Investigate, June 2006 by Investigate Magazine

New Zealand’s most talked-about magazine...

INVESTIGATE

SUPERNANNY BUSTED:

Smacking Ban

Burma’s Forgotten War

We interview NZ’s top lawyers on smacking law repeal

David Parker

Sue Me

Donny Osmond

Why is MP Sue Bradford driven on repealing s59? We talk to her

Issue 65

A Kiwi In The Warzone Investigate’s Alex Shea reports from Burma

$7.95 June 2006

June 2006:

‘TIME OUT’ ILLEGAL UNDER NEW BILL

PLUS:

David Parker – the whole story Donny Osmond on NZ, & stardom

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Volume 6, Issue 65, June 2006

FEATURES SUPERNANNY BUSTED

She’s the iconic TV child-tamer with all the latest parenting tips, but according to New Zealand’s top barristers, even Supernanny could be arrested if the repeal of s59 – the anti-smacking Bill – goes ahead in its current form. IAN WISHART asks legal experts about what happens if the ‘reasonable force’ defence is removed, and discovers even ‘time out’ would become a criminal offence

SUE BRADFORD’S CONFESSION:

INTO THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

28 32

She’s the woman behind the Green Party’s campaign to outlaw the use of ‘reasonable force’ against children, but MP Sue Bradford has a confession. She talks to IAN WISHART about the reasonable force she used against her own kids, why she feels so strongly about smacking, and how her Bill may now need to be modified

It’s a country that hasn’t known peace since 1939, a land closed to Westerners and ruled by an autocratic regime with one of the largest armies in Asia. New Zealander ALEX SHEA has been on assignment for Investigate in a Burmese border town run by pimps, thieves, spies and killers, and returns with a story that will disturb

DAVID PARKER: CLOSING IN

WORLDBRIEF: PRINCE OF PERSIA

The Prime Minister may be wishing it would go away, but the evidence against her resurrected cabinet minister continues to grow. IAN WISHART has the latest

To many in the West the ravings of the Iranian leader are merely the mutterings of a mad mullah. But Arab analyst AMIR OVEISSI argues Iran is moving into Armageddon mode, convinced that an ancient Islamic prophecy foretells a nuclear war that must happen before the Mahdi returns

DONNY OSMOND IS BACK

38 56

From teen superstar to near bankrupt, now Donny Osmond is back with a cover of Neil Finn’s Don’t Dream It’s Over, a New Zealand tour, and a new attitude to life. He talks to IAN WISHART in 15 Minutes Cover: TVNZ

EDITORIAL AND OPINION Volume 6, issue 65, ISSN 1175-1290

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

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Contributing Writers: Alex Shea, Rachel Robinson, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, Paul Belien, Chris Carter, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Morrow and the worldwide resources of Knight Ridder Tribune, UPI and Newscom Art Direction Design & Layout

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Heidi Wishart Bozidar Jokanovic

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL

Supernanny busted: s59 repeal catches time out as well

reen MP Sue Bradford’s bill to effectively outlaw smacking is back before select committee shortly, but on the basis of the information presented in this issue, it should not be allowed to pass in its current form. Significantly, in our story, Sue Bradford now appreciates she may need to reach a consensus with her opponents that deals with some of the problems we’ve discovered. As it stands at present, the Bill simply repeals s59 of the Crimes Act, removing a defence available to parents of “reasonable force” when disciplining children. Investigate has, for the first time, brought together some of the best legal minds in the country to offer their thoughts on the implications of the Bill as “Under this construction of the law, it stands. All of them are emieven TV’s Supernanny, Jo Frost, nent Queens Counsel, and all agree that the removal would be busted and convicted of the defence will not only of assault for the techniques she make parents potentially liafor assault charges if they espouses on her top-rating TV show” ble smack, but even if they lead a struggling child to their room for time out. With the defence of “reasonable force” removed, parents will have no more legal right to physically handle their children for disciplinary purposes than you and I have to physically manhandle someone in a public street. Under this construction of the law, even TV’s Supernanny, Jo Frost, would be busted and convicted of assault for the techniques she espouses on her top-rating TV show. For the purposes of our story, Investigate had a long interview with the champion of the Bill, Sue Bradford, to dig behind the hype on all sides and ascertain what she’s actually trying to achieve by repealing s59. We found Bradford honest, sincere and genuine in her approach, which is contained in an interview in our lead story. We understand her motive for repealing the section completely, rather than modifying it to better clarify what “reasonable force” is. Bradford is deeply opposed in principle to any clause in the law that “legitimizes violence against children”. She feels it is the wrong starting point for any debate, and that retaining a reasonable force defence in any form still sends a message that violence against children is OK. We understand why this deeply-held belief resonates with Bradford as a matter of human rights. However, after

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

conducting the interviews for this issue, we’re convinced that Bradford and the Greens may not have fully appreciated the legal implications of a blanket repeal of s59. For example, Bradford says she certainly doesn’t want her law change to criminalize time out, or physically dragging a resistant child to their room. Nor, she says, does she actually want to outlaw smacking as such. Instead, she simply wants the clause that would provide a defence, if police decided to charge, removed. However, as our panel of QCs points out, removing the defence puts children on the same legal footing as strangers, and potentially criminalizes any parent who touches a child when the child doesn’t want to be touched, such as during a defiant stand-off or tantrum. By declaring there is no “reasonable force” that can be used against children, the Greens have unwittingly shot down legal protection for what they themselves regard as “reasonable force” – dragging a child to time out. Bradford argues that police will use their discretion and won’t prosecute, particularly because police are already overworked. But she overlooks the existing ties between police and CYF. In Auckland, as reported in last October’s Investigate story about the girl who’s trying to divorce her parents, there is already a police policy to call in CYF where children are involved. Police take the view that CYF is better placed to look into these kinds of allegations. So while it is true that police may not prosecute, you could certainly see a huge upswing in parents having their children removed because of CYF’s “shoot first, ask questions later” policy, which aims to get kids into “safe” care until the safety of the home environment can be assessed down the track, a process that can take months or even years. Indeed, according to media reports this is exactly what happened in Sweden as a result of the ban on smacking. We applaud Bradford’s statement to Investigate that she’s now willing to look at re-wording her Bill to ensure a minor smack or force for the purposes of time out are not criminalized, but if agreement cannot be reached, the Bill should not be passed in any form because it risks turning all parents into criminals, and greatly increasing the removal of children from families.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006,

VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES PLUNKET FLUNKS IT

Congratulations on your magazine’s being vindicated in its exposure of the former Attorney-General. As Parker flounders and blusters following the Companies Office’s decision not to prosecute the case against him, your revelations of his obvious shortcomings have borne fruit. No wonder our trans-Tasman neighbours are wryly amused by the third world quality of our Ministers. The Sean Plunket insolence towards you (and towards others) on Morning Report simply further justifies serious investigation into matters concerning NZ which will never be investigated by the governmentt-sponsored media and the third-rate so-called “journalists” like Plunket. Michael Poli, via email

UNDULY SUSPICIOUS

Am I unduly suspicious when I ponder the recently “discovered” letter that, it is claimed, exonerates David Parker in respect of his requirement to get proper shareholder authority for making decisions about auditor appointments and returns to the Companies Office? Has this much-publicised letter been sighted by anyone other than David Parker supporters, and is it available for forensic examination to determine when and by whom it was written? Terence Webb, Lower Hutt

THE GULLIBLE PUBLIC

I am writing with my support for your efforts in the David Parker story. I laughed when TV One presented the findings. Parker resigned immediately (basically), assuming the guilt. But this letter amazingly appears, giving way to a return to office. More amazing was the way my wife swallowed this story I was intent on her listening to. She is like 95% of our country in the indoctrinated category of “believers”. I came here to email you and found your file on Labour colluding (www.thebriefingroom.com), to read what strangely I basically knew. With excitement I read parts to my wife. “Ooh, well it’s the way of the world, can’t change that, I’m off to pick up the boy”, was the reply. My wife is a normal intelligent kiwi who has learnt to accept mushroom food as the norm, we don’t bat an eye, or question that these people make their money off our toils.

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

This denial of the truth by the majority, drives me mad. These people (government and officials) use the system to slow us down in investigations, to their own advantage – by acquiescence. They have all the right tools, including and by no means least main stream media. The twist for me comes in that I understand it. Sadly I have confronted corruption. A clause in the Companies Act??? Try breaches of LGA and LGA rating, Bio Security, LGOIMA, Crimes Act, Privacy Act. Altering documents, creating false documents no problems, illegal rates, money-wasting, no problems. These acts apparently only apply to middle and low income earners, without connections. If a magazine can get “dealt with” so easily, imagine the individual. For me, this makes me feel I didn’t do too bad (I created many policy and one staff change), but my earning capacity took a hit, and I am not on the ‘old boys’ Xmas card list! On the other hand I am the only outsider to know this. Please do not stop trying. Name & address withheld to preserve his domestic bliss

CREEPING UP THE LADDER

Keep up the good work. I have two items for you to consider. Article One: “PM Vertically Disoriented”. We have had two journalists, John Campbell and Ian Wishart, labeled as ‘little creep’ and ‘creep’ respectively by a desperate Helen Clark, for nothing more than asking necessary questions or printing what needed to be exposed. I have trouble recalling any particular time when either of these journalists pretended to be the author of someone else’s work, or let someone become accountable for their own actions, or said things for personal advantage that no one believed other than their most cyclopean supporters. I might not agree with everything they say but at least they have depth behind their statements and belief. Therefore, on the ladder of integrity and honour that exists in our minds, methinks the PM is actually looking up at individuals like John and Ian. She mistakenly thinks she is looking down. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that when someone in her vertical position labels someone higher as a ‘creep’ it should be taken as an honour. Article Two: “The Gingerbread Ma’am” Once there was a little old lady who decided to bake a

gingerbread ma’am. She made long trousers, a clove for a nose and a dried currant for a brain. When it was cooked she left it on the window sill to cool. An evil fairy Maleficent came along and cast a spell to make the gingerbread ma’am came alive. She immediately jumped of the sill and went off to change the world. She joined a political party and one day became leader of her country. One day she was late for a wine tasting and ordered her drivers to get her there on time no matter how fast they travelled. When the police stopped the speeding cars she just ran away saying, “Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread ma’am.” And she did get away. Her supporters just loved her. One day to raise funds for her party she got someone to write a book and then pretended to be the author. When it was discovered, she just ran away saying, “Run, run, as fast as you can. You can’t catch me I’m the gingerbread ma’am. I got away with speeding and I will get away with this”. And she did. Her supporters loved her even more. When it came to election time she was worried by the level of support for the opposition. She decided to say or promise anything in order to get re-elected. When a journalist risked his career by not taking for granted what she said and uncovered a misuse of facts, she just ran away saying, “Run, run, as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread ma’am. I got away with speeding and fraud and I will get away with this too”. And she did. Her supporters were just rapturous. After her successful re-election she was asked to open a playground in her electorate. She asked the local council if she could play on it first. She wouldn’t have taken ‘no’ for an answer. As she tried each bit of equipment a flocks of hungry seagulls flew overhead and spotted her. No matter how fast she ran she couldn’t evade them and soon only her long nose remained along with a few crumbs. Her supporters cried and cried and from that day forth they started to be mindful of those nasty swings and roundabouts. Phil Jackson, Mt Albert, author of Fighting Political Correctness

EMAIL SENT TO PM

Helen, Thank you for helping me decide to take out a 12 month subscription to Investigate magazine today. If you get so riled by Mr. Wishart, he must be a great investigator and editor. I am certain there will be more Labour skeletons revelations to come in that excellent magazine. I am eagerly looking forward to them. J van der Lijn, via email

THIS KISS

There may be a story here. On election eve there was TV news coverage of the PM arriving at her election HQ. This showed the PM’s husband giving a full mouth kiss to a middle age man in a blue suit. Holmes seems to have noticed this as he showed the clip 2 or three times later, saying little himself but pointedly highlighting the small segment. Why was Peter Davis kissing another man? Name and address supplied, Wellington

UNITED FUTURE’S FAMILIES COMMISSION

I just got a pamphlet in the mail summarising the big survey they have been doing with NZ families. There is a section on values and they say they had a lot of feedback about values in society, e.g., civil unions and the negative effect on families. And at the end their conclusion is (regarding this I presume) that more education of New Zealanders to make us more tolerant is needed. If only our cricket team could spin like that! What ideology and mindset do these public servant social engineers have to come up with that rubbish? Paul Robinson, Levin

LETTER FROM THE KIWI DIASPORA

I’m writing to thank the good people of Investigate for their bal-

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006,

anced opinions. So thanks Investigate. Thanks Mark Steyn. Thanks Ian Wishart. Thank you for your balanced and honest opinions. We are New Zealanders living in the USA since 1985. We can honestly say that we arrived in America to do the job we were hired to do and had no feeling for America, one way or the other. We had only met American tourists and were not all that impressed. We quickly found that the heart of America and of Americans was very special. They are your down home country people like those we grew up with in New Zealand and met in our travels around the world. These are a generous very caring people. America spends billions and generously gives her very best to help all others in this world, only to be abused, ridiculed and misrepresented world wide. All countries have their self indulgent ‘me first’ fringe people that give their country a bad name. America is no different, other than we have Hollywood and the political left, who will use all willing news media outlets to further their self-indulgent Socialist position. The last twenty five year lead-up to the continuing abuse of America, culminating in 9/11, was a very frightening and unbelievable experience. We will never forget, ever, what these murderous people did and will continue to do, if given their way. If one listens to the Socialist left, America is to bend over and keep taking the abuse. If ever America and the world needed a real man like G W Bush running this great country, it is now. G W has the vision, determination and courage to do what is is right, regardless of left-run polls and opinion. He is guided by faith, decency and a will to change a dangerous situation that will affect the world if left to fester. Mark’s article really highlights the decency, the good intentions and inner strength of America to do the right thing! Mark Steyn, we personally thank you for your ‘Straight Talk’ article in Investigate, Vol.6, Issue 64. You are so correct in your observations and opinions. Every day we are fed political left-leaning, weak-kneed and treasonous opinions that do not convey true fact but feed our enemies with dangerous political rhetoric that our enemies gladly use to their own political end. Wake up world. The brave out in the Middle East, are stemming a tide of terrorism that will touch all peoples lives. This not a test, this is a real and gathering storm which left to its own devices will ruin the world as we know it and plunge us into a costly and deadly world war that will take many, many years of death and destruction to correct. Monte & Ruth North, Missouri, USA WISHART RESPONDS:

I think the point has been made by others more eloquently, but in WW2 the news media got behind the war effort for the sake of achieving peace. Today our news media has so bought into the Globalist line that it sees itself as having to give equal support to Attila the Hun. CNN, for example, covered up human rights atrocities in Iraq during Saddam’s rule because it didn’t want to offend Saddam. The media sees itself trans-nationally, with loyalties to international, rather than national, ideals. It manifests in the death by a thousand cuts news coverage of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, which eventually causes the public to lose their belief in a just cause. War is dirty, but our pristine

10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

little college graduate middle class journalists can’t get their pretty little network news heads around that particular reality, instead they chant “All we are say-ing, is give peace a chance” over and over to themselves, committing themselves to the ideal but with no idea how to get there. WW1 cost millions of lives, Stalin’s purges in the USSR cost millions of lives, and WW2 cost something in the order of 50 million lives. But our modern generation doesn’t truly know what war is, or the real cost of peace. So we look at a war in Iraq where the bloodshed is less than a day’s toll in Roman times (80,000 men are said to have been killed in one brutal, blood-drenched clash at Cannae, using only swords, arrows and spears), and we think our battle is lost. In three years, not one day, the Iraq conflict has cost the lives of about 30,000 civilians according to the Iraq Body Count project, and fewer than 3,000 coalition troops so far. Most of the dead were killed by rebels in just a handful of provinces. Contrary to media reports, most of Iraq’s provinces are relatively peaceful. Contrast that with this comment on a military history blog: “Stalingrad was a killing ground for civilians as well as soldiers, since it was a heavily populated city which was pulverised by bombardment from land and air, and was fought out in the rubble. Likewise Berlin, a battle in which somewhere between a quarter and a third of a million Soviet troops were killed or wounded in two or three weeks, and scores of thousands of civilians were killed, tens of thousands of women raped. The advance of the Red Army through Prussia was truly barbaric, with massacre, torture and rape inflicted on the civilian population, along with huge military clashes involving monstrous casualties.” As Mark Steyn has written before, you are witnessing the sun going down on Western civilization, not because Islamism or the Chinese or anyone else is stronger, but because the citizens of the West have largely lost the will to fight for their beliefs or their culture any more. The public in the West can no longer endure a battle where fewer people die in three years than we kill in abortions in New Zealand in two. Ironically, over the same three year period as the war in Iraq, 120,000 Americans have died in car crashes, but we don’t see peace groups marching through Detroit calling GM ‘the great Satan’. Incidentally, I don’t have the road toll figures in Iraq but in neighbouring Iran around 29,000 people a year are killed on the roads, which is triple the war death rate in Iraq. So here’s my prediction: knowing that Western civilization is crumbling like the walls of Constantinople before the Muslim hordes, and sensing that the West no longer has the stomach for the fight, troublemakers everywhere will snatch a victory here and a victory there, until in 30 years’ time the colour of the map has so changed that ongoing resistance is futile. Peacefully, we will surrender, and it’ ll be burqas and camels on Lambton Quay before you can say “and Muhammed is his prophet, PBUH”.

IT’S THE OIL – AGAIN!!

