmesan cheese, olive oil, salt – can’t be beat. Rosemary is not only delicious, but it functions as God’s own skewer come barbeque time (get those silly little bamboo skewers outta here); stripped of most of their leaves the branches can be threaded through meat or fish and will impart their own flavour as they cook. Dill adds a summery zest to fresh mayonaisses, especially when served alongside a nice piece of cold poached salmon and is great in potato and tuna salads. Thyme along with rosemary is tremendous on lamb, and recalls the flavour of great lamb dishes served around the Mediterranean where the creatures feed on the stuff in the wild, the taste being thusly imparted to their meat. And don’t overlook some of the other herbs on offer – chervil and marjoram for example – which are both underrated in my book.

Even if for reasons of space or, in my case, bad ju-ju, you can’t grow herbs it’s worth having a few at all times handy in the fridge from the market. Keep them wrapped in moist paper towel to keep them fresh for longer.

Herb-y Open Omelet You’ll need: 2 eggs 1 vine-ripened tomato 50-100g good goat’s cheese good handful of basil, or whatever other herbs you desire salt, pepper, and a knob of butter First, chiffonade your herbs – that means roll them up real tight and slice thinly – and mix with the goat’s cheese. Set aside. Chop tomato into a medium dice, and set aside. And in a small bowl, whisk together the eggs with a bit of salt, pepper and about a tablespoon of water.

Heat a medium non-stick saute

pan over medium-high heat and add a knob of butter. When the butter is melted and has stopped sizzling add the tomato and cook down for a moment. Add the eggs and swirl around the pan, making sure the tomato is reasonably evenly distributed. As the eggs begin to set drop marble-sized balls of the goat’s cheese and herb mixture around the pan, and finish under a pre-heated grill to melt the cheese down a bit and finish the dish. Carefully slide out onto the centre of a warmed plate. Serves 1.

Since this is more a morning dish, I’d recommend nothing stronger than a bright moscato in the glass.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 81

seeLIFE PAGES

Great Kiwi novels, and other stories

Michael Morrissey tracks Lloyd Jones’ latest and some historic kiwiana MISTER PIP

By Lloyd Jones Penguin, $35

L

loyd Jones is probably our most sophisticated stylist and also delightfully unpredictable in the kind of novels he writes. What is the gifted fellow going to do next? Like so many successful recent New Zealand novels, this one is set “abroad’ i.e. outside New Zealand waters. Probably this trend will continue, and the versatile Jones persist in pleasantly surprising us in subject matter, technique and setting.

Triumphantly written up in a recent Listener as Our First Million Dollar Novelist, I could not help subconsciously – though I knew the feeling was sure to be mistaken – expect some large complex blockbuster type of novel (say the New Zealand equivalent of Sacred Games by Vikram Chandler (see below)). Instead we are given a modest work of 220 pages in largish print. Up until recently, a lot of

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New Zealand fiction had a kind of moral pokiness, a gauche wooden style with lapses into political correctness – this is definitely not the case with Jones’s minor masterpiece.

The novel’s main character is Matilda, a young Bougainville girl who has the kind of teacher we would (or should) like to have – a gentle, cultured, morally upright man who invites them into his imaginative world by reading from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. In what has become almost the new politically correct world of contemporary criticism (Edward Said for example), this act might be seen as an act of colonisation – here it becomes a sharing of an exotic distant world that excites the minds of the children, leaving Matilda awake at night wondering what marshes or leg irons might be like. Mr Watts, aka Mr Pip (main character of Great Expectations) charms us with his quiet low-key manner and equally Lloyd Jones charms us. Do teachers still read to their pupils I wonder or has electronic media taken over completely?

Mr Watts, the teacher, succeeds too well. Pip becomes of greater interest to Matilda than stories about her dead relatives and her mother is understandably indignant. An ideological battle of wills develops with Matilda’s mother addressing her class mates about crabs and the weather, God and the devil. What Jones does with great skill during these scenes – reminiscent of Graham Greene – is interweaving the personal, the ideological and the political. It is the latter that slowly closes on the adult protagonists like a vicious vice.

With a further Greene-like twist of the ironic knife, Jones has the oppressive Redskins (government soldiers) threaten mayhem if the imaginary though now treated-as-real Mr Pip’s whereabouts is not revealed. Proof of Mr Pip’s fictionality relies on presenting a copy of Great Expectations but unfortunately Matilda’s mother has stolen it. And Matilda feels duty bound to remain silent. No problems accepting this response but I had credibil-

ity problems with Matilda’s mother keeping quiet about stealing the book when concealment meant the whole village was burnt down – though that may be my European perspective. The subsequent murder of Mr Watts is brutal and brief and all the more shocking because of its suddenness and brevity.

