Investigate, July 2005

INVESTIGATE

July 2005: Safe sex

Defence

Highway robbers

Peak oil

Issue 54

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New Zealand’s best cur rent affairs magazine

INVESTIGATE BREAKING NEWS

THE SAFE SEX MYTH So you think condoms will protect you from sexually transmitted diseases? Think again. In a trans-Tasman exclusive investigation, IAN WISHART in Auckland and JAMES MORROW in Sydney reveal the facts that health authorities have been sitting on for five years: condoms don’t work

THE INVESTIGATE INTERVIEW Having done the research in a sweep of the world’s leading medical journals, IAN WISHART asks Ministry of Health spokesman DR DOUG LUSH whether he accepts that the No Rubba, No Hubba campaign is dangerously inaccurate

THE HAWK’S HIGHWAY ROBBERS In the space of six years, has Labour turned the Police into the roadside collection unit of the IRD? IAN WISHART asked the police how many units were dedicated to traffic duties for one week in Auckland.

What emerged will surprise you

FEATHER DREAD The scientists are saying it’s now only a matter of time, perhaps even this winter, before the Asian Bird Flu epidemic mutates into a global pandemic with the capacity to kill tens of millions of people worldwide. Is it scaremongering or do we really have reason to worry?

SHAUN DAVIES investigates

THE LAST PETROL STATION Ever since Investigate first raised the topic in the mainstream media last year, debate has raged about whether we’re running out of oil and whether we need to prepare for it. CLARE SWINNEY reviews the state of the peak oil debate

NEW ZEALAND’S ARMED FIZZERS Former Skyhawk pilot ROSS EWING argues our armed forces have lost their punch and their morale by being turned into mere peacekeepers, leaving New Zealand vulnerable in the future

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Cover: FOTOPRESS PLEASE NOTE, this ‘June’ issue was renamed July to bring us into line with our Australian schedule. Subscription dates have been automatically adjusted, and no subscriptions are affected.

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION

INVESTIGATE vol

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Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart Customer Services Debbie Marcroft NZ Edition Advertising Jacques Windell Contributing Writers: Shaun Davies, Peter Hensley, Clare Swinney, Chris Carter, Laura Wilson, Ann Coulter, Tim Kerr, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, and the worldwide resources of Knight Ridder Tribune, UPI and Newscom Tel: Fax:

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

Editorial Can you hear the people sing?

Miranda’s anti 4WD campaign Big boys shouldn’t bleat The quest for natural justice When liberal media get it wrong Protecting politicians Big boys have every reason to bleat Tears in Heaven A low tax pitch from ACT When your passengers do drugs

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL

A story every sexually-active New Zealander needs to read

C

ondoms work, or do they?

(Wendyl Nissen, that headline’s just for you). For everybody else, behind the headline is a horror story, particularly for parents, teenagers and the Sex and the City crowd. You see, for twenty years now we’ve been sold a message that condoms equal safe sex; that all we need to be prepared for a casual encounter is some “protection”.

So ubiquitous has the “safe sex” message become that we now earnestly teach it in schools. The AIDS Foundation even takes delight in out strawberryNew Zealand’s Ministry of Health let handing flavoured condoms to hundreds of thousands of teenagers schoolgirls and schoolgo on believing that condoms would boys inviting them to try them out, all in the name protect them from STDs of “safe sex”.

But what if we were wrong? What if the truth about condoms, that kernel of fact that we began the journey with 20 years ago, had over the intervening years been overtaken by a massive mythology? And worse, what if that mythology was so wrong it was actually dangerous?

Well, that’s what this magazine is alleging this month: that “safe sex” is a myth, and condoms don’t work.

It began, in the mid 80s, as a reaction to the AIDS scare gripping the West. Researchers quickly realised that because the HIV virus was contained in body fluids, there was a good chance condoms would be an effective – although not foolproof – weapon against the disease. They were right, and the message was quickly spread that people needed to adopt safe sex practices by using condoms as a means of avoiding catching HIV. At the time, it was widely reported that AIDS was about to leap into the heterosexual community, so condom use seemed sensible advice for all young people.

But somewhere along the way, probably around the 6, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

time most people realised AIDS was never going to be a major heterosexual illness in the West, the safe sex message was subtly changed. No longer were condoms specifically targeting HIV, but the brief of “safe sex” widened to include sexually transmitted diseases generally.

Again, this probably seemed like a good idea at the time, and an eminently sensible approach to the vexing issue of sexually active teenagers.

But there were two aspects to this that didn’t get a lot of media attention. Firstly, by pushing condoms as “safe sex”, there was an immediate increase in teenage sexual activity fuelled by the belief that condoms – like the Pill in their parents’ generation – was a form of sexual liberation. Not only would it prevent pregnancy, but it would ward off sexual diseases as well.

Secondly, although it was assumed that condoms worked against other sexually transmitted diseases in the same way it blocked HIV, that assumption had not been scientifically tested in the field.

By 2000, however, the writing was on the wall. The first in a series of major field studies was indicating condoms were actually – incredibly – next to useless at preventing most sexually transmitted diseases. It turns out that what looked good on paper and in tightly-controlled lab conditions didn’t work so well in the field.

All this may have been excusable – if New Zealand’s Ministry of Health had coughed up to this new development five years ago. Instead, they let hundreds of thousands of teenagers go on believing that condoms would protect them from STDs; while all the while studies poured in debunking the safe sex myth, studies that were ignored.

In this issue, Investigate alleges that NZ’s record STD rates may be a direct result of the Ministry of Health’s refusal to admit that condoms don’t work. Tell your kids, and tell your friends.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 7

CONTRIBUTORS

LEADING LIGHTS The fire within

Miranda Devine is one of Australia's leading and most controversial opinion columnists. Currently with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald, for the past eleven years she has written what has been described as a ‘take no prisoners’ opinion column.

Prior to her current gig, Devine worked as an assistant editor and police reporter with The Daily Telegraph in Sydney and as a feature writer for the Boston Herald.

Miranda holds a Master of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University, Chicago, and Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Macquarie University.

Devine sits on the board of the Catholic Weekly and the editorial advisory board of Quadrant magazine. She lives in Sydney with her husband and two young sons.

8, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

Claire Morrow has worked in various facets of the health care industry for her entire working life and is particularly interested in child and family health and the miraculous workings of the human body in health and disease.

Morrow has an unfortunate habit of starting degrees, and is probably still enrolled somewhere to finish her degree as a registered nurse. Unfortunately, her two young children are unusually adorable, as is her husband, who edits the Australian edition of Investigate, and people keep paying her to share her knowledge and insight about health-related issues – all of which gets in the way of her studies. She plans to keep starting courses of study until someone finally gives her her M.D.

As one of the longest-serving pirates on the Investigate ship, this issue marks five years of Chris Carter in the Line 1 column. Magazine editor Ian Wishart and Carter first crossed paths in 1985 when both worked for Radio Pacific.

When Newstalk ZB was created in 1987, Carter switched stations soon after, initially taking the evening slot and later the afternoon shift, where he dominated the ratings for ZB. In mid-2000, Investigate picked up the opinionated talk host as a columnist. “Chris has a unique writing style,” remarks Wishart, “and is fearless when it comes to taking a sacred cow well and truly by the horns. He has an ability to hit the buttons on issues that concern ordinary New Zealanders, and give them something to think about.”

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 9

VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES SEND MORE WHITTAKERS We have seen several Labour Ministers step down from their positions over a range of controversies, including: John Tamihere, Lianne Dalziel, Dover Samuels, Phillida Bunkle, Ruth Dyson, and Marian Hobbs.

Leading our country is not a joke or a job for liars and deceivers. We have a right to expect MPs to demonstrate highest personal and moral integrity.

It appears Helen Clark is just as guilty of deliberately lying. Concerning the Peter Doone case – the Sunday Star Times submitted the transcript of their telephone conversation to the court and Clark in her evidence did not deny its veracity.

Now ... Dalziel was dismissed for lying to the media.

Helen Clark’s deliberate lie has destroyed a man’s career.

What is the penalty for PMs who maliciously lie? Helen Clark and the Labour party cannot be trusted to lead our country.

Denis Shuker, Hamilton

NATIONAL/MAORI COALITION Now that Labour is rapidly becoming a sideshow due to inferior leadership, let’s focus on the main event. A Maori/National coalition in Parliament has fertile ground in various policy areas, as you discussed last month (property rights and justice system, p.47 Investigate, May 2005). In Education policy too, I would argue that there is harmony in Maori Party and National Party voters’ values.

We are a middle NZ family comprised of a mum, dad and lovely children. And we have tangible evidence from our relationship with the local hapu that caring mums and dads in our community will work hard to ensure that not only our children, but all other children in the suburb, are educated to the highest possible standard, irrespective of their home-life.

This standard needs to be set by strong education leadership in Parliament, a strong Board of Trustees and high quality education. Maori and non-Maori in 10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

our suburb have identical expectations of our local schools: we know this because the schools are failing us appallingly at the moment and we’ve had to get down to basics to discover what we want from our schools.

We also know that the Ministry of Education under Labour’s socialist focus has no interest in helping our children. Labour’s ministers and the education unions are more focused on their own personal agendas and socialist fist.

Labour’s Ministry of Education and ERO are unwilling to give us an accurate picture of our schools, especially with regard to their relationship with the local community. To get all our schools working again we need a new government - one that cares about us. My husband and I want our lovely children to learn, be safe and be socialised to the highest standard, and that includes going to school with all the local children, Maori and non-Maori, irrespective of their home life. A great local school will give them all the head-start they desperately need to succeed in life. We won’t get excellence under Labour.

Maori/National is the governance team that we would trust with our children’s future.

A Hitchcock, Auckland

HELEN’S HIDDEN AGENDA? I haven’t traveled to any Scandinavian countries such as Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway or Finland. I would like to, given that I originate from Tasmania and now ‘Our Mary’ is set to reign in Denmark with her Prince Frederick. I am however getting an idea of what it would be like to live in these Nordic nations. Prime Minister Helen Clark doesn’t hide the fact she admires the Swedish political models and policies. She quotes Scandinavian countries whenever she can – so much so that I have spied a trend – one which makes me wonder what New Zealand would be like if we adopted these policies.

Helen Clark hosted the Swedish Prime Minister Goran

Persson in mid-February. The timing was ironic because he publicly agreed with key elements of Ms Clark’s state of the nation speech given just weeks earlier. I noted with interest how he favoured the NZ government plans for getting more women into the workforce by increasing childcare subsidies. NZ has just had a visit from the Prime Minister of Norway, Kjell Bondevik. “Norway is a country with which we agree on almost everything – except whaling,” says Ms Clark. Keeping this in mind, a quick look at the statistics leaves me concerned.

Over 75% of Swedish women are in the paid workforce – therefore 83% of young children attend daycare centres. Swedes ‘marry less and bear more children out of wedlock than any other industrial nation’, according to a feature article in The Weekly Standard. Universal childcare is costing the country and the average Swedish worker pays 52% in taxes. Nearly a third of GNP is spent on social welfare. In the 1990’s Sweden was number four in OECD ratings for economic prosperity but now sits much lower at seventeen.

Apparently these figures equate to ‘family friendly policies, equality between men and women and the promotion of work-life balance’.

If this is the ideology and vision for New Zealand then we should be worried.

Observations from Scandinavian countries do not paint a pretty picture. Kari Moxnes, a feminist sociologist from Norway, is part of an emerging group of public social scientists who sees both marriage and at-home motherhood as ‘inherently oppressive to women’. She says it is not a good idea for women to be dependent on their husbands, especially not financially dependent.

Another ‘new initiative’ from the Swedish government is a goal to breakdown gender patterns – in order to ‘set up true gender equality’.

Not only is this an inappropriate use of state power, it targets preschool institutions! “So that outdated and stereotype gender roles and patterns may in time be brought to an end,” says a report entitled “Gender Equality: Starting Young”, by Tomas Wetterberg at the Swedish Institute. The Swedish “delegation is to encourage debate and the promotion of gender equality in schools to encourage practical efforts in this area”. This is blatant engineering of social norms at its best!

With 83% of children in daycare and the plans here for ‘dawn-todusk’ childcare – that is a lot of time for state institutions to impress their values and ideas on our young children. My husband and I are quite happy to nurture and grow our children. They are doing quite nicely without some ideological government philosophy. My children have the privilege of seeing me in my role as at-home mum. They are benefiting from choices my husband and I have both made. They see a healthy functioning couple working out what is important. I am quite comfortable with my role as a mum.

Underpinning the policies lays a foundation built on the thought that the state has to meet every need in society. Perhaps this is what concerns me most. This sort of thinking sets itself up against the strength and purpose of marriage and family – our cornerstones of society. Nationally we would move to a place where independent thinking and personal responsibility is reduced and limited. Many of the Scandinavian political models are being embraced by our own government then presented to the general population as ‘progressive’ bringing greater freedoms. We need to be aware however that there is a cost and it could be our very own freedom.

Sue Reid, Wairarapa

EDITORIAL OFF BALANCE Congratulations on your interesting magazine. It makes good reading. However I wonder if your last editorial was written on a subject you knew very little about, and therefore is misleading. For instance, the quite high reported number of cases of cancer in New Zealand (and our case reporting is really quite exacting compared with many

countries) is biased because of the particularly high rate of lung cancer in smokers, particularly Maori. The evidence for the other factors such as food additives, pesticides and so on making any really significant effect on cancer statistics is very debatable and non-proven.

Furthermore charitable money spent on cancer research has made a very considerable difference to the ways we now handle cancer and has improved the life expectancy of a large number of patients. Also, cancer is not largely a disease of first world countries, as it is prevalent in many developing countries but very incompletely recorded or reported.

Self-inflicted causes of cancer are common in New Zealand.

Tobacco and alcohol play a major part as do some sexually transmitted viruses in cervical, breast and liver cancer. Just because abortions have increased, as have breast cancer rates in some countries, does not necessarily mean the two are linked, without undertaking much more exacting research.

This is certainly not a “no-go” area and the same applies to cervical cancer research.

Western world populations spend large amounts of money on alternative medicines, few of which have any subjective proof of their efficacy except for anecdotal case reports. These medicines are sold for large profits by firms that use a veneer of science to bolster their clever marketing campaigns . Such spending would be better placed into proven medical care. Of course you are entitled to buy your favourite herbal “medicine” but let us get the cowboys of the supplement market off our backs and ensure that the claims they make can be authenticated by at least “double-blind” trials. Some regulations to protect the public from their own lack of knowledge would seem reasonable.

Overall the editorial lacks balance or understanding of what is a complicated issue and therefore it is misleading to the reader. An indepth critical review of this subject, based on facts and figures might have been more appropriate for your magazine and informative for readers.

Dr Graeme Woodfield, (Medical Specialist)

PROSSER NOT A TOSSER I would just like to say how stunned and shocked I was by the terrifying outbreak of common sense in Richard Prosser’s ‘Weapons of Choice” article in the April issue (see, I didn’t just read the Tamihere interview).

As you would well know, a sensible and rational debate on gun control is all but impossible in New Zealand once Alpers and his merry band start ranting about Aramoana and the poor little children.

Statistics the world over bear out the same conclusion – strict firearms laws have little or no effect on gun crime, primarily because criminals by their very nature don’t obey laws that law abiding responsible gun owners do. As Prosser states so correctly, both Government and criminals have a similar mindset in that they prefer victims to be unarmed.

We need to get behind MPs who are pushing for change to various aspects of legislation, particularly section 48 of the Crimes Act 1961.

The McIntyre case I think was the final catalyst for people to wake up and realise just how slanted our justice system is against the victim.

The Police as always are caught in the middle, but in regions where their response time to 111 calls in often twenty minutes or more, it is clearly up to the individual to protect his own life and property as Police will be arriving long after any confrontation is over.

You would never see an opinion piece such as Prosser’s in mainstream media outlets. I will content myself with knowing Investigate magazine has people such as Prosser aboard, who can back up an argument with facts and figures rather than frothing at the mouth.

Paul Rogers, via email July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 11

WHAT, THEY ACTUALLY BREED? Hadn’t heard of your magazine until the excellent free publicity you scored on the interview of the century with JT. Even though he rolled on his back for Helen he still has some good miles left in him. As a white, middle-aged heterosexual male I need any and all advocates.

I feel compelled to congratulate you and you magazine for the lines you take. I get so ticked off being told I am conservative while the brave new social engineers stuff up. Just an encouraging thought, see what their breeding rate is.

Tony Hore, Wanganui

LOTS OF BUCKS, NO BANG Mark Burton’s propaganda about “revitalising Defence” must be challenged. It is all “smoke and mirrors.” To say that our armed forces are being revitalised is hogwash. Two main issues are misrepresented by his article and the documentation of the 10-year funding package.

Firstly, money is being spent on the wrong types of equipment and secondly: How much is available for actual expenditure after Treasury recoveries? I will concentrate on the latter.

Hundreds of million of dollars are recovered from Defence each year in GST and Capital Charges. Spread over ten years (together with depreciation) these figures bear a remarkable resemblance to the $4.6 billion increase that the Government is trumpeting.

By the time one discounts funds which are recovered from Defence

by Treasury; Defence gets little or no increase in buying power. Defence spending was declining every year in real terms. The $844,000 (yes thousand) adjustment to the Defence funding baseline may make

up this deficiency, but it is not the big handout Mr Burton would have you believe.

While it is understood that the latest ‘Burton’ press releases were drafted by the Secretary of Defence, the public should know that Ministerial Services has 89 private secretaries and 39 press secretaries to spin the Government line!

Hugh Webb, Hamilton

WHOSE ROTTWEILER? The May edition of Investigate introduces an interesting twist on the progress of the papacy in ‘Why God needs a Rottweiler’. The visions of St Malachi have been rather spot on so far and, with only one pope to go in his list, the plot thickens with regard to the identity and status of the final pope yet to come (if indeed he is to be the last one) and, more importantly, the end-time identity of the ‘Holy Roman Church’ itself.

The reformers of the 16th century were quite convinced that the papal system was the harlot of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation and that the pope (any or all of them) was the antichrist.

It therefore seems rather strange that the descendents of these reformers (who defended their understanding of Scripture to their deaths at the hands of the papacy) should now be making overtures in the form of ecumenism back to the Roman Church.

Each Anzac Day we are drawn back to the phrase – ‘Lest we forget’.

It is time that Protestants draw back to the same phrase as regards the very real differences in faith and doctrine between Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity – differences sealed in the blood of martyrs and as fundamental today as they were 500 years ago.

Malachi may have made one error or perhaps he was creatively edited.

The 112th prophesy says that ‘In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Petrus Romanus, who will feed his flock amid many tribulations; after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people.’ The Book of Revelation foretells the destruction of seven hills upon which sit the harlot of Babylon. Maybe the opening phrase of this 112th prophesy should have read ‘In the the final persecution by the Holy Roman Church...’ Either way, Malachi agrees with the Book of Revelation that seems to suggest Rome will be a seat of human power that exults itself against God and will be destroyed.

God doesn’t need or want a rottweiler to drive the faithful back to the old religion. He calls out a people who will follow His voice and obey His commandments. It’s a matter of personal biblical faith not institutional sacramental religion.

Tessa Beswick, Tauranga

INTELLIGENT ARGUMENT You ask, somewhat facetiously, I feel, given his academic credentials: “What part of the word ‘design’ does Pennock fail to understand?”

(May 2005.) The answer, of course, is none. He would, along with most biologists, I am sure, concur fully with your statement that “the very word implies intent”. What you and others of like mind cannot countenance is the view that organisms and their parts only exhibit the appearance of design – that they are really products of purely natural processes, rendering obsolete any comparison with products of human design. In any case, it seems worth repeating that the very nature of science as successfully practised today precludes any appeal to an external intelligence, for reasons I have outlined previously in this magazine.

As to whether the TTSS itself (i.e. the TTSS forming the basal portion of the flagellum) might be “another irreducibly complex mechanism”, now that the flagellum has lost its aura of irreducible 12, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

complexity – nice try, but it won’t do. Remember that the irreducibly complex argument, by definition, pertains to structures and systems that are regarded as functioning units, so that the removal of an element would cause the whole to cease functioning. That is, only the complete bacterial flagellum can be functional and therefore favoured by natural selection, not any of its components. What does appear likely is that the bacterial flagellum is another case of evolution, not through gradual improvement of an initial function, as with the vertebrate eye, but through changes in function (or functional shifts), each stage favoured by selection.

You remain silent on what one writer, Pete Dunkelberg, recently called “the dark side of design”, to which I alluded in my letter (May 2005). As he puts it: “If the Designer is directly responsible for flagella then he is implicated as a cause of human diseases.”

Warwick Don, Dunedin WISHART RESPONDS:

Warwick, we’re making progress. You, I and Pennock now agree that life “appears” to have been designed. We are agreed, despite coming from different ends of the theological spectrum, that it is perfectly rational to look at nature and come away with a deeply nagging suspicion that life has been designed.

Where we disagree, however, is whether we should set aside further investigation of apparent design because, after all, we know there absolutely MUST be a natural explanation if only we just keep looking.

As an adherent to Intelligent Design Theory, I look at the same things you do and indeed they reek to me of design and things that nature in a billion universes could not accidentally throw together. You look at exactly the same evidence, concede that it looks designed, but assume the design must only be “apparent” because gods, goblins and intelligent designers don’t really exist.

I look at the twists and intellectual contortions and mental leaps of faith that Messrs Dawkins and Gould had to make to postulate their own naturalistic theories, and to me I see men desperately tryng to ignore the elephant in the room - not for good scientific reasons but because both men had anti Christian reasons as a motivation.

That’s fine, they’re entitled to their own religious beliefs, but let’s not pretend they are neutral scientists simply following where the evidence leads.

We’ve discussed the intricacies of design recently, so I’ll take you up briefly on the last challenge of your letter instead.

At the heart of Christianity is a claim that humanity and the entire planet underwent a paradigm shift with the fall from Eden, which brought death and decay into the nature of things when Satan was given dominion over the world (which is how Satan was able to tempt Christ in the desert by offering him the world, because he had occupancy rights by virtue of humanity’s original sin.. So on the one hand, I can take a theological position that argues nasty bacteria are a fact of life on a fallen planet. This is not inconsistent with the Bible, and indeed would suggest that atheists who rail at God over the existence of evil simply don’t understand the theological position properly.

On the other hand, I can also look at the tremendous good that arises in our ecosystem and geosphere from the interactions of organisms large and small – how if it weren’t for some of the nasties our planet would be miles deep in putrid waste. Is this God’s way of giving us a fighting chance – a world that contains good and bad so we can still recognise both and make a value choice?

Given that Christianity makes it very clear we are all to die, the manner of death and even the timing is somewhat irrelevant in the great scheme of things. Some of us will die from disease, others from violence, and others peacefully in their sleep. Death itself is not the punishment, it is only an equaliser. Those of us who genuinely want to experience the mystery of Heaven will do so in the moment of death. Those of us who genuinely feel repulsed at the very idea will get our own heart’s desire – eternal separation from God at the moment of death.

If you’re interested, check out the new book “In The Beginning”, by Lewis Meyer, Ian Wishart and Donald Nield, which debates the merits of theistic evolution, intelligent design and creationism. Available from www.daystar.org.nz July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 13

THE DESIGN INFERENCE

CLARIFICATION – VELVET UNDERGROUND

Although space does not permit a vast dissertation there are a number of concepts that derive from the design approach to science.

Conservation, innovation, and redundancy are three I will touch on here. In design conservation could be summed up as “not reinventing the wheel”. An engineer, when approaching a problem, will look at previous solutions to the same problem and draw as little or as much from others work as he wishes. Reinforced concrete is widely used in construction because of its good resistance to tensile and compressive loads. A similar approach is found within vertebrate skeletons where mineral crystals resist compressive loads, and collagen fibres resist tension.

Innovation allows the engineer to exercise imagination both in reusing an existing concept in a different way, and in producing completely new designs. The reuse of these components in other ways can, if one is inclined that way, lead to belief in common ancestry.

However that argument is purely one sided as logically, if similarity is an argument for common ancestry, then differences in the design configuration are an argument against.

Canis and Felis both fit the definition of carnivorous mammalian quadrupeds, but their physiologies are different enough that they can be seen as different designs.

Redundancy arises when an engineer knows that lives are riding on the reliability of his design. By incorporating error-checking and backup systems the designer can ensure that a failure is less likely, and if a failure does take place that it is not catastrophic. The biological machines we inhabit include these features also, and even include self repair functions.

Some have labelled the design argument as “argument from personal incredulity”. When I consider the interaction of electrical, chemical and mechanical engineering that is required in simply lifting a glass of soft drink, I conclude belief in random chance over endless time is the height of gullibility.

Jason Clark, Auckland

We were a mite surprised, as this issue went to press, to see the NZ Herald roll over on its tum and make a very far reaching retraction and apology to Kay Goodger, the woman mentioned in our Velvet Underground article last month.

Since the article was first published, and the Herald did its own follow-up, Kay Goodger is apparently miffed that her writings from thirty years ago came back to haunt her. Investigate has not been asked to make a retraction or an apology, but we’d like to say this. The essence of our article was not to suggest that Goodger was somehow a Machiavellian entity successfully pulling the strings through the decades to engineer exactly the outcomes she sought. Rather, in writing the article we wanted to illustrate that thirty years ago a group of feminists, whose ideas Goodger endorsed in writing, set out a wish list of goals they’d like to achieve in the years ahead. Those ideas, which Goodger helped to draft (although Investigate accepts Goodger’s comments elsewhere that she was not the actual final author of the Socialist Action League documents herself), have successively been adopted, mainly by Labour Governments, over the years, to the point where only one major goal remains to be fulfilled – state-funded childcare round the clock so children can be indoctrinated by the state.

Investigate accepts that Goodger may well have moved on from the political views she held in her youth. But we find the Herald’s apology to Goodger curious when it says: “The Herald accepts that Kay Goodger was not the author of the words attributed to her in the article which came from a Socialist Action League submission to a select committee on womens rights in the 1970s”.

We find it curious, because in her introduction to the documents she describes the “radical ideas” and “radical changes” in the SAL submission, which she says “present a socialist programme of demands, some of which call for far-reaching changes affecting the very structure of the present social system...women’s liberation cannot be achieved without such fundamental change.”

She then writes, and this is the real kicker, “To those of us presenting the submission...”, a phrase clearly indicating to Investigate that Goodger was intimately involved with the drafting of the radical Socialist Action League list of demands, and must in fact have been present at the select committee hearing because she also writes: “At the select committee hearing, the response of the parliamentarians to these radical ideas was predictably cool. They simply did not want to discuss the basic issues.”

So she did endorse those ideas, she was one of the women who presented those very ideas to the committee, and the predictions and demands being made have now been fulfilled.

Furthermore, part of the booklet we quoted from was a speech made by Kay Goodger on March 8, 1974.

So, no, Investigate will not be apologising to Ms Goodger, and while we’re happy to clarify any minor grey areas we stand by our story. We’ve taken this rare step of issuing a clarification so that readers understand that just because the Herald felt a need to apologise and retract does not mean that Investigate will be.

Ian Wishart, Editor Letters to the editor can be emailed to us, faxed or posted.

They should not exceed 300 words, and we reserve the right to edit for space or clarity. All correspondence will be presumed for publication unless it is clearly marked to the contrary.

Address: INVESTIGATE, PO Box 302-188, North Harbour, Auckland, or editorial@investigatemagazine.com (please include your address)

14, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 15

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE The right to drive is not a right to kill

H

allelujah. It took the terrible death of five-year-old Bethany Holder but at last the truth is being told about big, heavy four-wheeldrives. No more pussyfooting around about personal choice.

No more pandering to the influential 4WD lobby. No more hearing “cars don’t kill, people do”.

No more pretence that a two-tonne Nissan Patrol or Toyota LandCruiser isn’t a lethal menace on suburban streets, especially to small children.

The senior deputy State Coroner, Jacqueline Milledge, a former police officer, minced no words a couple of weeks ago during her inquest into the death of kindy student Bethany, who A big 4WDs are four times was run over by a Nissan Patrol with bullbar in the more likely to kill passengers in a grounds of her Collaroy normal car in a collision and their school in 2002.

“I am not going to let drivers seem so often arrogant arrogant people who and oblivious think that the roads belong to them, and who think that they should be able to take their kids right to the doorstep to drop them off, get away with it,” Milledge said in Glebe coroners court as Bethany’s shattered parents, Daniel and Lisa Holder, looked on.

Drivers treated their 4WDs as their “own little private buffer zone”, said Milledge. “There is a comfort zone, a sense of superiority. They are above it all. We see these types of vehicles involved in pedestrian deaths far too often.” Amen.

At last people are talking seriously about curbing the use of these suburban killing machines which the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries now formally classifies as SUVs (sports utility vehicle) to differentiate them from regular-sized all-wheel-drive cars.

Milledge recommended that 4WDs weighing two 16, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

tonnes or more be banned from school grounds and within 200 metres, and that the drivers be required to hold special licences.

But steel needs to be inserted in the spine of the Toyota Prado 4WD-driving Roads Minister, Michael Costa, if he is to prevail against the 4WD lobby. There is already an attempt to defuse growing public hostility against big 4WDs on to all cars, rendering impossible any plan to remove the monsters from schools. Costa rejected the coroner’s idea of special licences and said “on first glance” restricting the huge vehicles around schools was unworkable.

In February when North Sydney Council announced it would slug big 4WDs more for parking permits, Costa dismissed the plan as “PC nonsense”. “Law-abiding motorists shouldn’t be made to feel like criminals because of the car they drive.”

Why not, if the car they drive is a lethal weapon they can’t handle? Seventy per cent of motorists are afraid of big 4WDs, a survey last year for insurer AAMI showed.

With good reason, since big 4WDs are four times more likely to kill passengers in a normal car in a collision and their drivers seem so often arrogant and oblivious.

Few people are better qualified to warn of the perils of two-tonne behemoths than the driver of the Nissan Patrol which ran over Bethany while pulling into a parking space on the Pittwater House School grounds.

Joan Waterhouse, 31, who was convicted in 2003 of negligent driving occasioning death, said she never saw pigtailed Bethany, who at 102 centimetres tall, was almost a head shorter than the 110-centimetre high bonnet of the Nissan Patrol.

“I don’t think they are a safe vehicle,” she said. “I don’t see the point of having them on city roads. Everyone has rights to drive their cars and they’re available but I think there needs to be a lot more training done in people driving four-wheel-drives and maybe having the licensing changed.”

Now using the surname Maclennan, she told report-

“A special licence for big 4WDs, with age and even height restrictions, is not unreasonable.

The Federal Government should at least stop the absurd import tariff subsidy on 4WDs, originally intended to help farmers, not Woollahra mums, to delete the discount which makes them such an attractive prospect to families”

ers that the tragedy “ruined my marriage. I’m no longer married because of the stress”.

There is no doubt in the mind of Raphael Grzebieta, president of the Australasian College of Road Safety, who testified at Bethany’s inquest, that if Waterhouse had been in a car with a normal-height bonnet, she would have seen the child. Two-tonne vehicles in an area with children are a “recipe for disaster”, the Monash University associate professor said yesterday. “Kids of kindy and grade 1 are at a height you can’t see over the bonnet of the big two-tonne vehicles. The whole situation was against Joan being able to perceive poor Bethany.”