The American economy is currently incurring massive trading deficits on an on-going annual basis. Americans are spending more on imports than they earn in exports. Any other country incurring such huge deficits would be suffering severe recession, their currency would be devalued. The cost of imported goods would rocket up. However, the American economy is impervious to such market forces. The reason for this is that the world’s

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 11

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for just $125

most essential resource, oil, is traded exclusively in US dollars. Every country in the world must buy or obtain through trade, sufficient American dollars to buy the oil it needs to sustain itself. Were oil exporting countries to arrange the sale of oil in a currency other than US dollars this would have a deleterious effect on the American economy. Saddam Hussein, smarting from his defeat by the Americans in the first Gulf War, decided that Iraqi oil should be traded in the Euro rather than US dollars. Almost at once he was portrayed by America as the possessor of weapons of mass destruction and a threat to world peace and his country was invaded. No weapons of mass destruction were of course, found. Following regime change and the appointment of an American approved government, Iraqi oil was again traded in US dollars. Now Iran has decided it will trade its oil in Euros instead of US dollars. Suddenly Iran is a threat to world peace. Although Iran does not yet possess nuclear weapons, America is trumpeting abroad that Iran might develop them in the future – sufficient grounds, it says, for attack and regime change. Strangely, North Korea, which has threatened its neighbours and probably does possess nuclear weapons is not subjected to the same American threats – but then North Korea is not an exporter of oil. B. Hill, Hamilton

BLACK GOLD, TEXAS TEA

Resins, fibres, plastics, all primarily produced via petroleum. So really, as purist as it may seem, unless you want to discard all those things in day to day life you take for granted, it might be worth looking at the bigger picture and the greater implications. The masses actively protest the war in Iraq, while passively condoning it. It goes far beyond electing not to drive your car. To look at the Global War on Terror, particularly from a New Zealand standpoint, I find it amusing to reflect that such a war has been waging for decades without public awareness, but the minute a school bus packed with New Zealand kids is blown apart by a terrorist, from say, the Philippines, perhaps the complaining might stop. When we are talking about extremists, you are not talking about average everyday Muslims who live their lives much as we do – but often with far more conviction of the faith they hold to. Instead these are people who believe that anyone who does not believe in their “form” of Islam is guilty. The reality is, this country is not a Christian society, but extremists see it as a viable target, whether we choose to ignore the threat or face up to it. If we face up to it, we at least send a message. No, they will not stay at home simply because we are unwilling to act. This is not the nature of this kind of extremism. We are deluded if we think we can change the face of mankind as it has waged war for centuries. We must face up to the facts. Yet we are equally deluded if we think we know them all. Leon Harrison, Wellington

Palestinian Land Rights

For those like John C. Ross of Palmerston North who want to go on arguing about Palestinian rights, a read of “From Time Immemorial” by Joan Peters might dispel some of the misconceptions upon which people like Mr Ross, base their opinions.

“From Time Immemorial” is probably the most thoroughly researched and documented work on “The Origins of the ArabJewish Conflict over Palestine”, ever written. About one third of the book is given to reference and documentation from official sources, showing clearly that the world has been brainwashed by clever propaganda into believing the present claims of the so called Palestinian people. Joan Peters started her research in support of the Palestinian claims and found, overwhelmingly, that the history and facts upon which the claims re land rights are based were greatly exaggerated or completely fictitious. That the “Palestinian people” are suffering is true enough but that suffering is the deliberate work of their own “brothers” as they are used as a political weapon against Israel as part of the Islamist attempt to take total world dominion. That aim has been stated publicly by Islamic leaders. Anyone not wanting to know the truth should not read this book. For those seeking the truth, “From Time Immemorial” is available from either http://www.amazon.com/ or http://www.worldnetdaily.com/ or try local bookshops, Victor K Relf, Tauranga

THE FIDO PENTIUM

I look forward to regularly reading your excellent magazine In the May issue, page 20, Richard Prosser again makes interesting reading, and properly asks real questions on why the current Government will stupidly require micro-chipping of all newly registered dogs. He also gives the logical outcomes, which of course will be zilch progress in controlling the few problem dogs, whilst increasing the costs to dog owners and ratepayers. In the first three paragraphs of his article, Richard Prosser says he struggles to understand what motivates those in power to impose these types of requirements on the public. I have a very logical and clear reason as to why those in authority act in such a way. You only need to see the re-runs of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister on Sky UK television. These types of decisions are taken to fool and mislead the public, and hide the real issues. They don’t worry about the costs and inefficiencies, because the taxpayers and ratepayers always pay. Rowland Crone, Paraparaumu

DROP US A LINE 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 302188, North Harbour, North Shore 0751, or email to: editorial@investigatemagazine.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 13

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE Wolves in sheep’s clothing

here is a new wave of sophisticated, articulate Islamic fundamentalists trying to spread the word among moderate Muslims in Sydney. Young men, wearing regular clothes, with neatly trimmed beards, broad Australian accents and fluent in Arabic, they appear to be fully assimilated, second-generation Australians. But they belong to a political group called Hizb utTahrir (Party of Liberation) that calls for the creation of a global Islamic state, or caliphate, under strict sharia law. The message from these young men is one of division, non-assimilation and rejection of the values of the “kafir” – non-Muslims. At a public lecture at Bankstown Town Hall in April, Hizb ut-Tahrir organ“... Secularism is a clear assault iser Soadad Doureihi, on the fundamental belief of a his brother Wassim, and Badar, president of Muslim. Democracy is a clear Usman Sydney University’s Muslim assault on the fundamental belief Student Association in of a Muslim also” 2005, outlined their utopian goal of the ultimate overthrow of Western democracies. “Islam can never coexist one under the other or one within the other,” Soadad told the crowd. “When the state is established, when people see the mercy of Islam they embrace Islam in droves.” The April 8 lecture, to about 200 men and 50 women, was titled “Should Muslims Subscribe to Australian Values?” Banned in Britain, Germany, Holland, Russia, and much of the Muslim world, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) has been invited to speak at Sydney Boys High at least twice, and often addresses students at Sydney University. Borrowing its methodology and ideology from MarxistLeninist groups, HT calls itself a political party which works to “change the situation of the corrupt society so that it is transformed into an Islamic society”, its website says. It opposes integration and assimilation of Muslims into Australian society. Wassim told the Bankstown crowd: “The pushing to integration and assimilation is to get us to think and believe and feel in a certain way that Islam will not condone. On the collective level everyone accepts you have to have one set of laws and no Muslim in this country is demanding today the implementation of sharia law. “In this country, yes, we believe this is the best way forward but . . . our current struggle is the implementation

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of Islamic law in the Muslim world and that will serve as a model for the rest of humanity. [But] if governments want to interfere in the individual, personal affairs of any citizen, they are going to create the conditions of civil unrest and chaos like in France.” Soadad had a message for youth: “They must be aware of the plot of the kafir, the plot of the Western society to enforce on them a palatable Islam ... Secularism is a clear assault on the fundamental belief of a Muslim. Democracy is a clear assault on the fundamental belief of a Muslim also.” HT says it advocates non-violence, and yet, terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told a conference in 2004, “key members of the al-Qaeda organisation [such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] formerly belonged to the HT organisation . . . “The upper echelons of organisations of key interest to us, operating at a violent, extremist, radical level, consist of former members of HT.” In Australia, HT’s threat is its anti-integration message. An audience member in Bankstown asked: “The reality is many of us live in Australia as citizens. We or our parents and families have accepted this citizenship with the full knowledge of Australia’s social construction and her values. Can we not as Muslims hold these Australian values [while] keeping our Islam intact?” Badar, a graduate of Malek Fahd Islamic High School in Chullora, who was such a good student he appeared on the 2002 HSC all-rounders list, answered: “It comes back to the theory that Western values, their opposition, the conflict is so clear, so stark there is no middle ground. “How do you come to middle ground on whether sovereignty belongs to the people or to Allah? You can’t. “Yes, our parents came here. I wouldn’t say they were fully aware of the Australian values and systems, way of life and so on . . . But what’s more important is why did they come here? What were they running away from? Was the country in which they lived not providing for them? What was the cause of the conditions in that country? “They were running away from the very same values . . . If you are saying they came here so we should accept or follow those values, there’s a clear contradiction. The simple matter of fact is there is no middle ground.” Video of the lecture is at http://www.risala.org. Detailed analysis of Hizb ut-Tahrir and its global plan is also available at www.investigatemagazine.com/dec02islam1.htm

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 15

LAURA‘S WORLD

LAURA WILSON

You don't know what you‘re missing…

ust as I was about to throw away the TV for good, consigning to my past the hours wasted in futile but pleasurable entertainment, something came along to recaptivate my attention. Something that has achieved the unthinkable, it has changed my attitude towards the black and silver box lurking in my lounge corner. I have never been comfortable with TV. Watching it gives me the same kind of feeling as lying in bed too long, eating too much or going several days without exercise. But unless you live alone in a hermitage somewhere off the grid, TV is unavoidable. I end up watching it for hours out the corner of my eye, grumbling rudely about idiotic Americans and irritating advertising, screaming for the mute-button to be pressed “I like, no…I LOVE the fact that whenever the Warehouse when I ring the main number jingle comes on. Of course, if I absolutely for the Maori channel, a guy hated it I wouldn’t watch answers the phone with “Yep?” a single second. But it is a warped kind of pleasure, belonging firmly to the ilk of things I do that I would rather not. I developed a mindset that TV gave the watcher the illusion that they were living an interesting life by replacing actual experiences with vicarious ones. By making you laugh, by making you cry, by a continual parade of the doings of others, those others often being actors trained in the art of faking. According to the charter of just about any TV network, programming is designed to offer a balance of information, education and entertainment into our lives, that affirms the way we live and enlightens us about the activities of others. Somehow I failed to exhume this wisdom from the nightly array of American sitcoms, Bminus grade movies and inappropriately titled ‘reality’ shows, including realistic scenarios such as shoving 20 abnormally good-looking, self-obsessed individuals onto an island to search for buried treasure, under the glare of several dozen cameras. TV executives defend their programming by releasing statistics that show ever increasing viewer numbers, proving they have their finger firmly on the pulse of the nation, giving people what they want. This is the same rationale used by McDonalds restaurants and Casinos,

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both institutions of dubious benefit that defend their right to exist by catering to various addictions. To suggest for one moment that marketing to people’s basest inclinations, their cravings for instant treasure and fatsoaked flavours, is less than a great achievement is to stand accused of riding a moral high horse. Apparently, I am an elitist, intellectual snob attempting to impose my values on a free population by daring to suggest they are consuming something not out of personal choice, but because it is marketed to their weaknesses in a manner hard to resist. If this give-folk-what-they-want justification was applied across the board to the sale of goods and services, then I’m sure we would see a ‘P’ or crystal meth stand next to the Moro bars in the local Dairy, and kiddie-porn next to the racing mags. The only reason you can’t purchase these items is someone has decided they are not good for you (nor for those involved in their making). Society finds it relatively easy to take a stand when the issue is one of physical health, and much more trying when it is one of mental health. I was of the opinion that watching TV disenhanced my mental health by wasting my precious time and ‘dumbing me down’ with information that was fake, false and unnecessary. I discredited television as an attribute in one’s life, considering that even a good programme wasn’t nearly as good as a walk outdoors. In the last month I have had to revise the perspective that even good TV is bad. I’m having a new viewing experience, one that’s not leaving me feeling wastefully indulgent and mildly polluted. If indeed I am a moralizing elitist, then I seem to have found my ilk. I have to confess the last place I expected to find this was Maori TV. I thought the Maori channel would be all proselytizing and finger-pointing, mixed in with vastly romanticized ‘this is the way we were’ history lessons. I expected it to be culturally narrow, which is absolutely fine as it would cater for a specific audience, and although it claimed this audience to be ‘all New Zealanders”, I didn’t believe it. Yet based on my viewing to date, if Maori TV has a target audience, it includes me. I could bore you by describing myself as white and middle-class, which means I’m not starving and I’m not an ethnic minority, and according to the absurd science of polls and demographics, I fall neatly into the category mainstream TV is catering for. Yet it is the programmers at Maori TV who have me sussed.

It is a strange sensation to feel not alone in TV land. Not a renegade hurling virulent criticism from the sidelines, but a willing consumer. I’m not the only one happy to endure subtitles to hear from Iranian women about their lives, or to follow nomads traipsing Siberia. I feel privileged to hear Tibetans describe in halting English their flight from the Chinese, and watch Nepalese traders cross the Himalayas. I like the presenters such as Beatrice Faumuina talking to me as though I am whanau. I like the feeling that I don’t have to be hip and yuppie and savvy and techie to be in synch with the newsreaders. I can be square, or retro, or sitting on the sand along Ninety Mile Beach doing not much of anything, and I’m still ‘up with it’. I especially like, dare I say LOVE, the lack of blonde, perky presenters. Of svelte weather-girls flirtily garbed. Of cheeky sportsreader-boys and heavily made-up newsreader girls. Yuk. Yuk. Yuk. Not a bar of it on Maori TV. I like, no…I LOVE the fact that when I ring the main number for the Maori channel, a guy answers the phone with “Yep?” He is in the newsroom, he is not a bored receptionist, he is not an automated message, and he is definitely not blonde. He is a kiwi, and he has the remarkable effect upon me of making me feel like I’m a kiwi too. Not an interloper, not an irritating Pakeha journalist, but whanau. I watch programmes on the latest medical technology, listen to panels debate issues, on Aboriginals and on matters Maori, and to my enormous surprise I have not once felt excluded or marginalized. Of course there are no commercials, an unfair advantage over channels that have to pay their own way through selling advertising, but even if there were I am sure viewers would be in for a surprise. Maori have been excluded from featuring in ads for all but the last five years, on NZ television. Even now they are in scant supply, used in Lotto ads as fat, friendly bus drivers, or in network promotions as cute, clean kids to show how inclusive the channel is. They are not used to sell cars, carpets or, Heaven forbid, wash-

ing powder, because they simply don’t purvey an image of the successful Kiwi we all apparently want to emulate. Admaking would indeed be a challenge for Maori TV as they are in the business of cultivating good vibrations, of sharing and disseminating, not of allowing advertisers to make a buck by appealing to viewers desire to conform. Call me and the producers of Maori TV moralistic if you will, but it is sheer delight to have an evening’s viewing without seeing one body being dissected. Or one child molested, or hearing every 15 minutes how much my life would be enhanced with the addition of L’Oreal makeup. None of these things reflect my life, and so far as reflecting the society I live in, the amount of airtime given to dramatizations of people’s worst nightmares is absurdly disproportionate to their actual occurrence. Easy money is made out of fear. Again the rationale given is that this is what people want to see. This rationale applied to advertising explains why, until recently, Maori weren’t used in ad campaigns. People don’t want to see them, nor for that matter do they want to see New Zealanders of Japanese, Indian or Somalian descent taking the role of Jude Dobson in selling us pharmaceutical products, or of Vince Martin seducing us to buy tyres. Removing the pressure of paying one’s way through ad revenue gives a television channel the right to define itself in terms other than economic. They do not have to select programmes on the basis of their appeal to advertisers. This leaves them free to create and purchase programmes that will enhance the lives of their viewers, rather than serving them yet another round of skinny, blonde detectives solving grisly murders in between ads showing skinny blondes devouring Pizza Hut triple-cheese pizzas, followed by News programmes featuring skinny, blonde presenters touting the latest shade of lip-gloss. As mainstream television sells increments of its New Zealand soul each year to the juggernaut of advertising, Maori television can hopefully show us there is indeed a world not ruled by the image-makers, the fear-mongers and the commercialists.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 17

STRAIGHT TALK

MARK STEYN Helen Clark and Whakapohane

hen it comes to Royal books, a picture is worth a hundred thousand words. Especially the picture on the back of Happy & Glorious. It shows the Queen in Cairns, Australia, with an aborigine in native dress – ie, naked except for some war paint and a few strands of twine dangling over his naughty bits. She’s in traditional dress, too – light blue frock with white spots, pearls, brooch, big hat, white gloves. Not so long ago it was the uniform of every white middle-class woman in the British Empire, but these days Her Majesty pretty much soldiers on alone. What I like about the photograph, though, is the way both parties are hav“My guess is the smiles are ing a grand old time: He’s genuine: In contrast to her great- explaining the finer points of some aboriginal ritual great-grandmother, her reign and she’s watching intently, seems to have got jollier and they’re both beaming delight. If the Queen’s as it’s gone on” with Prime Ministers sometimes give the impression they no longer have much use for the Commonwealth, this picture sums it up perfectly, at least from her point of view: How would you rather spend your day? Opening a new shopping centre in Liverpool before a crowd of whey-faced Scousers in ghastly Brit leisurewear? Or being brought ashore in Tuvalu or Papua New Guinea in a dugout canoe by semi-naked subjects in grass skirts? If the “Queen of England” really were merely Queen of England, life would be a dreary affair indeed – as dreary as the King of the Belgians’. Even the Maoris’ recent custom of baring their bottoms at Her Majesty whenever she arrives in New Zealand has somehow become a quaint tradition of its own, and certainly it’s livelier than most other expressions of anti-monarchism. Perhaps Helen Clark could be persuaded to do the same. The Aussie pic is one of eighty from recent years in this collection by Royal photographer Robin Nunn, and Happy & Glorious effortlessly lives up to the first of those adjectives. The Queen is a pro – she’d never show up as sour and ill-humored as her sister could be – and she appears to take more pleasure in the opening of a new wing of Government House in Regina, Saskatchewan than most of us would in her situation. My guess is the smiles

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are genuine: In contrast to her great-great-grandmother, her reign seems to have got jollier as it’s gone on. It’s the books that aren’t full of pictures that are the problem. In the course of my life, I have had one brief conversation with the Queen, and I haven’t a clue what she really thinks about anything. But that’s one more conversation with her than most “Royal watchers” have had, and they claim to be privy to her innermost thoughts. After the 1999 referendum on the monarchy, Christopher Morgan reported in Britain’s Sunday Times that “the Queen was ‘hurt and disappointed’ by the strength of republican feeling in Australia”. Really? On the night of the referendum, I happened to be dining at Buckingham Palace, and as the only journalist on the planet within six feet of a Royal facial expression that day I can exclusively reveal that I haven’t the foggiest as to the Queen or the Duke of Edinburgh’s feelings. Nor does Mr Morgan. But the great thing about covering the House of Windsor is that that’s no obstacle. And the only alternative to Royal-watchers is insiders. Princess Elizabeth’s governess, the much vilified Crawfie, got the ball rolling with her tell-all volume revealing that little Lilibet liked to get up in the middle of the night and rearrange her shoes and was wont to shout “You beast!” during spats with Margaret. The cash-in courtiers have widened their field of expertise since those innocent days. Paul Burrell, confidante to the Princess of Wales, reinvented himself as The Butler The Palace Can’t Gag, and in A Royal Booty – whoops, sorry, A Royal Duty – he gives us a Queen who’s part-Oprah, part-Gandalf and part-paranoid CIA spook just before his body’s found in a trunk at the airport. “I remembered,” writes Burrell, “the note the Princess had left me about the Queen: ‘I long to hug my mother-in-law.’” If only that chilly Sovereign were as touchy-feely and huggy-weepy as the butler, history might have been very different. Even Her Majesty concedes Burrell’s unique intimacy with Diana, though she frets that, despite being head of state, she’s unable to guarantee his safety: “Looking over her half-rimmed spectacles, she said: ‘Be careful, Paul. No one has been as close to a member of my family as you have. There are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge.’ She fixed me with a stare with eyes that underlined her words. ‘Do you understand?’”