This is a deceptively straightforward novel in which irony piles on irony. The meditations on the colour white, for instance, or the view of the “real” Mrs Watts that her husband was a weak man when we have seen his stubborn strength. At the conclusion, I felt a little breathless with the dazzle of Jones’s talent. The international success of his novel is well deserved.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR NEW ZEALANDERS

By Richard Wolfe Random House, $34.99

L

et’s say you were a woman in 1915 looking for a career in teaching. What would be the requirements? Actually they were quite strict. Marrying was forbidden and the teacher curfewed between the hours of 8pm and 6 am. She was not allowed to travel outside city limits without permission, not smoke nor dress in bright colours, nor dye her hair. And most importantly, she was not to loiter

downtown in ice-cream stores, presumably seething dens of vice. If, by 1946, our modern Ms had been lucky enough to become a mother to twins and was endeavouring to breast feed, Modern Mothercraft: A Guide to Parents, provides a detailed schedule.

Instructions are what we all need and instructions in abundance are what this natty little pocket book provides. There may be some who will read this delightful book with a straight face but I think most of us will smile and may even laugh.

Of course this humour is the by product of a shift in historical perspective. For all we know, the instructions of today – only a few are listed – may prove a matter of hilarity to future generations. Instructions can be found here on Hanging Pictures, Carless Days, Using an Electric Oven, The Prevention of Slugs, Clothing Required by Steerage Passengers, Starting the Engine, Playing the National Anthem and Filling a Hot Water Bag (Do not use boiling water!). In other words, for all of life’s exigencies, small or large, some thoughtful soul or government committee has written a detailed set of instructions on how to do and how to cope. I was cheerfully reminded of the extraordinarily resourceful Junior Woodchuck’s Guidebook – frequently consulted by Donald Duck’s nephews in emergencies.

Under the “The Art of Rugby Football” dated 1902 there is a chapter entitled How to Bump, first practised by Mr. J.G Taiaroa, the famous Otago back. The text continues, “It would therefore seem, a Maori invention and knack.” Bumping?

“Bumping is done by the timely transmission of the weight and momentum of the runner to a would-be tackler, and is generally only effectively done when the runner is going at top speed, when the momentum does the trick. It is done by throwing one’s weight plus impetus into the tackler’s shoulder, and brushing him by with the arm”. Whether the Bump is still legal fare in today’s rugby is unknown to a non-footballer such as myself but I am sure Stadium-voters will know. Perhaps a future edition will include a chapter on “How to Choose a Football Stadium”? At the time of writing it seems the nation and the council desperately need Instructions.

Among many gems, my favorite (almost) is instructions on Using the Long Baton issued in 1976. Astonishingly, there are eighteen different uses of this handy instrument of law enforcement. These include the Front punch, Back punch, Flat Chop, Forward spin, Pool Cue Jab from long extended position, Wrist drag, Running Armlock, and the Yawara strike. It is reassuring to discover that the art of the bludgeon has been so scientifically detailed.

Instructions for New Zealanders is an ideal book for a gift or a bit of summer levity and I look forward to a revisit in 50 years time.

TRAVELS IN THE SCRIPTORIUM

By Paul Auster Faber & Faber, $39.99

E

ither you’re a Paul Auster fan or you’re not. I am – most of the time. Writers tend to be melancholic beasties and most of Auster’s central protagonists (often furtive writers) are melancholic or in the modern terms depressed, alienated, passive. Not for long. Something puzzling awakens them from their depressed state.

This short novel starts off cheerily: “The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed, palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the floor.” Somehow – since this is a Paul Auster novel – you guess he isn’t about to be brought a dish of strawberries and cream by a beautiful young woman dressed as a French maid.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 83

From the drearily sterile circumstance of his surroundings one might guess that Mr Blank (yes, that’s his name) is a political prisoner of sorts but then it seemed the mental patient fitted the bill more accurately – there are references to treatment, nurses, pills that make his hands shake.

That doesn’t seem to quite fit either. A reality TV show gone wrong (there are cameras present)? A Dystopian political allegory? Perhaps. A Kafka-esque fable of alienation comes closer yet even that doesn’t seem quite appropriate. Since the room is locked and Mr Blank so miserable, comparisons with Beckett could also be drawn. In the end, it seems Mr Blank is trapped in the pages by that sadist, the writer, nominally N.R Fanshawe yet who ultimately must be, Paul Auster.

Even by stern Austerian standards, this novel takes a deeper plunge into gloom than most and the reader may feel like abandoning Mr Blank to his monotonously awful fate but there is something compulsive about the book, the Austerian capacity to surprise, that sustains interest.

The apparent window pane clarity of the beginning slowly gives way to a tricky corridor of fictional mirrors. Auster uses the multi-level device of the spliced in narrative that appears to have little connection with the main story but eventually interweaves with it. The enfolded narrative describes a land that is much like a nineteenth century American frontier circa 1830 with murderous Europeans and butchered Indians. It is, in fact, an unfinished novel that Mr Blank feels compelled to finish in his own way.

All of Mr Blank’s visitors are characters from earlier Auster novels which is either the writer being lazy or richly extending his fictional universe. Or playing a metafictional game. If the sole purpose of the book is to tell us that writers are trapped in rooms writing that is scarcely an original thought. In the end, this was my least favourite Auster novel and I hope next time Mr Blank is Mr Somebody and gets out of that locked room.