Grzebieta says, in industry, great effort is put into traffic design to avoid “conflicts” between people and trucks or forklifts, even when operated by experts.

Companies and the army train staff before they operate four-wheeldrives. Yet any woman who has driven a Corolla all her life can slip behind the wheel of a Pajero without warning and descend on schools.

“It’s just as much an occupational health and safety issue at schools because it is the children’s workplace. But they’re in no position to protect themselves at their age.”

The coroner’s recommendations come as a worldwide backlash

against big 4WDs reaches a crescendo, from Paris to North Sydney. The Pedestrian Council’s Harold Scruby detects a hardening of public attitudes against the monster trucks which politicians should capitalise on. And he warns of the time bomb waiting ahead, as the present generation of Nissan Patrols and Range Rovers are sold cheaply to Pplate drivers.

A special licence for big 4WDs, with age and even height restrictions, is not unreasonable. The Federal Government should at least stop the absurd import tariff subsidy on 4WDs, originally intended to help farmers, not Woollahra mums, to delete the discount which makes them such an attractive prospect to families.

After the accident in 2002, Waterhouse emailed me angrily to explain why she drove a 4WD: “I did not have a 4WD for an extension of my ego. I had it because my husband and my little boys (oh, yes, I have children, two actually, one was Bethany’s age - and feelings) go camping every fortnight and I had a child-care business that requires more seats than your standard Commodore or Falcon.”

While the dangers of 4WDS are ignored by legislators, the vehicles will remain attractive options, roads will be more dangerous than necessary and more people will suffer as the Waterhouse and Holder families do.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 17

LAURA’S WORLD

LAURA WILSON Big boys should stop crying

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any of my male friends, colleagues and contemporaries are of the opinion that the women’s movement has gone too far. An opinion shared, it seems, by a majority of males if we are to believe John Tamihere and those surveyed by Close Up for its “Crisis of Spirit” report.

The gist of it is, men are not free to be men any more.

The male spirit has been gradually eroded away by the disapproval of women and replaced with a neutered, domesticated, femme-friendly New Age model of manliness. Real men feel ripped off, as if they have to apologize for simply being male.

These frustrating emoIf the advancement of women to tions are behind men’s rea level of a 20% share in power vival movements such as causes a crisis amongst men, then it USA’s Million Man March, is obvious that male status has the Promise Keepers and New Zealand’s Destiny relied heavily on women remaining Church, who claim much in the background of society’s problems relate to the displacement of men. Restore the male to his former position of leadership and authority and you will reassert his sense of pride and responsibility. Crime will apparently reduce drastically as a result.

If men’s roles are not restored, crime, violence, war etc will continue to increase. The responsibility for this horrible scenario rests on the shoulders of feminists who upset the natural order of things by breaking out of their traditional role and stealing men’s thunder.

An astonishing piece of blackmail really. Essentially, if women don’t give men what they want, men will wreck the planet and blame women. So what do men want? I have asked this question of my disgruntled friends and I can only describe the response as elusive.

Men only know that they feel vaguely threatened and 18, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

undermined in subtle but pervasive ways, not how to fix it. Some comments I’ve heard cited by challenged men are: women’s wants never end, you give them some ground and they want more. Women have gone way beyond 50/50; they are at about 70/30 now and won’t stop until they have it all. Men are sexual beings, sex is a physical requirement and if women continue to deny men then rapes will logically increase. Divorce proceedings favour women giving them automatic rights to children and to half the husband’s assets regardless of whether she has helped earn them.

The examples of discrimination against males are numerous and compelling. Some of them, such as the parental-rights issue, do appear seriously unbalanced.

But there are glaring omissions in this summary of women’s power and territory. I have my own way of assessing gender equality and it is quite a simple formula. Power is associated with voice. Who gets heard, who gets published, written about, who stars in movies, who gets radio airplay, who gets promoted, who runs big business, who leads countries.

Applying this formula shows women at best account for 20% of who gets heard, seen, reported on, and who holds power. All it takes is one day of observing to come to this conclusion. Listen to the radio, read the paper, watch TV news and check out what’s on at the box office.

Roughly 80% of all that is newsworthy, all radio singers, all movie top-billers, all movers and shakers are male.

How this equates with women having gone too far in the minds of men is a little scary. Women have a long way to go before they are anywhere near equal to the actual wealth, earning power and overall status of men, and yet men feel robbed.

The hue and cry over boy’s second-rate performance in schools is a fine example. No complaints were heard when girls came second, as it was expected of them.

Now that girls have caught up, there is a feverish scramble to overhaul education. Why don’t boys simply do what girls did: try harder?

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 19

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER Natural Justice: a quest for the impossible?

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eter Ellis. David Bain. Scott Watson. Did they or didn’t they?

New Zealand’s legal history is littered with examples of people, mostly men, accused, tried and convicted of heinous crimes; men who serve part or all of their sentences, never letting go of their claims of innocence, and emerging at the end of years of imprisonment to the welcome of friends, family, and supporters who have never lost faith, nor doubted the integrity of those claims.

Why is this so? Why, in our supposedly enlightened Western democracy, do we continue to lock people away, when from the very degree Are jurors able to be mesmerised and spread of protest over such convictions, by the compelling arguments of nationwide, through the practiced counsel, or overwhelmed media, and across all strata society, there must, by by the undeniable weight of scien- of definition, still exist a reatific and professional opinion? sonable doubt as to their guilt or innocence? Are juries, by their participation in the courtroom, somehow party to crucial information or evidence which is denied to the general public, to the media, and to expert observers, despite the full reporting of the detail of evidence and submissions given in Court? Are jurors able to be mesmerised by the compelling arguments of practiced counsel, or overwhelmed by the undeniable weight of scientific and professional opinion? Is the jury system itself at fault? Or could the problem lie elsewhere? Could it be that the very structure of our legal process is fundamentally and irrevocably flawed, and that it is incapable of determining guilt or innocence beyond a reasonable doubt – in matters of complex nature or contentious issue – because it does not, by design or intention, concern itself with determining the actual truth of any particular case?

20, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

This revelation may come as a shock to many, and raise eyebrows of disbelief amongst those who have never had dealings with the criminal justice system, but it is true nonetheless. It is here where I believe the judicial process as it is used in New Zealand is most at fault, and where it demonstrates most clearly that it is inherently incapable of dispensing genuine natural justice.

The Adversarial System of Justice, the system employed in New Zealand, and in Britain, Australia, Canada, the Commonwealth, and the United States, does not ask juries to determine guilt or innocence based on the truth of any situation. Rather, it requires juries to determine guilt or innocence on the basis of the case as it is put – and on the evidence and arguments held up to support that case, and those put to oppose it. In other words, jurors are required to find a man innocent or guilty according to the nature and detail of one argument accusing him, and another denying it, even though neither of those arguments may have any connection with the actual truth of the matter.

In this writer’s opinion, such a system is not merely silly, pointless, and archaically naïve, it is obscene, and to call it a system of “justice” constitutes an abomination in the face of all we have sacrificed to build a world where truth and fair play are supposed to be paramount.

A system it may be, but just, it most certainly is not.

Conversely, the Inquisitorial System, founded in ancient Rome, and used today across most of Continental Europe, Japan, and a number of other countries, focuses on discovering the Truth as it pertains to any particular case or inquiry.

Under the Adversarial system, the Judge is an impartial referee and arbiter of the Law. He or she does not intervene in the combat between the defence and the prosecution, other than to ensure that both sides remain within the boundaries of their own arguments, and do not breach either the Law, or its rules as they apply in the Court. Under the Inquisitorial system, the Judge is the seeker of truth, and he or she may call for

new evidence, or inquiries, beyond the limits of the arguments presented by the prosecution and the defence. In an Adversarial criminal trial, if the defendant pleads guilty, the prosecution rests, the trial ends, and sentence is passed. Under the Inquisitorial system, a guilty plea from the defendant is entered as simply one more piece of evidence, and the trial continues onwards in its search for the truth. False admissions of guilt, made for who knows what reason, are not considered the end of the matter under inquisitorial judicial regimes.

Why is any of this important to New Zealand? Because, in my opinion, contested verdicts, delivered under the adversarial system, leave too many unanswered questions. Chief amongst these, I would contend, is the question of Whodunnit? If David Bain didn’t murder his family, then who did? If Scott Watson didn’t murder Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, who did? In Peter Ellis’ case, the question is even more complex; if he didn’t do it, did it happen at all? Some of the children in the Christchurch Civic Crèche case reported, amongst other things, being taken aboard spaceships, and seeing their friends butchered. Our judicial system apparently found this to be convincing testimony.

Nobody wants to see murderers and child molesters walk free. Personally I’d prefer to see them strung up; but that in itself poses questions, and not least amongst these concerns the degree to which we can have faith in both the judicial process, and the scientific establishment which supports it.

Every time I feel a rant in favour of the return of the death penalty coming on, my conscience throws three little words at me. Those words are, of course, Arthur Allan Thomas. What if we’d hanged Arthur Thomas, and then found him to be innocent later on? A pardon doesn’t bring back a dead man. And the whole matter remains as contentious today as it was then. Was the evidence cooked? Did the Police lie? If so, why? Is it really so important to obtain a conviction, to lock somebody, anybody, away, regardless of the fact that a killer may still be roaming free, while an innocent man languishes behind bars?

In a previous life I worked as a process technician for a large photographic company in a major New Zealand city. One of my colleagues, who had previously been employed by a small photographic firm in that same city, once retold to me a story passed on to him by his then employer; a story about two Police officers who, at the time of the Crewe murder inquiry, had brought in a 22 bullet cartridge case for photographing. The officers subsequently collected their photos, but left the cartridge case behind. To the best of my former colleague’s knowledge, it was probably still there – and who knows, may be to this day. Could that have been the infamous missing cartridge case from the Crewe inquiry? Maybe, maybe not; the point is that while the Judge in our Adversarial court system would not have been allowed to regard the disappearance of such a piece of evidence as important, an Inquisitorial judge would be compelled to consider it as a crucial marker on the road to the truth.

And at the end of the day, after all that has happened, after Arthur Thomas has served ten years behind bars for something he didn’t do, been pardoned, compensated, and allowed to get on with his shattered life, our flawed and faulty justice system still hasn’t answered the most important question – who did kill Jeanette and Harvey Crewe?

The Inquisitorial System would have regarded the discovery of that truth as its most important mission; our Adversarial System simply doesn’t care, because that question never applied to the case as it was put.

David Bain may well have killed his family. The Crown contended that he did. A jury of his peers concluded that he did. A good friend of mine, who met David Bain whilst in jail, is of the opinion that he’s as guilty as sin. But I don’t know. There is doubt in the minds of many; his most famous advocate, Joe Karam, and a host of friends and supporters. There is doubt cast on the integrity of evidence as it was

collected and recorded by the Police, and on some of the findings of forensic experts.

But the nub of the matter, as it relates to the Law in New Zealand, is not about who killed David Bain’s family. The media, and the public, continue to speculate on whether the murderer could have been David’s father, Robin, or perhaps someone else entirely. This question, in the minds of the public, and reflected via the news media, is Inquisitorial in nature, and to my mind, it is an approach far more likely to determine the ultimate truth than the process set before the jury, which was simply required to decide between guilt and innocence on the basis of the charges as they were laid. The jury did not have the option of saying “we don’t know”, or “we think it was someone else”. Hung juries come about because of a democratic impasse between the black-or-white opinions which individual jurors are required to form, not because of the grey opinions which their natural sense of justice may give them.

Scott Watson might have murdered Ben and Olivia. Or he might not. Maybe they died later, much later, somewhere else entirely, a long way away, on a mystery ketch which a whole lot of people only imagined seeing. Maybe they’re not even dead.

Maybe we put a petty criminal behind bars for seventeen years for something he didn’t do, and maybe even something which didn’t happen. Maybe Scott Watson – who wasn’t an angel – was simply the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, who ran foul of a police force, a public, and a judicial system all barking up the wrong tree, and hell-bent on knee-jerk revenge for what they all presumed was a heinous crime.

Maybe there’s a real killer still out there.

We will probably never know. Our Adversarial Justice System does not require us to know. It doesn’t care. All it asks is that we determine guilt or innocence on the basis of an argument and its counter, irrespective of whether either of these have any connection with the actual truth of the matter.

And the truth is that this ancient, traditional, revered, flawed, stupid, illogical, infantile methodology, may be called many things, but it may not be called natural justice. New Zealanders, and the concepts and traditions of fairness and the human right, deserve better than this.

NOTICEBOARD: THIS MONTH: Keep an eye out for abandoned cars that might have been stolen, and text their number plates to 8811 on your mobile. If the vehicle turns out to be hot, you’ll earn $150 just for calling it in.

Full details on www.spotter.co.nz ON TOUR: American bestselling author Tammy Bruce (The Death of Right & Wrong) is in NZ the week beginning Saturday July 2, to discuss the dangers of social engineering, who’s behind it and what the agenda is.

Hear her on Newstalk ZB with Leighton Smith 10am July 4, and at public meetings in Hamilton & Christchurch.

Email jreeder@wave.co.nz for details

CHARTREUSE WINNERS Congratulations to the winners from our recent Chartreuse competition. A bottle of this fine liqueur is on its way to each of you.

1. John Wilkens, Auckland 2. Stephen Layton, Ngaruawahia 3. David Kenworthy, New Plymouth 4. Selwyn Dando, Auckland 5. Graeme Wood , Timaru 6. Mike Eulink , Taupo

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 21

BREAK POINT

ANN COULTER When a story gets in the way of good facts

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hen ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.

When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey’s nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek Newsweek seems to have decided not to run it.

Matt Drudge got very different responses to Again, the story. the same reporter’s scoops.

When Isikoff was the first with detailed reportWho’s deciding which of ing on Paula Jones’ accuIsikoff’s stories to run and sations against a sitting which to hold? president, Isikoff ’s thenemployer The Washington Post – which owns Newsweek – decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.

So apparently it’s possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.

Why no pause for reflection when Isikoff had a story about American interrogators at Guantanamo flushing the Quran down the toilet? Why not sit on this story for, say, even half as long as NBC News sat on Lisa Meyers’ highly credible account of Bill Clinton raping Juanita Broaddrick?

Newsweek seems to have very different responses to the same reporter’s scoops. Who’s deciding which of Isikoff ’s stories to run and which to hold? I note that the ones that Matt Drudge runs have turned out to be 22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

more accurate – and interesting! – than the ones Newsweek runs. Maybe Newsweek should start running everything past Matt Drudge.

Somehow Newsweek missed the story a few weeks ago about Saudi Arabia arresting 40 Christians for “trying to spread their poisonous religious beliefs.” But give the American media a story about American interrogators defacing the Quran, and journalists are so appalled there’s no time for fact-checking – before they dash off to see the latest exhibition of “Piss Christ.”

Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas justified Newsweek’s decision to run the incendiary anti-U.S. story about the Quran, saying that “similar reports from released detainees” had already run in the foreign press – “and in the Arab news agency al-Jazeera.”

Is there an adult on the editorial board of Newsweek?

Al-Jazeera also broadcast a TV miniseries last year based on the “Protocols of the Elders Of Zion.” (I didn’t see it, but I hear James Brolin was great!) Al-Jazeera has run programs on the intriguing question, “Is Zionism worse than Nazism?” (Take a wild guess where the consensus was on this one.) It runs viewer comments about Jews being descended from pigs and apes. How about that for a Newsweek cover story, Evan? You’re covered – al-Jazeera has already run similar reports!

Ironically, among the reasons Newsweek gave for killing Isikoff ’s Lewinsky bombshell was that Evan Thomas was worried someone might get hurt. It seems that Lewinsky could be heard on tape saying that if the story came out, “I’ll (expletive) kill myself.”

But Newsweek couldn’t wait a moment to run a story that predictably ginned up Islamic savages into murderous riots in Afghanistan, leaving hundreds injured and 16 dead. Who could have seen that coming? These are people who stone rape victims to death because the family “honor” has been violated and who fly planes into American skyscrapers because – wait, why did they do that again?

Come to think of it, I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to

hold Newsweek responsible for inciting violence among people who view ancient Buddhist statues as outrageous provocation – though I was really looking forward to finally agreeing with Islamic loonies about something. (Bumper sticker idea for liberals: News magazines don’t kill people, Muslims do.) But then I wouldn’t have sat on the story of the decade because of the empty threats of a drama queen gas-bagging with her friend on the telephone between spoonfuls of Haagen-Dazs.

No matter how I look at it, I can’t grasp the editorial judgment that kills Isikoff ’s stories about a sitting president molesting the help and obstructing justice, while running Isikoff ’s not particularly newsworthy (or well-sourced) story about Americans desecrating a Quran at Guantanamo.

Even if it were true, why not sit on it? There are a lot of reasons the media withhold even true facts from readers. These include: 1. A drama queen nitwit exclaimed she’d kill herself. (Evan Tho mas’ reason for holding the Lewinsky story.)

2. The need for “more independent reporting.” (Newsweek Presi dent Richard Smith explaining why Newsweek sat on the Lewinsky

story even though the magazine had Lewinsky on tape describ ing the affair.)

3. “We were in Havana.” (ABC president David Westin explaining why “Nightline” held the Lewinsky story.)

4. Unavailable for comment. (Michael Oreskes, New York Times Washington bureau chief, in response to why, the day The Wash ington Post ran the Lewinsky story, the Times ran a staged photo of Clinton meeting with the Israeli president on its front page.)

5. Protecting the privacy of an alleged rape victim even when the accusation turns out to be false.

6. Protecting an accused rapist even when the accusation turns out to be true if the perp is a Democratic president most journalists voted for.

7. Protecting a reporter’s source.

How about the media adding to the list of reasons not to run a news item: “Protecting the national interest”? If journalists don’t like the ring of that, how about this one: “Protecting ourselves before the American people rise up and lynch us for our relentless anti-American stories.”

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 23

DOUBLE SPEAK

IAN WISHART

When turkeys vote to postpone Christmas

A

little piece of news that probably slipped past the radar of most people this month is the decision by Parliament’s Privileges Committee to recommend a change to the defamation laws making it even harder to sue a politician for lying. Currently, MPs have a unique constitutional position that allows them to stand up in Parliament and say anything they like, including lying like a flatfish, about anyone at all, and they cannot be sued for defamation.

The reason for this convenient state of affairs is actually a very good one. Back in the late 1600s, when the British were trying to bring their wayward, power-crazed kings under control, there was an incredible tension between the Crown (the After all, if the people’s elected king) and the Parliament, which represented the representatives could not ques- landed gentry and, tion the King’s affairs without fear through them, the peaswho worked for and of the death penalty, Britain would ants were fed by said gentry. never truly be free It was not uncommon for the King to send troops into Parliament to arrest a politician who’d said nasty things about him, and have the man flogged or even executed.

In 1689, modern democracy was born when Parliament finally won the power struggle and laid out a Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom to citizens and MPs alike from the tyranny of the monarchs. One of those rights was the right for MPs to raise matters in the House without fear of prosecution. After all, if the people’s elected representatives could not question the King’s affairs without fear of the death penalty, Britain would never truly be free.

Over the centuries, that right has been recognised as a cornerstone of free speech, and without it, Winston 24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

Peters would never have opened up the Winebox scandal. Day after day in Parliament, Peters stood up and let rip on the Winebox, naming names and outlining criminal deals, and his opponents couldn’t stop him.

But the protection of parliamentary privilege only goes so far. It stops at the exit doors of the Parliamentary debating chamber. What is said inside that chamber is absolutely privileged. Anything said outside it is not, and an MP who repeats outside the House the comments he made inside can be sued for defamation and subjected to a lengthy and costly court case, as Winston himself discovered.

No one came to Winston’s rescue. In fact at the time Labour and National were looking to collude to strip him of privilege wherever they could.

Of course there will be MPs who get their facts wrong – whether by honest mistake or carelessness – and others who abuse parliamentary privilege by deliberately slandering someone they don’t like. Nonetheless, the importance of MPs being able to speak freely on matters that may be of national significance is a paramount freedom worth preserving for the country.

But, as I said at the start, all that is about to change.

Parliament’s Privileges Committee now wants to change the law so that an MP speaking outside the House is protected as well. Their logic for doing so is horribly simple and horribly flawed.

Speaking to Newstalk ZB’s Larry Williams, Committee chairman Matt Robson explained that journalists were always asking MPs – once they were outside the debating chamber – “whether they were prepared to stand by what they said inside”. Robson explained to Williams that this left MPs in an invidious position whereby if they confirmed they stood by their speech, they could be sued for defamation.

Well, so what?

Surely the answer to any journalist is an easy one on every single occasion: “I’m sorry. You know I cannot comment on what was said inside Parliament.”

“Of course there will be MPs who get their facts wrong – whether by honest mistake or carelessness – and others who abuse parliamentary privilege by deliberately slandering someone they don’t like. Nonetheless, the importance of MPs being able to speak freely on matters that may be of national significance is a paramount freedom worth preserving for the country.

But, as I said at the start, all that is about to change”

Just because someone dares you to jump off a cliff, should you?

Allowing MPs to have immunity not just for “standing by” their comments, but to extrapolate on them further outside the House, adds nothing to the sum total of human knowledge: the MP can say anything they like inside parliament, what could they possibly add outside that they couldn’t have said inside?

And if the point of a journalist’s dare is simply to see whether the MP is so confident of his or her speech that they’d risk a lawsuit, then how does making what they say outside the House protected as well answer that dare? It doesn’t. Suddenly, the MP faces no risk at all, and the value of their comments cannot be weighed.

Take Winston Peters’ revelations in Parliament about gay bookshop owner Jim Peron and his links to a pedophile organization. Peters

firstly made the revelations in Parliament, which allowed the media to report them under the protection of privilege, and then Peters called a news conference outside Parliament to release further information, thereby illustrating to journalists and the wider public that he had the courage of his convictions.

If Peters’ subsequent news conference became protected under privilege, how could the MP’s credibility be tested when whatever he said carried no risk?

The proper place for allegations of last resort is Parliament, and over the past three hundred years Parliament has been a good arbiter of privilege. Surely MPs are media savvy enough not to get themselves in trouble outside the House just because a journalist asks a question at a lunch?

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 25

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER Has the male man gone?

T

he Spanish speaking peoples have a word that describes very succinctly a male of worth; One who rejoices in his masculinity is said to possess ‘cojones’. A man who, whilst by nature and temperament, is polite and thoughtful in his dealings with the fairer sex, nevertheless, as in the rest of the animal kingdom, when the chips are down, he undoubtedly rules the roost.

We too, here in New Zealand have a word to describe the men in our society, it is... Endangered!

Where to begin as to when and where it was that the vast majority of New Zealand men began to cast aside their previously well-recAll of this completely unnerved ognised, respected and place in our socieven the most machismo and natural ety, and indeed why it previously hairy-chested of the should now be that by far local lads, many of whom, scared and away the toughest individuals in this land half-silly by these hard-swearing, effect trouser suits, very sexually-demanding young harri- likely bras and knickers, without a doubt have dans, flagged the chicks away and managed to feminise NZ entirely and started to sleep with to a point almost beyond each other recognition. Silly question really I guess because it’s one that I’m sure most of us know the answer to...

Men and women are very different in both nature and thought patterns and for most of recorded history these differences have largely been complementary with man the physically stronger and having a natural inclination towards risk-taking – he did the hunting, provided security or protection etc. – with females, using a completely different sets of skills, having naturally produced offspring they managed the equally tough ‘domestic’ tasks in a manner that even today remains somewhat of a mystery to their mate. And thus it was, with very few 26, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

exceptions for all the millennia, until man invented the Pill, and those of the Sisterhood with a pre-disposition to speaking in gruff tones and very likely to require regular shaving, spotted their chance to completely upset the natural order of things.

The revolution, although having enjoyed the necessary (and fair) precursor of obtaining the vote for women at the turn of the 19th century, really began in earnest in California. (Where else!) A rather weird, even dysfunctional state, where women in ever increasing numbers removed their bras and very likely other vestments, and now well-protected by the afore-mentioned pill proceeded to go at it like rabbits...(The pop song ‘Californication’ is not so much a chart busting popsong as an indictment!) This complete turn around on the part of the previously shy, if not even bashful local chicks, to the point where many became in short order, the female equivalent of a randy old male stoat, this overnight swapping, as it were, of predatory roles where the previously chaste became the most enthusiastic chasers, all of this completely unnerved even the most machismo and previously hairy chested of the local lads, many of whom, scared half-silly by these hard-swearing, sexually-demanding young harridans, flagged the chicks away entirely and started to sleep with each other.

Remember My Fair Lady, and Professor Henry Higgins ruminating in song “Why can’t a woman be more like a man”...well it appears many young male Californians came to a somewhat different conclusion, because many of the women had done just that, whereupon, there really was little left to do other than to join these feminist usurpers of the previous male role, and to try to model themselves on the new age ‘wimmin’, thus the male descent towards the banishment of chest hair, along with the need to get in touch with one’s feminine side, for many young guys began. And how very successful this has been to be sure, for as is always inevitable with any Californian fad, within a couple of years of the reduction of Californian male society to scented, hair-

less and I suspect largely infertile drones, the self same phenomena quickly began to arise here...(If the word arise may be forgiven under the circumstances).

Many people are under the impression that the word dyke is a Dutch word used to describe a large embankment thrown up to stop the whole of Holland sinking beneath the waves, which of course it is, however it is also true that Butch is a proprietary brand of dog food...both words however have also come into common usage to describe invariably forceful if not actually mannish kinds of gals, whose biological drive, if not genetic blueprint, has produced within their ranks the most formidable male foe since the conductor of the Vienna Boys Choir discovered this neat little way to make the boys sing a lot higher. Taking the inherent subtleness that is a previously delightful part of the feminine character, and then combining this attribute with the combative drive of a masculine all-in wrestler, the ‘Sisterhood’ (if I may call them that) is within a gnat’s whisker of pruning the last bits and pieces from the few remaining ball-carriers that still bless our shore.

Occurring with the exquisite guile of a carefully planned military campaign, extremist feminist dogma, Chinese water torture-like, has been dripped upon the New Zealand male ego to the point where the stone (or in this case perhaps, stones) have been almost completely worn away. Increasingly we now see young men having been brought up to believe that “all men are rapists or at the very least abusers of women and children” now timidly creeping about the place, eschewing the previous bass boom of a confident male voice, instead, effecting the sort of quiet vocal tones that would not be out of place in a male attendant in an Arabian harem. Worse than this of course is that these same refugees from the previously tough, even flinty, Kiwi male genus, are frequently now dressing and smelling like the ‘sheilas’, all of which, to we ever reducing numbers of men, (sorry male chauvinistic pigs), is really not all that surprising.

The femanazis, by skilful infiltration of our entire education system have removed anything at all that could be even vaguely described as being relevant to young guys. You shall not even play fight, let alone climb trees, compete in games where there might be, God help us, a winner or even worse a loser, and certainly no one shall compete in the classroom either lest some young guys discover that the whole school system is now rigged, by the Sisterhood, to essentially create, at the earliest possible age, feelings of total male inadequacy. Oh mustn’t forget here the more or less open door school policy whereby various activist groups can now lisp to the kids that it’s just fine for boys to act like girls and of course for girls to be as butch as they like. Hell girls, the butch-er you get the better chances you have for a life in modern Parliament eh? Swear like a wharfie girls and I can tell you from personal experience that a top job awaits you at your nearest media newsroom.

(Just a tip there for your future employment chances).

The final nail in a young guy’s academic coffin? Scrap meaningful marking, testing and having actual examination results for the kids and you can conceal any sort of feminist social engineering you please! And it’s working well isn’t it, no, not the girls catching up with, but now passing the little Nigels and Ruperts like what name through a goose!

Surprises me actually that those real guys that are still here in New Zealand, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands who now live off shore, that our abysmal record during recent times in male team sports hasn’t given you a bit of a clue as to the effective emasculation of the Kiwi male, and in particular why it is that invariably it’s the Aussies that continually dish us up. Easy, when you think about it, it’s all to do with a healthy male attitude to bloody well win at all costs...You know, the good old male thing, that not that long ago before the sugar plum fairies and their ilk essentially stopped all forms of what used to be healthy male competition at school, plus making every other form of kid’s activities, so sterile and safe that it’s just plain boring to any red

“The trick is now to discover, just for how much longer we are going to let them get away with their warped ideology that without a shadow of a doubt, if we at least agree that the family is the whole basis of our society, is the biggest and most serious threat that confronts us”

blooded young feller, so is it really at all surprising that in Helen’s Brave New World, the edge, if not a restrained killer instinct has all but departed these shores, along, as noted with the bulk of the genuine ball-bearers.

Think I’m wrong? I don’t think so, like I’ve had to work real hard to balance up the nonsensical rubbish that my young fellers have had to contend with...End result? Like other parents who care about their boys and have taken the same trouble to tell their young blokes that being a guy is really quite simple and certainly more than just being OK, it’s actually great to walk down the street, shoulders back and being confident in who you are. Never go looking for trouble because it will find you easy enough, but if it ever arrives, never hesitate to defend yourself or your loved ones.

Forget what the social engineers have been telling you (or the nutcrackers as they are starting to be known as). General George Patton once told his troops, which is sort of relevant albeit maybe somewhat blood thirsty: “The whole idea is not to die for your country, but to make the other poor bastard die for his,” which to put it in perhaps a more modern and peaceable context...Real guys are warm and friendly.

They naturally love and respect women, they are not weepy ‘girly men’ in need of constant ‘counselling’. The term, “be a man” still has lots of relevance outside of California and Aotearoa. Men use their Godgiven strength and quite different brains and thought processes to protect and complement women, invariably forming long lasting and genuine partnerships in business, marriage and certainly in friendship.

So to all those ball-busting social engineers that have thus far managed to tamper with this age old natural order of things... Beware! We have at last woken up to what you have been doing to both our boys, and our society. Few thinking people have any quarrel with true feminism because it is simply females endeavouring to get a fair go...What we have been enduring however in recent times is an out and out assault on the Kiwi Male by man-haters, many of whom are nationally recognised for what they are. The trick is now to discover, just for how much longer we are going to let them get away with their warped ideology that without a shadow of a doubt, if we at least agree that the family is the whole basis of our society, is the biggest and most serious threat that confronts us. Me? I’m all for trying a whole new approach whereby the majority should rule, rather than having, noisy if well organised fringe groups wagging the Kiwi dog... I believe they used to call it Democracy, mind you, it’s a thing that once people even fought and died for to achieve…Wonder if we can tear ourselves away from the telly to make a start, and whether sufficient testosterone is still available in sufficient measure to fight the good fight…Hope so!

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 27

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART The death of a child

I

suspect many people remember this song: “Would you know my name, if I saw you in Heaven? Would you be the same, if I saw you in Heaven? I must be strong, and carry on, be cause I know I don’t belong, here in Heaven…”

When rocker Eric Clapton wrote those words, he was thinking not of the potential success of a hit record, he was writing from the heart. On March 20, 1991, just a week after my own son was born, Eric Clapton lost his four year old son Conor in a tragic, heart-rending accident. It happened on the 53rd storey of a New York apartment building. Conor, like all boys his age, was full of energy. Unfortunately a cleaner had just finished wiping a large floor to ceiling window and left it open to dry. Conor was Medical and psychiatric stud- running and, before his mother could grab him, ies have repeatedly found that simply fell out the window, a spiritual belief makes people plunging 49 stories to the rooftop of an adjacent four cope with life better than those storey building. who don’t have one There are so many “if only” elements to this sad event, and Clapton took nine months off to grieve. As commentators noted, when he returned to performing his music was much more powerful and more reflective.