HM Queen Elizebeth II pictured during her vist to Harrogate, England.

It’s a disappointment to realize that she confides this dark warning to the burbling butler in a sitting room at Buckingham Palace rather than at midnight in an underground parking garage while wearing a hat pulled low over her face. But thanks to Her Majesty fixing him with her half-rimmed stare Mr Burrell lived to pen another book: In The Royal Manner: Expert Advice On Etiquette And Entertaining From The Former Butler To Diana, Princess Of Wales. Given that, dinner party-wise, the Princess is best-known for bulimic vomiting and Mr Burrell was subsequently prosecuted for stealing the crockery (“Item 15: One plate with Prince of Wales crest”), he was stretching his expertise way beyond plausibility here. Among the shock revelations: “The Queen delights in making her own pot of tea, in a silver teapot, of course. During my career, I must have served thousands of cups of tea at receptions, meetings and garden parties,” adds the Royal confidante. “The essential element, of course, is boiling water.” But who needs garrulous servants when the Royals themselves are willing to spill the beans? My Story was written by, as amazon. com puts it, Sarah The Duchess Of York Ferguson, which makes her sound like Sammy The Bull Gravano, who, come to think of it, might have made a better Royal consort. The quickest way to précis the descent of the Duchess is to skip the text and look her up in the index, under “S” for “Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, Duchess of York”. It’s a perfect capsule biography: “Royal position and duties of,

Self-deprecation of, Self-sufficiency and desire for independence of, Ski-ing of, Stress of Royal life on, Tapped ‘phone lines of, Topless photos of…” The Duchess’ previous book was a children’s volume called Budgie The Helicopter. By this stage, the Queen was probably grateful Camilla’s agent hadn’t got her a six-figure deal to do Charlie The Chopper (a pop-up book). So skip the word books and stick to the glossy 80th birthday pictorial souvenirs you’ll treasure forever. Looking at those Lizzie-with-the-laughing-face photos of Robin Nunn’s reminds me of one Queenly volume I’d be interested to see: We Are Amused: The Royal Sense Of Humour. I’m especially fond, in our over-celebrified culture, of her hilariously subversive attitude to alleged cultural icons. Last year, the Queen found herself in a room full of legendary rock guitarists, and hadn’t a clue who they were. Introduced to Eric Clapton, she politely enquired, “Have you been playing a long time?” Passing on to Led Zeppellin’s Jimmy Page, the monarch asked, “And are you a guitarist, too?” Magnificent. The increasingly desperate Hollywood should sign her to host the Oscars: “Ladies and gentleman, to present the Award for Best Sound Editing in a Documentary Short please welcome George Clooney! Don’t tell me you’re another one of these actors, Mr Clooney!” © Mark Steyn, 2006 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 19

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER Boys to men

any moons ago, at an impressionable age, I was given a small red book which was to guide, and mesh with, much of my way of thinking during the following few years. It was not Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, and not the Bible, the Koran, or the Kabala, either. It was the Kiwi Joker Book, a slim satirical work, the brainchild of a one Gavin Wainwright. Gav’s tome epitomised the thinking of generations past, on such subjects as sex, dress, etiquette, table manners, drinking habits, suitable occupations, and acceptable names for one’s dog. It was a celebration and a reaffirmation of a glorious past era, when real men were real blokes, and sheilas were “Our society is failing those who happy about that. The Kiwi Joker Book come after us. We are breeding an advised that a good job for emasculated generation of boys, a real joker involved either who are quite seriously in danger of killing things which were alive, or tearing down things not being able to become the men which were not. A job was their forebears were” not acceptable if one had to sit at a desk, wear a tie, or shave more than once a week. Approved occupations included construction worker, demolition worker, freezing worker, farmer, deer culler, test pilot, and anything to do with concrete. Attire for the real Joker could include Swanndris, gumboots, or anything nicked from the job. The Real Joker ate red meat (preferably still kicking), drank beer, shot things, and ran over possums in the car. He loved his dogs, his kids, his sheila, and his country, and he drove either a station wagon (for carrying dogs and four-bytwos and keeping them dry) or a ute (for carrying dogs and four-by-twos and not caring if they got wet). He had sex whenever he wanted, which was whenever his sheila wanted it too, and he never paid for it. My copy of the Kiwi Joker Book accompanied me to Britain and Europe on my OE; such passages as I recall or quote are taken from memory, as it is a very long time since, dog-eared and beer-stained, I passed it on to another young man, a fellow traveler from home. I needed it no longer; it’s work was done. That work, however, is not being done in New Zealand

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anymore. Our society is failing those who come after us. We are breeding an emasculated generation of boys, who are quite seriously in danger of not being able to become the men their forebears were. Why? Because our society, New Zealand society, Western society in general, has been hijacked by a conspiracy of Silly Little Girls. They’re everywhere; in the schools, in the media, in the public service, in the judiciary, even in Cabinet. Everywhere we turn, the foundations of masculinity, the pillars of male-ness which have underpinned the construction and development of our very civilisation, are being undermined, by Silly Little Girls. And we are putting up with it. Today’s boys, raised evermore in a society of single-parent families, lack the role models which we, as the generation who came before them, had to look up to. Many do not have fathers or father figures in their homes; a dwindling number of grandfathers are unable to stem the tide of poor fathering provided by the procession of inadequate partners and deviant boyfriends served up to so many kids, by an ever-increasing number of single mothers. There are scant few male teachers in our schools, and their numbers are dropping all the time. Those who remain are hamstrung and muzzled by the priorities of an education establishment which has fallen victim to the shrill dictates of a regime founded and controlled by Silly Little Girls. Even those other stalwarts of commonsense, the caring grandparents and the sensible middleaged mothers, are fast disappearing from the classroom. I probably had thirty or more teachers through my school career. I remember about a dozen well and fondly; they were mostly men, strong characters, disciplinarians, strict but fair. Those who taught technical subjects, woodwork, metalwork, tech drawing, had been tradesmen before entering the teaching profession. They were real men before they became teachers. We feared and respected them. They coached rugby and wielded the cane. We listened to them, and because of that, they taught us. Where are they now? Such men are no longer attracted to the once-respected calling of the teacher; the commonsense of ordinary discipline has been replaced by the stupidity of political correctness, promoted, once again, by the pervading cult of the Silly Little Girls. They are unwilling to take the risk of being accused of sexual impropriety with children the

same age as their own; we are not all rapists, for God’s sake, and the hysterical rantings of unbalanced, frustrated, man-hating socialists doesn’t make us so. What does it say about our society that a man can’t even sit next to a boy on a plane, in a seat he didn’t even choose, without being labeled a paedophile? Boys of my generation played Cowboys and Indians, Germans and Americans, Bullrush, rugby, and scrag. It made us who we are. Nowadays, a generation of boys is learning Peace Studies and sewing, and they’re not even allowed to have water pistols unless they’re pink and don’t look like the real thing. Why? Because some Silly Little Girl says so? Back then, if someone was a bully, you ganged up on him and thumped him. Today, boys are suspended for such forthright action, and far from receiving a simple, effective, appropriate, and deserved thumping, the bully will be counseled, mollycoddled, apologised for, and ultimately sent away unmodified and unhelped, to fester into the psychopath of the future. Only this week as I write, a protective Dad, a real man in my considered estimation, ran foul of the law by administering a clip to the ear of the boy who had been bullying his daughter. Fining him $500, the judge, in tones reminiscent of the Silly Little Girl, proclaimed that “Big people shouldn’t pick on little people”. No, they shouldn’t, lest the remaining real men in our society stand up and thump them. The judge, seemingly, has failed to realise that the judicial system is the Big Person and, what is worse, that in this case it is also the bully; that the actual bully has learned only one lesson from this, that being that he can do as he likes to others without fear of retribution, and that Silly Little Girls, even if they have become judges, ultimately rely on the strength of body and force of reason provided by real men. How else does she suppose her judgement may be imposed or enforced? By other Silly Little Girls? The school, as we all know, will do nothing at all as far as any effective response is concerned, in spite of their pontifications to the contrary; and the parents of the bully, who have already failed, and probably deserve a thumping themselves in my view, will do nothing either. The buck stopped with one real man, and our society and our judicial system, opposed as it is to common sense and to real men, turned him into the villain. This garbage has to stop. It is ridiculous for masculinity to be promoted as something bad, and grossly irresponsible for society to allow our future men to be reshaped into some genderneutral shadow of the heroes of old who got us as far as we have come. My old man never put up with it, and still doesn’t; why should I? Dad served his military with pride, taught me how to use a rifle, ride a bike, box, study, and think for myself. What are we teaching our boys today? Shoot straight, talk straight, be straight with people, stand up to bullies, and help those in need? No. We’re teaching them to whimper and snivel and deny the testosterone in their blood. Boys are made to be men. They need to play war games, and kill animals, and roll in the mud; they need to have rough-and-tumble, to sort out their differences with a few punches and be mates again afterwards, and to play team sports, and weld metal, and hammer stuff, and mess about with cars, and stash girlie mags under the bed where they think noone will know about them. And they need to grow up into men who will look after their

“What are we teaching our boys today? Shoot straight, talk straight, be straight with people, stand up to bullies, and help those in need? No. We’re teaching them to whimper and snivel and deny the testosterone in their blood. Boys are made to be men. They need to play war games, and kill animals, and roll in the mud; they need to have rough-and-tumble, to sort out their differences with a few punches and be mates again afterwards, and to play team sports, and weld metal, and hammer stuff, and mess about with cars, and stash girlie mags under the bed where they think no-one will know about them”

mothers, and protect their sisters, and respect their old man; and stick up for their mates and help out the little guy and do the right thing, because society needs them to do that, or society won’t survive, regardless of what the Silly Little Girls think. And they need to marry and have kids, and raise the next generation of boys who will become men, and raise their daughters to become women, and love them to bits without the remotest intention of mistreating or abusing them, and 99.999% of us don’t, believe it or not, in spite of what the shriekers and the social engineers and the anti-family brigade would have people believe. I have a day off tomorrow, a rare thing during vintage; so I’m taking Junior down to the mine tailings next to the river, with a couple of rifles, and we’re going to shoot a few bottles. He’s twelve, and developing quite a good eye; and his dad thinks it’s a good thing, too. As Gavin Wainwright said, in his insightful book twentysomething years ago, “Blessed are the Little Boys, because they are the Keepers of the Clear Vision.” New Zealand has lost the Clear Vision, and we are in danger of losing a generation of boys who may never really become men. The Kiwi Joker Book was meant as, well, a joke; but there are, as is well known, many a true word spoken in jest. The end is not quite nigh, but unless we can rediscover the art of turning boys into men, it very soon will be. And as plain as it is that the world can be broken down into Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, so it is that the Real Man is an amalgam of Concrete, Gelignite, Diesel, and Testosterone; and the sooner we get on and tell the Silly Little Girls with their weak PC drivel to sit down and shut up, and get some real male role models back into the home, the schools, TV, public office, and the Beehive, the better it will be for all of us.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 21

SOAPBOX

Geoff Beach

regard myself as an honest businessman. In fifteen years of running my own business I have never been charged with any criminal offence …or previously, for that matter. Neither have I featured in the Mercantile Gazette – my bills are paid promptly. However, a judgement issued by the Auckland District Court implies that I am just the opposite – having unsuccessfully defended myself against a civil action for conversion, brought by my former Australian business partner. This case spanned nearly four years, involving three courts in two countries. My verdict at the end of it all? If the general public had any idea about the behaviour and competence of both lawyers and judges involved in comparatively minor civil cases like “If a first year law student mine, which rarely receive were this inept he probably any publicity, they would question what sort would have been advised to seriously of justice system we are runreconsider his career options… ning in this country. As Martin Luther King but a judge?” once said, “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.” It appears though, that some in the legal profession regard civil litigation as little more than an under-arm cricket match – dubious tactics are just part of the strategy; questionable decisions simply par for the course. Here are some highlights from Match Two. The venue: Auckland District Oval, December 2001. One of the more dubious tactics was apparently employed even prior to the game’s starting. Match fixing would best describe it. A witness, a warehouse owner, testified he had been presented with an affidavit by plaintiff’s counsel to sign. This highly prejudicial affidavit was to confirm, in so many words, that I had converted my business partner’s goods. A copy of the affidavit was presented as evidence: “Did counsel for the plaintiff suggest to you that if you signed that document, the outstanding storage charges owed to you by the plaintiff would be settled?” asked my lawyer. “She told me it would make a difference,” he replied. There was silence in court. What would the judge say now? Would counsel deny it? Nothing was denied. The umpire had no comment: he was clearly blind-sighted – out of left field, to say the least. In retrospect, it was to be expected. The opposing side was Australian. Play resumed.

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It emerged during cross-examination of the plaintiff that he was in fact not actually seeking $69,000 in damages, as initially claimed. A credit note of approximately $7,000 was buried in his brief of evidence. “Let me make this quite clear – when the credit note is taken into consideration,” asked the judge, “what you are actually seeking is $62,000 in damages?” “Yes,” replied the plaintiff. So, they had declared at 62,000. Now for the final score. If you guessed 62,000 runs to nil, you’re wrong! The answer is 69,000. 69,000? The umpire was deaf to the declaration. What! Was I in Auckland … or Pakistan? How could this be? Surely the opposing side will admit there’s been a mistake? Two weeks later my lawyer received a letter, from plaintiff’s counsel, demanding $69,000, plus costs, plus interest. If a first year law student were this inept he probably would have been advised to reconsider his career options…but a judge? Undoubtedly though, he was well practiced – in the Peter Principle, that is. Has to be one for the record books. A close reading of the scoreboard revealed some interesting calls: A crucial piece of evidence revolved around an e-mail the plaintiff claimed to have sent me. This was to inform me of a change of ownership of the goods in dispute. I had denied receiving it. Is it correct in all previous affidavits the plaintiff had claimed only to have informed the defendant verbally? Yes. Could he produce a copy of this e-mail? No. Why not? Because his laptop computer from which it was sent had been stolen. “Based on the evidence, I find it is a fact that the e-mail was sent,” read the judgement. What evidence? I couldn’t find any, and the judge hadn’t bothered to elaborate. Apparently us mere mortals are not entitled to a reasoned explanation as to why something is a fact; only judges need be privy to the information that makes it so; a higher authority had decided that it was a fact and that should suffice- ‘ours not to reason why, etc,’ is the message. Talk about divine rights! Should Rome now look to the Auckland District Court for secular guidance?

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

It’s a fact – it’s not just cricket!

Was infallibility no longer the sole preserve of the Pope? And as for those naive heretics who believed that justice demanded more, they were to be disappointed: salvation would not come through the High Court. Their faith in this superior body was sadly misplaced – High Court judges rarely overturn what has been deemed to be a fact from a lower court. So, the umpire’s decision was final: Catch 22 – successful appeal unlikely. Saddam Hussein could have had a field day with this game – playing the ‘facts.’ Here’s another interesting call: Both the plaintiff and I had registered a company in order to market the goods in question. Had the plaintiff written to a client informing them that the defendant was the manager? Yes. Had the client instructed the defendant to “alter at will” a multi-million dollar contract and submit it to this client (which he had done)? Yes.

Had the plaintiff sent an e-mail requesting an account of “goods sold in the new company” to the defendant? Yes. Then wasn’t the defendant acting as the managing director when he secured the goods from forfeiture, because the plaintiff had failed to pay storage charges for the previous six months? No. Why not? Because the company in question never actually traded. No prizes for guessing what the ruling on this point was… Yes, the umpire had decided until one actually puts runs on the board, one isn’t a team member; it’s a fact that because the company never traded the defendant was not acting as managing director at the time – the Employment Court must be bowled over by that one. Definitely behind the eight(h) ball now! They say, “What does a man profit if he sells his soul?” A great deal apparently – if he is a member of the legal profession. And that is a fact.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 23

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER That's progress for you...

unny how much can change within the space of a single lifetime. Indeed, I wonder if we might reflect on how the face of our previously happy and content little country has altered to the point of being almost unrecognisable, and all within such an alarmingly short period of time. There is so much to reflect upon in fact, that rather than the more usual narrative style, we must, perforce, descend to a sort of laundry list, and in the form of asking a repetitive question: Remember when...? By far and away the majority of children had a mum and a dad. Just about every child in the land could read, write, and count. NZ enjoyed the lowest infant mortality rate in the world. We had “By and large our towns and cities the highest child immuniwere run by clever people who did sation rates in the world. Our kids were fit, not fat. the job for free. Rates hardly ever Plunket was loved, went up and were never much respected and doing a marjob. Kids had a in any case” vellous proper breakfast and a cut lunch to take to school. Lots of men were teaching them in school. The schools ran up the flag at assembly and national pride was taught and expected. Classrooms were well disciplined and quiet so the kids could learn. Most kids were taught to swim in the school pool. Bullies were sorted out behind the shelter sheds. Kids walked or biked to school, with the littlest going hand in hand with mum. The kids knew and respected the local policemen, who knew many of them by name. Tea time was a cracker hot meal cooked by mum. They played footie, netball, and went more or less wherever they liked. Kids knew all of the neighbours, who knew all of them. Very few kids said much worse than “bugger” and weren’t into burglary or car theft. If the kids left the mower on the front lawn, it was still there the next day. Dope was a shortened version of the word dopey. Gangs were something in the movies that wore fedora hats and had Italian accents. Kids weren’t into marking out a territory with spray painted and primitive squiggles. New Zealand belonged to everyone, so, in effect did the kids. At intermediate school you made up your mind what you wanted to be. If you were really clever and passed U.E. you got a free university education.