RESTLESS

By William Boyd Bloomsbury, $35

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illiam Boyd, one of the leading novelists of today, has just published his ninth novel. It’s cracking espionage thriller, thoroughly

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authentic in period detail and atmosphere, recounted by two narratives – the first by Ruth Gilmartin is about how she discovers her mother Sally Gilmartin is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigre and spy, and the second, Eva’s narration of her life as a secret agent. Ruth lives in Oxford and teaches English as a second language, while trying to write a history thesis, the time being1976.

For obvious reasons, the war document is the more gripping, yet the book as a whole is enthralling with Ruth having to put up with shady characters who boast of making porno films and being mixed up with the Baader-Meinhof Gang – though who knows if it is all true? As with all such double narratives, we wait for them to intersect which satisfyingly they do.

Eva is recruited at the funeral of her brother Kolia by the novel’s suave bete noire, the polished and urbane Lucas Romer with an “upper class, patrician” accent – “swarthy, with dense eyebrows, uncurved, like two black horizontal dashes beneath his high forehead”. Her brother’s death is given as a reason for her to join up for Kolia who also used to work for Mr Romer.

As war clouds gather over Europe, Eva is given her exhaustive training. In terms of detail, this struck me as more authentic and meticulous than anything previously encountered – though obviously I haven’t read every spy novel in existence.

She is taught how to remember number by association with colours, how to recall at least 80 of 100 objects on a table; she is taught Morse code, use of a compass, code breaking, forging, how to tail someone and detect if she is being followed.

Her training is topped off with a spot of orienteering – being left out at night at a remote location and finding her way back. Interestingly enough, Mr Romer dismisses unarmed combat as being a waste of time and comments, “you have nails, you have teeth – your animal instincts will serve you better than any training”. So much for the James Bond style of espionage – though don’t forget the Russians did try to kill someone with a poison-tipped umbrella (or latterly a tiny nuclear bomb in the arteries) which makes it mildly plausible when Eva dispatches a Mexican heavy by stabbing him through the eye with a pencil.

Eva winds up working at British Security Coordination in the Rockefeller

Center in New York where they release phony propaganda stories to the media, and curiously enough they can never be sure if they are believed by the enemy or not. The aim is to spur the United States into joining the war. The presence of this large British spy agency in New York is well founded in fact. As we now know, the bombing of Pearl Harbour was far more effective than its efforts.

The double plot is complex with lots of richly realised secondary characters drawn in along the way. Excitement begins to mount when Ruth meets Romer and reaches full-blown thriller adrenalin when she and her Eva meet the ruthless Romer for the last time. Like Graham Greene, Boyd has managed and quite superbly, to inject full characterisation and psychological depth into an espionage thriller. Not even John Le Carre has done it better.

SACRED GAMES

By Vikram Chandler Faber & Faber, $39.99

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his whopper of a novel – 900 pages – is only Chandler’s second but with it he leaps to the forefront of Indian and world literature. This is fiction writing and characterisation on an impressive nineteenth century scale so it’s tempting to dub him the Indian Dostoyevsky. I make this comparison not only because the clash between gangster warlord Ganesh Gaitonde and Sartaj Singh, a Sikh police inspector, is somehow like an extension of murderer Raskolnikov versus Detective Porfiry in Crime and Punishment but also because of the depth of psychology explored plus the use of full-on dialogue and the book’s large scope and size.

Though the novel begins with a dog tossed out of a fifth story window – and this may be in part to illustrate that policemen have to attend to crimes other than murders – the novel really gets a grip on its two main protagonists in the second chapter. Ganesh is holed up in his nuclear bomb-proof concrete box with Sartaj Singh trying to flush him out. It’s a standoff resolved when Singh orders in a bulldozer with a driver who knows how to tackle the task. By the time the siege is successfully accomplished and the arrest of the decade about to be made, we – like Singh – are disappointed to find the Hindu warlord of

Mumbai has committed suicide. Thus does the grand drama begin.

While at first it seems like anticlimactic beginning, it becomes clear it’s part of Chandler’s fictional strategy. As in a modern thriller we have the James Bond-like beginning and the remainder is a furious and colourful flashback on a massive scale. From this point onward, the novel moves from Ganesh’s story to Sartaj and back. At first, Sartaj is the chief character but then Ganesh, as the more colourful guy, tends to overwhelm.

There are additional interludes called Inserts, which alas, I tended to skim over in my eagerness to keep track with the main story. These additions plus the size of the novel tend to give more detail than might be needed but the novel picks up the pace from time to time just enough to keep one reading onward.

The Dramatis Personae lists some 35 main characters but there are hosts more weaving in and out. The vicious world of Mumbai’s underworld is the overriding subject matter. Mumbai, for-

This

merly Bombay is if course, famous not only for its criminal underworld but also Bollywood. And no surprise to find that they are interwoven with wonderful dramatic effect. Chandler, it is abundantly clear, loves Mumbai for its colourfulness as Dickens loved London or Doctorow loves New York. In many ways, Mumbai is the third great character in the novel.