The other week, someone I know lost a child in an equally tragic accident in Auckland. Again, the “what ifs” and pain swirl around. The recriminations for a parent wishing they could turn back time and do something just a little different.

Death is something that comes to all of us, yet it is something that is so incredibly hard to deal with. The pain, the trauma and the emotional loss from an event like these is like a jagged blade in the heart, and the wounds take a long time to heal. So if religion is supposed to answer these “meaning of life” questions, if religion is supposed to help us deal with the ultimate question, how do the various religions stack up when it comes to death?

If you don’t believe in any kind of afterlife, I suspect 28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

coping with death is hardest for you. And indeed, medical and psychiatric studies have repeatedly found that a spiritual belief makes people cope with life better than those who don’t have one. For a non-believer who loses a child, there is no hope. No possibility of seeing their child again, ever. Instead, just an aching hole in the heart where their baby used to be.

If you’re a Buddhist, Hindu or follower of New Age, those religions essentially teach a cycle of reincarnation, so that the grieving parent at least is comforted by the idea that their child will return as someone else’s child.

The downside to this is the loss of personal identity. In the Eastern faiths, you become one with the universe, recycled and then spat back down to Earth again where past identities and memories of those you loved are lost to you. In essence, your life cycle is meaningless, a cosmic kind of Groundhog Day. It is Christianity, I suggest, that offers the only tangible hope for non-Christians and Christians alike.

Firstly, the central theme of Christianity is triumph over death. Death entered the world through the fall from Eden (imagine the movie Pinocchio, and the scene where Pinocchio is transformed from a wooden puppet into a real live boy.

Now imagine that sequence in reverse, where a kind of supernatural earth (Eden) is poisoned, turned back into wood if you like, in a massive universe-wide dimension shift that kicks humanity and the world it occupies out of the heavenly dimension into a dimension where death and decay exist.

This was the first separation of humanity from God. Jesus Christ came back to Earth to offer an invitation back for those who believed. In regard to children, it is widely believed from Christ’s comments that children who die are accepted into Heaven by God’s grace. For a grieving parent, Christian or not, God’s grace is equally available by invitation. Only Christianity and the example of Jesus’ resurrection, offers the hope of seeing a dead child alive again.

And yes, Eric, little Conor will know your name, if choose to join him, there in Heaven.

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July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 29

POLITICAL HEAT

RODNEY HIDE The case for tax cuts

T

he ACT Party stands for Freedom and Prosperity. We support the free market, private enterprise and freedom to choose. We oppose state control, big government and high taxes.

That’s why we oppose the ClarkCullen government. We oppose Helen Clark for being the bossy-boots telling New Zealanders how to live their lives.

We oppose Michael Cullen’s big spending, high taxing and wealth-sapping Budget. We believe in New Zealand and New Zealanders. We are ambitious for our country. We believe that New Zealand’s future is bright.

We believe that to succeed as a nation we need government off our backs and out of our pockets. We need to be able to get on with our The average worker paid 21 per lives free of government interference and red tape. cent as their top rate of tax when We need a government Labour came to power. They must that taxes lightly and spends our money wisely now pay 33 per cent. Their taxes and well. We need a govhave been hiked – even though ernment that concentrates Parliament never agreed to it – and its attention on core government services – like even though no one voted for it police and roads.

We believe it’s a disgrace successive governments have taxed us hard and spent up large on bureaucracy, business hand-outs and dopey programmes that no one wants or will pay for while running down our police, our military, and our basic infrastructure.

We are now taxed harder than ever before. We now get fewer basic services than we have ever had before.

And total government spending is higher than it’s ever been. And growing.

Total government spending has ballooned under Labour. It’s increased by a third in the last four years.

It’s forecast to increase another 38 per cent over the 30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

next five years. Government is set to grow 40per cent faster than our economy. The result is a government that is getting bigger and bigger but delivering less and less of value.

We need proper discipline bought to bear on politicians. Not just for the next government. But for every government.

The way to do that is through a Taxpayer Bill of Rights and proper spending caps. Spending caps would lock government expenditure at current real levels per capita.

That would mean holding government spending to present levels.

That’s the goal that we should be setting: to hold government spending. That isn’t too tough a goal, especially when you realise just how much government is spending and wasting now.

The caps would enable government spending to increase to compensate for inflation and population growth. But that’s all. Expenditure increases beyond that would need 75 per cent support of Parliament.

That’s as it should be. That would set a firm fiscal discipline on governments that’s now totally lacking. For example, Michael Cullen reaped a windfall as inflation and growth has pushed taxpayers into higher tax brackets. That windfall has been at the expense of taxpayers.

That’s why government has more and more money.

And that’s why the average family’s income has been static. The average family is no better-off after five years of Labour. Inflation and tax have taken their entire extra income. They are earning more but what they get to keep buys exactly what it bought five long years ago.

Our incomes are up but government has got it all.

Spending caps would require honest budgeting by government. They would require politicians to live within a budget just like every family in the country has to.

We also need to allow hardworking Kiwis to keep more of the money they earn. That’s why ACT is campaigning on a tax cut for every worker. We are the low tax party.

What about Cullen. He’s done nothing but put taxes up since coming to office. He then decides he will have a crack at cutting taxes. He just couldn’t do it.

What a fizzer! He talked his Budget up on tax cuts. And what does it give the average worker?

A pack of gum – in three years’ time.

And what does it do for business? A re-jigging of depreciation schedules. And the resulting savings to business are off set by Cullen’s new carbon tax.

It’s insulting.

The total value of the Cullen tax cuts in 2009? $348 million. That’s less than 0.2 per cent of total government spending!

Michael Cullen would have been better not to have bothered. The backlash has been incredible. I have been inundated with emails, faxes, letters and phone calls. In response I have launched a petition to get the surplus returned to taxpayers who first earned it.

New Zealanders want to show their total disgust of a government that piles up the cash for itself and politicians’ pet projects with no thought for hardworking Kiwis who generate it.

Well, now they have a chance to show their disgust. They can sign my petition.

Today’s a fitting day to launch ACT’s tax policy.

Staples Rodway has declared today (May 24) to be Tax Freedom Day. This is the day that the average Kiwi stops working for the government and starts working for themselves. That’s right. Up until now, you have just been working for the government to pay your taxes.

Now, the rest of the year is yours. In Australia, they have been working for themselves for ten days already – and Peter Costello has cut their taxes yet again.

The Staples Rodway research shows it will take 143 days for the average New Zealander to pay off his or her income tax, local body expenses, and other taxes such as petrol tax, cigarette tax and alcohol levies.

ACT wants to dial Tax Freedom Day well back. That’s why we have campaigned every day since our formation for tax cuts. We started out as a lone voice. Now tax cuts are an election issue.

Tax cuts mean more jobs and higher wages.

It’s true that tax cuts benefit those who earn the most – but that’s because they pay the most tax. That will always be the case. But the socalled rich will still pay more tax than those who earn less – and tax cuts will ensure a bigger economic pie for everyone.

Besides, our present tax system penalises hard work, investment, entrepreneurialism and success. We want to cut taxes precisely to those who work, who invest and who succeed. That’s our aim.

But that doesn’t mean anyone is missing out. More investment and more business means more jobs and higher wages to everyone’s benefit. We need everyone to benefit from tax cuts. That’s to get everyone in New Zealand agreeing with cutting taxes.

That’s why the McLeod report recommended flattening our tax system to just two rates. Michael Cullen paid a million dollars to get that report – and then ignored it.

Well, the ACT party hasn’t. That’s why the ACT party’s tax policy that I am releasing today is for just two rates of tax.

We agree with the McLeod report that we should flatten our tax structure to just two rates.

First company tax. Jim Anderton is calling for company tax to be reduced to 30%. Eight years ago, the average OECD company tax rate was 37%. New Zealand’s 33% rate meant we had a four percent tax advantage. Tucked away at the bottom of the world, we need every advantage we can get.

But things don’t stay the same. Around the world, taxes have been tumbling. Company tax rates are dropping on average 1% a year. This year, the average OECD company tax rate is 29%.

We have gone from being 4% below the average to 4% above the average. This is not good for business. It tells potential investors not to bother looking at New Zealand. They should go elsewhere.

To regain that 4% advantage, we now need company tax rates of 25%. ACT will drop the company tax rate to 25%. That will restore the 4% tax advantage New Zealand held in the late 90s.

This will be good for investment and growth. Each percentage drop in company tax rate has a fiscal cost of $205 million. A reduction to 25 cents will cost $1.6 billion.

ACT will reduce the top personal rates of tax from 33% and 39% to just 25%. To match the company tax rate.

When Labour imposed the top 39% rate they said they needed the money. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Reducing these rates has a fiscal cost of $2.4 billion.

But ACT would not stop there. ACT believes that tax cuts should be across the board. It is fair that all New Zealanders should share in the dividend from economic growth.

ACT would take the middle tax rate of 21% and drop it to 15%.

That would cost $1.9 billion, less some savings from adjustments to benefits to keep the net benefit payments constant, reducing the cost to around $1.7 billion.

New Zealand would then have just two tax rates. 15% up to $38,000 and 25% after that. All up, the fiscal cost is around $5.7 billion. This is $1 billion less than the surplus forecast for this year.

That would mean we could have tax cuts of that size without cutting one dollar of spending – even the dopey stuff.

Our aim should not be to make our government rich but to make our people and our country rich. Taxing hard and accumulating assets in the government is the antithesis of making for a free and prosperous country.

ACT’s tax package would boost investment, jobs, wages and growth.

It would also make an immediate difference to the lives of hard working New Zealanders.

For someone on the average wage of $41,300, this would mean the same as getting a 7% pay rise under the current tax scale. It would mean an extra $2,000 a year in take home pay for the average wage worker.

Contrast that with Michael Cullen’s 70 cents a week in three years!

Unions up and down the country are engaged in strike action to try and get 5% pay rises. Their members would be better off with tax cuts not strikes. And the country would be better off too.

Remember, we’d all benefit from the higher economic growth and investment. Higher growth means higher standards of living for New Zealanders.

If ever there was an unmitigated case for across the board income tax cuts, it is now. Last week’s budget was a lost opportunity for New Zealand and New Zealanders.

The way to boost the lives of New Zealanders and the prospects of our nation was to have had real and meaningful tax cuts. Not pretend ones.

But New Zealanders will get to have their say this year in a general election. The ACT party has been a solid voice for tax cuts over the past nine years in Parliament. ACT has championed the cause for sizable tax cuts, and has never compromised its call. After all, ACT was born out of the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers. The ‘T’ stands for taxpayers. ACT literally is the taxpayer’s party. ACT is the tax cuts party.

And this election, more so than the last two or three, is one where tax cuts will be a big issue. If people want a tax cut, they need to understand that a party vote for ACT is the best way of securing it.

This election you have two votes. ACT is only asking for one of them. The Party vote.

Every month from here to the election Investigate will publish a leader’s speech, as a public service July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 31

DIARY OF A CABBIE

ADRIAN NEYLAN

Cocaine blues

I

was working a big beachside hotel in the East ern Suburbs a few Saturdays ago when three young men and a girl, all skippies in their twenties, approached the cab and asked if I wanted to go up to the Northern Beaches. As the girl looked okay I gave them the benefit of the doubt and accepted the fare. Although the fellas were firing on all cylinders, I quickly noted the absence of alcohol odor. Coming from this pub it could only mean one thing: drugs. And as such I wondered if they had enough for the $70 fare, or if they would run. With half the night’s earnings at stake, one can’t be careless, and I braced myself for the psychological warfare to come. It began quickly Having gained the advantage when I noticed the lead I moved to consolidate: ‘Nah, male muttering something to the girl in the back that’s okay – you’re just having before calling out, ‘Hey a good time cabbie! Do you ever get women offering you favors for the fare?’. In other words, they were debating whether or not to pay. ‘Nah, never’, I lied, thinking he must be pretty gone.

Then the alpha male got on the phone, ‘Steve-o!

Whaddya doin’? What? Yeah, I’ve got a gram for ya!

Meet us at home in half an hour’. Then he turned his attention my way: ‘Hey cabbie’, phone-boy called, ‘feel like joining us for a few lines?’.

‘Nah, not for me thanks mate’, I laughed, waving away the offer as we whizzed across the Harbour Bridge, but he wasn’t convinced.

‘Ah, he says ‘no’ but you can see he’s itching for a line.

Come on mate, spark up!’

‘Mate’, I called over the thumping music, ‘I’m already sparking on caffeine and nicotine!’.

‘Yeah’, he shot back, ‘but wait ‘til ya see this – it’s the best coke in Sydney! Put a real edge on your night’. I just laughed and watched my speed as we shot past a tunnel camera.

32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

This had the desired chastening effect for all of five seconds, until they concluded if not for the camera, I’d be interested. ‘No worries mate’, they assured me, ‘we’ll talk about it later’. I now realized my move had backfired, convinced the offer of cocaine was linked to payment of the fare – or payment in kind. If I didn’t quickly recover the initiative, I’d lose.

‘Listen’, I told them, killing the music, ‘I’ve been there and done all that. I was once like you guys, partying every weekend. I chopped, mulled, snorted and smoked for 20 years. Until my girlfriend got cancer and I watched her slowly die. That’s when I said enough...’ It was a complete line, but they fell for it.

‘Mate, that’s terrible. We’re sorry for pushing you...’.

Having gained the advantage I moved to consolidate: ‘Nah, that’s okay – you’re just having a good time. But let me tell you something else – I know all about cocaine and it’s just as addictive as heroin. Except you don’t know it until you’re using it everyday...’.

‘Yeah, that’s just like Snowy..’, one fella solemnly commented to the others.

I continued, seeing I’d hit a nerve: ‘...Next thing you know, you’re 40 years old, looking like 50, with no money and driving cabs...if you’re lucky!’.

We pulled up outside a house in Dee Why with the meter showing $62. From the subdued mood in the cab, I was confident my tale had worked. ‘Anyway, you guys are still young, but it’s a total waste if you party endlessly. That’ll be $62 plus seven more for the tolls’.

They chipped in and handed me the full fare, plus tip.

Phone-boy made one last attempt to entice me: ‘You sure you won’t come in?’

‘No thanks mate’, I answered, ‘you guys party on, but do it safely, OK?’ ‘Yeah, it’s under control mate, it’s all good. Nice meeting you’. Breathing a sigh of relief I drove away wondering if they’d intended to run. One can never be certain in this game.

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

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 33

WHERE THE RUBBA MEETS THE ROAD

Is safe sex really safe?

In America, it’s ‘no glove, no love’. In parts of Australia, the message is, ‘safe sex, no regrets’. And here in New Zealand, the rule is, ‘no rubba, no hubba’. So with all the money being spent pushing the message that condoms are a cure-all, why are many sexually transmitted diseases on the rise? As JAMES MORROW in Sydney and IAN WISHART in Auckland discover in an Australasian exclusive, the safe sex ad campaigns may actually be causing the massive increase in venereal disease 34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 35

STUDIES CONDUCTED OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS SHOW THAT, FAR FROM BEING THE BE-ALL AND END-ALL IN SEXUAL PROTECTION, CONDOMS OFFER PRACTICALLY ZERO EFFECTIVE PROTECTION FROM MOST STDS APART FROM HIV, IRONICALLY

H

ere’s an interesting but little-known fact about condoms that may just win you a meat tray down at the pub Thursday night: the use of condoms dates back at least as far as ancient Rome and Egypt. Not only that, but archaeologists have discovered early cave paintings that seem to suggest (appropriately enough) that pre-historic Frenchmen may have discovered the things thousands of years before the New York Times ran the first-ever print ad for ‘Dr. Power’s French Preventatives’.

Looking for more condom trivia? Before the latex condom was invented, condoms were made by handdipping molds into rubber cement (hence the slang term). But in 1919 an inventor in Ohio by the name of Frederick Killian figured out that latex was a much better material for the purpose, and by the mid-1930s, at the height of the Depression, American manufacturers were producing 1.5 million condoms a day.

Oh, and here’s one more interesting thing about condoms: contrary to popular belief, they are not hugely effective in preventing an incredible variety of sexually transmitted diseases – from HPV, or human papilloma virus, which is linked to more than 90 per cent of cases of cervical cancer and also cause infertility, to herpes.

How can this be? Since the mid-1980s and the discovery that AIDS could be prevented by condoms, ‘French letters’, ‘rubbers’, and ‘raincoats’ have stopped being something that people whispered and tittered about and instead become deadly serious business. Around the world public health authorities, looking for a way to keep AIDS from spreading out of control, have promoted condoms in earnest for nearly two decades now with a variety of advertising campaigns.

But all is not happy and healthy in New Zealand’s bedrooms. While the number of AIDS cases is low, new HIV cases are on the rise, and the rates of many other infections are climbing as well. And while none are necessarily the death sentence that an HIV infection represents, they have potentially huge consequences, including cancer and infertility. Public health experts have seen a tremendous increase in cases of diseases like chlamydia and syphilis; in the Australian state of Victoria, the situation is so bad that Chief Health Officer was compelled this past March to issue a formal Health Alert to general practitioners telling them to watch out for the sudden uptick in syphilis cases. That sort of warning is not an everyday occurrence: the last time the Chief Health Officer issued such a bulletin was in 2003, warning doctors to be on the lookout for SARS. But if you think the Victorian warning is bad, Auckland’s chlamydia epidemic is three times worse than Australia’s, and in the far north as many as 25% of 36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

young people have the disease. Overall, the upper North Island’s chlamydia rate is six times higher than the Australian average.

There are many factors behind the rise in various STDs, but one has gone all but unreported in a culture where, officially at least, condom use has taken on an almost sacramental nature: studies conducted over the past few years show that, far from being the be-all and end-all in sexual protection, condoms offer practically zero effective protection from most STDs apart from HIV, ironically.

In other words, when the emperor has no clothes on, a condom is of limited, if any, use in protecting him from a host of diseases.

Back in 2001, the United States’ National Institutes of Health published a series of findings that were shocking, both because they completely overturned long-held conventional wisdom on a very important topic, and also because they received virtually no media coverage.

Indeed, the Washington Post at the time reported that ‘some health officials considered keeping the report private’, adding that ‘some family planning advocates said they feared that the new report would be used to put pressure on the FDA to change condom labels to reflect the conclusions.’

As one commentator puts it, ‘It’s like hearing that Grandma died and immediately asking if Grandma will be making brownies for the funeral. The reality of the loss just hasn’t sunk in yet.’

Among other things, the study found that when one partner is infected with herpes, using condoms cut the risk of transmission by only about forty percent. In other words, despite the condom, there’s still a 60% risk of passing on the herpes virus.

Meanwhile, with regard to human papilloma virus, by far the number one cause of cervical cancer, ‘the Panel concluded that there was no epidemiological evidence that condom use reduced the risk of … infection’.

In non-medical speak, there’s no evidence at all that condoms can prevent the spread of infection.

Follow-up studies in the past five years have only confirmed the worst fears of researchers – in the case of syphilis, for example, even consistent use of a condom will only give you 29% protection against the venereal disease – you still have a 71% chance of catching the pox, even with a condom.

And this doesn’t even begin to take into account the misuse, or irregular use, of condoms: according to just one study of Australian high school students, 68 percent of those surveyed who said they were sexually active admitted that they don’t use condoms every time they have sex, despite the fact that virtually every kid in

the state’s schools is given lessons in how to use the things. And even among adults, condom usage can be irregular, or start too late in an encounter, to prevent the spread of many infections.

‘The term “safe sex” needs to be examined in detail’, says Dr. Caroline Harvey, Medical Director for Family Planning Queensland. ‘We give people many mixed messages depending on whether we are talking about preventing pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections or HIV. In my dealings with clients, I’ve found that when they ask about safe sex, you need to talk to them and pull apart what they’re talking about.’

‘Viral infections like herpes and HPV do spread from skin-to-skin contact’, she adds, something that many people who come into her office are unaware of. According to Harvey, depending on what the client is looking to prevent, the options may be very different – something that doesn’t always come through in media campaigns such as the NZ Ministry of Health’s ‘No Rubba, No Hubba-hubba’ effort.

In fact, the Ministry of Health website for ‘Hubba’ is so inaccurate there are sufficient grounds to shut it down.

After identifying a range of sexually transmitted infections, including “chlamydia, genital warts, herpes, or gonorrhoea”, the website’s FAQ section then asks: Q: How can I protect myself against STIs? A: Use condoms. Correctly used and used every time you have sex, condoms are the most effective protection against most STIs, including HIV/AIDs.” Now here’s what the most recent scientific studies* have shown about condom effectiveness for a number of the diseases listed on the Hubba site: Chlamydia: still a 60% chance of catching it even if a condom is correctly used every time Gonorrhea: still a 60% chance of catching it even if a condom is correctly used every time Herpes: still a 60% chance of catching it even if a condom is correctly used every time Genital warts: no published study has found condoms can protect against this at all

E

ither New Zealand Ministry of Health officials and Health Minister Annette King are woefully ignorant of the failings of new scientific data over the past five years, or the Ministry is deliberately ignoring the facts, knowing that hundreds of thousands of school students have been misled about safe sex over that time, leading to now-record levels of * Sources: Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2001; 185: 380-385. See also AIDS; 2001; 15:2171-2179. See also JAMA: 2001: 285:3100-3106.

See also Abstract B09E, 2002 National STD Prevention Conference, San Diego)

sexually transmitted diseases in young people, at a cost of millions of dollars to taxpayers and the community.

The Hubba website doesn’t care that its “information” for young people is dangerously incorrect, judging from its arrogant Q&A on condom ‘safety’: Q: Are condoms safe?

A: Condoms do protect you. Some people say it isn’t worth using condoms because they have holes big enough for viruses to get through, but that’s not true.

Bacteria and viruses…cannot pass through an undamaged condom.”

Tell that to the international medical journals and research teams.

For the Hubba website to claim that condoms are “the most effective protection” against sexually transmitted diseases is incredible, especially if the 50% failure rate in condoms is not being disclosed to young people.

Nor is New Zealand’s influential Family Planning Association in the clear on this one. The Association’s resource kits blatantly state: “Condoms are known to greatly reduce the risk of catching other STIs such as chlamydia and gonorrhoea.”

In the course of researching the article, the revelations stunned many on the magazine’s staff and in the wider community as we gathered interviews.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 37

CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, CONDOMS ARE NOT HUGELY EFFECTIVE IN PRE VENTING AN INCREDIBLE VARIETY OF SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES – FROM HPV , OR HUMAN PAPILLOMA VIRUS, WHICH IS LINKED TO MORE THAN 90 PER CENT OF CASES OF CERVICAL CANCER, TO HERPES “I can’t believe it,” one woman told us. “There are women who go through their pregnancies terrified because they have a one in 600 risk of having a deformed child, and we’re talking here about a one in two risk of contracting serious and in some cases incurable sexual diseases even if we use a condom. Why on earth hasn’t anyone told us this before?”

While it is conceded that condoms can reduce your risk of catching an STD by around half, a one in two chance is still worse odds than a round of Russian Roulette, and hardly equates to “safe sex”. And if teenagers are not being told the grim full story in their school sex education classes, thanks to a Ministry of Health coverup or botch-up, is it possible that kids have increased their sexual activity in the mistaken belief that a condom will somehow protect them?

Is that the real reason for the massive increase in STDs? Instead of telling teenagers the cold hard truth, they’ve been lulled into such a false sense of security that they’ve tripled or even quadrupled their “bonk-rate” over the past 20 years of “safe sex” campaigns, making the (at best) 50% effectiveness of condoms useless in practical terms. If you’re having four times more sex because you think condoms make it safe, in real terms you’ve actually doubled your risk of catching an STD. And you won’t read that in the “No Rubba, No Hubba” material.

Naturally, we asked New Zealand’s Ministry of Health 38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

to justify the outrageously inaccurate data in the Hubba campaign.

“I’ve referred your question to one of our senior policy analysts,” said Hubba director Sally Hughes, “and they tell me that the Ministry of Health is satisfied that condoms are effective. We rely on the World Health Organisation’s Bulletin of June 2004 which includes a study of condom effectiveness.”

Again, naturally, Investigate checked up. Although the WHO Bulletin is bullish in its language and socially liberal in its conclusions, the Bulletin nonetheless concedes that every medical research study since 2001 has found condoms have only limited efficacy against venereal diseases.

“A meta-analysis of 20 studies found no evidence that condoms were effective against genital HPV (warts or cervical cancer) infection.”

So strike one against condoms in the very report New Zealand’s Ministry of Health is using to justify its fatally-flawed “safe sex” message. If just one New Zealand woman contracts cervical cancer because she relied on the ‘No Rubba’ campaign, does that make the Ministry of Health criminally negligent?

But there’s more.

The WHO document also discloses that a study of teenagers in the US revealed that STD rates were virtually the same between those who always used condoms (a minority) and those who either used condoms intermittently or not at all.

Twenty one percent of those who always used condoms had caught STDs, compared with 23% of the “sometimes or never group”.

“So why are you continuing to push this condoms = safe sex message,” we asked a senior Ministry of Health official, “when clearly it’s the biggest load of old codswallop that’s ever been perpetrated in a PR campaign?”

“Well,” pondered the official after a moment, “per-

haps the studies didn’t properly monitor whether people really did use condoms all the time.”

“Well, this is the WHO Bulletin that your own Hubba team referred me to…” we responded.

The WHO document also acknowledged and quoted the same studies we quoted earlier, showing (at best) a 40% reduction in the chances of a herpes or chlamydia infection.

Yet despite confirming that condoms are less safe than a six shooter revolver with one bullet loaded, the WHO seems to regard any reduction in STD risk as a good reason to keep promoting condom use.

‘Condoms are useful’, maintains Anna McNulty, Director of the Sydney Sexual Heath Centre, when asked about diseases that spread despite the use of condoms.

McNulty adds that the increase in the rates of infection various sexual diseases – chlamydia rates have trebled in her state alone in the last five years according to one estimate – could come from a variety of factors including, she claims, the lack of access to health care among young people.

The problem, says McNulty, is that ‘people use them some of the time but not all of the time’, and admits that while a great way to prevent things like AIDS and unintended pregnancies, in terms of preventing herpes and the genital warts that can lead to cervical cancer, ‘they are not as effective.’

An added challenge is that fact that many diseases such as chlamydia can be asymptomatic, especially in men. ‘It can be silent for a long time, but it can cause significant damage’, says Dr. Harvey.

Despite this, many public health bodies are delivering a mixed message. While, for example, South Australia’s Health Department’s web site frankly states that ‘condoms will give you some protection from most sexually transmitted infections, but some, like herpes, crabs and genital warts, can spread through skin-to-skin con-

‘THE TERM “SAFE SEX” NEEDS TO BE EXAMINED IN DETAIL’, ADMITS DR. CAROLINE HARVEY, MEDICAL DIRECTOR FOR FAMILY PLANNING QUEENSLAND.‘WE GIVE PEOPLE MANY MIXED MESSAGES’ tact’, it is a message that often gets lost when it is boiled down to a catchy slogan – such as ‘Safe Sex, No Regrets’, the message currently being pushed in an NSW Health ad campaign, or the aforementioned ‘No Rubba, No Hubba’.

Featuring a variety of television and print ads, the ‘Safe Sex, No Regrets’ campaign shows groups of healthy, happy, good-looking young people – straight and gay and of various ethnicities – in different social circumstances. The copy on the print ads says things like, ‘Tonight I’m picking up chlamydia’ or some other disease, with the name of the disease crossed out and the word ‘condoms’ printed underneath it, the implication being that condoms are all one needs to have what the tag-line calls, ‘no regrets’. In one ad specifically targeting Aboriginals, readers are told that ‘sexually transmitted infections … can affect anybody who has unsafe sex.’

Which is absolutely true, but again fails to mention that condoms are not foolproof against disease – and that ‘no regrets’ is a pretty broad statement that implies something close to 100 per cent reliability. Yet very little is ever 100 per cent when health and medicine are involved (and in the sense that condoms are used to prevent the spread of disease, they have a medical component), and if the maker of any other device with as many caveats as condoms have attached to them ever tried to advertise in a similar way, they would be shut down by the authorities sooner than the casual couples featured in NSW Health’s campaign could wake up the following morning with a splitting headache and serious misgivings.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 39

IN OTHER WORDS, WHEN THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES ON, A CONDOM IS OF LIMITED , IF ANY, USE IN PRO TECTING HIM FROM A HOST OF DISEASES But while the campaign does not tell the whole truth about condoms, McNulty says that ‘you have to keep the message simple, and the “Safe Sex, No Regrets” campaign did a good job as it targeted both young heterosexuals and gay men.’ She concedes, though, that even with 100% condom usage, people are not fully protected against skin-to-skin infections.

So what to do about all this? In Australia, national strategy on sexually transmitted diseases is due to be released in July, and according to McNulty, it will definitely have an emphasis on chlamydia and the sudden spike in infection rates, and will push for increases in screening. Easy tests now exist to detect the infection, and treatment is normally a simple antibiotic treatment.

But the campaign will also continue to emphasize ‘safe sex’ – perpetuating the lie.

“Take the example of NSW’s ‘Safe Sex, No Regrets’ campaign,” Investigate put to Hubba director Sally Hughes.

“That campaign features a poster on chlamydia.”

“I’ve seen it, yes,” she confirmed.

“Which, based on the scientific evidence now pouring in, is totally and utterly untrue!”

And yet the Hubba website makes pretty much the same claims online about using condoms to prevent chlamydia.

There is another aspect to consider. A generation ago, couples were getting married in their early 20s, entering stable relationships and generally avoiding promiscuity.

As a result, STD rates were much lower in the seventies and eighties. But today, most people are not settling into long term relationships until their late 20s or early 30s. They now have multiple sexual partners before marriage, and a corresponding huge rise in sexual disease rates. By the time many women now get around to having children, age and their exposure to STDs have played havoc with their fertility. Just another price that Generation-X will have to pay for the safe-sex myth the liberal Baby Boom generation lumbered them with.

T

he problem is that sex is a much more complicated thing than people of all stripes care to acknowledge, which is why diluting information about condoms to a happy, easily-digestible slogan that inspires false confidence is an irresponsible position for public health authorities to take.

Yet that is exactly what campaigns such as ‘Safe Sex, No Regrets’ and ‘No Rubba, No Hubba’ do by telling young people that using a condom is as simple a way to have a good time while preventing misery down the road as, say, advising them to only drink bottled water when they’re backpacking up some gorgeous Third World coastline.

The danger of “safe sex”, or “safer sex” as a slogan is that it cons people into thinking there is either no risk, or minimal risk. Yet a 71% chance of catching syphilis through a condom is hardly “safe” or even “safer”.

Yet the resistance to telling the truth about condoms is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

“What do you want us to do?” growled one sexual health campaigner spoken to by Investigate’s Sydney office, “preach abstinence?”

It is as if the sex education lobby is so wedded to pushing the “free sex, no consequences” message that they regard the scientific facts as a mere inconvenience, and have no intention of changing their advertising campaigns.