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You left school, got a job, usually married in your early twenties. With a couple of children now, you bought a house on a 3.5% mortgage. Dad earned enough to cover the bills, and mum did the hard yards running the home. Mum and dad falling out and splitting up? Somehow this hardly ever happened, and if any family member was a bit crook, the Doctor was happy to come to your place. Nationwide, solo mums and people on the dole wouldn’t fill Carisbrook. By and large our towns and cities were run by clever people who did the job for free. Rates hardly ever went up and were never much in any case. Saying “gidday” to anyone you met, and they could understand what you were saying. We owned all of our public utilities and power and water were really cheap. Our banks weren’t almost entirely owned by Ned Kelly’s relatives. We had a New Zealand-owned oil company. New Zealanders went overseas, just for a bit of a look see, but always came back. We had thriving woollen mills, manufacturing plants, clothing factories etc. You could build something without a lawyer and the local council robbing you blind. Driving for a couple of hours without a Police cash register ringing. On the rare occasion you needed a policeman they actually came. The armed forces before they became “peace-makers”and officially emasculated. The All Blacks before importing overseas-born hard-men to bolster the ranks. Being gay was to be happy. We didn’t try to “understand” violent criminals, we simply locked them up. Men and women could be easily told apart; especially by their voices... “P” was something always needed just as the council dunny had shut for the night. Mental patients were treated in hospitals not eventually put into prison. Politicians mostly told the truth, and if not, resigned if they were caught out. Drunks having a bit of a stoush usually at least observed the Queensbury Rules. The police didn’t shave their heads and look like the people they should be catching. Credit cards were not gouging a percentage out of every sale. Wrong was not “inappropriate”, or “Bad” a product of ones’ environment. Lies were just that, and the truth had yet to be “spun” into something unrecognisable. The Haka was a very special thing, rarely used, if ever, at the opening of a book. Most Maori could sit in the sun without getting burned. You could toss a line in the tide and pretty well guarantee a good feed. The railway system worked well along with buses and trams.

Retailers enjoyed the weekends with the family. Mum, dad and the kids saw lots of each other and had time to even see Nana. The local Vicar would call in at home and try to get you to join his church. People actually paid any of the few fines they might have got. Being called for Jury service was quite an honour rather than to be wriggled out of. How you could learn all sorts of useful stuff if you joined the Scouts/Girl Guides. The community expected that we should all be responsible for our own actions. Obscene language in the hearing of a copper would have you arrested, or a thick ear! Dogs were family pets not a make work source of revenue for civil servants. Politeness in men was considered a virtue, not a sign of a low testosterone count. Effing and blinding in women was largely confined to ship girls and prostitutes. The “F” or the “C” word on TV would have had the station manager arrested. Learning disorders were not yet stopping people from learning...Rock and Roll was going to destroy society. Yeah right! Gangsta Rap? Probably! And so these brief samplings taken from over the last thirty years or so could run on for pages and pages. Indeed these few points and observations are, after all, from the single point of view of someone who actually worries a fair old bit as to the largely cavalier way we have all sat back and simply allowed a pretty neat country to fall into a state of great dis-repair. However, I’m firmly convinced that apart from the lowlifes, along with their handmaidens in government and most of the media, the vast majority of Kiwis would really like our society to begin a major change in direction, which simply means that our society is in need of some repairs. Like, we really don’t have to do very much at all do we, to effect some quite remarkable changes for the good? It’s simply a matter of getting ourselves organised. We could perhaps take as a very good starting point the resurrection of the family as being the most important component of our society. Begin by means of tax advantages to once again give women the choice to work inside or outside of the home. To identify and then to politically crush the anti-family element that has wormed its way into Parliament and to replace them with normal Kiwis with some idea as to what a family is all about. That will do as a starting point. What we will then be needing from you guys and girls are the ideas and the means as to how we bring this all about. Then again, I suppose, we can simply do what we have usually done, nod our heads, and essentially do nothing. Otherwise, unless we really want to look forward to our time expired National Anthem being eventually re-written, (to paraphrase the Aussie anthem), as something like “Retreat New Zealand Fair” we really will have no cause in the future to bemoan the inevitable fate that will befall us, unless we begin, right now, to turn around the incredible damage that has already been done. ccarter@ihug. co.nz for your thoughts and ideas of how to get this revolution under way...It is, long overdue… Chris Carter appears in association with www.snitch.co.nz, a must-see site.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 25

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART

Why do Christians feel they have to convert people?

eidi and I were driving home the other day, kids in the back, when we suddenly inhaled this whiff of something burning. We were following a tow and salvage truck, with a vintage Mini van needing restoration strapped to its deck, but there was no obvious reason for the burning smell. Not for another 30 seconds, anyway. Suddenly, flames began licking up the left hand rear wheel of the truck. We flicked our lights, tooted our horns, and eventually during a break in oncoming traffic sped alongside the truck driver and held a fire extinguisher out to him while Heidi tried to explain that his truck was on fire. “Yeah, I know,” he said, as if it was old news, and waved us on, telling us “The reason Christians share the he didn’t need any help. I Gospel with people is because pulled back into the traffic flow and watched in they know Christianity to be true, the rear view mirror as and that the choice you make to the truck pulled over. I assumed he was dealing accept it or reject it will with it, and our house was have consequences” just ahead so we turned off and forgot about it. Instead, imagine my surprise 15 minutes later to see vast plumes of black smoke billowing up a kilometar down the road. Grabbing my binoculars, lo and behold there was the truck, now totally engulfed in flames, nearly three kms from where we’d left it. It transpired the driver had not taken us seriously and had merely pulled over to let other traffic past before continuing on his merry way. It was an error that cost him his entire truck, and its vintage cargo. I tell you this because it has a heck of a lot to do with truth. The truck driver didn’t really want to listen to some over-dramatic motorist hassling him with some cock and bull story about his truck being on fire. He was busy, he had a deadline. Problem was, regardless of how he viewed the seriousness of the motorist’s claim, it was true and it was going to impact his life whether he liked it or not. Christianity is like that too. In our modern world, we have so marginalized Christianity, and so embraced other belief systems, that we regard religion as a matter of personal taste, rather than something that is true and which has consequences. The reason Christians share the

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Gospel with people is because they know Christianity to be true, and that the choice you make to accept it or reject it will have consequences. Now you can argue, and many of you reading this will, that my belief in Christianity is just that – a belief – which I cannot prove to be absolutely true, and therefore that I should not make a truth claim for it. It remains, critics say, a clash between my honestly-held belief that nonChristians are destined for an unhappy afterlife, and the non-Christians’ belief that I’m just a wacky ‘Jesus freak’. Unfortunately, the critics have not analysed the logic of their argument well enough. Here’s why: Some of it hinges on a claim that all religions are more or less equal. This argument is the refuge of the intellectually feeble: if Allah is exhorting his followers to slaughter infidels wherever they find them in order to get into Paradise, while Christ exhorts his followers to love their enemy and show them forgiveness, by a process of logic Allah and God cannot be the same thing. If the Eastern mystics are right, and we are all “avatars”, all of us are God, along with the trees and the rocks as well, and that by being true to ourselves we reach oneness with the Universe, then logically how does that accommodate Hitler’s honest belief that he was right, with Mother Theresa’s? ‘God’ in the Eastern sense would appear to be permanently in conflict with him/her/itself, and thus not really worthy of any worship at all (if God is that confused, what hope for the rest of us?). The cold hard fact is that while you have a smorgasbord of religious choice in front of you, some of those choices are dodgier than others. If all religions are really equal, does that mean we should give equal space and time to the Aztec and Mayan cults with their attendant brutal human sacrifice? Does it mean we should start honouring Taniwha in every waterhole? The “all religions are equal” line allows a secular state to get around the competing claims of each religion by saying religious belief should be a private matter, that it is not important in the great scheme of things and that you are free to worship what you like but that you shouldn’t impose your personal beliefs on others. But what if one of those competing religions is actually true? What if it is the pearl in a field of lies and false beliefs? What if the fate of all humanity rested on the discovery of this one true fact?

Sure, we may lack the absolute final proof that Christianity is true, just as the truck driver sitting in his cab did not appreciate the full enormity of the judgement call he was about to make, but just because we lack absolute evidence does not mean the claim is not true. Just because the driver couldn’t see the flames did not mean his truck was not on fire. The Christian Bible says we walk by faith, and not by sight. This doesn’t mean blind faith, it means that in the first instance you have to believe, before God will reveal himself to you. There are billions of Christians throughout history who have had personal encounters with God, after first taking a step of faith. There are not many, although the apostle Paul was one, who are rewarded with a direct God-experience first, although God will often guide seekers towards him. Generally, first comes faith, the reward for which is knowledge. If you wait for too long, testing God by demanding some miracle as proof (and think for a moment about the arrogance of such a demand: it’s like a billionaire offering you $500,000 as a gift, and you demanding to see the colour of his money before being gracious about it), you may die lost, not saved. Unlike Islam or Buddhism, whose founders’ bodies remain in graves, Christianity does make a major truth claim: that it is the one religion on the planet founded by God and centred on a resurrected saviour. No other religion makes this claim. No other religion has evidence in its favour as strong as Christianity. Atheists

looking to challenge Christianity have instead converted after actually viewing all the historical evidence. Lawyers and judges have examined the gospel accounts and the writings of Romans and others outside the Bible and concluded that Christianity is actually true, “beyond reasonable doubt”, in other words that the evidence meets the highest courtroom standards. If we can execute criminals, or jail people for life, or seize their homes and property with society’s approval on the basis not of “absolute” proof but merely “beyond reasonable doubt”, why do we find it so hard to accept Christianity is true on the same test? The irony is enormous. We sentence others to death on a lesser standard, and we sentence ourselves to death by demanding too high a standard of proof for Christianity. If you’re not a Christian and you’d like to get a grip on the evidence for and against Christ, email us for a free copy of the international bestseller “The Case For Christ” by Lee Strobel (while stocks last), on the email address questions@investigatemagazine.tv (note the .tv suffix). I’d welcome your feedback on whether you’ve ever heard any of the evidence in that book explained to you before. So finally then, the reason Christians spread the gospel is similar to my truck driver analogy: we care enough about other people not to let them languish in their own ignorance, but rather to warn them that they might be about to catch fire. You still have the free choice to accept or reject it, but Christians should not be ridiculed for at least giving you the chance to make that choice.

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Y N N A N R E P SU

” D E T S U “B crime ime out’ a ‘t n e v e e mak eal would p e r 9 5 s n r top QCs wa

e g s59 of th in l a e p e r t tha of assault lic record y b t u p il f u o g r y l e matt hnical iscovered It is now a d rents tec a s p a h e e k t a a m stig will d: it n, but Inve e r Crimes Act d il considere h c ’t n ir d e a h h t s k ac rter put if they sm hysically ill’s suppo p B y e e h h t t n if e ev s tion something ding Queen to prosecu a e s l t n d e e r w a p ie erv pen ISHART int king Bill: will also o W c N a A m I s . t iu t o n the a o time angers of a child int d l a g e l e out th Counsel ab

COVER STORY

o say it is shaping up as one of the ‘social engineering’ fights of the Government’s third term would be an understatement. The Crimes (Abolition of Force as a Justification for Child Discipline) Amendment Bill promoted by Green MP Sue Bradford is pushing for a simple repeal of s59, the clause that gives parents a defence of “reasonable force” for the purposes of disciplining a child’s behaviour. In a letter to the organization Family Integrity last year, police headquarters not only confirmed that even a simple smack would be an assault, but suggested that because the Crimes Act already has increased penalties for crimes against children, an assault on a child would be more serious than an assault on an adult, in police eyes. But while commentators on both sides of the divide have discussed whether police would lay charges or not, no one has explored whether other forms of discipline could also run foul of the proposed new law. To explore that specific issue, we asked a number of top QCs to comment on whether a parent who carried or dragged a resistant child to ‘time out’ would also be breaking the law: STUART GRIEVE, QC: I would be opposed to the [repeal of s59] because I think that the provision works entirely adequately as it is. If one puts political correctness to one side, and just deals with these cases on an objective and pragmatic basis, the law has stood the test of time and I would have thought most reasonable people would know full well when the line is crossed between reasonable discipline on the one hand, and crossing that line on the other. So I would be opposed to it, and as one looks at the test now it is left to a jury to determine reasonableness. And being a fan of jury trials anyway, and being a fan of the commonsense of juries, that’s where I would leave it. Q: What if a parent forcibly manhandles a 7 year old to another room to enforce time out. In your experience, could that be a prima facie assault? A: Unquestionably! Not under the present statute of course, but those protections aside any unwanted touching, even threat of touching, can be an assault. It is so defined in the Crimes Act. Q: What about the act of shutting a child in a bedroom or a garage for ten minutes to calm down. If the protection of reasonable force is removed, could that open a parent up to punishment for forcible detention? A: Could do, I’d have to look at that more closely because that is a technical question, but it could do. If you remove the protection then you’re left with a child being a normal indi-

vidual, and it would be no different from doing that to some stranger, I suppose. Q: What advice would you give to law makers? A: My advice would be ‘don’t repeal it’. I would be asking for examples where it doesn’t work well, or where it hasn’t worked. Q: Do you have a fear that it could be used in marital breakups, or as a reason to get CYF involved in a family? A: Well it could do. Although I don’t pretend to be a family lawyer I’m well aware of the fact that in these situations as you describe them, frequently false allegations are leveled, generally by women against males, and allegations of sexual abuse and that sort of thing in order to win custody battles and so forth. This will simply give them more ammunition. GRANT ILLINGWORTH, QC The thing that tends to mask the situation in the NZ environment is the fact that questions of assault as far as civil law are concerned have become less prominent because of the accident compensation legislation. As you will be aware, under the ACC legislation you can’t generally sue someone for personal injury caused by accident, and accident is widely defined to include situations in which you’re assaulted by somebody. So in New Zealand, even serious assaults don’t get before the courts except in quite unusual situations as a matter of civil liability. Now, s59 is dealing only with criminal liability, and I suspect it is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface, because taking away a criminal law defence doesn’t necessarily change the underlying civil law principles. So there are two layers that must be considered. One is the criminal layer, the other is the civil layer. And in order to sort that situation one would have to give it quite a bit of thought and work through the principles. But to confine the analysis to the criminal law only, if you simply take away a defence of reasonable force then every touching of another person becomes an assault, and you then open up a vast area of potentially criminal conduct. You criminalize a whole lot of conduct which to normal people would be utterly ridiculous to criminalize in relation to the way you treat your kids. So I think it is a very important step, and I think it is something that has serious, wide-ranging implications and something that has to be considered very very carefully indeed. I think you do have to distinguish between civil and criminal. Conduct that is not regarded as criminal, or not pursued and charged as criminal, can be taken into account even now in a Family Court context. It doesn’t really matter to the Family Court whether you characterise something as criminal INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 29

Nick Davidson/Herald/Presspix

or not criminal, it’s a question of whether it represents proper treatment of the child. It’s going to the fundamental question of what is for the welfare of the child, what is in the child’s best interests. They’re looking at the situation through a different legal telescope. I think the real problem is that arguably almost every form of physical contact with your children becomes an assault as a matter of the criminal law. If you take away s59, that’s the issue. And if the child uses force against you, what force can you use against the child? That’s the real crunch issue. There may be lots of situations in which, very appropriately, a parent should avoid using force because it is unnecessary to do so. But there are some situations in which it is necessary and those situations would not necessarily fall within s48, which is the self defence provision. That’s one area in which use of force in self defence and defence of another is justified and will remain justified. But if you think about it, children can use force against their parents, and the parents won’t be able to use force against the children, unless it is self defence. S48 says ‘Everyone is justified in using, in the defence of himself or another, such force as in the circumstances he believes them to be it is reasonable to use.’ But it’s got to be in the defence of himself or another. It can’t simply be a child doing something naughty which involves the use of force, and preventing the child – for example – smashing up the living room. It’s not the defence of yourself or the defence of another. If your child goes beserk and starts smashing the furniture you might not be allowed to touch him. And if that’s the result of revoking s59 – that you’re exposed to a criminal charge of 30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

assault if you restrain a child in those circumstances, then that’s completely nuts. Q: Advice to the legislators as they consider this? A: Obviously it will go to a select committee and they’ll have the task of going through the various scenarios that could arise if this measure is adopted. That’s the appropriate process, and the normal process when an important change is being considered. But I think from my own part, having given it only a relatively short period of consideration, that simply to wipe out s59 could create some situations which are completely undesirable. NICK DAVIDSON, QC Q: The police are already on record as saying any smack would be a prima facie assault. Presumably that means that any physical contact for the purposes of discipline, such as a mother taking her child by the arm and forcing him into time out, would also be a prima facie assault? A: Theoretically that must be right. It would come down to an exercise of discretion. But there could be savings in the legislation, such as safety of the child or removing a child from harm’s way. Where it get’s sticky is the very point you mentioned: if someone actually picks up a child and carts them off, because the difference between that and admonishing them, or hitting them, is so marginal as a matter of law I think it can only be dealt with by discretion. I think it’s a very significant point. Someone who will simply not leave a situation where the parents are sitting outside in the car, waiting for the child to get in the car, and having difficulties because the child is refusing to get in the car, what’s a parent supposed to do? Leave the child

on the side of the road, or pick them up and physically put them in the car? Now if that’s not for their care and protection, what is it? There’s no defence to it. And I think there’s a failure to recognize the difference between smacking as such, and physically taking, with some force, children – because they can be quite big at 11 or 12 and you might have to deal with them in that way. To me the question is, if you cannot discipline a child physically, you remove the defence to what is otherwise an assault, the physical handling of a child of itself is not necessarily a discipline and would be treated like any other contact between two people. But in a relationship between parent and child there will often have to be physical interventions. Now you could not possibly classify an assault as a deliberate application of force to a child, where that is to save the child, or take it to safety. You could not in my view possibly treat that as an assault where the child, for the child’s own sake, should be removed from one place to another. Where a child is out of control, for example. So I think there must become a series of defences available where what is done is not for the purposes of inflicting force, but is a warrant to apply force for reasons which are for the good of the child. Now we don’t really have that available to us in law, but if you take assault as an example: you step in to assault someone else to defend someone – that’s defence of another, and that’s a defence. You step in to save someone from committing suicide, that’s a defence. You step in to save someone from any act of self-harm, or the danger of walking across a road against traffic – that’s a defence. The reason it’s a defence is that it’s not an intentional application of force except by the warrant that you have to do so for the good of that person. Now I think that will become the proper test in law – that where the force is applied for the good of that child, not as a discipline but in order to protect the child in some way, or deal with the child where the child is out of control, but not to inflict force for the sake of that, is the distinction to be drawn as a matter of law. Q: Grant Illingworth feels that where there are going to be issues is where your child is out of control – not necessarily a danger to themselves or anyone else – but nevertheless – A: Impossible to control! Q: …impossible. A: I think that is exactly the point! The time out situation is the key, because if you narrow down all the examples that you mention, it comes down to this proposition: to protect the child? Absolute defence. To discipline the child? No. To take the child out of a situation where it is causing pandemonium? Questionable, because we don’t have a marked defence on the statute for that purpose. That’s why I think the law will develop a defence that, for the sake of the child as much as for the whole family, the child is removed from a situation where the child for example is just screaming its head off and is just so out of control they’re at a risk of harm. The example you give, of trashing a house, is much more difficult, because the law in my view must allow a colour of right to prevent anyone doing that. You don’t have to stand by and watch your house being trashed by anybody. I think you’re