Even the glorious sunsets get a mention though symbolically the cause of their splendour is thought to be pollution.

As in so many great works of literature, the moral undertow of the narrative is the battle of good and evil, here explored in great depth. Whereas Sartaj is basically a good man, he is a policeman in a corrupt city. As the text almost mournfully informs us, the money he is paid would not even pay for the paper on which he writes his reports, so what choice does he have but to accept bribes and payoffs? When he was married, his rich wife had enabled him the “luxury” of not having to take them but at the time of the novel he has little choice.

Indian police methods, the text makes

clear, are not overly gentle.

Ganesh Gaitonde, by contrast, is a ruthless gangster though naturally he has a human side which the book skilfully invites to follow with fascination and sympathy.

But in the end he is a bad guy and the murder of one of his few genuine friends – a woman whom he admires for standing up to him – because of a blow to his sexual pride shows him in his true dark colours.

An extra strand in the elaborate plot is Ganesh’s servile relationship to a slick-talking guru who turns out to be a sinister terrorist intent on making nuclear mayhem.

This is a bravura performance that shows off a huge talent. Two reservations – it seems a shame that Ganesh’s shadowy rival Suleiman Isa is off stage at all times and the show down between Ganesh and his guru also indirectly reported.

However, the book remains a masterpiece of colour and high drama and the text teems with vibrant portraits of Mumbai’s exotic city life. This would make a fabulous movie though hopefully the director will not cast from Bollywood.

Christmas... say it with

candles from Wax Works

Dozens of designs handcrafted in New Zealand to choose from, with a variety of scents and colours to suit your mood Stockists nationwide, see www.waxworks.co.nz for details INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 85

seeLIFE MUSIC dinary ear for what makes a great song.

This is a mainstream album packed with catchy and pleasant-to-listen-to tunes that will appeal to all ages. From the first few notes of opening track “Along the Wall” until the closing moments of “Just a Little”, Nash has seamed together a collection of songs that flow well, while sticking to what she knows best.

There are some moments where Blue on Blue begins to drift off, slipping into songstress or country clichés in several parts; but for the most part Nash manages to keep things together.

You probably won’t see this one topping the charts or hitting the radio waves, but Blue on Blue is definitely worth the listen and comes highly recommended.

Albert Hammond Jr Yours to Keep

I’m a train-wreck

Chris Philpott discovers the son of 70s popster Albert Hammond, and appreciates the Deftones Deftones Saturday Night Wrist

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t’s been 3 years since the last flash of creative brilliance from California-based metal band, the Deftones, and – given their standing as the creative hope of hard rock music – expectations were understandably high for their latest release, Saturday Night Wrist.

Starting off with a hiss and a roar (quite literally) behind first single “Hole in the Earth”, Saturday Night Wrist sounds like it may well have taken the entire 3 years to make, with every high vocal note, string pluck and drum hit sung, played and timed to near perfection.

Packed with signature heavy guitar riffs and vocalist Chino Moreno’s desperate wailing, this is definitely a creatively charged album which easily stands out from the so-so offerings from many of today’s rock bands.

While it does suffer moments of monotony (such as on “Xerces”) or unneces-

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sary foul language (“Pink Cellphone”), Saturday Night Wrist is lifted by the quality of tracks like “Mein”, “Cherry Waves”, “Combat” and “Beware”, which is undoubtedly one of the true highlights of this album.

This is not quite for the masses, but if you like your rock with an experimental edge to it then this may well be for you.

Caution: contains explicit language.

Leigh Nash Blue on Blue

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here are times when I feel truly blessed to be writing these reviews and opening myself to a truly wide range of musical styles. Yet another of those moments took place this month.

Blue on Blue is Leigh Nash’s debut solo offering and, to be honest, it is bang on the mark. You may recall Nash was the frontwoman for mainstream pop band Sixpence None The Richer (of “Kiss Me” fame) and that pop sensibility has given Nash an extraor-

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f course, for every great discovery that comes my way, there are an equal number of discs I’d rather forget that get dropped on my desk.

Yours to Keep is the debut solo album from Albert Hammond Jr, guitarist with “it” band The Strokes, and to tell you the truth I don’t really know what to say about it.

For older readers, you might remember his dad, Albert Hammond the original, best known for early 70s hits like the bizarre “I’m a Train”, “Free Electric Band” or the classic “Air That I Breathe” which he penned for the Hollies. Now it’s his 26 year old son’s turn.

Sounding suspiciously like The Strokes for the most part, particularly on tracks like “In Transit” and “Holiday” (begging the question, why didn’t they just use these songs), but often slipping into unnecessary experimentation, like on final track “Hard to Live in the City”, Hammond Jr only manages to show that the creative apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

And while some Dire Straits and Beatles inspired moments of grandeur, as well as appearances by Sean Lennon and Strokes singer Julian Casablancas, manage to make Yours to Keep mildly interesting right to the end, they simply aren’t enough to rectify the fact that this just was not an album that needed to be made.