Case in point? As this article was about to go to press, TV1’s award-winning Close Up programme ran as lead story some Ministry of Health propaganda about a new survey that “…shows a lack of awareness among the young about the need to use condoms to prevent sexually transmitted infections,” presenter Susan Wood intoned.

“What researchers say is noticeable in the survey is the way teenagers seem to think they’re invulnerable when it comes to sexually transmitted infection. According to the stats, 74% of students agreed that it was likely young people their age would get some kind of sexually transmitted infection. But only 23% thought that it could happen to them. When students did use condoms the reasons were more likely to be a fear of pregnancy than of sexually transmitted diseases. That comes at a time when STDs nationally are showing an alarming increase.

The latest national figures from the sexual health clinics show that chlamydia rates are up 28% and gonorrhea is up 44%.

“With the survey showing a cavalier attitude to condom use amongst teenagers, the concern is that sexually transmitted diseases will only continue to increase, despite the message: if you don’t use a Rubba there’ll be no hubba hubba.”

That message, as we’re now revealing, is a complete fraud. Nonetheless, both the NZ Herald and the Christchurch Press ran the propaganda as the front page lead story the next day.

In another fascinating aside, a study in the British Medical Journal measured the effectiveness of a condom promotion strategy, much like the Hubba and No Regrets campaigns, but targeted at gay men. The survey found that while the condom promotion resulted in fewer cases of unprotected sex, inexplicably the rate of sexually-transmitted diseases “significantly increased”.

Perhaps, conned into thinking condoms were “safe”, the men indulged in more sex and thus increased their overall risk of infection.

While it may not be as sexy a message, so to speak, health authorities should instead work to tell people of all ages in the community that despite their best efforts, behaviours – especially risky ones – can have consequences.

The campaign wouldn’t have to be prudish or paranoiainducing, either, but simply give people the facts: condoms are great for certain things, but there are still high risks involved with having sex with people whose history and health status you’re not sure of. No one would dream of running an ad implying that wearing a helmet was all one needed to stay safe when riding a motorbike; there are plenty of other factors involved that keep one safe on the road, and people are well aware of this. The same sort of truth needs to be told about condoms.

i

WHAT THE STUDIES SAY WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION BULLETIN, June 04: “No published prospective study has found protection against genital human papillomavirus (cervical cancer/warts/ HPV) infection” JOURNAL OF SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES, 2003; 30: 273-9: A study of 917 female sex workers in Lima, Peru, were re-examined monthly for STDs. Those women who consistently used condoms still had a chlamydia infection rate of 74% compared to the infection rate of women who didn’t use condoms AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, 2003; 93: 901-2: A study of 380 American girls aged 14 to 18 over six months revealed that 30% of the girls who did not use condoms had caught a sexually transmitted disease by the end of six months, as had 17.8% of the girls who always used condoms AIDS, 2001; 15: 2171-9: A study of 17,264 adults in the town of Rakai, Uganda, over four years, measured STD infection rates in the population and the effectiveness of condoms. Only 4.4% (760 people) had always used condoms. Of those people, consistent condom use only resulted in a 29% reduction in syphilis infections, and a 50% reduction in chlamydia and gonorrhea. The prevalence of the STDs trichomoniasis and vaginosis “were not reduced”. Even with HIV, the disease the condoms are most effective at preventing, the infection rate was still 37% of the rate of those who didn’t use condoms JOURNAL OF SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES, 2002; 29: 725-35: A meta-analysis of 20 studies “found no evidence that condoms were effective against genital HPV infection”, warts or cervical cancer AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY, 2003; 157: 218-26: A study of 444 female university students found “that consistently using condoms with a new partner was not associated with significant protection against HPV” AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY, 2004; 159: 242-51: A study of 4314 participants who visited STD clinics found consistent use of condoms still resulted in an infection rate of 82% compared against those who didn’t use condoms JOURNAL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES, 1999; 180: 1624-31: A study followed the progress of 484 adolescents at four STD clinics over six months, and found 21% of those who always used condoms had caught a sexually transmitted disease, compared with 23% of those who sometimes or never used a condom (a 91% risk of infection, group vs group) JOURNAL OF SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES, 1995; 22: 15-21: A study of 598 people attending an STD clinic in Baltimore found infection rates were almost the same, regardless of whether a condom was always used or not

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 41

THE INVESTIGATE INTERVIEW

SEX CRIME Is the Ministry guilty?

The good ship “Safe Sex” is about to hit an iceberg.

IAN WISHART goes head to head with the Ministry of Health’s Chief Advisor on Population Health, Dr DOUG LUSH, in our punchiest interview, ever

42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

INVESTIGATE: It would appear that the public health campaigns that have been going on have ignored the scientific data now pouring in that condoms will not protect against most STIs, and that the huge rise in STIs may be directly related to the promotion of condoms as a safe sex tool, when in fact they’re not safe.

LUSH: I think that’s wrong, that condoms are a very important part of protecting people from sexually transmitted diseases and have a growing importance in the prevention of STIs and HIV. I haven’t seen the particular studies you refer to, however I do know there are problems in some studies in that the reported use and continued use of condoms cannot be verified or validated that these people are using them properly or consistently, and this can lead to the spread, so there are a lot of methodological problems.

INVESTIGATE: Yeah, let’s spread that the other way though, flip that coin, and you will never be able to prove condoms are effective. If you’re going to say condoms are effective ‘if they’re used correctly’ how on earth would you know?

LUSH: Have you heard of the Cochrane Collaboration? They did a very vigorous assessment of all the research in an area and they very strongly support the reduction of HIV incidence from condoms. Now HIV is somewhat different from other sexually transmitted infections but the work that’s done on HIV shows that condoms are very useful in protecting people from transmission.

INVESTIGATE: I’m not going to disagree with you on HIV, I think all the medical studies are showing exactly what you’re saying. What I will say to you is that it’s the only

sexually transmitted disease that condoms will protect you against. And I will tell you that categorically.

LUSH: Well I would say that that isn’t the case. We know that gonorrhea can be protected also by the use of condoms, and there’s good evidence of that. Other STIs like herpes, where it depends on where the herpes lesions are, there’s variable protection from condoms. But syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia – there’s good protection from condoms and I’m very comfortable with the approach we’ve used in New Zealand, “No Rubba No Hubba Hubba”. We know that teenagers are sexually active and this is a way that they can protect themselves from STIs. It’s not a foolproof way but it certainly does reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases.

INVESTIGATE: What sort of level of protection would you expect a condom to give against chlamydia, gonorrhea or syphilis?

LUSH: If they’re used consistently and regularly, then a very good rate of protection.

INVESTIGATE: How would you define that, percentage wise, allowing for the fact that three percent of condoms will result in pregnancy, so that’s the ultimate sort of failure rate.

LUSH: I know studies have shown the failure rate is between two and eighteen percent in condom use. The physical characteristics of the condom suggest that we know the agents that cause STIs don’t pass through the condom, so if a condom is used correctly there won’t be any transmission.

INVESTIGATE: How would you feel if I told you the scientific evidence over the past five years is showing that, for example, that there may only be a reduction in chlamydia

“You’ve got a bunch of kids out there who are putting condoms on because the health authorities are telling them “safe sex – wear a condom”, and the truth is they’re not being told that “in actual fact you’ve still got a very high risk you’re going to catch something”

rates of 26% against those who don’t use condoms at all. Those who are consistently and always using condoms according to the WHO’s meta-analysis are still likely to suffer a 74% rate of infection. Would that surprise you?

LUSH: That would, and I’d be interested in looking at their methodology as to how they validated this.

INVESTIGATE: This was a study of 917 sex workers in Peru, published in the Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases. But even in the best studies the WHO’s meta-analysis has pulled together, the chlamydia reduction rate is only 40%, so you’re still talking worse odds than Russian Roulette.

LUSH: A 40% reduction is a useful reduction and I would see that as a worst case scenario [not the best case].

INVESTIGATE: It’s useful in the sense of looking at the overall population demographic, it’s not so useful if little Johnny or Mary goes out, reading the posters saying condoms are “safe sex”, and that’s the basic message. Up to 25% of young people in some Northland towns have chlamydia, so that’s pretty good odds of catching it over time.

LUSH: It is a population approach, but it also is personal protection. And it is valid advice for someone who is sexually active that they should use a condom. The frequency of activity that prostitutes are involved in is very different from adolescents in NZ, as far as frequency of sexual contact. Although there may be some who are very sexually promiscuous, this isn’t the norm and you can’t really apply those studies to the type of protection you’re going to get from condoms.

INVESTIGATE: I’ll take you through some of these studies because they are fasci-

nating, and they’re the only evidence that the medical world actually has. A study of 380 American girls aged 14 to 18, revealed that 30% of the girls who didn’t use condoms had caught a sexually transmitted disease by the end of six months, and 17.8% of girls who always used condoms also had caught STDs at the end of that period.

LUSH: This is reported condom use, and we see a very dramatic decrease.

INVESTIGATE: Well you do, and you don’t. At a population level you see a decrease in the percentage, but at a personal level you’ve got a bunch of kids out there who are putting condoms on because the health authorities are telling them “safe sex – wear a condom”, and the truth is they’re not being told that “in actual fact you’ve still got a very high risk you’re going to catch something”.

LUSH: Our message to the youth of NZ, or sexually active people, is that if you want to avoid sexually transmitted infections, then the sure way is not to have sex. However...

INVESTIGATE: Where do you say that?!

LUSH: ... accepting the reality that young people do have sex and they want to protect themselves, using a condom is the best way.

INVESTIGATE: Well, are you telling young people though? Because I’ve looked across the Hubba site and I’ll be frank – that site is grossly inaccurate. Even on the Q&A section, “Are condoms safe?”, the site arrogantly is suggesting – it lists the STIs “Chlamydia, gonorrhea, herpes, genital warts” etc – and says “people say these things can get through, but they can’t, it’s safe”. That’s what they’re saying, and it’s a crock! There are something like 40 studies that the World Health Organisation has cited in its Bulletin, which

ironically the Ministry of Health referred me to.

LUSH: Looking at the site, we have a question “Why aren’t you promoting abstinence?” which is a question we are often asked. And I’ll read out the response: “The campaign is about supporting choices made by teens, whether that is to have sex or wait. Those who are sexually active need protection to reduce the risk of STIs. Unfortunately many young people don’t plan their first sexual experience, and this campaign aims to help young people think realistically and be ready to protect themselves.”

INVESTIGATE: OK, if this campaign is about making young people think realistically, where is the evidence on your website that you are telling them there is still, for example, an 80% chance they’re going to get syphilis?

LUSH: There isn’t an 80% chance of getting syphilis from a single sexual encounter.

INVESTIGATE: Well how many kids are having single encounters and how do we know? This gets back to my question at the start which we don’t have an answer to: You do query, and rightly so, that we don’t know how well people are using the condoms, or whether they’re really using them or whether they’re just saying so to please the researcher.

But the flip side of that coin is that the health authorities are making the point that a condom properly used will prevent this. But you’ve got no scientific evidence to back that up either, for exactly the same reason – because you can’t get a control group that you can actually prove are doing it right.

LUSH: Fortunately we know the way a condom works. It is a direct barrier between the semen and the vagina.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 43

INVESTIGATE: Yeah, it’s great for preventing pregnancy, but according to the studies it’s no good at protecting against most STIs. LUSH: Problems occur both with the validity of reporting and the behavioural aspects. It is hard to conduct because the intimate nature of the activity you’re investigating means you can’t actually watch what’s happening, so you just have to assume people are telling the truth.

INVESTIGATE: Exactly! But Doug, here’s my point...

LUSH: The point of our campaign is that we go into a great lot of detail about the need for people to know how to use condoms properly, and even to practice using condoms, so for young men we would advise them to practice by themselves using condoms, so that when it comes to their first sexual experience they know how to do them, so its important not just to use them but to know how to use them.

INVESTIGATE: I’m going to come back to this question time and time again: how do you know that using a condom the way the Health Ministry recommends will actually achieve the result? I’ll tell you why you don’t know – there isn’t one scientific study in the world that shows it, because there is no control group that you can monitor 24/7 to see whether they’re doing it correctly or not. There has not been a study like that, therefore you cannot make the claim that “if you do it right it will protect you”. You have no scientific basis for making that claim!

LUSH: We have extremely strong support for HIV from these meta-analyses that were done.

INVESTIGATE: Yeah, but as you’ve acknowledged, and I agree, HIV is contained within the semen, effectively, and is therefore trapped by the condom as part of the condom’s design to prevent pregnancy. These other diseases are not constructed in such ways, and according to the WHO, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, according to the British Medical Journal, and so on and so on and so on, these diseases are getting through.

Yeah, sure, you can sit there and say “well, we don’t know how well they’re using the condoms or whether they’re really reporting them”, but the flip side of the coin is, you have no proof that using a condom correctly is going to work anyway, because that scientific study hasn’t been done either.

LUSH: The studies that you’ve told me about that you say discredit the value of condoms still have significant differences between those who’re using condoms and those who don’t. So on that evidence alone it would be 44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

worthwhile to suggest using condoms and promoting condom usage.

INVESTIGATE: Well, let’s take it through a little bit. I’ll start with the World Health Organisation Bulletin of June 2004. Quote: “No published prospective study has found protection against genital human papilloma virus (ie, cervical cancer, warts, HPV) infection”.

LUSH: Does it say that?

INVESTIGATE: It does say that.

LUSH: Is that what it reports?

INVESTIGATE: I will read you the exact quote: “No published prospective study has found protection against genital human papilloma virus HPV infection”.

LUSH: And this is in?

INVESTIGATE: This is WHO’s Bulletin June 04. It’s in the abstract. I’ve got a couple of others here. AIDS Journal 2001, a study of 17,264 adults in the town of Rakai, Uganda, over four years measured STD infection rates.

Consistent condom use resulted in only a 29% reduction in syphilis infections as against the general population, and a 50% reduction in chlamydia and gonorrhea.

The Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 2002, a meta-analysis of 20 studies found, quote: “found no evidence that condoms were effective against genital HPV infection, warts or cervical cancer.” Again, that contrasts directly with what’s on the Hubba site.

LUSH: And the Hubba site is saying? I can’t see the part where you say we mention the wart virus. I’m looking here and it says

“condoms do work, used correctly and consistently”. And they’re the key points.

INVESTIGATE: Definition of STIs: “Chlamydia, genital warts, herpes or gonorrhea”. Then you’ve got a question, “How can I protect myself against STIs?”.

Answer, “Use condoms. Correctly used, and used every time you have sex, condoms are the most effective protection against most STIs including HIV/AIDS”. So you do mention genital warts in there.

LUSH: Well I do agree with that statement, that condoms are the most effective method of protection we know of. There aren’t any other effective ways of doing this.

INVESTIGATE: I’m not suggesting that the Health Ministry simply throws up its hands in horror and says “OK, no sex”, albeit that there are those who say it’s a good idea. I appreciate that you’re not going to get that message through to teenagers, but certainly fluffing around and ignoring the reality that condoms won’t protect – I mean, let’s get real!

Condoms will not protect people against STIs. Parents out there are thinking the sex education methods are working. You’ve got the front page stories in the papers that are nothing but inaccurate propaganda. It’s literally interwoven with all your publicity and has been for a long time. Is it not time that we admitted the Emperor has no clothes, and began investigating a different strategy for young people, because there’s nothing on your website to suggest there’s a risk at all?

LUSH: I think it [the website] implies that you need to be experienced and consistent in your use.

INVESTIGATE: I’ll take you to another one. American Journal of Epidemiology 2003, a study of 444 female university students in the States found that “consistently using condoms with a new partner is not associated with significant protection against HPV”.

LUSH: Yes, but that’s not an area that we dwell on in the publicity, we’re mainly talk about chlamydia.

INVESTIGATE: If you have got a partner who may have slept around, may have a disease, really, don’t rely on a condom at all.

Insist on a screening check because there is a very real chance that even if you use a condom, you’re going to catch it. You’re not saying that, but that’s what you need to say.

Is it time to say, “Condoms don’t work except for pregnancy or HIV. Don’t rely on them for any other protection”. Isn’t that a better way of giving kids the right choices to make?

LUSH: No I don’t believe so at all!

INVESTIGATE: Why? LUSH: Because condoms are effective.

INVESTIGATE: Against what!? With respect, what are they effective against?

LUSH: Syphilis.

INVESTIGATE: No they’re not. The best study that the WHO meta-analysis found shows a reduction of 29% in syphilis rates, still a 71% chance of contracting syphilis, so you can throw that one out the window.

LUSH: But again, the methodology in a lot of these is...

INVESTIGATE: You still have no scientific evidence to make the claim that a condom, correctly used, will protect you, because as you point out no one has done the 24/7, hidden camera, monitored installation of people having sex. So you can’t make that comment hand on heart, and your comment about the studies possibly not reflecting proper condom use is irrelevant, because if you don’t know that condoms actually work – even in ideal conditions – then how can you criticize these studies? That’s just fobbing it off.

LUSH: I will be a bit repetitive here. We do know that the viruses and bacteria that cause STIs do not pass through.

INVESTIGATE: You know from a lab test ...

LUSH: We know that if that physical barrier is in place these infections won’t be passed from person to person. We know from the best studies which have been undertaken in people with HIV that there is an 80% reduction. So we know that condoms will also work for other sexually transmitted infections.

INVESTIGATE: Such as?

LUSH: We have some modest results from the literature, but the methodological problems with reporting and the competence in using condoms means we need to interpret these results carefully.

INVESTIGATE: Doug, you’re not listening to me, with respect. You’re repeating the same thing.

LUSH: I told you I’d repeat the same thing.

That’s my line and that’s where we’re at with this.

INVESTIGATE: But you cannot make this claim. You can’t. You have no proof that a correctly-used condom, in the wild, will protect you. The results you have about viruses and bacteria not passing through the latex are lab tests in ideal conditions. But a human body is not an ideal condition. And you don’t know, and I don’t know, where in fact the bacteria from some of these things actually are on the person, or how easily transferable they are. That may be why the condoms are failing – not because people aren’t using them correctly but just because condoms will not actually work in that situation. And you can’t point to a piece of research that shows I’m wrong on that.

LUSH: I’m not underestimating the complexity in the technique, but there are technical aspects to this.

INVESTIGATE: You don’t have one single scientific study about using a condom correctly.

LUSH: We have extremely good studies.

INVESTIGATE: Name one. I have a suspicion after reading the WHO Bulletin that one has never been done.

LUSH: I’ll refer you to the Cochrane Collaboration on condom use, which shows an 80% reduction in HIV incidence.

INVESTIGATE: But I agree with you on that. We’ve talked about HIV. You’re not tackling the central issue. Before you can get up and slag off these studies by saying people may be misreporting their condom use, you have to be able to prove the claim that the Ministry of Health repeatedly makes, that a correctly used condom will protect you.

Where’s the proof ?

LUSH: A lot of it comes through inference, and a lot of it comes through studies that do show a reduction in transmission.

INVESTIGATE: What studies? The ones I’m showing you are not showing a significant reduction in transmission. You’ve still got, at best, a one in two chance of catching something. That’s worse odds than Russian Roulette, significantly worse odds.

LUSH: We’ll stick with the Cochrane Collaboration and the results for HIV where there has been attention to the methodology. I’d venture to say the methodology on the other ones is problematic.

INVESTIGATE: Obviously we’re going to be at loggerheads on this one. Is there any plan, on the basis of what I’ve revealed to you, to review the way the “safe sex” message is publicized in New Zealand, do you accept that the current publicity is flawed?

LUSH: No, I don’t.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 45

“Abstinence is something that needs to be considered and that is an option that young people may wish to explore.

However there are sexually active people and the best way of protecting themselves is condoms” INVESTIGATE: Do you accept that it could be potentially flawed?

LUSH: I acknowledge that we need to watch what is in the literature and that abstinence is the most risk averse – for the most risk averse, abstinence is something that people might want to consider.

INVESTIGATE: What about on your websites and in all your literature, why are you not incorporating the studies that have been around for five years now – and these are the only studies you’ve got to work with because they’re the only studies in the world – that are revealing significant – up to a 100% chance – risks of catching STIs regardless of using a condom. Why is this not on your website, why are teenagers not being told in school, and will you rectify that?

LUSH: Teenagers. The aim is to protect 46, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

teenagers who are having their first, or infrequent, sexual encounters. We know that the people they’re having sex with may well have an STI. There isn’t good information on the protection per single episode, but we believe it would give a good level of protection for each single episode, and combined with reporting and treatment of STIs, this is a useful way to protect individuals and the population by reducing rates.

INVESTIGATE: Well I’ve quoted you two studies following teenagers over six months, and even those who consistently used condoms, and in some cases almost exactly the same number of condom-users caught sexually transmitted diseases as those who didn’t use condoms. So we’re going to be saying the “No Rubba, No Hubba” camapign is an absolute fraud. If you guys don’t put this information in there, how can anyone trust what the Ministry of Health says?

LUSH: I don’t have anything to reply to that, except to say that I’m certainly comfortable with Hubba.

INVESTIGATE: But how can you be comfortable with it, in the face of 40-odd studies quoted by the WHO? How can you look at those studies and tell me that there’s nothing you have to do to Hubba and everything on your website is OK, when I’ve just proven scientifically that it’s a crock.?

LUSH: I don’t think you have proven that.

INVESTIGATE: We’ve had this discus-

sion. You have no studies to back up your claim. You can make the claim for HIV and that’s all you can make it for.

LUSH: You’ve raised a number of studies that show a low level of protection or no protection. There are problems, as we know, in the methodology of doing this. We know that what we see in HIV is generalisable. We know the physical characteristics of the condom.

INVESTIGATE: But that relates to pregnancy and semen. It doesn’t relate to herpes or HPV, or syphilis, chlamydia and so forth.

Those are different organisms. You are trying to extrapolate something which is specific to condom design – i.e., stopping semen from going through, and you’re trying to extrapolate that out to venereal disease generally and you can’t, there’s not one study in the world that shows this.

LUSH: Still, on herpes, I did mention that herpes can occur when condoms are used.

INVESTIGATE: The studies show that at best there will be a 40% reduction in herpes infection rates if a condom is always and consistently used.

LUSH: That’s a spectacular result.

INVESTIGATE: It’s a spectacular result at a population level ...

LUSH: ... and at an individual level as well.

INVESTIGATE: Not if the individual hasn’t been told. It’s only spectacular if the individual knows before slapping a condom on that there’s still a 60% chance they’ll catch herpes if they sleep with someone who’s affected over a period of time. And you’re not telling them that.

LUSH: You shouldn’t have sexual activity if you have lesions.

INVESTIGATE: But there’s nothing on your website, nothing, that gives people any advice of the risks. I’ll turn this around. You guys are going after the makers of vitamin supplements, for heaven’s sake, and dietary supplements, and saying that because there is a slight risk that somebody may be misled that these things should all be tightly regulated, and here you are promoting the biggest load of old codswallop I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t stack up against the scientific evidence.

You’re not prepared to make changes to your website or the way you do it. You are holding onto irrelevant studies to try and justify your position – if the Ministry was in private practice it’d be sued!

LUSH: I have no response to that.

INVESTIGATE: No, and with respect I’m not trying to get at you. But in general terms the Ministry of Health would be down on a private operator like a ton of bricks, as they are, and here’s the MoH refusing, refusing to tell young people the real truth about condoms and the risks. Nowhere on your website

or your material is that point raised, and you’re saying “we’re not going to change it”, and I’m saying to you the best scientific evidence in the world says what you’re saying is a crock. You’ve got no response to that apart from an HIV study that’s irrelevant, and I think you guys are on dangerous ground. That’s my personal opinion.

LUSH: Yep, I’m hearing you.

INVESTIGATE: So I’ll ask the question again: Are you prepared to start giving much more information about the failures of condoms based on the scientific evidence to date, so that people can make informed decisions for themselves? You say abstinence doesn’t work, but if people knew that every time they had sex there was a real 50% chance of their penis dropping off, do you think the abstinence rates would actually grow? I think they would. So abstinence can’t be taken in isolation. Abstinence is relevant to the amount of information and risk that is out there.

For the past 20 years we’ve been sold a safe sex message that says if you use a condom you’re protected.

LUSH: I don’t believe we’ve said that. We’ve said that if people are going to make a choice to be sexually active, then they can get a level of protection by using condoms. We’ve never said this is absolute, but we believe it is good protection they can get with consistent and proper use.

INVESTIGATE: Yeah, but your definition of good protection at the start of this interview was between two and 18% failure [a 98% - 82% protection], now there’s not one study in the world that shows you’ll get that level of protection from a condom with these diseases at all. Best case scenario, 50% protection, worst case zero protection.

LUSH: I’m talking about the condom failure rate. That is thought to be the way transmission can occur.

INVESTIGATE: Yes, but what I’m saying to you is that real tests in the real world are showing the transmission rate is much higher.

There is a very good chance that our current sexual disease explosion is directly a result of the safe sex campaign, because people are not being told the full story about the risks and failures. And it seems you’re not even aware of the failures in the Ministry.

I find it staggering. I don’t know how many kids have got a disease now that’s making them potentially infertile, and certainly giving them health issues, because we haven’t faced up to this. And how many women die of cervical cancer, because of this?

LUSH: The Ministry is quite clear on screening policy for cervical cancer.

INVESTIGATE: Yes, but screening is after the fact. You’re not giving people a choice before they endanger themselves. In fact the material on the Hubba site says condoms will protect you from genital warts. Your information is grossly inaccurate and possibly dangerous.

LUSH: I don’t believe that any of the information is dangerous. I do agree with you that abstinence is something that needs to be considered and that is an option that young people may wish to explore. However there are sexually active people and the best way of protecting themselves is condoms. We’re confident of that and we’ve had an expert group who have advised us on this.

INVESTIGATE: Well you’d better be going back to those experts and ask “why didn’t you tell us this?”. There is no study in the world that is giving people the confidence that you believe exists. And I can’t believe that an NZ taxpayer-funded Ministry of Health, with the responsibilities that the Ministry has for public safety, can justify the stand that it is currently taking as if the iceberg is not in front of you. It’s there all right.

LUSH: The iceberg is what?

INVESTIGATE: The iceberg is the cold hard reality that condoms don’t work, and we’ve got a generation of kids now who’ve caught STDs because they believed the lie.

LUSH: I think the kids who’ve caught the STDs are ones who haven’t used condoms or haven’t used them in a way that’s allowed them to protect themselves.

INVESTIGATE: Well, the international studies are showing that up to 100% of those using condoms correctly are still catching STDs. So again, you have no scientific basis for your anecdotal claim.

LUSH: That points to the problems they have in using them and using them consistently.

INVESTIGATE: And again, name me one scientific study that supports what you are claiming.

LUSH: I’ll take you back to the Cochrane study on HIV. INVESTIGATE: But you’ve got the WHO meta-analysis in front of you. It’s telling you something you don’t want to hear, and so you’re ignoring it.

LUSH: We’re going over the same territory now. We think condoms provide good protection from sexually transmitted diseases.

INVESTIGATE: How good is “good”?

LUSH: This is a difficult thing. Looking at what’s happened in HIV, we’d say an 80% reduction in risk.

INVESTIGATE: So you’d say there’s only a 20% risk when they use a condom with someone else who’s infected, of catching it, and that’s despite every single study I’ve taken you through today?

LUSH: I would have thought [the protection] was bigger than that. Obviously evidence in this area is difficult to come by.

INVESTIGATE: Doug Lush, Ministry of Health, appreciate your time.

FOOTNOTE

A

s this issue was going to press, Doug Lush sent a letter to Investigate to fur ther clarify the Ministry’s position. He urged the magazine to take cognizance of the fact that despite the bleak data in the studies, the World Health Organisation was still urging countries not to give up on condoms because they are effective at cutting population rates of STDs. The WHO also noted that more studies are needed on the subject.

With respect to the WHO, we disagree. While one medical study could be treated as a rogue result, the medical journals are publishing study after study reaching the same conclusion. No study is showing any result backing up the fairy story that “a condom, properly used” will pre-

vent STDs. While Investigate accepts that condoms certainly have a role in preventing HIV, and possibly other diseases at a population level, our major issue is one of informed consent. Currently, there are no warnings in sex education publicity material that reflect the grave failings in regard to condoms and STDs. It is only appropriate for condoms to continue being promoted if, and only if, the public is given the real facts about the disease transmission rates through condoms. If the public is not given the information from the dozens of medical studies published so far, then the Ministry is effectively conducting a new Unfortunate Experiment, only this time it affects hundreds of thousands of New Zea-

landers, their health, their fertility and possibly even their lives.

As we said in the interview, people may change their sexual behaviours if they believe there is a real risk to themselves, despite the use of a condom. Of course, others won’t change. But that should be the public’s choice, based on their right to know, not secret information hidden away because the Ministry of Health and Family Planning Association don’t want to upset their own publicity schemes.

This is a national disgrace, and the Ministry of Health’s continued denial of the only hard evidence in the world is an absolute scandal.

Ian Wishart, Editor

i

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 47

HIGHWAY ROBBERY How traffic cops hijacked the police force

On an ordinary Auckland night, is it true that there are more police traffic patrols on the roads hunting motorists than there are dedicated to crime and emergency response?

As IAN WISHART reports, the answer appears to be yes.

48, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

T

he pain and anguish in the mother’s voice was palpable. “My thirteen year old daughter has been raped by older men, and the cops don’t give a damn!” She was right. And it was shocking. And it’s the second such story to have come to this magazine’s attention in as many weeks. And it’s a story that probably repeats itself in numerous households every month: 13 year old daughter of a solo mum falls in with a bad crowd, starts to go through her teenage rebellious phase and puberty, runs away from home in protest at restrictions, ends up sleeping with men in their late teens and early 20s, gets beaten up, given drugs, returns home with her life in wreckage, wanting to kill herself. Mother calls police, complains of statutory rape of a minor, supplying of narcotics and assault – is told by police, “sorry, nothing we can do”.

Later, the same girl, still underage, will end up in the arms of an older man again, and be beaten so viciously that bones are broken. And still, Auckland police refuse to act.

Has New Zealand’s law enforcement regime really come to this, to the point where children cannot be protected from predatory men simply because the police are either underresourced, overstretched or – in a fit of postmodern social liberalism – perhaps

police have become so used to the sexualisation of teenage girls that they see 13 year olds as women capable of making up their own minds about sex?

Apparently it may be a combination of all three.

For years now, debate has raged over whether the police have become too revenue-focused, and not tough enough on crime in the community. And for just as many years, police bosses and their minister, George Hawkins, have denied it. Now, however, Investigate has obtained some information that casts the issue in a disturbing new light.

Under the Official Information Act, the magazine asked police bosses in Auckland, Counties-Manukau, and Rodney/North Shore/Waitakere districts how many police vehicles were on the regions roads at three specific times of the day: 1400 hrs, 1630hrs and 2000hrs. What we were seeking was a snapshot of how many cars were on traffic/road policing duties, and how many were rostered as crime patrols for the same period.

On Thursday February 10 this year, at 2pm across the whole Auckland region, there were 78 police cars and speed camera vans whose sole purpose was road traffic policing and nothing else. By 4.30pm that figure had dropped to 47 police vehicles, as some of the speed camera units started packing it in for the day. By 8pm that evening, there were still 52 cars on the road – the increase a result of alcohol checkpoint patrols coming on duty.