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entitled to protect your property, protect your person. What you can’t do is go beyond the bounds of what the law allows. I think if you can say that the intentional application of force was warranted, not for the purposes of discipline but for the purposes of restraint, I think the law will have to recognize it as a defence. So what I’m anticipating is that the law will develop a colour of right, it will have to. Q: What about where a toddler or seven year old is just being outright disobedient, defying boundaries and authority, and in need of discipline, but not in need of restraint for their own safety? A: Assault has always had various defences of the kind we’ve just been through, and to me it is about marking a boundary about what is effectively a legitimate form of restraint. I think the law would have to develop a defence, the same way colour of right developed, that what you were doing – a technical assault – was justified because of the circumstances that were presented to the parent. Q: Courts or parliament? A: I think the courts will probably be the right place to deal with it. I think a District Court judge familiar with dealing with assault issues generally will see how this fits into a pattern of defences to assault. I mean, technically there are not many defences to assault. You don’t get charged with assault for taking someone in a headlock who’s threatening someone else, because that’s defence of another, but the trouble is those things don’t generally have application to children. We’re still talking about a form of restraint for a reason to do with the way people live in their homes. And there is the conundrum: how do you take the INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 31

Supernanny Jo Frost drags a child to the ‘naughty chair’. But under NZ’s proposed law change, any touching for the purpose of discipline would be an assault. The big question: What are parents left with if they can’t smack or even carry a child into ‘time out’.

defences, and they’re well established, that apply outside and say it applies to the relationship between a parent and child inside a house? I think you’ve hit it on the button. The crucial question is going to be, child hitting another child – grab the child and take it away, that’s not assault. Child causing pandemonium, screaming its head off and threatening its own stability. You couldn’t possibly be charged with assault for taking that child to another room provided it’s reasonable force. That’s not discipline, that’s control. It’s the point at which it moves to discipline that I think the law has no answer at present. Because if you can’t smack a child, what can you do by way of discipline to say ‘you’re behaving very badly, I do not like your language, you’re going to go and sit in that room there!’ ‘I’m not going!’ ‘Right, I’m going to pick you up and put you in there’. That’s technically an assault. What’s the warrant for it? We have no statutory defence to it. 32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

On the other hand there is a tremendous amount of common sense in the police and the courts, so you’re not going to see thousands of parents prosecuted for this. But yes there will be test cases, and the law will evolve. IN SUMMARY, MAIN LEGAL POINTS: A simple smack would definitely be a prima facie assault. Touching a child for any disciplinary purpose, such as forcing them into time out, would definitely be a prima facie assault. Touching a child for the purposes of his or her own safety, or the safety of others, or the safety of property, would be authorized by s41 and s48 of the Crimes Act, and therefore not an assault While police would have a ‘discretion’ as to whether to charge, in practice many police stations are already calling in CYF, who take a blanket “no smacking’ approach and would be within their powers to remove children from parents, even if insufficient evidence existed to convict.

COMMENT FROM THE BLOGS Dave Crampton, Big News: Barnardos is campaigning to repeal Section 59 of the Crimes Act under the banner of Every Child Counts. It has recently put up an analysis of court cases relating to S59 on its Barnardos web site. I assume this has been done to illustrate why section 59 should not be successfully used as a defence in court. Trouble is, in the criminal cases quoted, all but one of the offenders were convicted, not acquitted. The one that was acquitted was a manager of a creche, and the decision was overturned on appeal due to technical grounds, and she was discharged without conviction. Nearly all the civil cases were deemed to be unlawful assault as well. None of the criminal cases relate to acquittals of parental discipline of children. All but one of the civil cases quoted relate to parents being convicted. The sole acquittal was not held to be personal abuse, according to Barnardos. Trouble is, Barnardos did not describe the circumstances, nor did it advise readers that it wasn’t the nature of the force that was the issue, the court case was decided on the nature of the circumstances. So where is the list of all these criminal court cases during the past four years where S59 was used to get people off abusive smacking? I haven’t seen it. I don`t think anyone else has, either. Is this the best Barnardos can do? MENZ website, reprinting Radio Rhema interview with mother acquitted in ‘riding crop’ case: My new husband had a generally good relationship with my son. He had been a “buddy” for him appointed by the family to get alongside the boy for outings and companionship and to enable me to have some respite. It was though his contact with my son that our relationship began. My husband has a closed head injury from an accident some years ago. Q: Then what happened? A: About two weeks after the school incident [kicking a hole in a door] my son was asked to assist my husband bringing in firewood for the night. He took exception to this simple request and did not respond well to my husband’s encouragement to help. He picked up a baseball bat and swung it full force at my husband’s head screaming that he would give him permanent head injuries. Fortunately my husband was able to block the blow and disarm the boy. If my husband had not seen the baseball bat coming, the consequences could have been dire, as the impact to his head could have seriously maimed him or even killed him. I felt I needed to discipline my son for this severe behaviour and looked for the cane, but could not find it. I saw the riding crop close by and thought that will give him a short sharp sting and then administered discipline with that. I did not give evidence at the trial and called no evidence in my defence. The prosecution witnesses clearly showed in their evidence, that this was a boy who was exhibiting extreme and irrational behaviour and needed to be quickly bought into line. The jury decided the case based on the evidence provided by the prosecution alone.

The evidence presented by the prosecution showed that the boys behaviour changed for the better after the discipline. David Farrar, KIWIBLOG, on the ‘riding crop’ case: [Plunket CEO Kaye] Crowther never mentions the circumstances. She didn’t say that the boy nearly killed his stepfather with a baseball bat just minutes prior to the discipline. Nor does she say that police laid charges reluctantly under relentless pressure of CYFS social workers. These social workers have [now] taken away the woman’s son from her and are now attempting to take away her daughter. Social workers are telling parents that it is against the law to use physical discipline on children. They have told parents that if they use physical discipline on their children, their children will be removed from their care. And they are doing just that, even if parents have been acquitted of assault after successfully using s59 as a defence. – Farrar Commenter on Kiwiblog, responding to Russell Brown: RB, if you read the interview on the riding crop case (horsewhip is a slight exageration as it conjures up something bigger), other methods of discipline had been tried. The kid got a smack with the crop after the baseball bat exercise. Note the mother administered the discipline, not the stepfather, who was the one the bat had been aimed at. The result? An improvement to behaviour. The improvement was noted at school. That lead to the “investigation” by social workers, wondering why it improved. The mother told about the discipline, and the trouble began. The success did not fit within their belief system. You said the social workers “should” remove the boy from custody, even though the women was acquitted, because of the “potential” for harm based on their brief interview. That is exactly the point. They pre-judged the situation and responded. Even after the judge ruled NOT GUILTY, the mother cannot get her child back. The child escaped “custody”, and wants to be back. That is every parent’s nightmare. That is the point. Now they are trying to remove the daughter from custody, even though she has begged to stay. This is exactly why we are concerned about the process of making it easier for a state worker to remove children from custody over even softer evidence (evidence of smacking rather than physical abuse) - and they turn out to be wrong. It happened in the thousands in Sweden. Read the links. We are not talking about abuse and excessively violent cases, where s59 doesn’t protect the parents in any event, we are talking about the predisposition of social workers to assume the worst of parents. When this power extends to smacking, the punishment (removal of children) far, far outweighs the crime (of a smack) to the vast majority of good parents. Saying it will never happen is ignoring all the evidence some militants are trying very hard to surpress. They rely on journalists reading their press releases and not going to the source material that completely blows their “facts” out of the water. Posted by: ZenTiger INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 33

THE INVESTIGATE INTERVIEW

RIGHTS TO SUE The Green MP behind the smacking law change

Sue Bradford is a driven woman. Quite happy to give the police a bit of biffo in days of yore, the activist-turned-MP wants a law change removing parental rights to smack. But in an interview with IAN WISHART, Bradford appears to approve of using reasonable force in some situations, and is now willing to look at a compromise position: INVESTIGATE: When are you expecting the next round in the smacking debate? SUE BRADFORD: The report back date to Parliament is at this stage August, but I suspect it might be put back a bit later because we’ve had over 1,700 submissions. I haven’t done an analysis, but I do know there are a lot of substantive submissions from major organizations that are in favour of my bill. In terms of organizational submissions it’s looking very good for my side of the debate, in favour of repeal of s59, but of course there are hundreds of submissions from both sides of the debate. Q: What led you to this, when did you first think, ‘I’ve got to do something about this’? A: Soon after I came to Parliament. I hold the health, social services and children’s portfolios for the Green Party, and I was just getting a really strong message from groups that work with families and children and domestic violence as well, about the problem of violence against children in this country. It became very clear to me that repealing s59 was something that I might be able to do as an MP that might change things for the better for the children of this country. So from very early on I wanted to do a private members bill, but in the first couple of years I didn’t because Brian Donnelly from NZ First had his bill in and you can’t have more than one bill on the same subject, so I figured that if Brian wanted to do it I’d just support him. But then he withdrew his bill, because he decided he wanted to go down the route of defining what constitutes ‘reasonable force’ against children, and I thought that was really shocking because I just don’t agree with those arguments at all – the more you define what reasonable force is, the more you’re actually legitimizing various forms of assault against children. And at that point once Brian did that, we wrote our own Green Party bill and put it in the ballot. Q: In terms of background, you’ve got kids, right? A: Yeah, I’ve had five children. Q: Presumably along the way you’ve smacked them from time to time? A: No, I’ve never hit them or smacked them. Not that I can recall, and I’m sure they’d tell me by now if they thought I was telling lies. I’ve asked them, but honestly I can’t remember ever doing it. It was never in my mind.

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I didn’t know the psychology of child-rearing, but I just never wanted to because my children were just so precious to me. I just could not conceive of doing that, that there would be any useful point or that I wanted to. Really to me, from the time you conceive your baby, and from the time it’s born, it’s out and as an adult my role is to nurture that child and look after it and love it. Hitting it? I just don’t get it. But that’s my personal view, I didn’t learn about the theory of it until later. I had twins when I was 24, and then I had three more children later on. Of the second three, there’s two years between the first two and then five years between the second and the last one. But I was on the DPB with twins for the first three and a half years of their lives, and that’s not the easiest situation to be in. I was very depressed through some of that time and I know how hard it can be to have kids and to be trying to do your best, sometimes without a lot of money. And how you can get frustrated and angry about some of the things they do, from personal experience! But it’s just that there’s other ways of dealing with it than hitting them. Q: What did you do? A: There’s lots of different things that you do as a parent. Part of it for me is that if you think of them as your equal, and I still do, if it’s appropriate – and it depends on their age – you try and explain why you’re angry or why they shouldn’t do something. If you’re going into danger, like running into traffic, pull them away from danger. Some people have made the argument that my bill, if passed, would mean that if someone pulls their kid away from danger that they would be arrested for assault. It’s a really nonsense argument, because no police or court would ever arrest or convict anyone if they were trying to save someone from danger. Q: Yeah, you’re absolutely right, there’s a section of the Crimes Act that authorizes force in the defence of another or to rescue them, so that’s not an issue, but I do want to get back to your own kids – A: I can remember putting them in their room, I can remember getting them to help clean stuff up when they’d made a mess. You can get them to do other things. Say they’re causing a scene somewhere in public, you try and get them away from the scene of the disaster so to speak, you’d try to remove them

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“I mean there’s a whole spectrum of assault and violence, with murder at one end and a light smack at the other end. That spectrum is there all the time. Trying to repeal reasonable force is driven by the fact that in a number of court cases as you know people have gotten away with actually severely beating their children in my point of view” from where the trouble is rather than attacking them. Q: How did you do it? A: Well you’d take them physically away from where the problem is. Q: Did they ever resist you, screech and complain? A: There’s certainly been times, the one people talk about is the screaming in the supermarket. I’ve certainly had the screaming in the supermarket and the yelling for treats and all the rest of it. I think that must happen to all parents, but it’s how you deal with it, whether you hit them or swear at them cause they’re doing something. I think the best thing is to get them out of there as fast as possible. Q: I think most mothers would be saying, ‘Yes, exactly,’, but I’m just trying to nut out in terms of your own kids that they were no better nor worse than anyone else’s.

A: No, I’m not saying they were angels at all, and I wasn’t some sort of trained childcare professional or anything like that, I was just trying to bring them up as best I could. The fundamental attitude I had was that from the minute I first knew I was having twins, and later had them, I just loved them so much I felt it was my job to look after and nurture them to the best of my abilities and to protect them from danger and bring them up as well as I could in doing that. The thought of being physically violent towards them in any way at all never crossed my mind. Q: What about when the twins were scrapping amongst themselves – A: Which they did a lot of! Q: What did you do? A: Well, you ask them to stop or, in a loud voice, tell them INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 35

to stop, or you can separate them and put them in their room, although often that wouldn’t be a good thing. But mainly I remember trying to tell them ‘this is not a good idea because…’ Once they reach the age when they can have any reason at all – of course when they’re tiny they don’t have that – but kids gradually reach the age of reason and the sooner you start explaining things to them, the better. To me, you don’t need to hit them or smack them to make the explanation. Q: But what I’m trying to drill down to here is, when your children hit the terrible twos, and they can’t be reasoned with, they just ‘want, want, want’ now, ‘get out my way’, whatever, what did you do, how did you enforce the point. A: Well it depends on the situation, you just deal with it at the time. As a parent you’re much physically bigger than they are, so for example if they won’t put their sweater on and you want them to put their sweater on, well you can physically put it on them. And if they won’t go into their bedrooms you can physically put them into their bedrooms. Yeah, when they’re that age you can physically manage them better than when they’re 14, but stages of child-rearing and what you can do are so different depending on age. You can tell them not to do it. I certainly would have yelled quite often! You can put them in their room or take them away from situations. You can try and distract them. Q: Let’s say you’re taking little ones into their room, and they’re kicking and screaming while you’re dragging them in, were you comfortable with that? A: Yes, but, yes, but I mean, but when kids are little you do physically have to look after them and make sure they’re safe, and that’s part of a parent’s job. If safe means putting them in a cot or safe means putting them in their room, but that’s not hitting children, that’s just looking after them. Q: I’ll come back to it, but I think most parents, like you, have yelped at their kids, but aren’t you worried that if a simple smack disappears as a form of discipline and parents feel they can’t do that, then they will simply take out their frustrations with much more verbal abuse of children in many ways? A: Well that would be awful, and I think that verbal abuse, psychological abuse, is just as bad in many ways as physical abuse, and it can actually be worse sometimes – the psychological impacts of how parents can freeze out their children, or abuse their children or call them names, or be really denigrating and humiliating to their children verbally – that can actually have a worse effect in some cases than physical violence. Repeal of s59 is only one small strand of what we need to do. A big part of this is actually putting sufficient resource into support for all the community and church groups and other organizations that help to train parents on different techniques of child-rearing that don’t involve either physical or psychological violence. And also into the organizations that provide support to families in trouble where the parent or parents are really desperate: ‘How can I bring up this kid, what can I do about this kid that’s causing me all these problems?’ At the same time as repealing s59 we have to give a lot more support to parents and families. It’s not something that stands alone. But why s59 is the key is because it is saying is the State legitimizes a degree of violence unspecified against our children. Q: Yeah, I understand the legal perspective you have of it. In 36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

terms of verbal abuse, I’ve seen kids who are browbeaten without a finger ever having been laid on them – A: Reduced to a sense of nothingness – Q: And their spirits are broken. Why can’t the law tackle that then? A: I don’t know what the law can do about that particularly. It’s certainly something that should be tackled with education and training and support from parents, and I suppose broader public education campaigns as well. Q: I’m going to play Devil’s advocate with you on the point: if, as I suspect, there are more cases of children being verbally abused and broken-hearted by that sort of thing than probably there are kids where smacking has turned into physical abuse – A: I don’t know if you can say, I mean the statistics on abuse and neglect of our children are – Q: Yeah, but I think the difference is, they’re not abused per se because there’s a decent pair of parents who smacked them. They’re abused because there are parents, or a parent, who just doesn’t care. And the parenting skills are just so poor, and the parent probably doesn’t know what the law is nor care. A: That’s right, but the fact that we have a defence on our books of reasonable force, it adds to that culture that accepts violence, or that hitting children or smacking children is OK. For some parents, and you’re right – the less equipped a parent is to cope the more likely they are to do it – but for example the fathers or mothers who shake their babies to discipline them because they pissed on the floor, and then the baby is badly injured or died – even though there’s nothing about the law in that parent’s head, it’s an extension of our culture which we’ve had since settlement that says it’s actually a parent’s right to physically hit or beat or smack their child to try and get them to do what you as an adult want them to do. It’s that thinking – so many kids are brought up in a family that believes that they should be smacked, beaten or hit when they are kids, they grow up with the idea of a parent’s right to beat, and when they have their babies it’s transmitted from generation to generation, and that cycle is what we’ve got to break. Q: Were you ever smacked as a child? A: Yeah, but not much. Q: So it didn’t screw you up? A: (Bursts out laughing) I have no idea! You’re the first one to ever ask me that question, and I really don’t know the answer! Q: What I am going to ask you is the one you’ve probably been asked a million times, but it is a fair question and it is this: If we got down to the core of it you’d acknowledge that the real problem is not with the traditional two parent family who take a keen interest in the welfare of their kids, supporting them, loving them. It’s the sort of family you’d see in Once Were Warriors where some of the really nasty abuse is happening. Do you recognize that there is a fundamental difference between a smack on the backside or the hand that doesn’t extend into a full-on beating – and parents who are just criminals and beat the proverbial out of their children? You must, you would acknowledge there is a difference? A: Of course. I mean there’s a whole spectrum of assault and violence, with murder at one end and a light smack at the other end. That spectrum is there all the time. Trying to repeal reasonable force is driven by the fact that in a number of court cases as you know people have gotten away with actually severely beating their children in my point of view.