If you are a huge Strokes fan you will probably love this, but I believe most listeners simply won’t get it and won’t enjoy it.

seeLIFE MOVIES

Time-travelers

From the futuristic Deja Vu to the French revolution Deja Vu Rated: M Starring: Denzel Washington, Jim Caviezel, Bruce Greenwood, Val Kilmer Directed by: Tony Scott 121 minutes

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he question on the table, raised in regard to Deja Vu, Denzel Washington’s mind- and space-bending new thriller, is this: Is Hollywood getting smarter, or are audiences demanding smarter movies?

“You know, I always shake my head when someone refers to Hollywood or ‘the studios’ as some kind of cabal or brain trust or something,” Washington says. “I mean, am I Hollywood? Is Russell Crowe Hollywood? Is Jerry Bruckheimer? The guy who heads distribution at Disney?

“As for the studios, I’ve worked for almost all of them, and the people who run them are all different kinds of people.

Heck, sometimes they’re different from one meeting to the next. So, the only thing they have in common, I guess, is that they want to make money. And some of them, believe it or not, want to make good pictures. Lately, they seem to be doing that.”

It reunites Washington with producer Bruckheimer and director Tony Scott, the team responsible for Man on Fire and

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Crimson Tide, and Washington has no compunction about calling it a popcorn movie.

“It is a popcorn movie,” says Washington.

“But I warn people, you better have all the popcorn you want before you sit down, because you may not be getting up. You gotta watch this movie, because it’s tricky.

There’s things going on you have to pay attention to.”

It is set in New Orleans, post-Katrina; it was in production when the hurricane hit, and had to be postponed during the rescue efforts and clean-up – “alleged clean-up,” Washington says. With the high-powered and high-paid talent involved, it was thought the production would relocate elsewhere, but Washington says all involved were committed to keeping the movie there, to add something to the economy “and just make a statement.”

In any case, the disaster then was made part of the story “out of necessity,” he says. Washington plays an ATF agent who is brought in to help the local police and a federal team headed by Val Kilmer to investigate another disaster, this time man-made: the bombing of a ferry, potentially an act of terrorism. But when Washington examines the body of a young woman (played in flashback by Paula Patton) killed in the explosion, he discovers she was murdered before the event, raising some serious questions.

The answers may be provided by a

mind-blowing government secret project that combines high-tech surveillance and experimental physics theory that allows Kilmer’s team to peer into the past.

Washington is in effect investigating a crime that has not yet happened – and that is already in the past.

Washington is hesitant to say whether the recent box office success of smart, challenging entertainments like The Departed, The Prestige and World Trade Center, and smaller, audience-connecting films like The Illusionist and The Queen could indicate a change in the movie industry. “The truth is, we go through good stretches and we go through bad stretches.”

“The first thing I know is that if you make a good movie with actors that people want to see on screen, you always do OK,” he says. “Look at Inside Man, for example,” he says, referring to the spring bank-heist thriller he made with Spike Lee. “That movie had serious things to say, but they were in the context of a really entertaining movie.

“The second thing I know is that success breeds imitation in this business. If a movie like Deja Vu takes off, then people start saying, ‘Let’s make another movie about the time-space continuum.’ That doesn’t usually work. You have to come up with new ways to keep audiences engaged. You don’t want new ideas to become a new formula.”

Reviewed by Terry Lawson

Marie Antoinette Rated: PG-13 Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Steve Coogan, Marianne Faithful Directed by: Sofia Coppola 123 minutes

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n Sofia Coppola’s entertaining if not particularly profound portrait of Marie Antoinette, the young queen is more or less an average teenage consumer. If she were alive today, Coppola’s bubbly biopic suggests, she’d be shopping for Juicy Couture, downloading Scissor Sisters on her iPod and arguing with her friends over which America’s Next Top Model contestant should get the ax.

Alas, Marie, the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Empress Regnant Maria, was born in 18th century Vienna, where girls just wanted to have fun but had to worry about more pressing matters, such as marrying the heir to the French crown and quickly producing little princes. Coppola, who wrote and

directed the terrific Lost in Translation as well as The Virgin Suicides, casts her queen in an ambiguously modern light, allowing for stylish period costumes and decor but viewing Marie’s eventual excesses – drinking, adultery and the abject worship of shoes – with an excessively contemporary and forgiving eye. Lonely and isolated in a strange place, plagued by a disinterested husband and disturbing customs – the entire French court, for example, gets to help you dress each morning – Marie turns to the life of a party girl to make herself smile.

The conceit of 18th century nobles cavorting to modern dance tracks won’t work for audiences expecting a true examination of the queen or the period, but Coppola uses a gloss of pop confections to reflect on Marie’s youthful nature (in one marvelously giddy scene, the queen shops for shoes to the insistent, frothy beat of “I Want Candy”). She gets nicely to the heart of Marie’s dilemma: Despite her diplomatic importance for France and Austria, she’s only a kid, distraught when she can’t bring her puppy to her new home but quickly mollified by being

allowed to have “French dogs” instead, happiest giggling with her ladies in waiting, flummoxed that her husband Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) has absolutely no sexual interest in her.