Remember, these figures don’t include the general duties police who are still required to make at least one, and as many as three, traffic policing “contacts” per hour of road travel.

For the record, Monday or Tuesday evenings, and Saturday and Sunday afternoons, are the times in the Auckland region that you are least likely to encounter a police traffic unit in your travels. Even so, at those times there were still a minimum 32 traffic patrol units across the region, solely rostered to road duties.

S

o the next question we asked police was a no-brainer: At those same times, in that same week, how many police cars/staff were on the road rostered to general duties/CIB, I-cars etc? In hindsight, we made a grave mistake leaving “etc” in the question. Judging by the answer that followed, police bosses including anything with wheels in their calculations, including their grandmothers’ shopping trundlers.

On that same Thursday, February 10, at 2pm, a seemingly massive 148 police cars containing 252 police officers were on the roads chasing criminals, rather than motorists. By 4.30pm, that had dropped to 117 cars and 194 staff, while on Thursday night in Auckland there were 102 police cars patrolling for criminals and 162 police officers inside them.

Thursday, unlike traffic, wasn’t the busiest day, however. Wednesday February 9 had seen 173 police crime cars on the road at 2pm, 114 units by 4.30pm and 101 units on the road at 8pm.

Yet on Friday and Saturday nights, said to be the busiest nights of the week in terms of crime, only 93 and 84 police crime patrols were on duty across the Auckland region. In fact, if you want to commit a crime, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights are the best times of the week to pick because the number of “official” police crime patrols is lower then than at any other time, while the number of traffic patrols is highest.

However, here’s where the story gets interesting. Investigate had been advised three years ago by a police senior sergeant that at times in central Auckland city, the number of cars available to respond immediately to a late afternoon bank robbery might be as low as only two or three. “In fact,” he added, “if an offender picked their time carefully, we might not actually have a car within ten minutes of a CBD crime scene”.

So naturally, when we received official figures suggesting up to 173 police cars on patrol in Auckland at any one time, dedicated to crime and general duties, we ran it past senior police officers in the region.

“That is just not true!” exclaimed one. “It just isn’t true. If you’re trying to suggest to me that the communications centre can lay hands on 173 cars and 300 staff, already on the road, you’re making it up! To get that level of staff in the count, they’d need to include our receptionist and the tea ladies.”

“I’ll tell you now,” confirmed another, “that across the three Auckland police districts, I would expect there to be around 30 cars available for priority one callouts – around ten per district. And that can fluctuate depending on how busy we get. Sometimes we just don’t have any cars available. But if the brass are giving you figures to say we have 173 cars available – that’s a joke.”

Another to burst out laughing when he heard the figures was Police Association boss Greg O’Connor.

“Nothing like it. Nowhere near it. It’s disappointing when this kind of stuff is released because the boys on the front line know it’s not real.”

“They’re simply running interference for the Government,” growls MP Ron Mark down the phone. It’s a subject the high profile NZ First politician has taken a keen interest in over recent years.

In June, 2003, Investigate published “Rescuing 111”, where we reported, “Leaked documents suggest the collapse of the police emergency communications system is imminent, and public lives may already be at risk.”

The article noted that the 111 system – and indeed the entire police communications system – was badly run, with patrols facing rioting mobs sometimes waiting up to ten minutes before they could even get clear radio space to call for back-up. Not only that, but our report warned that callers to the emergency lines were increasingly getting the runaround, and that sooner or later a member of the public would die as a result of failings in the police communications system.

With the death of Iraena Asher last year, that grim prediction came true, a point that Police Minister George Hawkins was forced to remember when facing a parliamentary question in May this year: “Does the Prime Minister seriously expect the country to accept this Minister as being competent,” asked NZ First’s Ron Mark, “when he ignored the advice given to him on 29 September 2002 by a communications officer as to the problems with the emergency 111 system; when he ignored the advice given to him by his own Commissioner of Police, dated 21 November 2002, highlighting the problems of the 111 system, in Auckland in particular; when he failed to take on board the very serious article published in Investigate in June 2003, and which cautioned that there would be a death; when he failed to approve the recommendations in the police bid for May 2003; and when he told this House that traffic officers were not sitting on the side of the road with their radios turned off, and we now know they were?”

To which Justice Minister Phil Goff, standing in for the hapless Hawkins, responded: “I will answer two of those questions. Firstly, the member is not quoting accurately from the first communication he talked about. That communication – he can table it if he likes – does not deal with communications staff; it deals with general staff. Secondly, it was not ignored. It was passed on to the Commissioner of Police, because it was an operational matter. Thirdly, this Minister, unlike Winston Peters when he was Deputy Prime Minister, has delivered an increase in the Budget for police each and every year that he has been Minister. I refer Ron Mark to 1997, when the Budget cut the appropriations on Budget night for the police. Winston Peters cut the police Budget. George Hawkins has seen it increase each and every year for 5 years.”

Pointedly, the only question Goff avoided was the one about Investigate’s June 2003 prediction. Little wonder – here’s what Hawkins told the magazine back then when we put it directly to the minister that the communications system was dangerously close to collapse: July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 49

“If the priority was ‘forget the bloody traffic, your job is to smash organized crime’, then we would start to see some headway in that area. We’re not. We’re not even treading water. We’re sinking.

Our communities are not safe, our children are not safe. And all for what? We’re chasing bloody traffic tickets”

“There are no known issues that require attention…police are not aware of any major issues involving the communications centres.

“Police are confident in the knowledge that the Comcens (com centres), which are a mission critical function of policing, are working efficiently, effectively and producing the required outcomes.

“Police have deployed sufficient resources to these areas to achieve the required outcomes.”

Within the public service chain of command when reporting to their ministers, it is likely that Police Commissioner Rob Robinson was aware of the answer that his department provided to Hawkins for Investigate, and that he endorsed it. It is surprising that Robinson has been allowed to remain in his position despite the release of the Corboy report in May that pilloried the police communications system, just as Investigate had predicted two years earlier.

Instead of spending money to urgently fix the police infrastructure, George Hawkins was reported in this magazine as saying that of the many ways Government could spend money on police, “the most satisfying is investing in police property”, as he cut the ribbon on a shiny new building somewhere.

Indeed, say his critics, the Hawk fiddled while the police emergency response system burned.

This is, of course, the same Hawk who perched motionless during the leaky homes crisis when he had the housing portfolio. Presumably he didn’t use the same builders to construct the new police stations.

This time, though, Ron Mark is gunning for Hawkins and the Labour Government for allowing law and order to fall into almost as bad a state of disrepair as a house built by the armed services from dodgy timber on the entrance to private land in a training exercise.

W

hat the figures released to Investigate show, officially, is roughly a two to one ratio of general duties cars to road traffic policing units. But if you trust the comments of senior police officers in a position to know, and there are only around thirty patrol cars chasing crime in the entire 1.1 million metropolis of greater Auckland, and 78 traffic units, the positions are reversed. If what police officers are telling Investigate is correct, the real figure is at least a 50/50 split between crime and traffic, and sometimes running at two traffic revenue units for every genuine police car on the road.

Anecdotal proof of this can be found in a story that broke in July 2003. On a Wednesday night, a group of youths in a stolen white Lexus Altezza took it for a joyride up Auckland’s busy Ponsonby Road – on the footpath. Pedestrians and outside café diners leapt for their lives as the vehicle ploughed up the pavement then sped off up the street. A security guard tailed the stolen car in his own vehicle, giving the police communications centre a running commentary on what was 50, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

happening. Incredibly, the Lexus, reaching speeds of up to 175km/h, whizzed past a police alcohol checkpoint on the motorway where eight patrol cars were stationed, almost colliding with a magazine editor driving home from a talk radio shift, weaving in and out of traffic dangerously.

Even more incredibly, despite being given a live commentary from the pursuing security guard, police control did not alert the eight patrol cars at the booze bus, nor did even one of the officers there lift a finger to catch the menace.

According to official reports, there were 18 crime patrol cars “logged on” the system at that time, but none of them could be diverted from other jobs to chase the stolen car. Eighteen patrol cars. And somewhere between 50 and seventy patrols on road traffic duties, none of which could be dispatched for this blatantly criminal dangerous driving.

But it got even better. The stolen Lexus sped to a service station and robbed it, deliberately knocking over a forecourt attendant as they made their escape.

Only then, only after the car thieves turned dangerous drivers turned desperadoes robbed a service station, did police manage to show up, with two patrol cars. By which time, the offenders had gone.

The security guard had spent 25 minutes on the phone to police. At no time during that 25 minutes did one single patrol car become available in New Zealand’s biggest city, even though more than half a dozen remained parked on the side of the motorway watching as the robbers sped past.

Investigate’s queries at the time as to why the booze bus patrol cars didn’t give chase were met with the response, “Police are financially contracted to spend a certain number of hours on dedicated LTSA duties like checkpoints, and we cannot break those contracts.”

Police Association president Greg O’Connor, speaking to the media at the time, acknowledged the difficulties as well.

“The reality of it is there is road policing that is ... organised somewhat differently to the reactive policing ... It’s the reactive policing which generally is where the shortages show up.”

Although the magazine offered its own eyewitness evidence of the chase to police, no police officer ever called back to follow up.

Earlier this year National’s Tony Ryall asked written questions in parliament about the allocation of resources in one district. Ron Mark says the answers were illuminating: “The answers to those written questions are crystal clear: at least 50% of the police resources available on a given day in the Tauranga/Bay of Plenty District, at least 50% of those resources were dedicated to traffic.

“That frontline traffic officers make up 50% of the total police deployment in a day, is ludicrous, quite ludicrous, especially when you consider that the other 50% doesn’t just include crime patrol cars, but also police sitting at their desks in supervisory roles. When I talk about total police deployment we’re not just talking about GD (general duties) officers, we’re talking about all the support staff behind that, who are lumped into the other 50%, so the number of traffic cars would far outweigh the number of general duties patrol cars on those figures.

“These figures that Investigate has been given are a continuance, I believe, of senior officers in the police force seeking to deceive and mislead the public. To suggest to me that two days after Waitangi, at 2pm, there are 318 staff and 161 vehicles available is absolute crap, and I don’t believe it. On that same day, every one of those 318 officers supposedly dedicated to general duties are also being required to complete a certain number of road traffic policing hours. “ According to Mark, the price of getting frontline police to issue hundreds of thousands of traffic infringement notices is a huge drop in the ability to get a police officer to respond to any criminal matter that doesn’t involve an immediate risk to life.

“It’s a massive backload on the taxpayer and the public who buy insurance, because when burglaries are not investigated they don’t get solved and premiums go through the roof.

What does it mean? It means that detectives, rather than continuing their investigations on files that are open, are being pulled off those cases to go and do eight hours worth of traffic checkpoint duty issuing seatbelt infringements, as has happened and as is continuing to happen, despite the lies I’m told. It means that detectives, instead of investigating allegations of sexual assault, investigating those burglaries, investigating those stolen cars, tracking down the heavy recidivist criminal, is being diverted to traffic and public confidence goes down.

“People who should be hunting down, locating and busting meth labs and organized crime simply don’t have the resources, the time or the priority allocated to them to do that.

“The information I have tells me that if the priority was back on drug squads – which we don’t have any more – instead of traffic duty, if the priority was ‘forget the bloody traffic, your job is to smash organized crime’, then we would start to see some headway in that

area. We’re not. We’re not even treading water.

We’re sinking. Our communities are not safe, our children are not safe. And all for what?

We’re chasing bloody traffic tickets.”

It is the failing of the 111 system, and more significantly the failure to get police on the ground to respond to emergencies, that is driving an increasing growth in armed neighbourhood support groups, particularly in rural and semi-rural areas.

“We had some riff-raff steal some gear out of the shed the other night,” one farmer just north of Auckland told Investigate, “and a few years ago a woman down the road was held at gunpoint in her home for hours in a nasty home invasion.” The nearest police station is 15 to 20 minutes away, and that’s if it’s manned, so around here our neighbourhood support group is armed. We can be at someone’s home in around two minutes, and we’ll sort it out.”

The Bentley case in the Bay of Plenty last year highlighted the problem. Maggie Bentley spent an hour hidden in bushes on her farm with a cordless phone while masked intruders beat her husband almost beyond recognition and fired a shotgun in the house. Although

Maggie had dialed 111 from Te Puke, the call diverted to the Auckland control centre. It took police more than an hour to arrive at the Te Puke scene – a situation the police minister described as “textbook” – and during that time Maggie Bentley was prevented from phoning neighbours for help by the 111 calltaker locking her phone line.

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n our June 2003 article in Investigate, an internal police memorandum leaked to the magazine criticized the practice of linking police radio channels to other cities, warning “It is only a matter of when, not if, an officer is injured because he cannot get on the radio for help or backup.”

Another police officer was quoted as saying at the time, “the reason cops are standing off a bit is because we’re not getting any backup, they can’t get on the radio.”

In the Bentley case, it was a crime victim who got hurt, because of delays in getting Auckland police to mobilize patrols to the Bay of Plenty scene. Even so, the Bentley case highlights a bigger problem for the NZ Police – an inability to deal urgently with armed confrontations. Because of budget restrictions, there’s July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 51

a shortage of body armour for frontline officers, and many officers have chosen to import state of the art body armour from the US rather than wait for Police Minister George Hawkins to push it up the priority list. Nonetheless, a lack of resource means the police tactical response to armed standoffs like the Bentley case or Aramoana is to set up a safe assembly point (safe for police) and wait. In the US, by contrast, heavily-armed and armoured SWAT teams are more likely to move quickly into a situation.

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eciding how to tackle a gunman is always difficult for police.

In an incident outlined in Zero Alpha, the official history of the police armed offenders squad, police were called to an eviction in Christchurch where an unstable tenant in a boarding house had obtained a shotgun. Although the landlady escaped to raise the alarm, another elderly boarding house tenant was in a room on the same floor as the gunman.

This extract from Zero Alpha shows what happened.

Section 1.3 decided to carry out an “unannounced forced entry”, as the available cover for staff was inadequate should the offender attempt to leave the flat, and the other occupant on the floor could not be removed.

Sergeant McEntee (O/C 1.3 Section) and Constable Ashton, took up positions on one side of the doorway, and Constables Foster and Barlass, the other.

Dogs Lamb, remained in the vicinity of the stairs behind Foster and Barlass.

As the flat’s door was securely shut, entry could not be immediately gained.

Constable Ashton forced the door with a sledgehammer and when partially open, looked into the room.

Tim Ashton : “I looked around into the bedroom. It was in darkness due to the time of day, I think it was about 8 am on a winter’s morning, a southerly day in Christchurch, grey and overcast, and the windows were pulled. The curtains were closed and it was on the southerly side of the house. It was quite dark.

I saw a shadow lying on the couch. I couldn’t see if he was holding anything and I just peeped around the left hand side of the door so as not to expose myself too far. There was no eye contact because it was dark and I could just make out something lying down. I couldn’t even make out what it was.

Almost immediately there was a loud flash and a bang and I felt like someone had smacked me in the hands or punched me in the face.

There wasn’t actually any immediate pain, just more, “What the hell happened” sort of thing in polite language.

My immediate reaction was to try and pull the trigger in the direction of the person lying down, even though at that stage I still couldn’t see a firearm, but I was obviously aware I had been shot.

I tried to pull the trigger and remember thinking, “The f-ing thing doesn’t work” and then I looked at my hands and, well to me at that stage, they looked like a couple of squashed tomatoes and the skin was split open and bleeding and I thought, “Oh s..., my hands don’t work”.

In training we were told to switch hands to the other hand and I looked at my other hand and that was stuffed as well.

So I slid down the wall and then there was a loud boom and there was a hole appeared in the hallway and at that stage I thought, “This is not a good day, my hands don’t work, I can’t defend myself, I can’t shoot my gun and he’s going to come out here and shoot me”.

I wasn’t actually in a huge panic, I just thought, “Oh s...”.

It’s a strange feeling, it’s like not being brave or anything, it’s just a sort of dull acceptance of what is going to happen.

And then a lot of the boys yelled out, “Throw some gas, throw some gas” or “Fire a shot”. I think it was “Throw gas” and I yelled out, “I can’t, my hands are f...ed”.

And then some gas went in and unbeknown to me the shot gun pellets had knocked out the eye piece of my gas mask and consequently the gas mask was useless ‘cause it then filled up with gas.

At that stage I couldn’t breathe and I was in a little bit of pain. So I got up and thought, “S... I’ve got to get out of here somehow” so I walked down the hallway, 52, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

smashed my way through an adjacent door and went over to the window and stuck my head out the window and yelled at one of the guys, “Get me a f...ing ladder”.

He looked up and said, “We don’t have one”.

This conversation seemed a bit inane at the time but he jogged off somewhere and then one of the guys came up and said, “Come on”. I went downstairs. I was still standing at that stage. I obviously had to go out through the gas and everything and what happened was, then I got gassed again, just to add another icing on the cake and I staggered outside and I fell over in the street because I was gassed, not because of the injury to my hand.

This whole procedure probably took about - from the time of being shot, perhaps five minutes, if it was that long. It is difficult to gauge in respect of time if you are ever involved in anything like that.

It’s all perfectly crystal clear in your mind and it’s one of those events you can recall with true clarity or your version of it anyway. Other people will probably see it differently.

Once outside I was assisted into the ambulance and I received shotgun pellets in the teeth, there is still a pellet inside my head which the Neurosurgeon, Dr McFarlane, a true gentleman of a man who dealt with me, told me that the injuries were such that if the pellet had penetrated any further in the brain, I could have been killed and obviously that didn’t happen or I wouldn’t be making this recording now.

So the injuries to my hand were extensive and the thumb and forefinger will never work properly again. The surgeon Dr Sally Langley, another true professional, did her best to patch up the damage.”

Had police been able to access better body armour and better technology, would that outcome have been different? Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

In Parliament last month, United Future’s Marc Alexander summed up the views of many with a question to Prime Minister Helen Clark on the devastating findings of the Corboy review of the 111 system.

“Has the scathing review of the national management structures of the police 111 system, which are credited in the report as being “essentially defunct with low staffing levels, woeful and inadequate training, self-defeating, inefficient, and risky” changed the Prime Minister’s mind about the level of confidence she has in the Minister and in the Commissioner of Police; if not, what would?”

Receiving an answer in the negative, Alexander followed up: “Can the Prime Minister explain why the Government has chosen to advance all her intrusive, busybody, social engineering policies while core State responsibilities, such as the safety and security concerns of the public – concerns long recognised by anyone who had even a marginal interest in law and order issues – have been all but marginalised, as is clearly outlined by the damning review of the police 111 system?”

To which Justice Minister Phil Goff, standing in for Clark, responded: “Of course, the whole emphasis has been on the safety and security of the public. That is why we have 1,000 additional members of the police force and why we have $200 million a year extra being spent.

That is an indication of the commitment of this Government to better policing and to the safety and security of the public.”

Except, based on the figures Investigate has seen, nearly all the growth in the police force is in the roadside tax division, rather than the crimefighting side.

Although the Government is now earmarking $45 million to fix the 111 system, the serious questions about the traffic/crime balance within the police go unanswered. For Ron Mark, the solution is simple: “It is New Zealand First policy to de-merge traffic and police. We would put traffic patrols back under the control of the LTSA, and fund the police force to concentrate on crime and emergencies.”

Whether Mark gets that chance will depend on how strongly voters feel about their safety, and whether the public continue to have confidence in Labour’s policing priorities.

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A WING AND A PRAYER Can New Zealand cope with a bird flu pandemic?

Bird flu: It’s on the rise in Asia, and experts agree it’s only a matter of time before it – or another killer flu – shows up in our part of the world. How ready are we? Is any preparation enough? As SHAUN DAVIES discovered, the world is overdue for a flu pandemic, and even the best preparations could leave thousands of New Zealanders dead

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Through unsanitary wet markets, undercooked food and other means, the virus is known to have made the leap from bird to human 89 times since January 2004.

In 52 of these cases the infection was fatal – a kill rate of 58 per cent

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or post-war generations unused to death on a global scale, it’s not easy to comprehend the enormity of a disaster like the Spanish Flu. The worst health disaster since the Black Plague, in 1918 and 1919 it killed an estimated 40 million worldwide - more than twice as many people as died in World War One – and infected around twenty per cent of the global population.

Originating in the US, the virus spread to every corner of the globe. In India alone it killed seventeen million, while in Fiji fourteen per cent of the population was wiped out in two weeks. Australia got off comparatively lightly with 12,000 deaths, but there were still massive disruptions to everyday life. Authorities closed cinemas, schools, public transport and churches. One town in the US even banned its citizens from shaking hands.

The Spanish Flu was not the only influenza pandemic of the twentieth century. The Asian Flu of 1957, which started in China and spread to every continent, killed at least one million worldwide. Just 11 years later, in 1968, the Hong Kong flu caused a relatively mild pandemic that killed 750,000 people.

In fact, for at least the past 200 years we’ve averaged an influenza pandemic once every 20 to 30 years. Seeing as it’s more than 30 years since the Hong Kong Flu, experts are worried that the world is overdue. The World Health Organisation’s regional director for the South Pacific, Dr Shigeru Omi, warned this year that ‘the world is now in the gravest possible danger of a pandemic’.

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The reason for all this alarm is a deadly strain of avian influenza called H5N1. This is the virus that has devastated Asia’s poultry industries. More than 140 million birds have died or been destroyed and the combined losses to GDP in affected nations is estimated at between US$10 billion to US$15 billion so far.

But H5N1 also has a nastily efficient knack of killing humans, and that’s what’s got authorities in a spin.

Through unsanitary wet markets, undercooked food and other means, the virus is known to have made the leap from bird to human 89 times since January 2004.

In 52 of these cases the infection was fatal – a kill rate of 58 per cent.

At present, H5N1 hasn’t been proven to jump from human to human. But in a process called ‘antigenic shift’, it can exchange genetic information with other influenza viruses, forming completely new strains. If H5N1 came into contact with another virus in just one human host it could potentially gain the ability to move easily from one person to another. And if that happens, a new pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu could be imminent.

Dr Ian Gust is the chairman of the WHO Influenza Collaborating Centre in Melbourne. He would play a vital role in co-ordinating the global response to a pandemic, tracking the progress of the virus, advising the director-general of the WHO and providing governments around the world with up-to-date information.

‘The reason many people are concerned about the cur-

rent situation is that something very unusual has happened in the bird population,’ he says. ‘We’ve seen almost simultaneously in Asia major outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza, killing initially thousands, then millions and now probably tens of millions of birds. It’s become endemic, certainly in ducks, in much of Southeast Asia.’

H5N1 is asymptomatic in ducks - and Professor Gust says this is a big problem. Because people can’t tell which birds are infected and which are healthy, the risk of a viral leap is greatly increased. The more times H5N1 crosses to a human host, the more likely it is to swap proteins with an ordinary influenza virus.

Although there have been no definitive cases of human to human transmission, suspicion centres on a case where a Thai mother died after cradling her sick daughter for hours in her arms. In this case, the mutated strain may have died out with its second victim, but perhaps health authorities won’t be so fortunate on the next occasion.

If the virus did gain the ability to jump from human to human, modern transportation would spread it around the world far more quickly than in 1918. ‘Then it essentially went at the speed of individuals, horses, trains and ships. Now infected individuals are likely to be moved around the world quickly by aeroplane ... so one would guess that the spread is likely to be quite brisk.’

But just how likely is this much-feared mutation or recombination in H5N1? Are we a hair’s breadth away

from disaster? Or are the scenarios being played out in the media exaggerated?

‘The answer is we don’t know, other than that the probability is low,’ Dr Gust says. ‘Over the last 15 months you’ve had tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of people living closely beside infected birds, which you would think gives a significantly increased risk of this rare event occurring... This tells you that it is a lowrisk phenomenon.’

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ven if a worst-case outbreak of avian flu is statistically unlikely, local authorities are on high alert. Australia’s Health Minister Tony Abbott recently said that an H5N1 pandemic could be a ‘worldwide biological version of the Indian Ocean tsunami’, and the Federal Government has dedicated $133.6 million over five years to preparing for a pandemic. And although New Zealand has had a ‘pandemic preparedness plan’ in place since 1999, New Zealand virologist Lance Jennings told National Radio recently that if and when bird flu adapts to humans, it would spread to this country in ‘a matter of hours’.

There’s another factor to this, however, and that is the opportunity for the pandemic to spread before authorities realise the extent of what they’re dealing with. At the height of the SARS scare in 2003, it took weeks before quarantine and screening procedures were in place at New Zealand’s ports and airports. And then, while the Ministry of Health confidently boasted about its July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 57

SARS killed just 770 people. But it did an estimated $15 billion worth of damage to the economies of Southeast Asia. In a worst-case scenario, H5N1 would cause tens of millions of deaths. What damage would that do to the global economy?

preparedness, hospital workers were revealing to the media the shocking state of readiness inside hospitals and medical facilities.

In other words, like an episode from Dad’s Army, the Ministry of Health has a track record of issuing soothing statements to reassure the public while it panics madly behind the scenes.

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f further concern, nowhere in the Ministry of Health’s pandemic action plan, available on its website, is there any reference to screening airports. At best, the MoH only intends to issue “travel advisories”, which means New Zealand could be bombarded with pandemic-carrying air passengers without any attempt to steer them towards medical attention or possible quarantine.

Given that the disease will originate overseas, an oversight in the form of no border control seems hard to explain.

Over the past year, Australia has amassed the single largest stockpile of antiviral drugs in the world. These ‘neuraminidase inhibitors’ prevent infection in healthy people and cure infected people if administered during the onset of symptoms. They’d be our frontline defence in the event of an outbreak, administered to essential service workers and groups deemed most at risk from the virus.

In New Zealand, health authorities have ordered 800,000 doses of the drug Tamiflu (oseltamivir) which they’re hoping will be strong enough to lessen the number of fatalities and the severity of any outbreak.

The Australian government has also entered into contract with pharmaceutical companies CSL and Sanofi Pasteur to supply 50 million doses of any pandemic flu

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vaccine that became available – enough to protect every Australian citizen. However, it would take up to six months for a vaccine to be produced and distributed in large numbers, and some experts say that by that stage the virus will have already worked its way through the population.

The director of the communicable diseases branch of NSW Health, Jeremy McAnulty, would help co-ordinating the health response to an influenza pandemic in New South Wales. He says that the states have been hard at work creating influenza pandemic action plans that complement the national approach.

‘Early on what you’d do is try to identify each case individually, rapidly if possible, and isolate them and then identify their contacts to try and prevent further spreads’, he says. ‘We’d be looking out for cases as they came into the country, you’d be sending out communications to all doctors, and we’d put people in isolation and we’d have certain powers that allow people to be held for certain diseases.’

There would also be attempts to trace the networks of people the infected individual had been in contact with. Double-checks to ensure correct diagnosis would be mandatory, and infected people would be interviewed and counselled. But the strategy would change if the situation became worse.

‘As numbers increase further you use other strategies such as looking after people at home and community caring for people. At some stage, depending on the numbers involved, it would involve cancelling routine operations in hospitals.’

There could also be closures of football stadiums, cinemas and schools, as well as cancellations of public events. The states would be required to keep essential

services running as absenteeism shot through the roof.

Hospitals would be overloaded and community centres converted into isolation wards.

‘If it does happen it will be something that our country will not forget in a hurry’, Tony Abbott said at a recent press conference. But he also claimed that Australia is ‘better prepared than probably any other country in the world.’

Professor Peter Curson, director of the Health Studies program at Macquarie University, does not share Abbott’s confidence. He has just completed a paper for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which sharply criticises the government’s pandemic action plan on numerous points.

‘There is no comment anywhere [in the action plan] about how they’d handle fear, panic or public reaction’, Professor Curson says. ‘I’ve spent 25 years looking at public reaction and human behaviour in previous epidemics in Australia and there’s no doubt that people have an underlying fear of contagion, of infection, particularly when there’s no specific cure or specific treatment.’

‘Official measures put in place like increased surveillance, quarantine, limited supplies of antivirals, masks, restricted travel and so on will heighten public fear and panic, and that’s not mentioning the role of the media of course, who undoubtedly would play a major role.’

The government has a basic duty to protect Australians from outbreaks of disease, says Professor Curson, pointing out that in the event of a major pandemic there would be nowhere near enough antivirals to protect all Australian citizens. It would be six months before a vaccine became available – leaving a huge proportion of the population unprotected.

‘The priority plan says antivirals will be delivered to high risk groups, and by that they mean the old, the young and the people suffering from chronic illness’, he says. ‘But if you take out the one million health-cumservice workers, there are about two million people aged over 65, there are one million kids aged under two or three, well that won’t leave anything.’

But a spokeswoman for Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor John Horvath, rejects Professor Curson’s criticisms. She says a revised action plan, which will soon be released by the Federal Government, does contain provisions for the handling of public fear and the other matters that Curson raises.

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ew Zealand’s Ministry of Health also points out that there are limits on the global production of antivirals, which means the government can’t provide protection for every New Zealander, even if it wants to; their website cautions that ‘No vaccine is currently available to protect humans against an H5N1 type infection. WHO is working with vaccine manufactures to look towards producing a vaccine. It takes at least four to six months to produce large quantities of a new vaccine.’

There’s another ethical issue at stake in the bird flu debate – what level of support should Australia provide to its neighbours in the event of a pandemic? On one hand it has the world’s largest stockpile of antivirals; on the other there’s not enough to go around. Would Australia be generous to others, as it was during the Indian Ocean tsunami? Or does Australia give only when there’s no risk to itself ?

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turer or have a guaranteed supply agreement with one of the existing manufacturers would be able to access vaccine’, says Dr Gust from the WHO. ‘For most countries in the world, vaccines and antivirals are only something they can dream of and they’d have to rely on conventional public health measures.’

The WHO will soon broker a meeting where countries with large stockpiles of antivirals (including Australia, Japan, the US and the UK) will be asked to make their drugs available to stamp out a small outbreak of a novel virus in small village in Cambodia, for instance. New Zealand won’t be among those countries; at the moment, only around 20,000 antiviral doses are physically available here, though the government is negotiating to buy more.

‘My hope is that (these countries would) make a tremendous effort to put out that spot fire, to prevent it becoming a bush fire that spreads widely, so there would be a major attempt to quench the infection using international stockpiles’, Professor Gust says.

‘Clearly Australia is a key participant in that discussion and has an opportunity to take a lead in that area. I can’t foreshadow what the government’s view would be, but I hope they would be generous.’

Whether H5N1 is the culprit in the next global outbreak of influenza remains to be seen. But experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before the world faces a new pandemic. If the outbreak is severe

enough, no amount of preparation would be enough to prevent a disaster - and that’s a frightening thought.

SARS killed just 770 people. But it did an estimated $15 billion worth of damage to the economies of Southeast Asia. In a worst-case scenario, H5N1 would cause tens of millions of deaths. What damage would that do to the global economy? Could we ever be ready for the devastating effects of a pandemic?

‘We’ll never be able to sit back and say, ‘Well, we’ve done it now, let’s bring it on’,’ says NSW Health’s Jeremy McAnulty. ‘Unfortunately it will never go away and our preparation will always be there, and if a pandemic hits then we’ll have to start preparing for the next one. It’s an ongoing process.’

But Professor Gust from the WHO believes that it’s too early to start panicking. He says that to have a doomsday scenario, the virus ‘has to escape and retain its existing virulence’ – a fairly unlikely prospect.