Like the case in Timaru last year, and a number of other cases. Q: Just querying that, did they actually use the s59 defence in that one? A: Yes, yes, they did. I wasn’t actually in court but that’s my understanding. The woman who used a horse crop and a cane on a number of occasions on a 12 year old boy. That was the Timaru court case last year and it’s my understanding that s59 was used as a defence. Q: Some of the blog sites have pointed out that it might more have centred on self-defence, that the kid was quite large and quite aggressive. A: That may, I mean, I wasn’t in the court so I really don’t feel able to speak with authority on it. I know that was an element of the case, that that was part of the mother’s defence, but I’m pretty damn sure s59 was part of her defence as well. Q: Obviously you are not looking to intentionally outlaw time out, or a parent who has to physically manhandle a child into a room, are you? A: No, or who physically removes or saves a child from some danger. And just on that, I’m not seeking to outlaw smacking either, which is a myth that’s being driven up by my opponents. All I’m doing with my bill is seeking to repeal one clause of an Act. If s59 was repealed, and say some mean person dobbed in a mother for lightly smacking her child – say that happened, which is the fear that’s being driven up – Q: It’s happened overseas, yeahA: Yeah, and so the police come and investigate the mother who smacked her five year old child (if they come at all, because we know they’re already overworked) but they’re going to look and say well, how severe was that? What damage was done? What’s happened here? Which is what they’re supposed to do in everything they investigate. I think, during the process of select committee hearings which we’re about to go into on this Bill, the one thing I really hope that as a select committee, if we want to get this Bill through, is that we can make very clear that it is not the intention of me or Parliament to suddenly have all the parents who lightly smack their children subject to arrest or imprisonment or anything like that. It’s not my intention, it’s not the intention of anyone I know, it’s not the intention of any other MP. It’s a myth. Q: Did the Greens get any independent legal analysis on what the repeal of s59 would mean? A: I’ve certainly talked with a number of lawyers over the past year and there will be a number of submissions dealing with this. Q: Family lawyers, criminal lawyers? Which? A: Both. I’ve talked to both. Q: The reason I ask is because we’ve done a survey of top QCs on this point: because s59 is a repeal of a defence, then technically if there’s unwanted touching or a smack, it is technically an assault, just like two people on the street. A: That’s a very good analogy, because in fact I’m asking for equity for children like what happens to adults now. If an adult is assaulted to the point that it’s a problem, the police always have to make that judgement about how severe that assault was. At the moment if the husband assaults his wife, he has no defence unless it is self-defence, whereas if he assaults his child he has a defence. And that’s inequity.

Q: But surely no normal jury would see the Delcelia Whittaker case as an ordinary smack. A: No, not at all. It is a spectrum. But it does happen in all parts of society. Q: Getting back to my question, the general consensus of the QCs is that physically putting a child in time out, or physically grabbing your child, is an assault in the same way as if you grab somebody on the street. A: Which is a technical assault. That’s true, that’s absolutely true. But all that case law that currently exists would be applied, as it is now. Q: In court, and I think the Louise Nicholas case proves the point, judges tell juries to consider the letter of the law. And if the letter is simply that it is an assault, the jury may have no option but to convict. A: Yeah, but juries also make decisions on the facts of the case. To think that police would arrest and prosecute someone for lightly smacking their kid or putting them into a room for timeout, I think that would be ridiculous. But on the other hand if a 14 year old girl went to the police and said ‘Look, my father smacked me and I felt this was inappropriate and was really hurt and offended physically, sexually etc’, I think that would be a case to investigate. But that’s why I find it so hard. This is the job of the police and the courts every day, to make those kinds of judgements: is this a mother, lightly smacking her child when they screamed in a supermarket, or is it something else going on here that’s worthy of the police attention and often other agencies as well. Those judgements are what the poor bastards that work on the front lines of police, CYF and the health services have to face constantly. That’s not going to change. Q: Whilst one can see the heart behind it, is a simple repeal of s59 too blunt an instrument? Does there need to be some modification about appropriate force? A: Some members of parliament are very keen to amend my Bill so that reasonable force is defined, and I’m sure there’ll be lots of submissions saying that. But once you start looking at that, what it’s saying is that you can hit a kid between this age and this age, you can beat them about the body, but not about the head, you can beat them with an open hand on the buttocks but not with an implement – to me, it gets really gruesome and it’s like defining methods of torture. If I did anything to a policeman I’d be arrested tomorrow – and that’s happened to me on more than one occasion. I could lightly assault a big beefy cop and go to jail, but if I do it to a child I’ve got every defence in the world. Q: I’m flying a kite here, but don’t you really need to say somewhere in the Act itself, ‘No force is to be used on a child, except that this is not intended to suggest that a smack, or a session of time out is an offence’? A: What you’re saying there Ian is where I think we need to go. How we do it…it’s going to be up to 121 MPs. I think it’s very likely going to be necessary to make it clear that that’s not the intention of the Bill. Q: Perhaps in the introduction to the Act, or the definition of assault? A: Well in some place. I have talked to lawyers about it, and I’m very supportive of doing it if it means the Bill can go through. INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 37

ON ASSIGNMENT

At the edge of forbidden A New Zealand journalistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s report from the Burmese frontier

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I Photography: Alex Shea

Investigate correspondent ALEX SHEA finds desperation and disfigurement among the refugees of Asia’s forgotten war, on the border of a closed country that last knew peace in 1939

f a people suffer in the forest, and there is no one to see them suffer, do they really suffer? Maybe the answer lies at a clinic near the town of Mae Sot. A Thai-Burmese border settlement teeming with refugees, rebels, informants, and illegal immigrants. Mae Sot’s official population is supposedly 60,000, but realistically the number is much higher than that. Prostitutes have to fill demand, factories need to be staffed, and officials will turn a blind eye if the price is right. Life for the Burmese ‘illegals’ is a life full of unknowns. However, what is known is that here exists a portal into which you can glimpse the human tragedy of a country the U.S. calls an “outpost of tyranny”. I step onto the coach at 10pm, and its air-conditioned cocoon is a comforting change to the squalid fumes of Bangkok. Mae Sot is an 8-hour bus ride along a highway steeped in monotony – especially at night. The 500 km stretch seems lined with possibly hundreds of brightly lit petrol stations, placed at 500metre intervals, in what appears to be a concerted effort to add sleep deprivation to a tedious journey. Eventually, after several hours, I fall into a disturbed sleep. I’m awoken on the outskirts of Mae Sot, as we’re stopped at some form of checkpoint. An equally jaded official peruses various documents. I pull out my passport, but he waves at me to put it back. I can only assume that as the only Westerner on board, I’m not seen as much of a threat to the stability of a region racked by drugs, displaced persons, and an armed conflict that has lasted fifty-seven years. The war between the KNU (Karen National Union) and the Burmese regime – otherwise known as the SPDC (State Peace and Development Council) – has become one of the longestrunning conflicts in the world. It has spanned three generations, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and at times spilt into Thailand itself. The conflict began shortly after Burma’s (Myanmar) independence, and was primarily born out of colonial duplicity. Whilst mustering allies for the Second World War, the British guaranteed the Karen a homeland in return for their loyalty, and their lives. It was a pledge that never materialised and in mid 1948, the Karen declared secession from Burma, whom they have been fighting ever since. In recent years however, the SPDC have become increasingly brutal, and the fight has turned from one of freedom into one of basic survival. In 2003, the warring parties agreed to a verbal cease-fire. Alas, torture, killings, and forced relocations are still the norm INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 39

in Karen State. The ceasefire is viewed by many human rights activists as a one sided affair; it is upheld by the Karen, but used and abused by the SPDC in order to build bases, incinerate villages and commit further atrocities. Due to this situation, the ceasefire seems to be on the verge of breaking down, and in recent weeks a new consignment of refugees have marched across the border, whilst thousands more remain internally displaced inside Karen State. 28-year-old Naw Bee Kho is one such internally displaced person. Her recollection of an incident that occurred on April 10 is documented in a report by the Free Burma Rangers; a team of volunteer medics: “My family and I were hiding in an area near Ta Kweh Wah Hta. Many other families were there as well. When we had to move to another place, no one knew where the next hiding place was. My mother in law (80 years old), at this time was sick and could not walk. My husband carried his mother on his back. My husband, his mother and my 9 year old daughter went ahead of our main group. When we were walking up a ridgeline, Burma Army soldiers began to shoot at us. My husband’s mother fell off his back in the shooting. His mother called him and he went back to help her. The Burma Army then shot my mother in law in the neck and my husband in the chest. Both fell down and all of our group scattered. My 9-year-old daughter ran to me and I saw that she was shot.” We finally arrive in Mae Sot town at 6 o’clock in the morning, and I am quickly shoved onto a tuk-tuk to be taken to my 40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

hotel. A fragile-looking man shows me up to my room. His eyes are sunken with age and, considering the town’s proximity to one of the world’s largest opium supplies, goodness knows what else. He shows me every corner of the suite, including the broken radio built into the bedside. Once he has exhausted the exploratory possibilities, he stands there and waits for his tip; it is an awkward moment until he breaks the silence. “You want lady?” he asks, clarifying his statement with an unmistakable gesture. Three of the biggest commodities to come out of Burma are Drugs, Timber, and People. Young girls are to Burma what beef is to Texas. They are sold into prostitution and almost guaranteed to contract AIDS; various surveys taken in Mae Sot suggest that eight in ten local sex workers will eventually become infected. I decline his offer and there is a further silence as he continues to wait for his tip. It is rumored that many door attendants in Mae Sot are in fact Burmese spies; collecting information for the SPDC, on the activities of Westerners in town; and for some reason he looks like the informant type. I just hope that my stinginess has assured him that I am no high rolling arms dealer, hell-bent on destabilizing Burma’s internal security, at a time when some Western countries will argue that it needs a bit of a shake-up. As Condoleezza Rice said at a Senate confirmation hearing , “in our world there remain outposts of tyranny – and

“When we were walking up a ridgeline, Burma Army soldiers began to shoot at us. They shot my mother in law in the neck and my husband in the chest. Both fell down and all of our group scattered. My 9-year-old daughter ran to me and I saw that she was shot...” America stands with oppressed people on every continent – in Cuba, and Burma, and North Korea, and Iran, and Belarus, and Zimbabwe.” The Burmese regime took this veiled threat to heart, and in true paranoid style (typical of the aforesaid governments), packed up Rangoon and moved it to a new, fortified complex 320 km to the north, at a town called Pyinmana. If all this sounds a bit deranged, that’s probably because it is. Especially considering it is happening at a time when Burma’s internal security has never been better. Having amassed the second largest army in South-East Asia – with the primary role of oppressing its own people – they have also managed to squeeze ceasefire deals out of nearly every ethnic army in the backwoods. Bribed with logging concessions, and revenues from drugs, they swap their existence as beleaguered rebels for lives as pampered collaborators. The most prominent cease-fire group opposite the Mae Sot area is a Karen splinter group called the DKBA (Democratic

Kayin Buddhist Army). This group has developed a love for the easy life, and they do much of the regime’s dirty work. As a force, they are almost as feared as their sponsors. It is suspected that they are also involved in the trafficking of drugs, and in a letter sent to the Thai authorities in April 2000, they demanded the release of three of their soldiers who had been imprisoned on such charges. If their demands were not met, the group informed the Police, they would be forced to burn Mae Sot to the ground. Mae Sot is a strange place. Much of its architecture resembles a dilapidated English seaside town, despite it being nine thousand kilometres from England and four hundred kilometres from the seaside. The Lonely Planet calls it a profiteering ‘Wild East’ town, and, apparently, a billboard used to read ‘Have fun, but if you carry a gun, you go to jail’. Although that was years ago, I still had the feeling that public displays of aggression were still not particularly frowned upon. On a side street, I glimpse a man beating his wife about the head INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 41

with a shopping bag. He follows through with a boot to the thigh that would make any Thai kick boxer proud. Nobody seems to mind however; they continue to chat and loll about in hammocks as if nothing in particular is happening. Maybe with a dose of local knowledge they know better than to intervene. ‘When in Rome…’ I think, not wanting to break with local custom. My primal instinct of survival tells me to keep walking; she however is relegated to the flat bed of his SUV. A Thai police officer, who I’m sure saw the whole thing, flashes me a grin as I walk on by. Noting the large quantity of bullets strapped around his waist, I quickly return the pleasantry. Allegations of police corruption have been well documented in Mae Sot: Amnesty International describes an incident on 14 May 2003, when six Burmese migrant workers resisted efforts to extort money from them. Their fates are outlined in a report titled ‘Grave Developments: Killings and Other Abuses’. According to the report, “the six men were eventually taken away the same day in a pickup truck by men dressed in uniforms. On 23 May, their bodies were discovered in a forest near Huay Kalok village, Mae Sot District. The bodies had been burned and spent pistol cartridges were found at the scene.” In 1988, refugees flooded this area after the Burmese student uprising, and the crackdown that followed. It was around this time, along with thousands of others, that Dr. Cynthia Maung walked across the border. Hiding during the day and

walking only at night in order to avoid the Burmese Army, she arrived in Mae Sot, planning to stay only a few months. Eighteen years later, she is still there, and was last year nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. When she founded the Mae Tao clinic, known locally as Dr. Cynthia’s, it was nothing but a one-room shelter; things at the clinic have changed since then, however the overall political situation remains the same. The Mae Tao Clinic is on the road to Maenam Moei, which eventually crosses the ‘Friendship Bridge’ into Burma itself. As I enter the hospital grounds, people are eating, sleeping, and wandering aimlessly. Cinder-block buildings surround a dirt square; the inside of which reveal bunks draped with sheets in a futile attempt at privacy. Whilst trying to track down my contact, I am shuffled between several buildings until I am eventually directed to a teahouse where I meet a Scottish aid worker named Lisa. She tells me that, due to security reasons, many patients don’t want to be photographed, and says the situation today is especially sensitive since they are treating a soldier from the SPDC. “We’ve had people from the KNLA, the DKBA…” (she runs off another couple of four letter acronyms that make up a patchwork of ethnic militias) “…but we’ve never treated anybody from the SPDC before”. I ask why he is there, but she doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Obviously, he’s being treated, but no one’s sure why he’s actually there, instead of a clinic inside Burma. The only thing they

do know is that somebody had brought him there, and that nobody has killed him yet. After a few minutes, a man named Maung Maung Tinn saunters up to us; he is to be my translator and guide. The clinic sees roughly 300 patients a day, however that number is steadily rising. The majority are refugees or Burmese residents; many of whom trek or are carried for days through mountainous terrain. We make our way to the prosthetic department, which in essence is a mid-sized workshop; all the technicians employed there are fellow amputees themselves. For the duration of our visit, a patient sits perfectly motionless, smoking cheroots, saying nothing, his eyes staring into space. The clinic saw 200 amputees last year, and in ninety percent of cases, the reason was landmine-related. Burma is the largest producer of mines in the South-East Asian region, and it is estimated that in the country alone there are between 4,000 and 9,000 landmine victims. However, it is thought that the majority of Burmese casualties die before they receive medical attention, and in some cases, those seeking help have been blocked by the SPDC. Nevertheless, there are much bigger killers than landmines here, and malaria happens to be one of them. We move to another ward – a warehouse of illness. A single arm protrudes from a blanketed shape on the bed, whilst other bodies lay about in a collective malaise. As miserable as it may seem now,

I am told things are much worse during the rainy season. The clinic does the best it can with the limited funds available, however, there are sometimes cases that are beyond their means. In the children’s ward, a baby lies alone on the floor. She has an enlarged heart, and two giant oxygen tanks loom over her tiny body. “Some people say it is good to have a big heart... but not always” says Maung Maung Tinn. In situations like this one, funds are usually sought to transfer the patient to a betterequipped hospital. If funding is not found, such patients like the baby lying at my feet will more than likely die. Refugees International says malnutrition and infant mortality rates amongst displaced Burmese are similar to those documented amongst displaced people in the Horn of Africa. At the end of the ward, another ailing child is sprawled over a blanket. His mother has died and his father has abandoned him. It is a scene straight from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – “Slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind white flicker in the depths of the orbs which died out slowly”. So, if a people suffer in the forest and there is no one to see them suffer, do they really suffer? The answer is: does anybody really care? As the Burmese regime further consolidates its position of absolute power, it seems the world has become bored with the victims of a war well into its sixth decade. Perhaps the ethnic minorities of Burma are – as Condoleezza Rice once said of North Korea – the real “road kill of history”. INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 43