Kirsten Dunst gets to speak her lines with no hint of a French accent, which adds to Marie’s accessibility as a girl in over her head (though she does with persistence finally solve the nonconsummation issue). But Coppola never offers a deeper look; depth does not appear to be something pretty Marie possesses. Instead of turning her inside out, Coppola illustrates just how ordinary she was and how her insular world prevented her from understanding the events that eventually would end her life.

Coppola and her crew were allowed to shoot at Versailles – family pedigree does pay dividends, apparently – which gives the film a needed whiff of reality. But the angry peasants raising hell over at the Bastille are virtually ignored. This is Marie’s story, and she has no knowledge of revolution brewing. Her interest lies elsewhere, you see. So many shoes, so little time.

Reviewed by Connie Ogle

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 89

seeLIFE DVDs

Christmas crackers

Putting a little beauty and bang into the silly season

An Unfinished Life M (for some violence including domestic abuse, and language), 103 minutes

Joyeux Noel M (brief nudity, discreet sex, discreet war scenes), 116 minutes

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asse Hallstrom’s An Unfinished Life has it all: A compelling story, great characters, dialogue so good you want to commit it to memory and a genuine appreciation for life’s sadness and saving epiphanies.

Jean Gilkyson (Jennifer Lopez, and don’t laugh because she’s really good) and her 11-year-old daughter Griff (the winning Becca Gardner) flee Jean’s abusive boyfriend and make their way from Iowa to Jean’s hometown in Wyoming. Bruised, broke and desperate, Jean throws herself on the mercy of a man who hates her: her rancher father-in-law, Einar Gilkyson (Robert Redford).

Einar blames Jean for the death of his only child, Griffin, who died in a car wreck while Jean was driving. He’s spent most of the last decade staring at life through the bottom of a whiskey bottle, in the process pushing his wife into the arms of another man. He only cleaned up his act when his best friend and long-time hired hand Mitch (Morgan Freeman) was crippled in a grizzly attack. Now he devotes himself to nursing his hideously-scarred pal.

The casting couldn’t be better. Redford should have hung up his pretty-boy leading man jacket years ago and turned to meaty character work. Here he’s grizzled and blotchy, angry and ironic in an Oscardeserving performance.

This is why we go to movies – to laugh, cry and become part of the lives of the characters up there on the screen. An Unfinished Life is so good that it makes you believe in Hollywood again.

Reviewed by Robert W. Butler

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hen the music floated up from behind German lines on that frigid and eerily quiet Christmas Eve of 1914, the Scots and French soldiers in the trenches didn’t understand the lyrics.

But they recognized the warm, familiar melody emanating from the enemy camp. And they couldn’t fail to decode the meaning of the words. “Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh” – “Sleep in heavenly peace,” the final phrase from “Silent Night,” stirringly intoned by a German tenor and then echoed by a Scot on his plaintive bagpipes.

A poignant and rousing carol for peace, Joyeux Noel (“Merry Christmas”) tells the true-life tale of a World War I spontaneous cease-fire, the Christmas truce of 1914.

The film opens with a sequence of schoolchildren – English, French and German – reciting warmongering rhymes of the sort that raised the morale of their respective nations by vilifying the enemy.

From these children spouting toxic invective, the movie introduces the soldiers and officers of nations who will meet on the battlefield both to exchange fire – and for a magic 24 hours – Christmas cheer.

There are the young Scottish brothers excited that something is finally happening in their lives, the German opera tenor whose career will be interrupted by his service and the French barber who will trade razor for bayonet. Many of them will perish on the battlefield, their bodies left to freeze. When a cat wanders between the French and German trenches, he foreshadows the rapprochement to come.

To its detriment the film is less character-

driven than story-driven. But what a story!

One with soldiers peeking up over the ramparts, laying down arms to warm up for an impromptu soccer match. With commanding officers speaking to their counterparts with respect. And with that parish priest presiding over a Christmas Mass spiritually uniting the soldiers of warring nations. Unpatriotic? Doubtless. Humane?

Absolutely. An act of faith? Definitely.

Reviewd by Carrie Rickey

Miami Vice R16 (strong violence), 132 minutes

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he name is the same; everything else is changed. Miami Vice is not an echo of the pastel-hued 1980s cop show.

It’s a distinctly darker vision, another of the striking, atmospheric crime dramas that have been the hallmark of writer-producer-director Michael Mann’s career. It was Mann who, as executive producer of the TV show that debuted in 1984, single-handedly brought pop-culture hip back to television – on Friday nights, America would come to a standstill to watch Miami Vice. But Mann’s reinterpretation is a hard-edged thriller that carefully avoids resurrecting the pink Tshirted ghosts of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. With its gritty, disquieting video imagery and high-tech hardware, it’s like a Bond film spliced with Cops, giving Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx a serious vehicle to thrill with. The plot is not overtaxing – it’s about guns, drugs and money – because the real focus is the allure, danger and alienation of hiding behind an assumed identity. Highly recommended.