‘In North Vietnam the virus has already become less pathogenic for birds and less pathogenic for humans,’ he says. ‘A mutation or a recombination that enabled the virus to spread could equally, easily, result in a virus which spread rapidly but had relatively low pathogenicity.’

‘The scenarios that you keep seeing painted in the newspaper are absolutely worst case scenarios. And as we know from history, the most probable scenario is rarely the worst case scenario.’

While the world waits for the next flu crisis, JENI PAYNE meets an Australian on the frontlines of another age-old epidemic

plies in the intestine. It spreads rapidly by unsafe water and hand-tomouth contact, especially in overcrowded conditions where sanitation is poor and faecal contamination prevalent. Houseflies also contribute, by transferring viruses from faeces to food. Toddlers not yet toilettrained transmit polio readily even in hygienic environments. Initial symptoms are fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness in the neck and pain in the limbs.

One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis (usually in the legs). Among those paralysed, 5% to 10% die when their breathing muscles become immobilized.

The tragedy is, polio mainly affects children under five years of age and there is no cure, it can only be prevented. Polio vaccine, given multiple times, can protect a child for life.

‘Polio is generally caused by poor sanitation, so kids in underdeveloped countries are most as risk’, says Horton, adding that currently, the coalition against polio is facing a crucial time in the program.

In 2004, there was a cessation in the immunization program in Nigeria, due to political circumstances. It led to a blow-out in numbers locally and threatened to spread to neighbouring Sudan.

‘Polio is passed on so easily. Only 1% will catch it, but the rest are carriers.’

It was this exposure to the poignant plight of third world children that inspired Jenny to save all year for working holidays as part of Polio Plus. ‘It’s lucky I have a supportive boss! I never want to see children suffering. In India I saw children with flaccid legs. Sometimes it’s too much. It’s an awesome, terrible reminder of the disease. No child deserves to live like that. If we can do something to help, why wouldn’t we?’

As part of a so-called ‘STOP team’, consisting of 36 people from 22 countries, including medical professionals and Rotary volunteers, Jenny makes a difference in countries that are desperately in need, most recently Pakistan.

‘Pakistan has never broken transmission. There were 103 cases in 2003 and now there are 46. There’s a new government now and it’s supporting the initiative, working very hard with immunisation campaigns every six weeks.’

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n a visit to the US to see her host families and life-long friends she made as a high school exchange student, Jenny heard about the massive worldwide scheme known as PolioPlus. ‘Then when I became a member back in Australia, I decided that’s what I wanted to get involved in.’

India gave Jenny her first taste of work as a volunteer and she returned three times to help immunize its population. Then followed holidays spent working with communities in Ethiopia, Botswana and this year, Pakistan.

‘Two drops on the tongue is all it takes. A child can be protected against polio for as little as sixty cents worth of vaccine.’

In 1985, Rotary International launched the PolioPlus program to protect children worldwide from the cruel and fatal consequences of polio. Since that time, Rotary’s efforts and those of partner agencies, including the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and governments around the world, have achieved a 99% reduction in the number of polio cases worldwide.

From the launch of the global initiative in 1988, to the eradication target of 2005, Rotary’s Centenary Year, five million people, mainly in the developing world, who would otherwise have been paralyzed, will be walking because they have been immunized against polio. More than 500,000 cases of polio are now prevented each year.

But complacency is the enemy. According to the UN, the number of polio cases has been reduced from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to just under 700 reported cases at the end of in 2003 – a greater than 99% reduction. At the same time, Indonesia has just suffered its first polio outbreak in ten years, and UN officials suggest that worldwide eradication this year may in fact not be possible.

Poliomyelitis (polio) is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus.

It invades the nervous system, and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours. The virus enters the body through the mouth and multi-

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THE GOOD OIL Life in a world with less petrol

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Some are calling it the collapse of the Age of Cities.

Others are calling it a wacko conspiracy theory. Some say it will be the end of Global Warming. No matter what your view of the Peak Oil debate, there’s no denying the issue is fast coming to dominate international discussion on energy planning, as CLARE SWINNEY discovers.

u c k l a n d C i t y, 2 0 1 9 . The skytower basks in the glow of the sun’s last rays of the day before it slips below the distant and hazy Waitakere Ranges. The motorways though, are almost empty, as they have been for most of the previous 18 months – ever since petrol hit the latest in an ongoing series of highs – $8 per litre. These days, the traffic is mostly buses and trucks, commuters having long ago given up on runs into the CBD each day in preference for telecommuting from their home computers. The extensive revamp of the city’s motorway network, completed in 2013, is now largely a tarmac wasteland; and down in the centre of town the apartment buildings that sprang up at the turn of the millennium are decrepit and leaking wrecks – the last refuge of the homeless and those who couldn’t afford land in the suburbs or outlying districts.

Such a scenario may sound outlandish, and perhaps it is, but according to a growing number of energy analysts we’re in danger of living the dream-turned-nightmare. Oil, you see, is running out. The ubiquitous black gold that permeates our daily lives in everything from shampoo and soap to pharmaceuticals, pens, computers, telephones and cars, is getting harder and costlier to extract from the ground. On this much virtually everyone, even the skeptics, agrees.

What they don’t agree on is when it’ll happen.

“In the next three years,” argues author and researcher James Howard Kunstler in a recent interview with Grist magazine in the US, “we are going to be feeling the pain. Our lives are going to be noticeably beginning to be disrupted. In the next ten years, you will see the beginning of a major collapse of suburbia.”

New Zealand is a country heavily reliant on oil. Our ability as one of the world’s leading agricultural producers hinges on not just fuel oil for transport, but oil by-products as fertilizers.

According to Kunstler, rising fuel costs will force cities to grow their own food literally in household backyards and farms on the back doorstep. Many people, he says, will find their lifestyles change to accommodate a necessary grow-your-own component. Prices for lifestyle blocks and large city sections will soar, while prices of apartments will plummet.

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Although Kunstler was speaking to an American audience, there are those in New Zealand, like the Green Party, who hear his warnings.

These are strange and confusing times we are living in, even from a Shakespearian perspective. For in one parliamentary corner we have the Green Party telling us that “peak oil” is a Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum giant stomping towards us that we must prepare now for, while, in the other, our governmental masters have been steadfastly retaining a business-asusual approach.

Even the media cauldron has been bubbling away furiously on the heat of contradictory messages. While TV3’s Campbell Live painted peak oil as a threat to civilisation as we know it, other mainstream sources have been portraying it as much ado about nothing. For instance, The Dominion Post’s feature on the 21st January this year concluded with quotes from a Danish statistics professor, Bjorn Lomborg, who claims, “We have plenty of oil. We will find more when it’s necessary to do so, but we don’t need to now.” Similarly, Newstalk ZB host Leighton Smith insists on air that “there’s plenty of oil” and the impending oil crisis is “a media beat up,” and to top it off, resource management expert Owen McShane wrote in the New Zealand Herald on 15th April, “We should take no notice” of the Green Party warning.

Perhaps the skeptics can be forgiven. After all, back in the 1970s environmentalists were predicting a new Ice Age by 2,000, and there’s currently huge debate over whether global warming is caused by humans, and is therefore reversible, or by the fact that the sun is getting hotter, in which case no amount of carbon taxes will make a blind bit of difference.

Is this matter of peak oil really much ado about nothing; simply the Green Party exaggerating its significance as a ploy to garner election votes and reduce vehicle emissions? Or are these skeptical media sources misinformed?

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elson-based geologist Alan Hart, who has worked on the frontline of the oil industry for 30 years, believes the ramifications of this final oil crisis will be very serious indeed and our media has fundamentally failed to alert people to the realities of what lies ahead. Born in Texas in 1951, he graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with advanced degrees in petroleum geology in 1974 and 1979, and has worked for

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several oil companies, including the 7th largest US petroleum company, ARCO. Since 2002, he has been on the board of directors of Canadian company, TAG Oil, which is concentrating on exploration efforts in New Zealand.

“These journalists and radio hosts are entitled to their opinions and can denigrate spokespersons like myself all they want, but I personally know that peak oil will arrive in two or five or 10 years. From that point on, the world as we know it will be changed unless the global community meets it head on and begins its preparations now.”

The act of taking oil from the ground is called producing it. Since the start of oil production in the nineteenth century, the world has produced about half of its ultimately recoverable oil resource. At the halfway point, the world will achieve what is referred to as its production peak – more oil will be produced in a year near the halfway point than ever before – or thereafter. This is what is referred to as peak oil.

There are varied opinions regarding when peak oil will occur. Dr Colin Campbell, a petro-geologist who is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on predicting oil trends, calculates that it will occur in 2006.

Dr Campbell, who was conferred with a PhD from Oxford University and has held prestigious positions within oil companies, is currently the convener and editor of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) and a Trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre in London. He told the Guardian in late-April 2005 that about 944 billion barrels of oil have thus far been extracted, some 764 billion remains extractable in known fields or reserves, and a further 142 billion of reserves are classed as ‘yet-to-find’ – that’s the oil geologists expect to be discovered. He said if this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year – with unpredictable and perhaps drastic consequences for the world, (refer http://www.peakoil.net).

Optimists focus on the figures and assume that just because the production peak has arrived doesn’t mean that oil is under imminent threat. But Campbell and James Howard Kunstler argue the petrooptimists are missing the point.

“We don’t have to run out of oil or natural gas to have severe problems,” says Kunstler. “All you have to do is head down the arc of depletion on the downside of world peak production.”

In other words, as production decreases yet demand continues to increase, oil prices become problematic for the world long before the wells actually dry up.

Energy Minister Trevor Mallard has told Investigate the Government stands by its view that peak oil will occur sometime between 2021 and 2067, with “probability highest around 2037.” The source for this view is the Bush administration’s Energy Information Administration.

“I stress that other estimates abound,” concedes Mallard, “and that I’m not claiming that this is the right one, but it’s in our view the best estimate we have to work to for now.”

But critics say Mallard has no choice but to play it cool. The Government is between a rock and a hard place and can not reveal the truth, for, if it did, its economic cards would come tumbling down – the healthy economic outlook would be exposed as a fraud. The man who just purchased a new $65,000 gas-guzzling SUV on hire purchase would think the bottom had dropped out of his world and the young couple who’d just built their dream home an hour’s drive from their work places, where there was no alternative but to drive, would be gutted.

It’s far simpler, say petro-pessimists, for the Minister to use smoke and mirrors to provide an illusion of a rosy future, which allow for the continuance of current trends over the coming years, rather than to tell it like it is.

Offers Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons on the day she launched the Green Party energy policy: “The Government should acknowledge that peak oil is closer than they’ve been admitting. Even the International Energy Agency, which was until recently saying 2037,

and whose advice the Government takes, is now saying 2013-2037. Pretending there’s nothing to worry about yet is just lulling people into a false sense of security.”

It’s like booking us to go First Class on the Titanic and moving all the furniture towards the end that will sink first.

Like Mallard, National’s leader Don Brash appears reluctant to tackle reality head on either. He said on April Fool’s day that a National-led government would put every dollar of fuel tax into roads. That would mean an extra $2.1 billion over the next six years for roading and at the same time legislation would be changed to make it quicker and easier to build new roads.

But while National may be making political inroads on Labour, and while the economic growth from road-building would normally be a boon, there’s a growing sense in the wider public that wasting tax money on tarmac when oil is running out might not be such a bright idea, despite the frustration of sitting in traffic jams.

It is significant that peak oil is getting much more coverage in the international media than it is in New Zealand’s daily press. But this will change.

Ordinary people are waking up to Peak Oil Theory, thanks largely to word of mouth and the internet. One who ascribes to this view is Waikanae builder Robert Atack. For six years now, this 47-year old has been a modern Jeremiah informing people about the impending oil crisis. He, like some experts in world energy studies, believes it will have a catastrophic impact on humanity, an impact which could be lessened if we start our preparations now.

Atack has plunged $9,000 of his own cash into the issue, printing and distributing leaflets, CDs, DVDs, videos and books, which carry information from experts of Dr Colin Campbell’s ilk, to members of the public and parliament.

“During the last term of government I had 10,000 copies of The Oil Crash And You printed and sent about 5 copies each to all 120 MPs. And I’ve sent a lot of e-mails - and I think probably most of the current government have had something sent to them,” offers Atack.

Not known for social niceties, however, Atack called Trevor Mallard “a gutless public trough feeder” in a mail drop to his home letterbox in 2002, so doesn’t blame the Minister for shouting at him the last time they spoke.

“Trevor Mallard’s been in denial. Any official reply I’ve seen from his office since he became Minister of Energy is just the regurgitated rubbish Pete Hodgson’s secretary sent out, who became Mallard’s when he took over the job of Minister of Energy.”

The cold shoulders from politicians and lack

of interest shown by members of the public have at times made his exploits seem like those of Sisyphus, until this past year when the tide turned. Investigate broke the story in New Zealand in February last year. Since then, the Green Party highlighting the peak oil threat, the petrol price jolt and the TV3 Campbell Live show on March 22nd have continued to raise public awareness. The number of hits to Atack’s website, oilcrash.com, after the Campbell Live show soared to 70,915, up from 9,883 the day before, with a further 53,376 hits the following day. The number of people around the country educating the public about peak oil has grown. From a community perspective, Nelson is streets ahead of others says Atack.

Although Nelson City Council recently backed away from a proposal to begin an investigation into likely consequences of peak oil for the district, the word about what peak oil will mean for our future has been spreading like wild fire regardless. This has been across all ages, and it’s being helped to ignite by groups of “peak oil aware” youths from four Nelson colleges who have been encouraged to network with other young people.

It’s not only the Green Party that will be talking about peak oil in the lead up to the general election, but also the Maori Party. “They seem to genuinely want to inform people out of concern, which I’ve found is the main motivation for most of us peak-nicks,” says Atack.

If you want evidence that the oil industry really is in dire straits, there is a myriad of signs that can’t be denied. According to oil geologist Hart it is an industry virtually working at full capacity now. It’s being pushed to its limits. He can tell by the number of oil tankers travelling around, the number of seismic vessels gathering seismic data for oil companies, as well as from the number of oilrigs in use.

At present, the world can produce about 84 million barrels of oil a day at the most. Over 82 million barrels per day are being used at

present and there’s an increasing demand for more. The world economy grew by 5.1% in 2004 – the fastest in nearly three decades.

Among the leaders were China, (with around 1.3 billion inhabitants), expanding at 9.5%, Argentina at 9% and India at 7.3%, (around 1.1 billion people). Projections for the fourth quarter of 2005 indicate that 86 to 87 million barrels of oil a day will be required and this won’t be met. Although the biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and BP talk about there being “plenty of oil” and being able to produce more, their production figures are actually going down every year.

While the oil industry can function well at the moment, it won’t in the imminent future. Compounding the oil availability problems is that for the past 20 years the industry has failed to attract enough new personnel.

Faced with the choice of studying oil geology or the glamour of IT during the dotcom boom of the nineties, many students chose IT. The grim period of mergers and downsizing in the oil business added to the perception that the oil business was a beast in its death throes. As perhaps it is.

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anaging editor of the Oil & Gas International journal, Dev George, writes in the May 2005 issue: ‘It seems as though every major petroleum industry conference these days has at least one session devoted to bemoaning the critical shortage of new blood, the lack of young professionals – engineers and geologists and geoscientists as well as business and industry generalists – entering the industry.’

Hart says this spells doom for the oil business, because the ability to successfully locate and drill for oil is highly dependent upon having an employee base with extensive work experience.

“In 1985, the average age for a member of

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If there was anything the producers - especially OPEC and petroleum companies could do to slow the price juggernaut, believe me they’d be doing it now, not tomorrow.”

At the end of 1999, oil was trading for around US$10 a barrel. Since then it has risen by about 29% per year. Simply extending the trend means that oil will be at about US$100 a barrel in three years and US$160 in five years. While such a rise won’t impact on the lifestyles of the very wealthy, it could those on low incomes who may have no option but to alter their lifestyles.

Hart says it’s the plight of his own four children that motivates him to inform the public about peak oil, because while he can educate them on the impending oil crisis, without the cooperative efforts of the rest of the community and nation, their entire livelihood is threatened by the coming dilemma.

Dr Peter Ballance, formerly Associate Professor of Geology at Auckland University, specialised in sedimentary and oil geology and holds a Doctorate of Science from the University of London. He contends that the threat of peak oil should be taken very seriously. “It’s a physical fact. One which we may reach this year or in 10 year’s time,” he warns.

I All data is taken from the Association For The Study Of Peak Oil And Gas Newslatter For May 2005 the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was 38. The average age last year was 53. This shows that at this critical time when the industry really needs experienced employees, they won’t be there. It is really a dreadful situation we face,” offers Hart despondently.

The American Association of Petroleum Geologists has been providing videos and encouraging its 31,000 members to speak in public forums about the possibility of future oil shortages for the past 15 years. Hart began making presentations to various civic and business groups in New Zealand several years ago in an attempt to alert the public to the coming end to cheap oil, but finds it difficult to disseminate the message because the public is chiefly “unbelieving.”

Some people think that “peak oil” is nothing but evidence of a greedy oil industry trying to talk up the oil price. This is not so, says Hart: “Why would the industry manipulate prices so high that they drive away the very customers that are required to keep them in business? The last thing the oil companies want to see is a chaotic global event [peak oil] that destroys their carefully cultivated consumer base.

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n regard to whether commentators such as Owen McShane are correct in claiming that there is plenty of oil, Dr Ballance states: “People who say there’s plenty of oil are right in one sense, but in the sense of plenty of the ideal oil, they’re wrong. Much of that remaining oil will be in tar sands, oil shales, deep-sea locations and Arctic locations. All of that’s very expensive and environmentally damaging to extract.”

McShane’s logic is worth following just to illustrate where it falters.

The peak oil skeptic writes: “Although the wells are distant, refining is complex and fuel is subject to huge taxes, the petrol powering your car is cheaper a litre than most bottled water – including New Zealand water.”

He’s right, as far as he goes. But if the inference readers are supposed to draw is that oil will stay plentiful because it is cheaper than bottled water, McShane is in for a mathematical shock. Nearly half of the cost of a litre of fuel goes to taxes. But even if you scrapped all petrol taxes, it would be only a momentary reprieve against a rising tide of international oil price rises. Sixty cents a litre might be a big saving while petrol is $1.20 a litre. It won’t be so hot when petrol hits $2 or $3 per litre in the not too distant future. And you can only scrap taxes once.

The cost of oil is not the real issue. The availability of oil is. It is currently cheap because we’re extracting fuel from easy fields whose technical infrastructure was put in place and paid for decades ago. When those fields empty, sooner rather than later, prices will rise.

It is commonly suggested that technological advances will play a role in finding meaningful quantities of more oil. Unfortunately, according to Hart, while technology has and will continue to enhance the oil industry’s ability to locate significant new accumulations of petroleum, it cannot compensate for the huge amounts of cheap oil we are chewing our way through.

“Anyone who believes that technology will “save the day” like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster is not facing up to reality. Technology alone cannot replace the amounts of cheap oil [less than US$10/ barrel to produce] we are currently consuming on a global scale. It’s going to take a conservation effort too,” he asserts.

On ACT’s weblog, RodneyHide.com, one blogger summed up the mood of many ACT supporters by suggesting that oil depletion was not a concern because “the market will take care of it and develop new alternatives”. Such wishful thinking, whilst also correct to a point, still ignores the reality that markets rely on plenty of advance warning and new discoveries, not magic wands, and that if another chemical existed that could replace oil as a fuel, or in plastics or any of the other myriad

uses for oil, we ought to know about it by now. And we don’t. And on a worst case scenario those “markets” may only have another five years to find the mystery new elixir, test it and produce it.

Yes, solar power can help reduce some of the dependence on oil, but currently we use oil to create solar generation capacity. The power and telephone lines into our homes are manufactured from oil. Computers are dependent on oil. Many pharmaceutical and health products require oil. For the markets to truly “take care of it”, planning has to begin immediately, argue petro-pessimists.

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ome still refuse to face the possibility of a world with less oil, however, like those who believe Thomas Gold’s theory that oil is abiotic, or non-organic in origin. This theory, which appears to have many followers judging by the profusion of internet pages devoted to it, proposes that oil is being produced within the mantle of the earth, from where it continually moves upward, to provide an unlimited supply. Dr Ballance says that sadly there is no substance to Gold’s theory.

“It’s one of the many myths on which people build hopes,” he says. Correspondingly, Hart says the theory of abiotic oil is like clutching for straws, while he’s out gathering the wheat.

Although the oil industry has repeatedly proven that oil is biotic, meaning that it is derived from the degeneration of organic plant and animal remains from which the carbon molecules have been converted to complex hydrocarbon molecules through pressure and time, the Gold theory has retained many believers for a number of reasons.

There are genuine accounts of oil wells refilling, and drilling at levels deeper than 10,000 metres, which some say is evidence that has supported Gold’s theory. It does not however on close inspection. Dr Ballance says the reason the wells have been refilling is not because oil is being magically produced deep within the earth – it is because oil moves through permeable rocks in response to a pressure gradient. It can continue to move after a well has ceased to provide economic quantities of oil. Thus, it’s to be expected that old wells will in some cases, refill with oil, but in no where near the quantities that will make any difference to a world that uses over 82 million barrels a day.

Likewise, the drilling beyond 10,000 metres does not lend support for the abiotic theory either because when hydrocarbons are subjected to the temperatures and pressure that exist below 9,000 metres, they are generally destroyed says Hart.

Former industrial chemist Kevin Moore,

who has an Honours degree in chemistry from Auckland University, has studied the abiotic theory and says its proponents are asking us to accept a process that defies the laws of chemistry. “Until the proponents of abiotic oil present a plausible theory, and they’ve presented none to my knowledge, it’s just junk science.”

The deepest bore to date was drilled by Russians in the Kola Peninsula to 12,262metres from 1970 to 1994 and cost more than US$250 million. However, it was not drilled in order to search for oil or natural gas, but to study the nature of the earth’s crust. “While there’s no ultra-deep oil except in a couple of unusual fields, there is ultra-deep gas in many places. No matter where people get their information from, they can be assured that petroleum is not generated in the mantle. And if Russia, which passed peak production in the late -1980’s, has all of this deep oil, why isn’t it selling it on the world market?” questions Hart.

In times like ours when relentless changes can leave one feeling that one is trapped on the mouse wheel of consumerism, it’s not surprising that there’s resistance to acknowledge that the substance that we’ve built our lives upon, oil, is not unlimited.

Thus far, the only countries to have made serious preparation for peak oil have been the United States and the United Kingdom who, critics claim, are using the excuse of terrorism to invade countries with large remaining oil reserves to ensure they have access to that oil. Obviously, this is not an option for New Zealand.

According to Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons, who’s being tipped as a possible Energy Minister if the Greens can survive on election day and be strong enough to form a coalition with Labour, what we should be doing now is a thorough analysis of each sector of the economy to understand how vulnerable it is to oil prices and shortages and what can be done. For example, can our food be grown closer to where it is eaten? How do we maintain soil fertility without nitrogen based fertilisers – which are made from fossil fuels?

Fitzsimons argues we need to invest now in expensive infrastructure that will be hard to afford when oil is expensive – like rail, wind turbines and solar technologies. We need to stop the import of gas-guzzling vehicles and allow in only the most fuel-efficient. “There’s a lot we could do now to make it easier to cope later, but we need to act. There is no room for either fatalism or complacency.”

At present New Zealand has fewer than half a dozen oil and gas fields being developed, and 12 producing fields which supply only about seven percent of the oil we consume,

and this is declining each year. We are competing against the world for a limited amount of liquid energy. As long as oil demand outstrips the industry’s ability to supply oil, the prices will continue to rise. When global oil production does peak, and it soon will, the disparity between demand and supply will continue to grow and the situation will so worsen. It’s not a case of if, but when. Hope and pray all you wish that gigantic new sources of petroleum will be found tomorrow, but if the majority of people working in the petroleum industry are correct, this won’t happen and continuing our gas-guzzling ways is only going to add to an already critical situation.

LETTER ON ATACK’S WEBSITE 23rd March 2005 Hi Robert, I am glad you have opened up this site.

I am 15 years old and after watching Campbell’s new show the other night I was very angry that after everyone else using all the oil and petrol it would be me and people my age that would cop it.

My Mum has been looking into either renting some land or buying some land and having it being run on a solar power, and things like that and instead of building permanent housing us and the rest of the group are looking into building mud huts and everything else.

I used to think this was a stupid idea because of course it means that we would have to sell the house, but I am beginning to see the actual situation we have at hand. I think the NZ Energy Minister is not letting the NZ public know that there is a real danger, I mean we have scientists and possibly you telling us that we will see the effects no later than 2006, and then we have the NZ Energy Minister telling us that it will happen in the 2030’s sometime. My mum and I are now making our part and so are most of the supermarkets it is just up to the public now, my Mum and I are now using permanent shopping bags and everything like that. We got a centametre (one of those things that measure power) to lessen our power usage. But still we have the people up in Auckland using their central heating and having everyone else to pay for it. Thank you for listening I know I have been ranting on a bit.

Ross McKinnon Dunedin

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ESSAY

THE UNFORTUNATE EXPERIMENT Whatever happened to New Zealand’s Defence Force?

Retired Skyhawk pilot ROSS EWING takes a spin around Government defence bungles of the past six years, and fires some missiles of his own

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f the scuttlebutt heard around Parliament is to be believed, the Government has finally realised that it made a mistake in disbanding the Air Combat Force. It was an unfortunate experiment, which failed, utterly.

Scrubbing the jets was something that grew out of the Labour Party’s “anti-war” roots in the 1970s. Prime Minister Clark was around when the Air Force’s new Skyhawks were paraded in Auckland, towed from their unloading wharf to nearby Whenuapai, and was reportedly amongst a small clique that said words to the effect of, we will live to see the day when those “baby killing” jets are grounded. Well, they did.

But Clark and her government, too busy gloating over the ease of the supposed 2001 anti-war victory, failed to see that their disbanding action had consequences far beyond their wisdom and mere ideological point-scoring.

Disbanding the ACF was an un-mandated decision and one that lost the country substantial credibility around the world and caused alienation – especially among the country’s previous allies like Australia and America. Some said, we alienated the very allies we 68, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

needed. The action caused a large public outcry at the time, an outcry that has grumbled on since despite ongoing attempts by government-paid spin-doctors to shut down all utterings on defence matters.

Removing the ACF took the heart out of the Air Force and this in turn took the heart out of defence as a whole. New Zealand was consequently left with no “force” at all. The Government had put political ideology ahead of social responsibility and its “gutting” action brought defence, already shamefully run down by the previous government, to its very knees.

As if this wasn’t enough, the Government also made sure that the jet training infrastructure and its overall technical support was also ripped away. Hundreds of Air Force ground technicians were made redundant and many pilots left only to be snapped up by other armed forces around the world.

The Government then squandered large amounts of money on a very expensive and highly questionable mishmash of defence equipment including its now infamous and controversial Army light armoured vehicle (LAVIII) purchase. Subsequent investigations by the

Auditor General found that in a number of purchases it had used quite irregular tendering antics and found its procuring mechanisms were far from robust. Defence bought two second hand replacement V.I.P. jetliners, but this was hardly defence equipment; more like long range taxies for politicians and bureaucrats.

The Government had lost touch with the people of New Zealand, especially the young people who left all three services in record numbers. This caused a crisis in experience levels across Defence and the situation was compounded by the fact that potential recruits stopped knocking at the defence door.

The direct cause of these fundamental problems was the demise of the ACF. It is well known to many that an ACF provides a positive interface between the combat component of a defence force and the general public, which, after all, funds it. A recent statement on this, from an overseas country, noted that such operational units “greatly assist the recruiting and retention goals of the military services, enhance esprit de corps among uniformed men and women, as well as demonstrate the professional skills and capabilities of the armed forces to the... public and [the country’s] allies.”

The litany of New Zealand defence disasters and the pitiful rundown state of its three armed services – the Army had several fatalities – went on. It then became known that the Returned Services Association was about to produce a written statement that would disagree with Government policy on defence. The Government realised that both it and Defence were in serious trouble and so it announced a very predictable and politically defusing ploy: It threw some money at it – $4.6 billion over 10 years, it said. But the action and amount were immediately criticised as “smoke and mirrors” and it was pointed out that they did not take full account of existing expenditure, inflation,

capital charges, and taxation. It was also said that money wouldn’t fix what was largely a self-caused political problem: No one wanted to stay in, or join, a force when most of it was missing.

It was as if, when it came to power, the Government knew absolutely nothing about the meaning or vital function of a country’s defence or where defence fitted alongside foreign affairs and trade. Or it just didn’t want to know, having its own agenda and believing that defence stood for “peace only”. It was determined to take over the control of defence, and it did. There have been several public reports into this situation including one written by Derek Quigley on the F16s, and an extensive in-depth report written by Don Hunn who was previously a very high ranking public servant. But the results and recommendations of these have been completely buried by the Government even though the Hunn Report, for example, noted that Labour’s revised defence set-up was “unworkable”.

Compounding the situation and also changing it drastically for New Zealand was a move to have the appointment of the top defence person, namely the Chief of Defence Force (previously the Chief of Defence Staff), appointed by the State Services Commission, instead of by the Minister acting on the recommendation of the uniformed branch of Defence. CDF thus became, effectively, a political appointment, the present incumbent doing nothing to dissuade one from this point of view.

Since coming to power in 1999, history shows that the Government initially, led by its “minister of no defence”, went off on a completely non-defence tangent, but then started to learn the error of its ways. It is starting, at last, to see and learn what the wider ramifications of defence are all about; this learning exercise being at taxpayer expense, of course.

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It is even starting to wake up and knuckle down to talks with the Australians and Americans who have been secretly laughing behind New Zealand’s back at its pitiful contribution to “real” defence.

Defence Minister, Mark Burton, has been in talks about “exercises” with his Australian equivalent; while Foreign Affairs Minister, Phil Goff, has reportedly been talking to Americans although one does get the impression that such conversation is light in substance and is largely one-way.

The Defence Force is meanwhile trying to advertise for new recruits, being sure to emphasise the international aspects of such a commitment and to cover up the actual dilapidated state of much of the existing equipment as well as the faded morale.

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ut neither it, nor the Government, has come to grips with the fundamental concept that young people join a defence force to serve New Zealand and New Zealanders. No one wants to join a defence force – army, navy or air force – in which the primary task is to be aid working in other often distant, dusty or destabilised countries around the world. They know that such a role would be at the cost of leaving New Zealand and New Zealanders completely undefended against any untoward threat. Peacekeeping along with aid to the community back home they rightly see as an altruistic offshoot, in the interests of world peace, but not as an absolute replacement for the primary role. Military people make good peacekeepers, but peacekeepers do not make good military people.

Young military aspirants are just not interested in devoting their working life solely to “dish washing”, and who can blame them? Where does the current government expect to find the young people it needs?

Through immigration?

Many young people believe that peace does not come without a price and some would say that price is eternal vigilance. They can see that for peace to be maintained it must be enforced by muscle where necessary as it cannot be maintained on its own. Good keen men and women want to be involved in contributing to the defence of their own nation, rather than joining a band of mopper-uppers in some distant land, cleaning up someone else’s country after yet someone else has been there.