CLOSING IN The growing case against David Parker

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Prime Minister Helen Clark and Labour MP David Parker have attempted to deflect scrutiny of the cabinet minister’s affairs by launching a stinging attack on Investigate magazine. But as the story that follows shows, not only has the magazine done its homework, we believe there is now prima facie evidence of fraud, as IAN WISHART explains

aced with an ageing cabinet line-up at the shallow end of the gene pool, it is perhaps no surprise that Prime Minister Helen Clark and her advisors moved so swiftly to resurrect disgraced Attorney-General David Parker in the wake of Investigate’s bombshell revelation that he had filed false documents with the Companies Office. When the magazine’s April issue hit the streets on March 21 with details of a series of false returns signed by David Parker, the Attorney-General firstly quit that post the same day, and the following morning resigned from cabinet completely. The Prime Minister told reporters that if Parker hadn’t jumped, she’d have pushed him. So what happened? Why was Parker then cleared by the Companies Office on 26 April, and did Investigate really get its facts wrong, or was the Companies Office investigation politically influenced? We’ll deal with the false returns aspect shortly, but first here’s the latest Investigate story on David Parker: revelations that he may have broken the Crimes Act fraud provisions by concealing the ownership of a major asset of his failing company, and arranging to sell the asset for a payment that did not appear in the company’s books. Although the Prime Minister has claimed that liquidators looked through Parker’s business affairs and found nothing irregular, Investigate believes that could be because the relevant transaction was concealed from the liquidator of Parker’s company, and his creditors. The central question in the whole affair is this: with two companies crashing around his ears, creditors who had not been paid for nine months banging on his door, and liquidation looming, is there an innocent explanation for falsely stating that a company asset belonged to someone else, and arranging the sale of the item so that no money appeared in the company’s books? Part of the test for criminal dishonesty in court is whether relevant information was concealed from those with a duty to know about it, in breach of any law. While company directors

often are commercially aggressive and take positions that could be challenged in a civil court, such aggression is normally fine provided any official required by law to examine the circumstances can see all the relevant dealings and make a judgement as to whether the deal is worth challenging. It is where key details are withheld from an official, whether it is a liquidator or the IRD, that a director opens themselves up to provisions of the Crimes Act (see overleaf), because the law can only operate fairly if relevant information is not concealed. The Government says Investigate’s latest allegations are “baseless”. The Prime Minister and Parker have made extremely serious and defamatory remarks suggesting the magazine has been wrong all the way through, that there is absolutely no factual basis to any of the stories and that Investigate has therefore done the stories only for “malicious” reasons. We suggest you read the allegations and judge for yourself whether you believe David Parker acted honestly, whether there are sufficient facts and affidavits requiring real answers, and whether the Companies Office investigation that cleared him of making false returns needs to be re-opened: The new allegations are contained in two affidavits and interviews obtained by Investigate magazine from three Dunedin company directors, one of them a highly prominent businessman in the city. Parker had two companies working on the city’s old St James theatre restoration in 1996. One, Empire Delux Ltd, owned the building itself and was carrying out half a million dollars’ worth of renovations and refits. The other company, St James Ltd, was to be a café and bar that was the building’s only tenant, and was supposed to pay rent to Empire Delux. The project failed because of massive cost overruns on the renovation, exacerbated by the failure of the café to generate enough money to pay rent. The first affidavit, from company director Mark Stephenson of Allied Electrical Ltd, discloses that when Empire Delux became insolvent, Parker arranged to sell its biggest asset, the St James theatre building in Dunedin, to local construction tycoon Tony Clear. There was only enough revenue from the building sale to pay back the bank, leaving unsecured creditors short of more than INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 45

$100,000. The biggest of those were builder Russell Hyslop, owed $25,000, and Dunedin electrical company, Allied Electrical Ltd, owed almost $24,000. Stephenson’s affidavit (all documents are available online at www.tbr.cc) discloses Parker allegedly falsified the ownership of a major chattel, in order to disguise a payment to him. “In February of 1997,” Stephenson says in the affidavit, “my company was informed by Mr Parker that the bar and restaurant had closed and that Empire could not pay my company for any of the work it had performed. “In or about March 1997, Mr Parker informed me that Empire was selling its asset, the building, to Mr Tony Clear and John Farry who intended to convert the building into a new multiplex movie venue. “Mr Parker informed me that he had told Mr Clear that an air conditioning unit located within the building was my companies [sic] and that if Mr Clear offered me $5,000.00 for it, I would accept that offer. “I recall Mr Parker’s actual words to me on the subject were: ‘I’m sorry about all this, but I’ve sold the building to Tony Clear and John Farry, but I’ve told them you own the air conditioning plant up in the ceiling space’. “The revelation that I ‘owned’ an air conditioning unit was news to me! “Mr Parker also told me: ‘So I’ve told them that you own that and that it didn’t form part of the sale but they could buy it off you direct for five thousand dollars, so send them an invoice for five thousand dollars and they’ll pay it.’

“ M

r Parker was aware that the air conditioning system was not my companies [sic] when the proposal was put to Mr Clear, and presented to me. My company had never purchased such an air conditioning system, and it was not part of the schedule of work my company did for Mr Parker on the building site. I did however supply electricity to that system, install some control equipment, and commission it. “Over that period of time I had contact with Tony Clear because we played squash together. I remember talking to him about it, and he confirmed that David Parker had advised him that I held the interest in the air conditioning plant, and that I should invoice Clear Construction Ltd for the sum David Parker had advised. “My company duly invoiced Clear Construction Ltd for the air conditioning system as per David Parker’s instructions, and about a year later Mr Clear paid me.” Mark Stephenson says that was the only payment Allied Electrical Ltd received, and Empire Delux was duly put into liquidation in March 1998, although Investigate has confirmed other creditors had commenced legal action to liquidate way back in May 1997, just after the secret payment had allegedly been arranged by Parker. After searching the list of creditors, Investigate located Otago Sheetmetals Ltd, an engineering company that originally supplied what it says is more accurately described as a ventilation/ heating unit. Managing Director Ian Moran has given Investigate an affidavit confirming that his company supplied a ventilation sys-

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tem worth a total of nearly $20,000 installed, and that Allied Electrical Ltd never owned the unit. Moran says he was “gobsmacked” to find out Parker had allegedly made a false declaration about the ownership of the unit, in order to arrange an off-the-books payment to another creditor. Moran was further shocked by the timing of the under-thetable offer, which coincided with Otago Sheetmetals’ court action to wind-up Empire Delux for unpaid debts regarding the system. Businessman Tony Clear, who purchased the ventilation unit, has confirmed to Investigate that he didn’t actually pay for the unit until December 1999, right in the middle of the time the liquidator of Empire Delux Ltd was still looking for assets with which to pay creditors. Clear was unaware the unit was an asset belonging to the creditors, because he says David Parker told him Mark Stephenson owned it. “What happened was, we had the original meetings with David in terms of the sale of the building, and he indicated at that stage that he did not own the air conditioning unit. I don’t know whether it was the full air conditioning unit or flues or whatever, but whatever it was, that he didn’t own it and we would have to deal with Mark Stephenson, who I actually knew. “So I contacted him and we had a discussion about it and the price, he told me what we needed to pay and at that stage we weren’t unconditional on the site and there was nothing written down in terms of an agreement with Mark Stephenson, but I think what happened and I’m almost 100% sure in my mind, is that I said ‘well if we go ahead with the deal, and if we can put it together in terms of the picture theatre project, we will buy that from you at an agreed price’. And that’s what happened. “David never disclosed the price to us. He did indicate they didn’t own the air conditioning and that we would have to deal with someone else on it, Mark Stephenson or Allied or whatever. “In terms of the way it was represented by David, it was very open. We were quite happy to pay extra, it was disclosed to us that he didn’t – it was totally upfront and we knew the situation from day one. We assumed that was the person, we took it at face value and that’s who we paid. Now whether he owned the air conditioning unit I don’t know, and that is immaterial to our side of the deal. “We knew were buying the building and David was the representative. I don’t know who he was reporting to. And then we were doing a separate deal, which we did completely separately, and I had an invoice from Allied Electrical for $5,000 for that unit.” Investigate understands that under companies law, the air conditioning unit would have been an asset of Empire Delux Ltd, and because the company had already been insolvent for several months with no income and – at that stage – $140,000 worth of unsecured creditors, and few if any other assets, the proceeds from the sale of the unit should have gone to the benefit of all creditors. Documentary evidence of the transaction exists in the sending of an invoice from Allied Electrical Ltd to Clear Construction Ltd for $5,000, and the payment of $5,000 back the other way and subsequent deposit into a bank account, along with the relevant GST paper trail.

The situation is further aggravated because it appears the sale of the ventilation unit was not disclosed to the liquidators. Here’s why we believe this: Tony Clear, who purchased the unit, says he was not invoiced for it until February 1998, just weeks before Empire Delux was liquidated. He didn’t pay for the unit until Dec 23rd, 1999, almost two years into the liquidation process. Neither Clear nor Allied Electrical’s Mark Stephenson were ever asked about the transaction by the liquidators, which would have been expected if the transaction had been disclosed to officials by Parker. As even stronger evidence of what Investigate believes was dishonest concealment, the transaction could have been easily struck down by the liquidator. Normally, preferential payments are hard to unwind because creditors have long-since received the money and spent it, which is a defence under the law to having to pay it back. But the air-conditioning deal was a “gimme” for the liquidator because Clear had not yet paid for it at the time of liquidation. This means that if Parker had told the liquidator about the deal, the liquidator would have legally been entitled to intercept the $5,000 cheque before it ever got to Allied Electrical Ltd, because Allied Electrical could not have claimed it had already spent the money. But the fact that questions were never asked suggests the transaction was never disclosed which, if proven in criminal court, could open Labour cabinet minister David Parker up to a lengthy prison sentence for fraud. If the liquidator knew about the deal but made no inquiries

into it, then he would be breaching the rules governing the performance and duties of liquidators under the Companies Act. Investigate tried approaching David Parker for comment but received none. We also approached the liquidator who handled his affairs, and he hung up on us. The magazine has asked for copies of the liquidation files on both Parker’s companies, but the Companies Office would not release them to us at the time of our request. But the concealed transaction is not the only financial irregularity surrounding Parker’s business collapse. Investigate has obtained a schedule of creditors dated December 1996 which includes margin notes in David Parker’s handwriting. The schedule reveals that by December 1996, Empire Delux Ltd was already as much as eight months behind in its payments, and that some outstanding invoices dated back to early April 1996. The margin notes in Parker’s handwriting list eight invoices from seven creditors as later being paid a total of $20,870.75 “by DWP and SRW”. Investigate understands SRW stands for Sue Wooton, Parker’s wife. One of those seven creditors listed as paid in full, while others missed out on anything, was a company called Security Specialists, which Parker’s notes reveal was paid a total of $3,167.19 across two invoices. Allied Electrical director Mark Stephenson’s affidavit discloses: “I subsequently became aware that some creditors had nevertheless been paid in full for their work, despite the liquidation. My suspicions were confirmed when I discovered through Greg Angel of Security Specialists that they (Security Specialists Ltd) had been paid in full. INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 47

“He made the statement, ‘but I’m in the same Rotary Club as David though’, which I took as a reference to the fact that Angel and some of the other creditors were members of the same Rotary club as David Parker.”

nder companies law governing liquidations, it is unlawful to make preferential payments to creditors in the 24 months leading up to a liquidation. Those requirements are there to give liquidators power to unravel major transactions and claw back money if they determine that payments have been made unfairly. If the payments have been made in the ordinary course of business trading, courts are much more reluctant to unwind transactions because of the effect on creditors who got paid in the ordinary course of business. However, in the case of Empire Delux Ltd, the company had 41 outstanding invoices, all but one at least six months old, involving 33 different creditors who had not been paid, and it had no source of income and no prospect of paying its creditors. It was therefore legally insolvent under s4 of the Companies Act. Investigate believes Parker must have known at the time he chose to pay seven particular creditors in full, that his company was already insolvent and that his payments constituted preferential payments under s292 of the Companies Act. Investigate believes that, as a lawyer and officer of the High Court, Parker would and should have known that a false representation about the ownership of the air conditioning unit, which induced a prominent businessman to pay thousands of dollars to one of Empire Delux’s biggest creditors under the table, was illegal under the Companies Act. But these discoveries are not all. David Parker has admitted on oath that Empire Delux Ltd borrowed $110,000 from the bank specifically to pay for the tenant’s fitout of the building. The bank took a security over Empire Delux and its assets. But in an application to the National Bank by St James Ltd in late 1996, the documents disclose that Empire Delux had on-lent $132,336 to St James Ltd – a company owned 100% by David Parker, with no security. And when St James Ltd went bust, the money owed to Empire Delux Ltd appears to have disappeared from the St James company’s books, because the liquidator’s final report makes no mention of the $132,000 liability, and says the total amount owing to 73 creditors was only $105,194. If Empire Delux Ltd had taken a debenture over its loan to David Parker’s personal company St James Ltd, Empire Delux and its creditors would have received a substantial share of the $31,777 dollars recovered from the sale of the café’s assets – assets purchased ironically using the unsecured loan from Empire Delux Ltd. It was David Parker behind the application to the National Bank for extra finance for the St James Ltd. In that document he told the bank the St James had five shareholders who were all prepared to personally guarantee the extra finance. But his statement to the bank was not true: although shareholders had paid Parker for shares in St James in late 1995, he had never transferred the shares into their names. At the time of the application in late 1996, St James remained 100% owned by Parker alone.

48, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

David Parker was the man controlling both companies. Empire Delux had five shareholders, three of them members of the Parker family and two – Russell Hyslop and Rex Simpson – were independent businessmen. Simpson, who was a director of Empire Delux Ltd, actually wrote to Parker on 3 February 1997 expressing serious concerns about Parker’s obvious conflicts of interest: “Dear David “I understand that the pending deal with the Rialto Cinema Group has fallen through and that the Empire Delux directors have decided to put the St James building on the market for $450,000. “Can you explain why the price is so low, given the valuation at $650,000 as presented to the National Bank? “I am also given to understand that the St James Restaurant and Bar tenant is still not in a position to pay back-rent, yet continues to trade. “Is it likely that the Empire Delux will get the back rent, and has the tenant been notified of its failure to do so in order to have the Empire Delux registered as a creditor? “I am aware that you are in a difficult position being the sole director of the St James Ltd and acting as the Managing Director of the Empire Delux Limited and suggest that an independent person be appointed to conduct the affairs of the Empire Delux in order for there to be no conflict of interest recriminations in the future. “I would appreciate your reply in writing.” Investigate has not so far obtained a copy of Parker’s reply, but we can confirm that the liquidator of St James Ltd reported: “The landlord [Empire Delux] has advised that they will not be claiming in the liquidation for rental arrears.” The unpaid rent is estimated to have totaled somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000, although it is difficult to confirm as no formal lease agreement existed. Accordingly, as a result of all this, when Parker’s St James café went bust, no payments were made to the Empire Delux Ltd because its loan did not appear in the accounts. Nor did tens of thousands of dollars in back rent owed by St James to the Empire Delux. Returning, then, to the original Investigate article and the Companies Office decision to clear David Parker, and serious questions about the integrity of the Companies Office investigation remain. The first signs that something was badly amiss came just a week after Parker’s resignation, as a report published in Investigate’s “The Briefing Room” on April 5 discloses (pay close attention to the dates, and the leaked information to Investigate: “On Monday March 28 the Prime Minister announced that Parker could be returned to Cabinet soon once the Companies Office had found him not guilty of what she was now calling mere ‘allegations’. “In a bombshell development today [April 5], National MP Bill English gained an admission from the Prime Minister in Parliament that her office had been liaising directly with the Ministry of Economic Development (which oversees the Companies Office) about the course of its investigation into Parker’s affairs. “The Prime Minister also admitted her statement on March 28 directly followed discussions between her officials and the Ministry of Economic Development about the case.” But what made the story even more intriguing was that on March 28, the Companies Office had not even approached

Dunedin businessman Russell Hyslop to seek an interview. How could an official investigation send signals that someone would be acquitted, before all the evidence was in? But it was the next paragraph in our April 5 Briefing Room story that contains the most damaging evidence of a whitewash: “Sources in Parliament have told Investigate this afternoon that a Companies Office official informed Labour – possibly as early as March 23 – that they would take the line that because Hyslop had gone bankrupt, his ownership of the shares lapsed in favour of the Official Assignee and was never returned to Hyslop. Our sources said the Companies Office had given the Prime Minister’s Department a copy of a letter signed by the Official Assignee and sent to David Parker back in 1997, soon after Hyslop’s bankruptcy, which would be used to establish that fact. For that reason, according to our sources, the Companies Office might be able to find Parker not guilty because he was not required to seek Hyslop’s approval from that point on.” Sound familiar? That’s the leak out of Parliament on April 5, and apart from dating the OA’s letter two years early (1997 instead of 1999) it exactly matched the outcome of the Companies Office investigation that wasn’t released until April 26. Even more incriminating however was this: the decision of the Companies Office and the Crown solicitor in Auckland was not only common knowledge around Parliament three weeks before it was released and allegedly two weeks before the Crown solicitor wrote his legal opinion, but Russell Hyslop still had not even been interviewed by investigators on the morning we were told what the outcome of the official “investigation” would be. As a matter of record, Investigate was tipped off by our parliamentary sources on the morning of April 5. Russell Hyslop was not interviewed until later that day. And surprise, surprise, the Companies Office lawyers adopted the position right from the outset that we’d been told they would: “Hyslop, who was not aware of the development in Parliament until the magazine told him after we questioned him tonight, has told Investigate both lawyers came at him from the perspective that because he was a bankrupt, his shares had lapsed in favour of the Official Assignee and he had no further rights to them. Hyslop said the two lawyers also had the first shareholders’ resolution, which was signed by the Official Assignee, and they told him this proved he was no longer the owner of the shares.” In Investigate’s opinion, the Companies Office investigation sails dangerously close to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, particularly as the magic letter detailing the Official Assignee’s waiver of an audit was only effective for one year, not six. As an experienced lawyer, David Parker should have known that, the Companies Office lawyers certainly knew it, and the Crown solicitor knew it because he admitted as much. Section 196(2) of the Companies Act forbids shareholders making waivers for future years, and expressly says all waivers must be renewed, in writing, each year, by law. In other words, the Official Assignee acted “ultra vires” or outside his powers and, in fact, outside the law, by purporting to waive the need for future resolutions. So that’s the first big weakness in the Labour Party/Companies Office get-out-of-jail-free card claim: that the letter, in fact, simply didn’t work. It was itself illegal. Secondly, if David Parker genuinely believed Hyslop was INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 49

not a shareholder, why did he continue to file returns for years falsely stating that he was? If the returns were not false because Hyslop didn’t have to be consulted because he was no longer a shareholder, then arguably they were false by continuing to list Hyslop as a shareholder.

he issue of “honest belief” is central to prosecuting crime. To prove a crime to a criminal standard, prosecutors have to show not only that a defendant broke the law, but that he did so with dishonest intent. When David Parker was interviewed by media in the wake of the first Investigate article, he admitted that that he’d felt his conscience twitch when ticking the box declaring there had been a unanimous resolution of shareholders on a given date. This was one of the reasons he resigned – he felt guilty. In Investigate’s view, this action, and his continued listing of Hyslop as a shareholder, are evidence of Parker’s real state of mind. He didn’t even know about the 1999 letter from the OA’s office when first questioned. Parker’s actions appear to reek of criminal intent. Thirdly, there’s the controversy over whether the shares controlled by the Official Assignee were formally transferred back to the Company or not. Although there were preliminary discus-

Crown solicitor Mark Woolford hasn’t actually tackled this point in his analysis. From what we can see, it hasn’t even occurred to him. He hasn’t followed the money – the ownership of the shares – through all the logical steps. Sure, Hyslop was bankrupted and the OA took over. Sure, the OA could have sold them, but didn’t. Sure, the OA could have expressly legally transferred the shares back to either Hyslop or QPML, but didn’t. In the absence of either of those actions, the Insolvency Act appears to suggest the company becomes the lawful owner again, but according to High Court cases in practice it is usually the former bankrupt who picks up the rights. Here’s what Justice Hammond in the High Court judge ruled in Re Hobbs, HC Hamilton, b407/98: “Sometimes an Official Assignee will become legally saddled with property that he or she does not want, it being thought to be worthless. “In practice, commonly a bankrupt or former bankrupt takes over the proprietary rights in property which has been so abandoned by the Official Assignee. It was common ground by all counsel before me that this represents the present law...” This High Court ruling, and others like it, were not referred to by Crown Law, but clearly are material in determining whether Hyslop is in fact the rightful owner of the shares.