Reviewed by Colin Covert

YOU, ME & DUPREE M, 110 minutes

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wen Wilson, Kate Hudson, Matt Dillon and Michael Douglas star in this amusing tale of the annoying newlywed-crasher (Wilson) – a best man down on his luck – who comes to stay with Hudson and Dillon, causing mayhem in their relationship.

The movie and DVD are a case of life imitating art, however, with the break-up of Hudson’s own marriage now blamed on a developing friendship with Wilson while shooting.

Reviewed by Ian Wishart

Arrive with a smile The iCN 530. Ultimate Performance - only from Navman.

The iCN 530 breaks new ground with ideas such as “Fuel and Park locator buttons” that allow you to quickly find the closest petrol station or car park. Its sleek pocket sized design conceals a faster-fix GPS receiver, while Navman’s intelligent new navigation software features clearly spoken directions with detailed 3D moving maps on a touch screen.

Travelling will never be the same again. With Navman, you’ll always arrive with a smile!

Available from Harvey Norman, Noel Leeming, Dick Smith Electronics, Sound Around, Available from Harvey Norman, Leeming, Dick Smithselected Electronics, Sound Around, Leading Edge Communications, OrbNoel Communications and other retailers.

Leading Edge Communications, Orb Communications and other selected retailers.

Ultimate Navigation

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 91

touchLIFE

TOYBOX

ET, phone home

Telecom launches video phone Telecom’s first home video phone

The Telecom Ojo Video Phone is a dedicated video phone for the home, and is the first of a new generation of communication and entertainment services using broadband that Telecom will be introducing. The Telecom Ojo is the result of a partnership between Telecom and Philadelphia-based Worldgate. The partnership agreement means customers will purchase the Ojo phone from Telecom and WorldGate will provide the calling service. Telecom expects the Ojo to appeal to New Zealanders who have friends and family living around the country and overseas. The phone can be used anywhere in the world and simply requires a standard fixed-line broadband connection, router and WorldGate subscription. Customers can then simple plug the phone and they’re ready to make calls. Features: Large 7 inch portrait screen, ergonomically-designed so callers can look directly at screen and camera • No additional software required • 30 frames/second video (MPEG-4; 30 frames-per-second), picture clarity close to broadcast quality • Video Mail, callers can receive a pre-recorded video greeting when the person they’ve called is out • Monthly service fee (US$14.95) allows customers to make as many calls as they like within the their allocated broadband allowance • Photo caller ID • Speakerphone to allow more than one person to be involved in either end of the call • A single Ojo handset is $749.99 and $1399.99 for a twin pack Visit http://www.telecom.co.nz/tlab/video

Epson PictureMate 210

The PictureMate 210 use Epson’s photo optimised Claria (tm) Photographic ink with Epson’s PictureMate Glossy Photo Paper to print vibrant photos that have a print life longer than photos printed at a lab. Epson’s PhotoEnhance software in the PictureMate 210 takes the time and worry out of photo printing by automatically resolving image problems to ensure the finished photo shows the full advantages of the wide colour gamut and superior brilliance of Claria Photographic ink. PhotoEnhance is a powerful tool that analyses images and corrects common problems encountered by amateur photographers like shadowed faces, backlit images and dull colouring, allowing anyone to create images to admire and share with family and friends.

Epson has also released a new PicturePack for the PictureMate 210 with a Claria Photographic ink cartridge and 150 sheets of Epson’s PictureMate Glossy Photo Paper that retails for around $54.99 RRP inc GST, making home printing extremely affordable at just over 36 cents per print. The Epson PictureMate 210 is $349 RRP including GST. More details at www.epson.co.nz

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Have you got the light time?

In a quest for constant innovation Tissot has enhanced its T-Touch line with a polished titanium version, featuring a carbon fibre dial and a black or orange strap or bracelet. Smoother and stronger than steel, titanium is warmer and silkier to the touch, as well as being extremely light. It’s also resistant to corrosion and changes in temperature. More than just a watch, the T-Touch features eight functions, activated by pressing on the crown and then the touch-sensitive screen. An accurate altimeter, chronograph, compass, alarm, thermometer, barometer and date and time (12hr and 24hr) make up its technology library. RRP: $1525, with strap and $1550, with bracelet. For further information contact: John Vaassen at Griffiths, McKay & Buckleigh, Suite 2, Level 2, 200 Victoria St West, Auckland, 09 309-4948, john@gmbwatch.co.nz or Debra Douglas, Chaucer Partnership, 09 521 7446, chaucer@xtra.co.nz

The BlackBerry Pearl 8100

The BlackBerry® Pearl™ 8100™ smartphone is one of the world’s smallest smartphones and packs all of the power of BlackBerry. It comes complete with digital camera, multimedia capabilities and expandable memory. And it offers users everything else they would expect from a BlackBerry device – including phone, email, web browser, text messaging (SMS and MMS), instant messaging, organizer applications and more.