Most New Zealanders consider the primary role of any government

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to be to GUARANTEE the defence of its citizens. It is not to hope for someone else’s “best efforts”. It seems very clear that this government has given over this responsibility to a self-appointed world authority – the UN – one that has far from convinced thinking people around the world that it is a capable, effective and honest world-governing organisation. It has no mandate. It has no teeth. What has stopped the concept of a “united nations” from working? Allied with that, is the question: do New Zealanders want to give up their sovereignty to someone else? What New Zealand assets have our politicians already covertly given away via signed UN Treaties? This is of perplexing concern. Does New Zealand want to see the future of its nation taken over by a world body?

Despite all this, the Government seems to have become transfixed on peacekeeping and peace-building in support of the United Nations, which it sees ultimately as this country’s defence, economic and globalising saviour. One has to ask why has it adopted this stance?

Is it for the betterment of New Zealand? Or of its politicians? Whatever, its stance is something that this Government has yet to fully convince potential military recruits, and voters.

The situation is a conundrum.

So what is the answer? A solution will obviously include large amounts of informed public debate. Honest debate will expose the futility of single-minded ideology and will inevitably conclude that, instead of that, our defence is – it must become – a bipartisan matter.

The country’s superannuation scheme is bipartisan so why not Defence? It is, after all, more important.

Such debate will need to include viewing a recently compiled television feature documentary on defence, called New Zealand Defence. It has interviews with about 20 commentators: authors, historians, retired diplomats, broadcasters, scientists, legal philosophers and newspaper editors. It also had several retired servicemen but, interestingly, no politicians or public officials. New Zealand Defence was bought by TVNZ some months ago but the State broadcaster has since sat on it as if trying to keep the opposition from getting hold of it – or the public from seeing it. This antic is despite public criticism that the “TVNZ Charter [has failed] to put more Kiwis on screen”, something this documentary would undoubtedly do. It deserves public airing.

Debate will also need to include wide dissemination and discussion of that extensive RSA report, Statement of Defence, released last month and which the Government is also desperately trying to bury from public scrutiny. 2005 is, after, all Election year and the Government wouldn’t want defence to become an election issue…

Informed public debate is bound to show that New Zealand has become a third rate banana republic and will continue to deteriorate unless there is a promise to revitalise the three services with a full and complementary structure. The Defence Force needs to be dedicated primarily to achieving a balanced defence arrangement for New Zealand – as we used to have – one that would be capable of covering a host of future unknown situations and threats rather than dealing to a “benign strategic environment”. It needs to have an effective air combat force.

It is said that, although Helen Clark now realises the error of her disastrous deed of dismantling defence, and the domino effect it caused, she will – in true political fashion – fail to do a u-turn on this one. This is despite the fact that any political party that says it will definitely reactivate such a force, and all that comes with it, will get more votes in the forthcoming general election.

Ross Ewing is a defence commentator from Christchurch. He was a jet pilot and flying instructor in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and became a war veteran. He later studied medicine, specialising in aviation medicine. Dr Ewing is a writer and author of several books.

He is not a member of any political party.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 71

LIFESTYLE

MONEY

FAMILY MATTERS Retirement planning is more than taking a punt on the ponies, says Peter Hensley

im and Moira’s extended family looked and acted was older than Michael and while being financially prusimilarly to most others. There was the usual array dent was not as driven as his brother in law to build an of cousins and maiden aunts along with the odd, asset empire. He preferred the laidback lifestyle that the eccentric brother in law. For some strange reason the north coast offered. Jim had experienced Kevin’s eccentric ones always seemed to marry into the family hospitality several times over the past twenty years and and not belong to their blood line. Jim was looking appreciated that he knew more about the location of forward to the upcoming family reunion, with the op- the snapper beds, rather than who owned the local fish portunity to catch up and see how others were handling shop. Over the years Robyn’s loyalty to Michael waned the transition into their mature years. as she grew to place her trust in her husband’s abilities Jim was particularly interested in a set of distant rela- to provide for their family and future. tions. There were three surviving members, all in their It was different story for her sister Myrl. When Myrl late fifties or early sixties, all still living on the NSW met Ron, it was love at first sight, she was a hairdresser north coast. Two of his cousins were married to their and he was a truck driver. They have always had an abunfirst husbands and the brother divorced many years ago dance of love but not money. Because of this Myrl has and did not seem to settle after the break up. As was always kept close to Michael and at times has been envinormal in those days, the eldest brother was given the ous of her brother’s ability to attract money and finaresponsibility of ncial success. At her looking out for his brother’s insistence Jim had experienced Kevin’s hospitalsisters. The sisters she brought her have always respown hairdressing ity several times over the past twenty onded with blind business, and then years and appreciated that he knew loyalty to their older in turn the buildmore about the location of the snapper brother, until recently. ing that it operated Jim has followed from. They then beds, rather than who owned the local the family fortunes used the small equity fish shop from afar. The eldest in the commercial brother Michael has building to leverage always been financially astute. He had strictly followed again and buy into a courier run for Ron so he too could the century old laws of gold and always lived within his be a budding business baron. means. Some suggest that his miserliness contributed Ron and Myrl had one fiscally-fatal flaw. They spent to his divorce, but Jim had no proof of that. Michael more than they earned. Their business expenses always had proved beyond all doubt that he was fiscally astute. seem to exceed their income. They thought that because He started building his empire at an early age and found they ran a business, the business would expand to cover it difficult to comprehend that others could not follow their expenses. Myrl thought that if she employed the same asset-gathering course that he had. He owned another stylist then the increased turnover would make a range of commercial buildings in and around Lismore all their problems go away. The mortgage on the buildand still had an interest in the family farm. His elder ing gradually grew to a stage that the bank said ‘enough’ sister, Robyn was still on the farm and Kevin, her hus- and instituted a mortgagee sale. Because it was sold in a band was comfortable in his role as provider. Kevin down market and Myrl never had any money for mainnever really got on with Michael, and preferred to go tenance they came out of the sale still owing the bank fishing for snapper than another property deal. Kevin close on $100,000.

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The courier business went the same way and in their late fifties Ron and Myrl found themselves back working for wages with a double mortgage. Times were tough.

Apart from looking out for his sisters, Michael was also trustee of their late parents estate which included a range of undistributed legacies. Michael was strong on compounding and in his long history of asset accumulation he had disposed of very few and had maintained a similar strategy with the estate. He knew that his younger sister was struggling financially and designed a plan that would ease her burden.

He proposed a deal that altered the beneficial ownership of some family assets so that Myrl would be entitled to receive a cash distribution from the estate.

This series of events was tearing Myrl apart emotionally. On one side she had immense sibling loyalty to Michael which went back a lifetime.

On the other side was her husband Ron, a faithful confidant whom she adored who had worked tirelessly for her and their family. It was obvious that they had made a few fundamental errors in their married life, but that did not mean they had not learned from them. Ron understood, along with his advisers that they could not afford to carry their existing debt into retirement. One did not have to be a rocket scientist to comprehend that without some sort of intervention their retirement prospects looked decidedly bleak.

The problem that Myrl had, was that Michael did not want them to use the estate’s cash injection to reduce their debt. Michael’s experience with debt was that he always had other income to service any debt repayments that were necessary. That was the way he approached debt and in reality he was blind to the fact that Ron & Myrl existed on limited wages.

Myrl knew that if she went along with the reorganisation of the estate

that Michael would expect her to retain the capital and only use the interest to ease their debt burden. Myrl struggled with this ideal.

Ron on the other hand could see the legacy used to extinguish their obligation to the bank. They would be debt free for the first time in their adult lives, an experience they have dreamed of for the past twenty years. Ron had told Myrl that he wanted to be debt free and struggled with the logic of not making best use of their resources. Myrl stood in the middle and knew that the decision was hers to make.

To clarify her thoughts Myrl decided to seek outside advice. She visited with their accountant who had stood by them through thick and thin. His counsel in the past always seemed to fall on deaf ears as in the early days they refused to rein in their spending. His call was to suggest they should use the legacy to eliminate their mortgages and start to rebuild some sort of capital base in preparation for their pending retirement. He was pleased to learn that Ron was sympathetic to this approach.

In addition she wrote to the national newspaper and outlined her situation to a question and answer columnist. He suggested that her answer lay in their personal circumstances. Her well meaning brother was operating from a different perspective and was blind to the fact that Myrl and her family’s financial situation differed greatly from his.

He strongly supported the elimination of their outstanding mortgages and that would provide Ron & Myrl with a start for some serious retirement preparation.

There might even be some spare cash that would enable them to join in the family reunion scheduled for Labour weekend. Jim knew of some secret snapper spots off the Taranaki coast that he would be please to share with Ron. Michael was unlikely to attend as he did not want to spend the money on flights.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 73

LIFESTYLE

EDUCATION

WHY THE NCEA IS A DOG A history lesson provides a useful backdrop as Martin Hanson argues the Government has created a monster

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s a biology teacher I have never given much after Stalin’s death in 1953 that the noose was removed credence to reincarnation, but after recent events from the neck of Soviet agriculture. in New Zealand education, I’m not so sure.

Today, Lysenko’s spirit lives on in Wellington in the Let me explain. In the famine of 1931-3, millions of Ministry of Education and the New Zealand people in the Soviet Union suffered starvation because Qualifications Authority (NZQA). Some years ago a of a man called Trofim Lysenko. An agronomist from small cabal of educational zealots managed to convince Ukraine, he first caught Stalin’s attention as a man able the politicians that what was needed to cure educational to motivate the peasants. Using his political skills he ills was something called the National Certificate of promoted Lamarck’s idea of inheritance of acquired Educational Achievement (NCEA). All that was needed characters – change the environment of crops and not was a system in which each student was tested on his or only will they adapt to the change – their offspring will her ability to reach a particular level of attainment in be better adapted too. each of a series of “Achievement Standards”. For Though this view had long been discredited, it example, in English, we have performance descriptors appealed to Stalin because it suggested that if people like this: were forced to work for the common good, eventually Achieved: Show understanding of text their children would inherit good socialist attitudes. As Merit: Show convincing understanding of text a “barefoot scientist”, Lysenko was hailed by Stalin as Excellence: Show perceptive understanding of text. the embodiment of peasant genius. He sneered at those In History, the requirements for the standard “Can academics who had hitherto dominated genetics, and interpret historical facts, ideas and points of view” are indeed he denied the very existence of genes, as follows: maintaining that they were a “fascist” invention.

Achieved: Accurately identify historical facts and ideas.

Among Lysenko’s Merit: Accurately more harebrained ideas identify a range of facts was the notion that if and ideas.

Monopoly is power, and power seeds were planted close Excellence: Accurately corrupts. NZQA has not felt it neces- identify together the seeda wide range of sary to listen to its customers; the lings would cooperate facts and ideas. rather than compete.

One does not need parents and students Predictably, crop yields even a double-digit fell disastrously. In a IQ to see that these healthy society, such ideas would be judged on their descriptors are without clear boundaries and are vague results. to the point of being meaningless. Yet we are told that Under Stalin’s protection, Lysenko enjoyed near- each level of achievement is clearly defined! One must absolute power, but agricultural research withered and ask how it is possible for the authors of such drivel to died. Any geneticist who was naïve enough to think wield power over the future of our children. that science was about testing ideas by experiment and With descriptors like these, one would not expect listening to alternative hypotheses went to the gulags results to be consistent between different Achievement or was put up against a wall.

Standards in a given year, or from year to year in the Never mind that the crackpot ideas of Lysenkoism same Achievement Standard. To give just one of many resulted in a succession of crop failures and that people examples of massive inconsistency: starved; it was the doctrine that counted. It was only In Mathematics 1.8, 5069 candidates out of 39,605

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obtained Excellence in 2002, but in 2003 only 81 out of 40,494 obtained Excellence. It is well known that cohorts of this size do not vary much from year to year. It is, to say the least, unlikely that the performance of Mathematics teachers in 2002 was 64 times better than in 2003. The only possible explanation is that NCEA cannot reliably measure achievement.

Although it was the National government that was first seduced into adopting NCEA, none has been more strident and blockheaded in support of NCEA than Trofim Mallard under the protective wing of The Prime Minister.

Monopoly is power, and power corrupts. NZQA has not felt it necessary to listen to its customers; the parents and students.

Educational research that does not support NCEA dogma is ignored. Emeritus Professor Warwick Elley, an internationally respected authority on assessment, has consistently criticised NCEA with copious research data yet he continues to be treated as a non-person.

Though Elley and other dissidents have not yet been carted off to a re-education camp in the Chatham Islands, any principal who publicly speaks out had better forget about promotion to those green pastures within the Ministry or NZQA. Trevor Mallard has said that NCEA Achievement Standards are robust, consistent, and reliable. He has also said that the Cambridge International Examinations are “shonky” and “Third World”.

In this terminological inexactitude, Mr Mallard could not be stating the exact opposite of the truth with greater precision.

Indeed, this propaganda is positively Orwellian in its contempt for the English language.

The people of New Zealand may not be emaciated as the Soviet peasants were under Lysenko, but our children are being starved of meaningful qualifications under the stewardship of the NZQA commissars.

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Our Education column welcomes submissions on educational themes, email 650 words to editorial@investigatemagazine.com July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 75

LIFESTYLE

TOYBOX

LOVE IN MOTION Things that move you

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he new BMW 3-series has hit New Zealand streets with a bang this month, once again setting the agenda for executive transport and leisure. Wider, longer and slightly higher than the outgoing model, the new 3 retains its 50/50 balance for optimum handling. The flagship 330i, shown above, features significant engine upgrades delivering what BMW says is an even more responsive powerhouse. We haven’t driven one yet, but we’re planning to. Stay tuned for the whole story. For more info on where to get a test drive yourself, email mark.baker@bmw.co.nz for details

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pson NZ continues to carve a niche by delivering high-performance technology at breakthrough prices - in this case the new EMP-S3 multimedia projector for just $1599, a price unthinkable only a year ago. Epson’s patented 3LCD technology is designed to offer brighter and more natural large screen images, along with smoother action, because there’s no colour break-up. It has seven colour modes and can handle corporate, education or home entertainment tasks with ease. Again, just take a look at the price. We want one.

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ust when you thought it was safe to go and buy yourself that cheap plasma screen you’d always craved, along comes Sharp to rain on your parade with the release of the world’s largest commercially-available LCD screen TV, the monster LC-45 Aquos which, as its name suggests, is 45 inches of liquid crystal viewing. The beauty of these big screen TVs is that they have amazing lives – 20 odd years even if you left the set on eight hours a day 365 days year for two decades. As you’ll see instore, the Sharp LC-45 is slim and light enough to hang on a wall, and perfect for the introduction of HDTV. The TV features built-in Virtual Dolby Surround Sound, although with a beast like this you’ll undoubtedly be plugging it into a 5.1 home theatre system anyway.

Naturally, as an LCD, direct light has little impact which makes it a good choice for rooms with large windows and plenty of natural light. www.sharp.net.nz

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it bikes started out as personal transportation for race crews in the 1990s, and have since burst on to the mainstream. Now $3,499 including GST will buy a ride on one of the hottest pit bikes around, the 110cc Thumpstar. Featuring a 110cc flat-top piston engine, wave rotor front and rear discs, 4104 tensile front and rear axles, and 33 mm telescopic forks, the Thumpstar is just the ticket for any adrenalin junky. For further information call 0800 4 THUMP.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 77

LIFESTYLE

FOOD & DRINK

HOMEMADE PROZAC When the weather’s cold and the sun sets mid-afternoon, Eli Jameson finds brightness in the kitchen

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taken to tossing the results of this together with some t has always amazed me that when T.S. Eliot wrote pasta, cream, and good freshly-grated cheese the line, ‘April is the cruelest month’, he wasn’t (see recipe). talking about the onset of winter. Of course, this is Another old standby for when people come by the hardly surprising given that he lived in the northern house is a lamb-and-pasta dish I picked up when I lived hemisphere. Sitting here in June, I’d give anything to be in New York (and yes, I realize that complaining about back there in April. a downunder winter after spending one particularly bleak Somehow, it’s hard to be cheery when the sky turns December-through-February living next to the East River black at what always feels like four o’clock. does show a lack of perspective, but bear with me).

To cope with this seasonal black dog, I’ve tended to This involves getting some lamb steaks, flattening take refuge in good food and cooking: after all, much them out, rolling and tying and them up into little better to stick a roast in the oven than your head in one. parcels with mint, rosemary, and cheese. I then brown Not only does keeping the cooker on full-bore help the packets, set them aside, and make a rich red sauce in heat at least one end of my drafty circa-1890s terrace the same pan with onions, garlic, mint, and tinned San house, but it also provides something in the neighMarzano tomatoes – deglazing, of course, with some bourhood of an acceptable substitute to that favourite hearty red wine. That done (and here’s the beauty: all summer pastime – namely, standing in front of the this fiddly work can be done in the afternoon), I boil up barbeque searing off ribeyes and drinking shiraz at some orichiette pasta (the 8:30pm, when it’s still bright name menas ‘little ears’), and and sunny.

There is something about serve it in bowls with some Another advantage is that of the sauce and a couple of winter comfort food (for lack cooking that makes for a lamb rolls. If you’re out to of a better, and less hackneyed, welcome distraction from impress, cut the lamb on a phrase) can be as simple or as the winter blues bias and arrange artfully on complicated as one likes. For top of the pasta, garnishing the home chef with a busy with some fresh mint or parsley. And serve, of course, work schedule who still likes to muck about in the kitchen with a big earthy red – perhaps a zinfandel or Cape a few nights a week, this is a great advantage: if I’ve Mentelle (a sister vineyard to Marlborough’s Cloudy Bay). knocked off a bit early and am home by six or seven, Whether simple or complicated, there is something then I might happily bread and fry some eggplants, restorative about the whole cooking process that shuts knock up a red sauce, grate a few cheeses, and boil some off the white noise of the previous twelve hours and spaghetti (perhaps even making the noodles myself, if makes for a welcome distraction from a bout of the the mood strikes) to wind up with a ridiculously huge winter blues. platter of eggplant parmagiana that will keep me in As American novelist Nora Ephron once put it, ‘what lunches through the week. (Fill a good bread roll with I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is somea few rounds of the leftovers, wrap in foil and bake thing comforting about the fact that if you melt butter until gooey). and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a Otherwise, tossing a tray of veggies in the oven to sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is roast for an hour or so while pottering around the house sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those tidying or simply watching the Holmes over a quiet drink of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to pays a myriad of dividends. Out of a concession to age settle for crossword puzzles.’ and arteries, I don’t do this very often, but lately I’ve

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ROAST VEGETABLE PASTA Even though it takes a little while to roast the veggies, the actual work time involved in this pasta is virtually nil. And all the cream and cheese makes the healthy bits of the dish much more palatable.

You’ll need: • 250g dried pasta, such as fettucini, papardelle, or rigatoni • An assortment of baby eggplants, fennel bulbs, zucchini, onions, et cetera – whatever looks good at the market that day, roughly chopped • 200ml whipping cream • 1 cup (or more) freshly-grated grana padano cheese • Fresh parsley, for garnish • Olive oil 1. Place the chopped vegetables in a roasting tray with a good glug of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Toss the lot around to coat, and place in a reasonably hot pre-heated oven. Meanwhile, place a pot of salted water on the stove to boil.

2. After about 45 minutes or so, check the vegetables – when they are good and soft and roasted, throw the pasta in the water.

3. Warm some cream in a wide saucepan, bringing just to the boil.

When the pasta is a few minutes away from being al dente, remove the vegetables from the oven and toss with the cream. Add a good handful of the cheese.

4. Drain the pasta, and toss with the cream, vegetables, and cheese.

Serve in warmed pasta bowls and sprinkle on some more cheese and fresh parsley.

Serves four

WINTER-WARMING BEAN SOUP Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian This a great winter soup that’s not too complicated for a weeknight and packs a spectacular payoff. Plus, with the exception of the optional truffle oil, it costs virtually pennies a bowl to make. My family eats vats of this over winter.

You’ll need: • Approx. 250g Great Northern beans, soaked overnight • 2 litres vegetable stock • 2-3 peeled garlic cloves • Dried mint, oregano and/or other dried herbs • Olive oil • 3-4 diced onions • 2 starchy potatoes, peeled and diced • Leaves of one silverbeet or one head rocket, thinly shredded • Fresh parsley • Salt and pepper • Good extra-virgin olive oil (or, for something really special, truffle oil) 1. In a biggish, heavy-bottomed pot, bring the stock and the beans to the boil. Skim off the froth that comes to the surface, and add the garlic and dried herbs. Give it a good stir and simmer, loosely covered, for up to an hour or until the beans are tender. At this point, crush the garlic cloves against the side of the pan.

2. In a second, bigger pot, bring some olive oil up to a medium-high heat and add the onions and potatoes, stirring so that nothing sticks and everything picks up a bit of colour (about five minutes), with a

shot of salt and pepper. Add the silverbeet or rocket, stir until just wilted, and pour the other pot with the beans over the whole affair.

Bring it all to a boil, then simmer and stir occasionally for about half an hour.

3. Just before serving, toast some thick slices of good crusty country bread and set aside. Using a wooden spoon, mash some of the potatoes and beans against the side of the pot – this nicely thickens the broth. Check seasoning and ladle into bowls, and drizzle a little good extra-virgin olive or truffle oil over each dish. Serve with toasted bread.

Serves: an army.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 81

LIFESTYLE

HEALTH

CRAZY ENOUGH TO WORK? Bad movies and bad ideas contribute to our misunderstanding of mental illness

T Claire Morrow

he infamous Australian stockbroker Rene Rivkin a person a split personality where normal self is interwas convicted of insider trading in 2003. Now mittently replaced with a Jim Carey character who thinks my understanding of insider trading is that you he’s Jesus. Kinda fun-sounding, almost. Another film, know something other people don’t and use it to make Girl, Interrupted, features Winona Ryder as a young money on the stock market. Dangerous criminals such woman with ‘borderline personality disorder’ (and the as Martha Stewart have been jailed for this heinous crime, tagline, ‘sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a as was Rivkin, who was given nine months periodic little crazy’) who suffers psychological distress and in detention. He fell to pieces in prison and was hospital- the end receives enlightenment. It could happen to anyised. There was little sympathy for him at the time, per- one, right? Well, no. Personality disorders are pervasive, haps because he didn’t suffer from something nice and life-long, and serious. Meeting Angelina Jolie does not straightforward, like epilepsy or a stroke. Of course he provide any insight for the patient, and for their poor did have that benign brain tumour, but since it only families, it probably makes things worse. affected his mental health and not, say, his ability to Mental illness affects a lot of people, but the statistics walk, no one cared. That and bipolar disorder. ‘The big are different depending whom you ask: 1 in 4, 1 in 10, 1 baby’, people thought, ‘trying to get out of his prison in 25. In the end, what difference does it make? We’re term by saying he was unbalanced. Pull your socks up still talking about a lot of people. And yet we still can’t Rene, you big faker. Get over it and do your time.’ Rivkin decide whether mental illness is a big deal or not. People was divorced from his wife and seem to talk a lot more about it committed suicide at his moth(Rivkin was very upfront about It takes a hero to stand er’s home earlier this year. He was it), but as a community we don’t survived by five adult children. seem to do much to help. Do up and shine the light on Great attitude towards the we even know much about the proverbial black dog mentally ill, huh? mental illness? Mostly it seems About a month ago I saw one to depend on which campaign of the local mums in the playground. New babe in the health department is running at the time. arms, looking drowsy, and could this supermum be her Aside from the really esoteric out-there stuff (rare pre-pregnancy weight? ‘You’ve got it going on’, I com- specific psychoses about shrinking genitals, Munchausen mented. I waited for the inevitable litany: ‘oh no, I had syndrome, and so forth), when people talk about menterrible morning sickness, I actually lost weight…” Well, tal illness they seem to mean either the psychotic illI should have known her better she has integrity. I have nesses where the patient sees, hears or believes things never known her not to be straight up and she was. ‘No, that the rest of us do not (yes, it’s complex, and there it’s crap. I’m depressed.’ are many other symptoms) or affective disorders (disorGive the woman a medal: it takes a hero to stand up ders of mood). Aside from the obvious symptoms, and shine the light on the proverbial black dog. It really mental illnesses have many other symptoms, such as stood out for me because of the rarity of both insight disordered thinking, sleep disturbance and so forth. They in a person with a mental illness, and the raw honesty are not fun, nor are they easy to deal with. They can she displayed. either be managed and lived with in one way or the The movie Me, Myself and Irene was about a ‘schizo- other (for most people), or they can spiral out of conphrenic’ who had two personalities. More like Jekyll and trol, ruining the lives of everyone they touch. The homeHyde, really. I asked around and apparently a lot of less guy ranting on the street corner? How do you think people believe that schizophrenia is something that gives his mum feels?

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Maybe the term “mental illness” is too broad. It describes everyone from the person who gets mildly depressed and then mildly manic, also known as cyclothymic disorder (which can even at times be an advantage in life) to the person who is totally divorced from reality.

Rivkin was desperately seeking help and understanding. The illness that gave him an energetic business edge also gave him week after week of abject misery. His family was shattered, over and over again. And Rene got the best medical care that money can buy. What do you think you get if you can’t afford private treatment?

You get a prescription. And that’s about it, unless you happen to be competent, live in an area where mental health services are accessible, and be referred by someone who knows what help is available. Private psychiatrists charge fees. Psychiatrists in public services have time to treat people in crisis, and that’s about it.

We know that early intervention works. But unless you (or a family member) have the insight and the cash to front up to the appropriate specialist(s) seeking and paying for help, you are unlikely to get help until you show up in an emergency room with a gut full of booze and grandma’s sleeping pills. People with severe mental illness don’t advocate well for themselves. The ranting homeless are sleeping under the letters to the editor, not writing them.

Perhaps part of our problem is that mental illness is a new frontier.

For the longest time, we have acknowledged the existence of mental illness, but effective treatment and recovery is a new thing. The first effective treatment for a mental illness was lithium carbonate, accidently discovered by an Australian doctor in 1948, to be a highly effective treatment for mania. This was back in the days when you could just

test any old theory out on your hospitalized patients. The occasional person died from lithium toxicity, of course, but suddenly we had a medication that specifically treated mania. This assisted in refining the distinction between psychotic mania and other forms of psychosis.

It also allowed very sick people to quickly get better and be treated as outpatients.

Iproniazid, the first modern antidepressant, was originally developed to treat tuberculosis in the early 1950’s. In addition to treating tuberculosis, iproniazid was observed to elevate mood and in many patients. The first tricyclic antidepressant – no longer used due to toxic side effects – was likewise discovered accidentally in the search for a treatment for schizophrenia. The first modern selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (Prozac) was released in 1987. There are now a whole new generation of treatments for depression. There are now antipsychotic medications that do not belong to the “major tranquilizer” group, because they are not majorly tranquillizing.

Our understanding of these drugs gave us insight into how mental illnesses might work, and not the other way around. As medical treatments to treat chemical imbalances in the brain get more refined, our knowledge of mental illness increases. Go on, write me. Perhaps the odd person goes nuts and kills their family entirely due to taking Prozac.

It’s very, very rare, if it happens at all. But certainly a significant number of people destroy their own lives and families (literally and figuratively) as a result of their untreated – or perhaps untreatable – mental illness.

We don’t do well at handling mental illness (in ourselves or others).

Should, but don’t. The last sixty or less years have been a sharp learning curve. Sorry, Rene, you deserved better.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 83

LIFESTYLE

SCIENCE

COPY CATS Entrepreneurial American scientists are destined for the dog house, says Susanne Quick

I

t’s just another brown brick building in a suburban a pet. The recipient, a Texas woman known only as Julie, American business park. But Suite J at the Waunakee paid $50,000 to have her beloved – but dead – kitty Business Center in Wisconsin is about to turn into cloned. While some say she was swindled, Hawthorne the animal cloning debate’s ground zero. Genetic Sav- believes she was given an incredible, if expensive, gift. ings & Clone Inc. – the entrepreneurial outfit that intro“Our product is based on love”, Hawthorne said. duced the first cloned pet cat to the world in December David Magnus, director of Stanford University’s – is opening its doors in this small Madison, Wis., sub- Center for Biomedical Ethics, scoffed at this claim. He urb this month. The company’s CEO, Lou Hawthorne, said the high death rates and possible cruelty that go has promised that by year’s end, a dog will be born here. into cloning make Genetic Savings & Clone’s product In the eight years since Dolly the Sheep’s birth was anything but “loving”. announced to the world, research into animal cloning has Also, he and other critics said consumers are being progressed in ways few dreamed possible a decade ago. duped: The animals they think they are getting – their Scientists have now cloned barnyard animals and original pets – cannot be reproduced. endangered species. They’ve created cloned cows from And finally, they think Genetic Savings & Clone’s prodfrozen steaks and cloned mice from cancer cells. They’ve uct is grossly frivolous in light of the number of anitalked about resurrecting extinct creatures such as woolly mals in shelters who need homes. mammoths and Tasma“Everything about nian tigers. And with the this is objectionable”, Who and what are the clones? news on Thursday that Magnus said. soft tissue from dinoBut Autumn Fiester, Are they healthy animals or desaurs had been discova bioethicist at the Uniformed monsters? How many aniered, re-creating these versity of Pennsylvania, mals are sacrificed in the pursuit of giant lizards does not said there isn’t evidence seem so farfetched. to show that animals are one healthy clone? And, in the end, Despite the scientific suffering – at least any what will it lead to? excitement, creativity more than commercially and ingenuity that have bred dogs or cats. inspired and driven this research, cloning remains She added that the claim that pet owners are being duped uncomfortable – even freakish – for many people. is condescending. As for the frivolous argument, she says, Who and what are the clones? Are they healthy ani- “Then you’re arguing against buying any luxury good.” mals or deformed monsters? How many animals are Among those involved in cloning, she is in the minority. sacrificed in the pursuit of one healthy clone? And, in Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific the end, what will it lead to? development at Advanced Cell Technology – a WorcesAs ethicists and scientists weigh the motivations for ter, Mass., company at the forefront of cloning technolanimal cloning – improving the food supply, fighting ogy – called it “troubling.” disease, saving endangered animals – the arguments for Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor of biology at the Massaand against cloning mutate and evolve along with the chusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the research advances.

Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, called pet That debate is now moving to the backyard. cloning “ridiculous” and “preposterous.”

In December, Genetic Savings & Clone announced Somatic cell nuclear transfer – the shop name for clonthe birth of Little Nicky, the first cloned cat to be sold as ing – is conceptually a pretty easy process.

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A cell – such as a skin cell – is taken from an adult animal. The nucleus, and the DNA it houses, is sucked out and placed next to an empty egg cell that’s had its nucleus removed. The new egg-nucleus combo is then jolted with electricity or bathed in a chemical cocktail.

“What you want to do is basically trick the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized by a sperm”, said Neal First, a retired professor of animal sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the first researcher to clone cattle.

If all goes well, the duped egg starts to divide, eventually creating an incipient embryo, which researchers implant into a surrogate animal.

While this may sound pretty straightforward, it’s actually a messy, hit-or-miss process that yields few successful clones.

Depending on whom you talk to, the number of successful clones – i.e., those which survive beyond birth – can run as low as one-in-1,000 to as many as 15 percent.

Researchers believe this is the result of a host of molecular issues, some they can pinpoint, others they can’t.