The BlackBerry Pearl provides Quad-Band network support on 850/900/1800/1900 MHz GSM™/GPRS and EDGE* networks to allow for international roaming between North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. The BlackBerry Pearl is small enough to take anywhere. It’s the ultimate combination of brains and beauty. Small. Smart and Stylish. So you can live large. Visit http://www.blackberry.com

Toshiba gigabeat S series

Toshiba has recently launched its new gigabeat S series of portable, digital audio and video players that allow users to store and watch recorded TV programs, video and photos, as well as listen to music. The gigabeat uses Microsoft Windows Portable Media Center software, enabling simple management and sharing of content, including with Windows XP Media Center Edition PCs and Xbox 360s.

Available in either white (S30) or black (S60), the gigabeat S comes with a 30GB or 60GB hard drive, both with a 2.4inch QVGA LCD colour screen with 320 x 240 resolution and more than 65,536 colours. S30 RRP $479 Inc GST ;S60 RRP $579 Inc GST

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, January 2007, 93

realLIFE

15 MINUTES

1962

Making the Best of it

Ex-Beatle Pete Best missed the ‘fab’ part, but he landed wwon his feet. Now he’s talking to MCT’s Timothy Finn

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ete Best never completely shed the job he lost in 1962. That’s what happens when you’re history’s only living ex-Beatle.

“Liverpool is my hometown,” he told us recently. “The people of my generation were aware of all that happened — the subterfuge, the heartache. It was all wellchronicled.”

What happened was that in August 1962, the Beatles unceremoniously sacked Best and replaced him with drummer Ringo Starr. Two months later “Love Me Do” hit the Top 20 in Britain, and the Beatles were off on their mind-blowing voyage.

And Best, who was part of the band’s founding years (including its infamous

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tours in Hamburg, Germany), became a tragic bystander to it all.

“The hardest part was when ‘Love Me Do’ went into the English charts,” he said.

“We always knew once we had success on the English charts, we were on our way. If it had taken awhile to get a record on the charts, it would have been different. But lo and behold, it was the first record — boom, right onto the charts. After that the No. 1 songs flew out the door, didn’t they?”

More than 44 years later, Best insists that things worked out just fine. He got married, raised a family, earned his pension after 20 years in the civil service and, since 1988, has been a working musician again.

These days the Pete Best Band plays gigs in the US and Britain. The music he plays, Best says, will take listeners back to the era that made him famous (and infamous).

“It’s just good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll,” Best says, “from a band that has established ourselves in our own rights.”

Best is speaking from the Casbah Coffee Club, the venue his mother opened in 1959 in the basement of his boyhood home. It would become the early Beatles’ unofficial headquarters in Liverpool, the hometown he never left. He was fired Aug. 16 for reasons he says he still doesn’t fully understand.

“But two people out there know the rea-

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son,” he says, referring to Ringo and Paul.

Best, then 21, joined Lee Curtis & the Allstars to keep his music career going, but the group never took off. In 1968 he stepped away from music completely.

“I needed to provide some security for my family,” he says. “So I took a civil-service job, one with some stability and promotional possibilities.”

By that time his old band had become the biggest thing in music since Elvis, and Liverpool had become a holy land to millions of their fans. How did Best deal with all that going on around him?

“I became a fan of the music, regardless of what happened. Sure I had moments when I thought, ‘It would have been nice to be a part of that,’ but it didn’t happen and different priorities took over my life.”

Best has heard from none of the Beatles since he was fired, and he received virtually no windfall from their fortune until the “Anthology I” compilation was released in

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1995. That two-CD set includes 10 tracks recorded when he was still with the band.

“It came as a bit of a surprise,” he says.

“There had been other projects which I would have liked to be featured in but financially-wise I was not included. We knew this massive ‘Anthology’ project was coming out, and I figured I wouldn’t be a part of it, but I wondered what it was about.

“Before the release Apple (Records) contacted me and said, ‘We want to use some of your likenesses and some of the material you played on. Any problems with that?’ I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘We want to pay you for it.’ I said, ‘That’s even better.’

“Financially it was nice, like a fairy tale come true after all these years. And the truth is, they could have used just one track. But they gave me the kudos and showed, I guess you could say, how important my contribution was during those two years.”

His connection to the Beatles has paid

off in other ways: In 1988, after retiring from his job, Best did what he figured would be a one-off show in Liverpool with some of his contemporaries, including Billy Kinsley of the Merseybeats. He hasn’t stopped playing since.

These days the Pete Best Band tours about six months out of the year, all over the world, Best says. The rest of the time he spends running the Casbah, which is still a popular spot on the tourist trail, and a recording studio. His band plans to release a record of new material in 2007.

Best has also released his own Beatles documentary, “Best of the Beatles” – his way of telling his small part of one of the greatest stories in pop culture.

“At the end of the day, the recognition is always nice. It shows people are still interested and are aware of my contributions.”

Spoken like a man who realizes there are much worse things to be in life than an ex-Beatle.