The mystery is in the egg. “There are molecules in the egg that allow the DNA to reprogram” and start anew so that it’s read as the blueprint for an embryo, not an old skin cell, Lanza said.

But what those molecules are and how they work remains elusive.

There is also an issue of extra DNA in the egg. Even though the egg’s nuclear DNA is removed, other genetic material remains floating around the egg cell in a form known as mitochondrial DNA. No one knows for sure what effects this might have on a developing clone embryo, but it does mean that the clone, despite its name, is not an exact genetic duplicate of the donor. It has some other DNA that may or may not affect its development.

Then there’s the issue of imprinting. Mammals carry two copies of each gene: one set from their mother, the other from their father. But only one of these copies is active at any one time.

In a clone, “the normal battle between mom and dad” is not taking place, Lanza said. The end result: critical messages from the genes are being lost during an embryo’s development, potentially leading to cardiac problems, respiratory ailments and “a messed up placenta.”

The hurdles don’t end here.

When DNA is in a quiescent state, it looks like spaghetti noodles with proteins attached to it. This means that when the skin cell DNA is sucked out, it’s carrying a lot of protein baggage. It is possible these proteins may get in the way of the egg-skin cell DNA fusion.

Researchers at Genetic Savings & Clone say they have solved this

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problem by using a new technique called chromatin transfer that cleans the DNA. The result, according to Hawthorne, is higher efficiency.

“Our losses are well under 50 percent”, he said, adding that such losses are typical in commercial breeding.

Magnus and others question these claims; scientists at Genetic Savings & Clone have not published their results. But Jim Robl, president of a South Dakota biotech company called Hematech and one of the developers of chromatin transfer, said he, too, had gotten good results using this method to clone cows.

Yet, the battle over pet clones only partially hinges on technical and molecular hurdles.

These animals are behaviorally complex. They are not just products of a strict genetic blueprint, but of the multicolored and textured tapestry of their environment and experiences.

This means that a consumer who’s paying thousands of dollars in hopes of getting the same dog or cat will be getting an animal that behaves differently than the original. That, said Magnus, is “a rip-off.”

Finally, critics of pet cloning said there’s the issue of the millions of animals who don’t have homes that are living on the streets or housed in shelters.

Magnus and Spiegel-Miller believe Hawthorne’s business is minimizing the plight of these animals.

They charge that the money Hawthorne’s clients are willing to spend on a clone would be better used on these other animals, that Genetic Savings & Clone clients should head to a local shelter, pay $50 for a cat or dog that needs a home and donate the rest to the shelter.

That would be a more ethical way to spend their money, they say.

Fiester and Hawthorne dismiss the criticism as baseless.

“Why should someone who loves their cat be more obligated to donate money or help shelter animals than someone else?” Fiester said.

He also threw back the notion that cloning for agricultural or medical purposes is somehow more ethical.

In the end, he said, the future of the pet cloning business will depend upon the quality of the product.

If Genetic Savings & Clone can create animals that pet owners are happy with – animals that aren’t sick or compromised and behave in ways similar to the original – the business will succeed, Hawthorne said.

His scientists also are looking into how to enhance pets and make them live longer and healthier.

“Our clones will be better than normal,” he said. “Clones are going to become the preferred pets.”

ing that you now have one empty cylinder.

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July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 85

LIFESTYLE

TRAVEL

AEGEAN IDYLL Mamma Mia, the water in the Greek Islands really is that colour, writes Lisa Vorderbrueggen

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EA ISLAND, Greece: Menus? Leave them for travel log written by a U.S. family that had voyaged on a the tourists, our skipper admonishes my hus- chartered sailboat in the Greek Isles. band, Joe, and me as we walk into one of the It was perfect. It appealed to our adventurous nature, half-dozen tavernas lining the marina. “Anna! Show us but it was tame enough for a couple of suburbanites to the fish!” he demands. (Or at least that’s what we think handle. Our journey began in earnest with an hour-long he said. It was all, um, Greek to us.) taxi ride from downtown Athens to the port of Lavrio, We meekly follow the proprietress and our skipper, where we met our skipper and inspected the Filyra, our Yannis Lekkas, through a swinging door into the kitchen, floating home for the week. where Anna deftly pulls open an ice-filled drawer packed The first task was to provision the ship. with the day’s catch.

We climbed into the back of an old, rusted van that Our heads bob back and forth as, astounded, we ferried folks from the marina to the village store, perched watch the pair haggle loudly and with much hand ges- on a couple of milk crates and held on. turing over our culinary fate.

Inside the tiny market, we stood frozen for a few An hour later, we strip clean the bones of six fried red seconds as we looked at the shelves stacked with unrecfish coated in a crispy, ognizable packages. Uh, delectable seasoning the Greek word A veteran sailor in his early 50s with what’s and toast Lekkas with for sugar? a wry sense of humor and a classic the ouzo sent over Thank goodness, a from a neighboring group of friendly and Greek profile, he was more than our table of Swiss sailors. knowledgeable Brits skipper; he was our culture coach And so it began, the also on a sailing holiday glorious September joined us in the store week we sailed the Greek Isles on a 32-foot chartered and the grocery clerk spoke English. (Most Greeks we sailboat, just the two of us and a hired skipper. talked with spoke English and loved to help people We pulled up anchor each morning, set a course across learn Greek.) the Aegean Sea and moored at a different harbor every We still didn’t get it quite right. night. Our days consisted of swimming in clear water I awoke after our first night aboard to face my first the color of jewels, strolling amidst 2,500 year old lesson under a Greek skipper’s command: Coffee is Greek ruins and soaking up architectural, cultural and very important. culinary delights.

And I had bought the wrong kind. We had a French All told, we landed on six islands in the Cyclades re- press coffee pot on board but I mistakenly bought the gion of the Aegean – Kea, Kithnos, Siros, Mikonos, finely ground Greek-style coffee that required boiling.

Delos and Rineia.

Fortunately, a sailor knows how to improvise, and he Neither of us had ever sailed. So what possessed us taught me to enjoy the sweet, thick Greek coffee. to go to sea halfway around the world?

It was the first of many things Lekkas would teach us It began with a simple question. that week.

“How far can you go on 100,000 miles?” I asked A veteran sailor in his early 50s with a wry sense of my husband, referring to the balance in his frequent humor and a classic Greek profile, he was more than our flier account. skipper; he was our culture coach.

I had long dreamed of traveling to Greece, and durWe watched him closely and learned to eat dinner when ing my research I stumbled across a Web site with a Greeks eat, about 8 or 9 p.m., and shop each day in the

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harbor village for fresh bread, feta cheese, vegetables, fruit and wine. He even cooked omelets and made sliced tomato and cucumber salads for us as we bobbed lazily under the golden Greek sun in a bay the color of a turquoise pendant.

He began by teaching us to sail. We didn’t have to work. Lekkas could sail without us – probably a lot easier – but we wanted to learn.

And even though Lekkas spoke perfect English, it wasn’t always perfectly clear what he was trying to tell us.

The sails were rigged with colour-coded lines, or ropes, and controlled with winches and clamps.

To change direction, the skipper adjusts the angle of the sails through the manipulation of the lines. From his perch behind the helm, Lekkas yelled directions to his rookie crew.

“Liberate the blue one!” he hollered over the noise of the sea. Huh? Oh, release the clamp on the blue line.

“They are confused! Unconfuse them!” No, we were the ones who were confused. The lines were tangled. Fortunately, we weren’t forced to walk the plank except when it led to the taverna where we drank wine and ate fried calamari and boiled octopus.

We berthed each night alongside other sailboats – imagine a watery campground for boats – in a harbour that typically faced a row of tavernas. Their proximity proved both a blessing and a curse.

Remember the Swiss sailors who sent us ouzo our first night?

The men were either sucking up to us in advance or recruiting for their bar medley: They sang until the wee hours of the morning about 200 feet from our bed.

And we couldn’t shake them.

The Aegean has more than 1,400 islands and we found ourselves docked with the Swiss three times. To top it off, they bathed naked each morning from the back of their boat, using an outdoor shower attachment.

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Singing, as it turns out, is a common event in Greek tavernas. It was only a matter of time before Joe, an accomplished singer and guitarist, added his voice to the tradition.

After a dinner of meatballs and cucumber-tomato salad at an outdoor taverna in Merichas, a Kithnos harbor village, Joe spied a guitar resting on a chair at a nearby table.

“May I?” he asked its Greek owner. It was old and out of tune, but within minutes, Joe was taking requests for American rock ‘n’ roll from the locals and a table of young Canadian women also on a sailing vacation.

What did they ask to hear? “American Pie,” Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen. “The Boss!” they yelled. (Joe loathes the first and doesn’t do Bruce. But they liked his Beatles renditions.)

The singalong even led to a romantic encounter for a couple of young, handsome Greek men who sailed the next day with the Canadian ladies. (One of the men sent us a nice email update.)

It may sound as though we did little more than eat and drink, but we found time to explore the islands.

Picture-perfect Mikonos, where the rich and famous come to party, looks as if it had been constructed in Disneyland.

White, stone-lined streets – narrow and crooked to thwart pirates – are home to chic and expensive shops where jewelry, especially, abounds.

Buildings wear traditional colors of deep blue and dazzling white, and flowers hang from the window boxes.

The town beautifully complements Mother Nature’s work, the unbelievably blue Aegean Sea. If you’ve seen only pictures, the water really is that color.

We didn’t frequent Mikonos’ famed nightclubs, but we did dine with some of the town’s renowned avian residents.

A small flock of pelicans have become pets and freely waddle about the town to the unending amusement of the tourists. A few feet from our table, a pelican the size of a first-grader delicately groomed with its long beak the head of a fish-bearing taverna manager.

Despite Mikonos’ charm, our most memorable stop was Delos, a barren granite rock about 4 miles long and smothered with archaeological sites that date to the second century B.C. Cruise ships control the dock so we had to anchor offshore, lower our tiny inflatable dinghy into the choppy water and motor to a narrow beach.

We began at the museum, which sells an invaluable guidebook to help decipher the acres of carved columns, edifices for the gods and goddesses, tile mosaics and theaters of stone. Excavation has been under way here since 1872, and the museum also showcases some fascinating artifacts, such as its famous stone lions that lined a marketplace from 110 B.C. If you visit Delos and you have an interest in ancient Greek life, go early. The island closes at 3 p.m., and if you have just one day, you’ll need every last minute.

We learned another thing about ourselves on this trip: We like the sailor’s life.

On our first day at sea, Lekkas pulled on his lemon yellow slicker as we left the harbor, a sign we would come to know well.

We moved into open water and the famous Aegean winds, called the meltemi, blew 30 knots and the swells reached 5 to 6 feet.

The Filyra rose and fell with a great clatter as roaring waves crashed over her bow, sending a cold, salty spray onto our faces. While we dipped into the trough, we lost sight of the horizon and watched a wall of surging water rise behind us.

Lekkas watched our faces closely. “Are you all right?” he asked. He later told us that some clients become terrified or horribly seasick.

Not us. We were wearing our anti-seasickness patches, so bring it on.

We may be middleaged suburbanites today, but tomorrow, we may just buy a boat and go to sea.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 89

LIFESTYLE

BOOKCASE

WINTER READING Timaru's Chekhov adds another notch to his belt, and we re-navigate the globe

WATCH OF GRYPHONS

By Owen Marshall, Vintage, $27.95

Michael Morrisssey

Every two years or so, the Timaru Chekhov (as he has been dubbed) puts out another stunningly good collection of stories. Some days a city slicker like myself might ask how come an author living in Timaru (population 28,000) never seems to run out of material? How come a guy living in a town you can drive through in five minutes seems to have more stories up his sleeve than someone like me living in big bad Auckland (population 1 million and rising)?

Two reasons come to mind. First, Marshall is in the tradition of the great nineteenth century novelists as noted by Mary McCarthy in her famous essay, “The Fact in Fiction” – he is interested in what jobs people work at, in either life in factories or life in the office; no strata of society is beyond his interest or observation. Second, as a former school teacher and long time resident of a particular locale, he has had the opportunity to acquire a richly detailed knowledge of how human beings intermesh. In a small town, the social distance between poor and affluent is, I suspect, more easily crossed – particularly in a profession like school teaching where – in the familiar New Zealand way – rich and poor often rub shoulders. I could be wrong about this – but it is a working explanation. Of course, Owen Marshall might just happen to be an extraordinarily acute social observer and writer regardless of what region he inhabits. In quarrying the provincial, Marshall continues to dazzle with closely noted particulars which paradoxically express the wider human picture.

Length-wise the stories fall into three categories. Some like the hilarious “Hodge” are but four pages, most are in the middle short story distance of 10-20 pages and a few (“Minding Lear” and “Journey’s End”) are 30 plus.

The shorter ones are relatively plotless sketches – they have the compacted power of a prose-poem, an essay, the character sketch. “Hodge” is the best of the shorter stories – its depiction of a family of accident-prone losers made me laugh out loud more than once.

With more than just a nod in the direction of his

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original mentor, Frank Sargeson, it is no surprise to find that his protagonists often have jobs like vegetable packer, baker’s assistant, pea sorter, wall board maker or brisket puncher (whatever that may be – I’m in no hurry to find out). Sympathy and empathy for the working class have been the hallmark of much of the New Zealand social realist tradition and Marshall surpasses all his predecessors in sophistication in this genre. Most of the time, Marshall couldn’t easily be labelled a modernist, let alone postmodernist (though he makes the odd foray), but his realism has a multilayered richness that hints at depths you won’t find in writers like (say) Noel Hilliard or Roderick Finlayson. Writing about the working class, also allows an incursion into bleak zones like

Sydenham and the world of petty crime (“Buster” and “Poetic Licence”). Just as confidently, Marshall writes about a woman lawyer (“A Modern Story”), or a Personnel and Publicity Manager (“Margaret’s View”).

Marshall’s portrait of dementia in “Minding Lear” is masterful – variously moving, grimly funny, cryptic.

Good as the stories are overall, a couple are marred by Marshall overreaching himself as moraliser at the conclusion – “Time would tell whether their muse could countenance their sins” smacks the fist a little too firmly into the palm, as it were. Possibly the finest story of all is the title story which though set in Italy, a country Marshall cannot know as well as his beloved Timaru, keeps us in glorious suspense as we wait for a probable romance to burgeon, then gently eases us into the life-like letdown of life continuing, sans romance perhaps, but leaving friendships and fond memories intact.

OVER THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

By Laurence Bergreen, Harper Collins, $29.99 Great as was Columbus’s voyage to America, it was exceeded in length, duration and endurance by the globe-encircling expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan 27 years later in 1519. Indeed, Bergreen notes in this excellent biography that Magellan’s voyage was fifteen times longer and encompassed far greater hardship and adventure as well as more spectacular feats of navigation. The discovery and navigation of the 300 mile-long straits that now bear

his name is regarded as the greatest single feat of navigation of all time. Magellan was also the first to cross the vastness of the Pacific ocean in a single journey – 7000 miles of uncharted water. The mediaeval map-makers of Europe did not know of its existence – hence their estimate of the size of the earth was about 18,000 miles instead of the true figure, 25,000.

It should be made clear that educated people and of course explorers like Magellan did not believe the earth to be flat. The whole expedition was predicated on the globularity of the planet – in particular, the possibility of approaching the Spice Islands from a westerly instead of an easterly direction. The motive behind the expedition was to grab the spicerich islands off the Portuguese who had a passion for secrecy and had been harvesting them for some time.

Apart from any few remaining doubters of a round planet, the men may have feared that they would boil alive at the equator, meet various monsters including the wondrous Socolopendra with a face of flames or sail near a magnetic island that could pull nails out of ships. They met sharks, whales and flying fish but the greatest dangers they encountered were scurvy and mutiny. Bergreen notes that Magellan and his officers did not get scurvy while many of the men succumbed. The explanation, unknown at the time, was because the Captain and his officers were eating preserved quince which had enough vitamin C to keep them healthy. It is humbling to think that without a few regular helpings of preserved quince the expedition might never have succeeded at all. Magellan and others thought the cause of scurvy was “bad air”.

All in all, there were four mutinies. Magellan, a man of his time, didn’t treat the ringleaders lightly - they had to endure strappado, a thoroughly nasty form of torture involving weights tied to the feet and being hoisted and violently dropped. Bergreen doesn’t spare us the details.

In reading about Alexander the Great, Captain James Cook and Magellan, a strange similarity becomes evident. All came to be treated as gods and when they came half to believe it, they became arrogant and cruel. Eerily, both Magellan and Cook did much the same thing – showed the “natives”: the awesome power of their weaponry but paid the ultimate price by overestimating their “godly “powers.

Some three years later, one ship of an original five and 18 battered survivors from an initial crew of 260, arrived back in Spain to tell the tale of the greatest sea voyage of all time.

Without Antonio Pigafetta, the ship’s chronicler (also a lucky consumer of preserved quince), we would know almost nothing of these extraordinary events. Bergreen makes the point

that Pigafetta’s fair-minded and objective noting of languages and customs made him arguably the first social anthropologist. This is a grand tale, perhaps the grandest in all seafaring history, and it is thrillingly told by Bergreen – this will be the definitive biography of Magellan for some time to come.

GRANTA 89: The Factory Edited by Ian Jack, Granta Publications, $29.99 The cover of this issue of Granta aptly hints at the contents – a fading grey print of tall old-style factories with smoking chimneys on which is vividly imposed a flaming red dragon: symbol of China’s new industrial might.

Unsurprisingly, the longest article is called “Made in China” by Isabel Hilton and it’s hard to read it without fear and sadness entering your western heart. England’s Blakean Satanic Mills may have given way to clean tree-lined Cadburys (here represented in kind by similarly Quaker-owned Rowntree’s) but in China, it seems, unions, a safe environment and fair deals for workers have yet to find a place.

Hilton writes of terminal worker diseases like silicosis (lung disease caused by inhalation of mineral dust typically occurring in quarries and coal mines) and cadmium poisoning. There is no right to strike, yet strikes do occur – they are usually brief and often dealt with harshly.

The scale and growth of Chinese industrialisation are hard to comprehend – compared to the rest of the world, it’s like translating stellar distances into miles. Three hundred million workers have passed through the Pearl River Delta region in 20 years. There are 30 million there right now – working (if not actual) life expectancy: five years. Guangdong’s exports rose from $2.9 billion to $50 billion

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during 1985-1994. Wages are up to 40 times cheaper in China than in England. It is disarming – or perhaps expected in today’s world – to discover that the famous model Hornby trains are now made in China.

Most of the contributions grimly echo the overall theme – factory work is often dangerous, almost always stupefyingly boring. A ray of hope is (or was) to be found in the Frederick Cooper Lamp Company in Chicago which had a courtyard and windows (!) where 150 employees all made individual, highly crafted lamps. Instead of production lines, there are hand tools with wooden handles, chisels, augers and mallets. Each lamp hand is finished with twenty minutes of buffing with steel wool. It all sounds too good to be true in the 21st century – and it is. A footnote notes that the factory will close on June 30th, 2005. By way of consolation, there are plans to convert the attractive-looking factory into lofts.

Granta continues to maintain its high standard of gritty, down to earth vivid writing which is always on the side of the underdog, the oppressed, the peasant, the politically displaced and – the factory worker. In a different mood and mode entirely, there is an interview with James Joyce by Czech writer Adolf Hoffm eister here published for the first time in English.

THE MERMAID CHAIR

By Sue Monk Kidd, Review, $36.99 Many satisfying novels have been written about what is cynically called the eternal triangle – the situation where one partner strays from the marital bond and has an affair with a third party – but regrettably this is not one of them.

In today’s up tempo world, it’s risky to set in

motion a plot of this kind - attractive married woman and rookery-minding monk about to take his final vows meet and are overwhelmingly attracted – and not have anything happen between them until more than half through the novel. They “make love” twice at my count and their dialogue is unlikely to set the world on fire: “I can’t believe how beautiful you are.”

“I’ve wanted you from the beginning.”

It’s hard to get interested in the jilted psychiatrist husband who does a good turn in angry jealousy but otherwise is fairly ineffective as a character. Two women sidekicks also fail to rouse interest. Then there’s the dog, Max (yawn). I’ve tried to warn writers about allowing in dogs as characters in serious novels but to no avail. Stubbornly canine-smitten authors keep introducing speechless mutts who lower narrative interest as soon as they start wagging their tails, barking, throwing meaningful doggy glances, etc. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mind dogs in real life – but fiction-wise I think they’re best left in stories (or movies) for children or pet programmes.

There is a saint-demented mother who keeps lopping off digits and apparently is intent on severing all ten – though thankfully the narrative only takes us up to two. (How do you chop all ten anyway? The way I figure it is, it’s going to be damn difficult to finish the job after you’re chopped off eight of them).

It’s a convention with this type of story that the sudden rush of blood to the head (and other parts) isn’t always the strongest foundation for new lasting relationships. Sooner or later, the offending party crawls back to the faithful one. Whatever, Graham Greene did this sort of thing infinitely better a generation ago. Ms Kidd also needs to work on her style: “He stood. He lifted his shoulders. I don’t think he knew what to feel any more than what to say.” I rest my case.

MAGICAL THINKING

By Augusten Burroughs, Hodder, $34.99 We all want to be thought of as nice people but Burroughs has made outrageous capital of the opposite tactic. By his own confession (though can we always believe him?) he is cruel to mice and children, hates babies and is promiscuous as an alley cat. By way of self deprecation, he tells us he has an undesirably skinny ass, is domestically grossly untidy and once had sex with an undertaker and in case you’re wondering, yes, there was a body only 20 feet away. Depending on the location of your funny bone, there is black humour to be extracted from these real life tales.

Burroughs’ accounts of frequent meeting of partners through ads, picking them up willy nilly confirms the reputation that gays have for extreme promiscuity. With paradoxical 92, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

humour, Burroughs reports there was one fellow with whom he was sleeping but not having sex with –“I told him how it’s really difficult for me to have sex with somebody unless I know them very well and am extremely comfortable with them. This sounded better than the truth which is I can’t have sex with somebody unless they’re a stranger and I’m drunk”.

The sexual hi jinks (or low jinks) quickly pall and it’s easier to feel more sympathetic to Burroughs at his missing out on being in a TV ad as a child and - after goggling at a sumptuous Vanderbilt mansion – informing his parents that they had kidnapped him and in reality he is a Vanderbilt who wants to go back to where he rightfully belongs. “You’re monsters. I hate you I hate I hate you,” he screams at his parents. Confirming the impression he was a difficult child and maybe a worse adult, Burroughs cheerfully lists his flaws as a “wide, deep cruel streak” plus “fear of intimacy, sexual dysfunction, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, social anxiety disorder and mania”. And don’t forget that skinny ass.

Looked at from the outside, all of Burroughs’ weirdness belongs to a tradition of potentially harmful eccentricity and self-endangering life style which we can readily identify as a subset of American behaviours most frequently associated with the inhabitants of California or New York (Burroughs is a Manhattanite) . Burroughs’ rollicking lucid style make for an easy read though it jades after several very same-sounding chapters about casual sex. The reader, whether bemused or shocked, must be wondering if Burroughs is a nice guy pretending to be an asshole, an asshole who somehow wants us still to like him or a guy who just can’t help himself – or a combination of all three?

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 93

LIFESTYLE

MOVIES & DVDs

SAME OLD SCHTICK Woody Allen’s routine is growing old, but Samuel L. Jackson’s still got it

Melinda and Melinda Released: May, 2005 Rated: M

✯✯

I Shelly Horton

just don’t get the fuss over Woody Allen. I think the man’s films all suffer from dialogue diarrhea.

The characters just talk and talk and go on and on (and on). And they are always horribly highbrow Manhattanites discoursing over incredibly important topics and appreciating fine music. I can guarantee none of his characters has ever watched Desperate Housewives!

If I was invited to a dinner party with people like that I’d probably end up plucking my eye out with a fork.

So keeping that in mind, here’s what I thought of Melinda and Melinda. The story starts across a restaurant table, as two writers debate whether life is essentially comic or tragic. To prove their respective sides they each take a tale about an uninvited guest and put their own spin on it. So for the rest of the film the audience is flipping between the comic version and the tragic version of Melinda’s life. The trouble is the comedy isn’t funny and the tragedy isn’t tragic so it’s easy to get lost.

My hint is to follow Melinda’s hairstyle: straight=funny, curly=sad.

Although the script is weak a couple of the performances are strong. Rhada Mitchell is mesmerising as Melinda. She’s in nearly every scene and carries the film with ease. But no matter hard she works at her character it’s distracting when she’s sprouting lines like, ‘The subject of infidelity is completely out of the question. You were correct in your assumption.’ This sounds like Jane Austen, not present-day New York.

Woody Allen didn’t cast himself in this film (be thankful for small mercies) but he did make a strange decision for who would play his usual neurotic lovelorn character: Will Ferrell. And weirdly, the comic actor pulls the role off fabulously. I have always thought Will is amusing but not romantic lead material, but in this film the

romantic lead is wracked with insecurities, guilt and jealousy, so it works. Others were more disappointing: Chloe Sevigny and Amanda Peet simply play themselves again and again. Yawn.

If you’re a Woody Allen fan ignore me and check it out. If not, I’ll pass you a fork.

Coach Carter Released: May, 2005 Rated: M

✯✯✯✯

C

oach Carter is a clichéd sports flick. But it’s a great clichéd sports flick that is based on a true story. Coach Carter (Samuel L Jackson) inherits a bunch of trash-talking, selfish high school basketballers who end every sentence with ‘dawg’. He makes them sign contracts to maintain their grades and respect each other, then whips them into shape with a kabillion pushups and enforced teamwork. Soon no-one can beat them and the state championships are well within their grasp.

That is, until the teachers reveal half the team is actually failing. So Coach Carter puts a lock on the gym and benches the entire team. The players, school and parents are furious. But Coach won’t budge; he points out young black men are 80 per cent more likely to go to prison than go to college.

Cue inspirational speech and swell motivational music.

I know it’s formulaic but I couldn’t help it, I was sitting there grinning and urging them to study so they could make something of themselves…oh and win basketball scholarships…and sort out their off-court relationships…and still win the championship.

Samuel L. Jackson smolders with intensity. He carries the film on his capable shoulders. He’s commanding, powerful and likeable. A strong cast of young actors portrays the players in sad but believable situations.

It’s a true story that rings true. Hooray for clichés.

Shelly Horton can be seen on the Today show, Prime, Tuesdays at 9.40am NZ time 94, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

LISTEN UP!: Coach Carter leads a winning team

The Woodsman Released: May, 2005 Rated: M

✯✯

S

ometimes I love seeing a movie I’ve heard nothing about. I walk in with no expectations and no idea of plot and let it wash over me. This was not one of those times. The Woodsman is a story of a pedophile. I think with a subject like this I would have liked some warning.

Kevin Bacon plays the lead role of Walter. Even before it’s revealed he’s a child molester, Bacon shows his character is uncomfortable in his own skin. He’s withdrawn and living with the stigma of being just released from jail. Imagine how much worse it is when people find out

what he did to get twelve years in the slammer. The editing of the movie splices unrelated scenes together making you feel disjointed and uncomfortable. It makes you see things from Walter’s point of view.

The Woodsman follows Walter and watches what happens when he tries to re-enter society. He honestly says he wants to be a “normal” person but at the same time is driven with a deep compulsion.

He gets a job at a timber yard with a bunch of rednecks and as an excon the only apartment he can rent is a rundown shoebox that happens to be across the road from a school. Demons follow his every thought.

Although there are other actors in the movie you almost don’t need them. It’s all about Walter and the battle of his will. Bacon is superbly restrained and subtle and acts with all his might in the many silences.

Will he lapse?

Not recommended as a first date movie.

July 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 95

DVDs

By TIM KERR

A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT R16, contains violence and sex scenes, in French with subtitles, 133 Minutes

son, Zach, Jason Lair (Josh Lucas) had been caring for his querulous, sickly grandfather, Henry (Michael Caine) when his father, Turner (Christopher Walken) arrives at their front door. A return of the father who had abandoned Jason decades ago leaves many questions to be answered. After Henry’s death they embark on a road trip that gets them “digging”; delving into a past that neither men find easy to explore.

Around the Bend, despite oozing sentimentality and being very often quite predictable does offer some quirky moments. Henry’s wish in his will provides the frame for their adventure, his wish being for them to visit every KFC (which in this film is a ‘restaurant’) along the way, stopping to eat a meal. The Colonel’s smiling face on the paper brown bag even acts as a nice reminder of Henry’s constant presence even after his death. Henry’s wish proves difficult however, Jason is a vegetarian, Turner doesn’t eat chicken; on the road differences have to put aside as each man tries to make sense of the space between, having to learn how to deal with memory and death and at the same time finding life ‘somewhere out there’.

Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, Amélie and now the acclaimed French director’s latest offering – A Very Long Engagement is yet another film that intricately and beautifully captures on screen life, death and longing. Based on the novel by Sebastien Japrisot, A Very Long Engagement is a film set in France towards the end of World War I. It is the story of Mathilde (Audrey Tautou), crippled by polio who longs to know the fate of Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), her fiancé who went off to fight for France. Manech, convicted of self-mutilation on the front lines, was punished alongside four other condemned soldiers. He was ordered to make himself an easy target for the enemy, and he never returned. Conflicting reports about his fate have thrown fuel on the feeble fire of Mathilde’s hopes. She will stop at nothing to find out if Manech survived.

Amelie’s Audrey Tautou is truly beautiful. Her performance of Mathilde seems like Amélie a few years older, quieter, and more melancholy, but that’s forgivable considering how powerfully she commands our attention. Gaspard Ulliel, plays her lost lover with innocence and gentleness. Many of France’s finest actors show up along the way. Fans of French cinema will be glad to see Dominique Pinon (Amelie, Delicatessen), Denis Lavant (Beau Travail), and Jean-Claude Dreyfus (The Lady and the Duke) in memorable supporting roles.

Perhaps Engagement more than any other reminded me that a film, if constructed correctly, deserves the title: art.

AROUND THE BEND M, contains offence language, 83 Minutes It is hard not to come to the conclusion that humanity likes to be reminded of the same stories time and time again. Around the Bend, a well-meaning, heavily padded film reminds viewers of the familiar narrative of emotionally wounded characters who hack at life’s trials and complications to triumph. A single parent raising his only 96, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, July 2005

HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS M, Contains violence, You could overdose on beauty at House of Flying Daggers. The romantic adventure from China was made by many of the people who concocted Hero. If each scene in that movie was about one glorious color, the early scenes in House of Flying Daggers are about every riotous color in the rainbow.

The story is a simple one with complications: Mei (Zhang Ziyi) is a spy, a member of the elusive House of Flying Daggers. Two men (Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro) are trying to track her down and, possibly, falling in love with her.

But the real story in House of Flying Daggers is director Zhang Yimou’s command of visual storytelling. There’s a scene where Mei finds herself in a green bamboo forest and, suddenly, other Flying Daggers appear, all clad in green and all looking like bamboos themselves. Later, Mei and opposing soldiers battle in that same forest, gliding up and down the slim, sturdily graceful trees with a speed and confidence that takes your breath away.

There’s a reason for all the gravity-defying, logic-leaping that we see in House of Flying Daggers. They’re telling us: Don’t believe your eyes. There are things much more wonderful than what we can see.

Reviewed by Chris Hewitt