“if David Parker genuinely believed Hyslop was not a shareholder, why did he continue to file returns for years falsely stating that he was?” sions, no formal transfer actually took place, and the Companies Office investigation admits as much. If the transfer of shares did not legally take place, and it is agreed they did not, then by virtue of s78 of the Insolvency Act and s89 of the Companies Act it appears the shares did indeed re-vest in Hyslop by virtue of the company continuing to list him as a shareholder after his discharge from bankruptcy. And that means that Parker should have consulted him, so we’re back to square one. Here’s how it works. To us the issues in a legal sense were very, very simple: If Hyslop’s shares had not re-vested in him after his discharge from bankruptcy, then why on earth did the company’s annual return and in fact its own share register falsely record that Hyslop was the lawful owner after the bankruptcy discharge? S89 of the Companies Act specifies that the share register is the final proof of legal title, barring a specific declaration by the High Court to the contrary. The share register says Russell Hyslop is, to this day, a one third shareholder. By disclaiming any interest in the shares himself, the OA effectively handed them back to the company. But instead of following proper legal procedure, dotting the i’s etc, to either cancel them or sell them under s78(5) of the Insolvency Act, the company chose to list Hyslop as the ongoing shareholder. Like it or lump it, that is an act of the company that goes towards establishing legal and beneficial ownership. 50, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

Clearly in the 1993 case, all counsel on both sides agreed that the former bankrupt took up the reins again, and that “this represents the present law”. This in our view is probably reflective of Parker’s own understanding in 2000 when Hyslop was discharged as a bankrupt, and would explain why he made no attempt to excise Hyslop from the share registry. The NZ Court of Appeal has likewise, in Edmunds Judd v Official Assignee, agreed that property abandoned by an OA can re-vest in the former bankrupt who owned it, even without the extra help of having the ex-bankrupt’s name placed on the annual return as the owner for five years. Now either of the two scenarios above work for us: either Hyslop could own the shares by virtue of abandonment, as per the High Court opinion, or he could own the shares because legally they became the company’s property at s78(5) of the Insolvency Act but that the company legally gave them back to Hyslop by continuing to name him in the share registry and in annual returns. No matter how you look at it, Labour’s brightest legal mind remains in a quagmire of his own making. A mere Crown solicitor’s opinion does not, of itself, determine ownership of Hyslop’s shares. From Investigate’s perspective, we think Hyslop still owns them, and we think Parker thought that too, right up until the Companies Office investigation told him otherwise.

DID DAVID PARKER BREAK THESE LAWS? CRIMES ACT 1961 [240.Obtaining by deception or causing loss by deception – (1) Every one is guilty of obtaining by deception or causing loss by deception who, by any deception and without claim of right, – (a) obtains ownership or possession of, or control over, any property, or any privilege, service, pecuniary advantage, benefit, or valuable consideration, directly or indirectly; or … (c) induces or causes any other person to deliver over, execute, make, accept, endorse, destroy, or alter any document or thing capable of being used to derive a pecuniary advantage; or (d) causes loss to any other person. (2) In this section, “deception” means – (a) a false representation, whether oral, documentary, or by conduct, where the person making the representation intends to deceive any other person and – (i) knows that it is false in a material particular; or (ii) is reckless as to whether it is false in a material particular; or (b) an omission to disclose a material particular, with intent to deceive any person, in circumstances where there is a duty to disclose it; or (c) a fraudulent device, trick, or stratagem used with intent to deceive any person.] [241.Punishment of obtaining by deception or causing loss by deception – Every one who is guilty of obtaining by deception or causing loss by deception is liable as follows: (a) if the loss caused or the value of what is obtained or sought to be obtained exceeds $1,000, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 7 years… [242.False statement by promoter, etc – (1)Every one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years who, in respect of any body, whether incorporated or unincorporated and whether formed or intended to be formed, makes or concurs in making or publishes any false statement, whether in any prospectus, account, or otherwise, with intent – (a) to induce any person, whether ascertained or not, to subscribe to any security within the meaning of the Securities Act 1978; or (b) to deceive or cause loss to any person, whether ascertained or not; or (c) to induce any person, whether ascertained or not, to entrust or advance any property to any other person. (2)In this section, “false statement” means any statement in respect of which the person making or publishing the statement – (a) knows the statement is false in a material particular; or (b) is reckless as to the whether the statement is false in a material particular.] [243.Money laundering – (1) For the purposes of this section…, – “conceal”, in relation to property, means to conceal or disguise the property; and includes, without limitation, – … (b)to conceal or disguise the nature, source, location, disposition, or ownership of the property or of any interest in the property

“deal with”, in relation to property, means to deal with the property in any manner and by any means; and includes, without limitation, – (a) to dispose of the property, whether by way of sale, purchase, gift, or otherwise: (b) to transfer possession of the property: “interest”, in relation to property, means – (a) a legal or equitable estate or interest in the property; or “proceeds”, in relation to a serious offence, means any property that is derived or realised, directly or indirectly, by any person from the commission of the offence “property” means real or personal property of any description, whether situated in New Zealand or elsewhere and whether tangible or intangible; and includes an interest in any such real or personal property ”serious offence” means an offence punishable by imprisonment for a term of 5 years or more; and includes any act, wherever committed, that, if committed in New Zealand, would constitute an offence punishable by imprisonment for a term of 5 years or more. (2)…, every one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 7 years who, in respect of any property that is the proceeds of a serious offence, engages in a money laundering transaction, knowing or believing that all or part of the property is the proceeds of a serious offence, or being reckless as to whether or not the property is the proceeds of a serious offence. (4) For the purposes of this section, a person engages in a money laundering transaction if, for the purpose of concealing any property or enabling another person to conceal any property, that person – (a) deals with that property; or (b) assists any other person, whether directly or indirectly, to deal with that property. (5)In any prosecution for an offence against subsection (2)…, – (a) it is not necessary for the prosecution to prove that the accused knew or believed that the property was the proceeds of a particular serious offence or a particular class of serious offence: [260.False accounting – Every one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years who, with intent to obtain by deception any property, privilege, service, pecuniary advantage, benefit, or valuable consideration, or to deceive or cause loss to any other person, – (a) makes or causes to be made, or concurs in the making of, any false entry in any book or account or other document required or used for accounting purposes; or (b) omits or causes to be on-fitted, or concurs in the omission of, any material particular from any such book or account or other document; or (c) makes any transfer of any interest in a stock, debenture, or debt in the name of any person other than the owner of that interest.] Investigate makes no allegation as to the ultimate guilt or innocence of Parker in relation to any of the possible offences listed above, because such a determination can only come from a court of law hearing all the evidence. However, the magazine believes that a prima facie case exists on the face of the documents and evidence available to it.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 51

WORLDBRIEF

THE POWDERKEG Iran, Iraq & the return of the Mahdi “Before the coming of the one who will rise (al-qa’im), peace be on him, the people will be chided for their acts of disobedience by a fire which will appear in the sky and a redness which will cover the sky. It will swallow up Baghdad, it will swallow up Kufa. There blood will be shed and houses destroyed. Death (fana) will occur amid their people and a fear will come over the people of Iraq from which they shall have no rest.” ( from the Chapter of The 12th Imam)

AMIR OVEISSI analyses the rise of a leader with an Armageddon complex in Iran, while LEILA FADEL documents the battle lines being drawn among young students in Iraq

n the 1980s it was Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime vying to fill a power vacuum left by the demise of the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran. Today the roles have reversed, as we witness the Islamic Republic of Iran trying to exert its influence in post-Saddam Iraq and beyond. Tehran’s efforts to subvert progress next door betray an over-arching scheme to dominate the Middle East. And a nuclear weapon is the linchpin. Despite what it claims, Iran is clearly seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Amid sheepish cries of protest from the United Nations, radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently touted the country’s membership to the international nuclear club and declared its ambitions to be irreversible. Iran’s successful April 11 enrichment of uranium using 164 centrifuges is a mere prelude to industrial scale enrichment by the end of 2006, according to deputy nuclear chief Mohammad Saaedi. 52, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

Nuclear technologies that could lead to weapons in the hands of Ahmadinejad and his ilk would undoubtedly render the entire Middle East hostage. Repeated calls by the firebrand leader that Israel be wiped off the map cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Ahmadinejad and a vanguard of influential mullahs are religious literalists convinced Shiite Islam’s 12th Imam will soon return to herald a new era of Shiite Islamic supremacy. They also believe this must be preceded by an apocalyptic conflagration that will reduce enemies to ashes. Unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, there is a case to be made that Iran is not bound by the invisible cuffs of mutually assured destruction. Connect the dots and a nuclear Iran becomes more than just a geopolitical pest. The delay of the world’s attention to Iran is a testament to the clerics’ prescience. Ahmadinejad’s fire-and-brimstone remarks echo those of previous Iranian leaders since the revolution of 1979. Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, the patriarch of the Shiite

revolution, labeled Israel a cancerous tumor; former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani carried the banner, saying that if the Islamic world is also equipped with (nuclear) weapons ... the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill; and even selfstyled reformer, ex-President Mohammad Khatami, deemed Israel a parasite in the heart of the Islamic world.

hile the tone of rhetoric has fluctuated – hot under Khomeini, lukewarm after the setbacks of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and a tactful cool during the Khatami years – work has moved forward underground to put bite behind the bark. The International Atomic Energy Agency discovered in 2003 that Iran had carried out secret nuclear activities for 18 years in breach of its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty. And Iran has threatened to halt all cooperation with the U.N.’s atomic energy agency if the Security Council imposes sanctions, warning that it might hide its nuclear program if any other harsh measures are taken by the West. Meanwhile, intelligence sources in Washington believe hundreds of Iranian intelligence agents have infiltrated Iraq to undermine U.S.-led efforts at democracy building. There are reports that Iran has smuggled sophisticated weaponry to give Shiite militants a boost in case of a full-blown conflict. Military officials further allege that Hassan Kazemi Ghomi, the charge d’affaires of the Iranian embassy in Baghdad, is working in secret with local forces and militias. According to the U.S.backed Iraqi National Intelligence Service, Ghomi is a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force – a special forces outfit much like the Green Berets – with specialized skills and experience in the support of militia activity. As for soft power, mullahs in Tehran have cultivated ties

with powerful Iraqi Shiite leaders such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, ex-Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi (out of favor in Washington after charges that he passed U.S. intelligence to Iran). The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country’s most powerful political party, was formed by Khomeini’s intelligence services. Even more troubling is firebrand leader Moqtada al-Sadr, whose 10,000-strong Mahdi Army has already fought U.S. troops. Sadr has vowed to defend Iran if necessary, and intelligence estimates indicate he commands the support of 1-1.5 million Iraqis. Clearly Iran poses a formidable challenge to U.S. policy in the region: A state sponsor of terrorism, increasingly aggressive, on its way to developing nuclear weapons and tilting the balance of power in the Middle East favorably in its direction. With the brunt of its forces tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan as oil prices hover around $75 a barrel, how should United States respond to such a threat? To the delight of the mullahs, fevered head-scratching is the order of the day among White House and Pentagon officials. But while there is no easy solution to the Persian puzzle, inaction as Iran’s nuclear program advances is tantamount to giving up the game. A comprehensive inside-out approach would at worst stall Tehran’s nuclear drive, and at best, spark internal convulsions to scuttle the regime. First, Security Council sanctions need to be imposed on Iran post-haste. With Russia and China running interference, the United States and allies must look for alternative means of delivering economic penalties. The recent House vote to penalize foreign groups investing more than $20 million in Iran’s energy sector is a first step. A possible arrangement with the EU3 (Britain, France, Germany) to impose a separate set of sanctions, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 53

The Commander of the faithful, peace be on him, said: “Before the one who will arise (al-qa’im), there will be red death and white death; there will be locusts at their usual time and at their unusual time like the colours of blood. As for red death that is (from) the sword,while white death is (from) plague.” ( from the Chapter of The 12th Imam) Shayne Kavanagh/INVESTIGATE

free of Security Council restraints, could have leverage comparable to a Council decree and need not be ruled out. Second, Congress needs to shotgun the approval of the $75 million dollar request by the Bush administration to increase support for opposition groups working in and outside of Iran. The House has already signed off on the initiative, though reports funding has been slashed to $56 million are troubling. Consider that a majority of this money would be used to finance television and radio broadcasts, which beam programs that reinforce the repressed but far from toothless student democratic movement in Iran. And third, the administration needs to continually show – in word and deed – its support for Iranians and their plight for democracy in Iran. This will give a moral boost to opposition groups simmering within Iran. Modern Iranian history has shown that moral support from a U.S. administration can 54, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

go a long way in fostering revolutionary movements. The distancing of Jimmy Carter’s administration from the Shah, and his vocal support of dissident groups that toppled the Pahlavi throne, expedited Iran’s undoing, whose aftershocks are still felt today throughout the Middle East. The lesson learnt from Carter’s administration is that bold, symbolic gestures of solidarity drastically help dissident groups. The last option on the table is military strikes. There’s only one worse scenario, rightfully stated by Sen. John McCain, and that’s a nuclear-armed Iran. Amir Oveissi is a Mideast analyst at the Institute for International Law and Politics at Georgetown University. He is currently working as a contributing author on a book titled Lifecycles of Terrorist Movements, to be published by the IILP. He can be reached at aroveissi@gmail.com

WHEN HATE COLLIDES By Leila Fadel

AGHDAD, Iraq – Twenty two year old Zina Hassan drops her voice to a whisper when she talks about student politics at Baghdad University. “We are surrounded by spies.” Hassan is a Sunni Muslim. Dr. Kadhem al-Muqdadi, a Shiite Muslim, scans the campus before getting into his car. A colleague was killed when a student alerted a waiting assassin with a phone call. Mohammed Jassim, a Sunni, resigned his job as a lecturer at Mustansariyah University in northeast Baghdad. Members of the Mahdi Army, the militia of militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, threatened twice to kill him if he stayed. With Iraq teetering on the brink of civil war, university campuses have joined the rest of the country along the fault line that’s growing between Sunnis and Shiites. All the powers that be in Iraq are trying to find a presence on the campuses,” says Basil al-Khateeb, a spokesman for the Ministry of Higher Education, which oversees a university system that caters to about 737,000 students. “There are clashes between students in many of the universities.” How many students and professors have died in the clashes is unknown. Ministry officials said that at least 100 professors had been murdered. There’s no count of students who’ve fallen victim to the violence. For the past year, the Ministry of Higher Education has warned students and professors to avoid discussing politics unnecessarily, not to squelch free expression but because it’s dangerous. Still, student governments, backed by powerful political parties, intimidate professors and fellow students on many campuses. Since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, which touched off the current wave of killing between the sects, more than 2,300 students have petitioned the ministry for transfers: Sunnis from campuses in Shiite areas, Shiites from campuses in Sunni areas. Typically the ministry receives about 200 such requests in the autumn. “We pay the cost of the political chaos at the university,” says alMuqdadi, the Shiite professor who fears that one day he, too, will be killed by someone alerted to his presence by a student with a cell phone. Historically, Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites have been intertwined. Mixed marriages were common, many neighborhoods housed members of both sects and universities were largely secular institutions in which religion rarely played a major role. But since the fall of the iron-fisted Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraq has been dividing slowly along sectarian lines between a Sunni-backed insurgency and a Shiite-led government. That division has accelerated in the weeks since explosives destroyed the golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, a holy site for Shiites, with both sects fleeing once-mixed neighborhoods. Tales of campus friction come from all over the country. In the northern city of Mosul, students say Sunni Arab Islamists and Kurdish political parties control Mosul University, known as one of the top universities in Iraq. After the Samarra bombing, six students were killed in one day. Last month a fight that began over a Sunni girl who rejected a Shiite student’s advances quickly turned into a confrontation between Shiite and Sunni students, al-Khateeb says. It stopped only after the mayor intervened, according to police. In Basra, followers of maverick cleric al-Sadr and other Shiite parties

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hold sway at the university, with students saying they don’t dare criticize the parties for fear of retribution. Al-Sadr sympathizers also run the student governments at Mustansariyah University and Baghdad University in the capital. At Mustansariyah, near the huge Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, pictures of the late Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada al-Sadr’s father, cover the walls and al-Sadr newsletters are piled on benches and tables across campus. Students stand in line to enter the campus, waiting for guards to search them for weapons and check their ID cards. It’s the only campus in the capital that’s known to celebrate the student-fueled 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Late last month, about 30 students marched outside the Ministry of Higher Education to protest the assassinations of five professors and eight students from Diyala University in Diyala province, northeast of the capital. They demanded transfers to safer universities and investigations into the murders. The following Monday, students at Mosul University, a mostly Sunni campus, crowded the dean’s office after a Shiite student from the south, Hassanein Kadhem, was murdered. He was kidnapped from a bus that was traveling to a graduation party at another campus. The students demanded transfers to other campuses. Professors have lost much of their control to threatening students backed by one political faction or another. Civil engineering students at Baghdad University said they hadn’t had an exam since September because students had threatened their professors. Dr. Mouayid al-Khafaf, a Sunni journalism professor at Baghdad University, went into hiding after five men interrupted his class three months ago. They took him to his office, locked the door behind them, then beat him. It was a warning for criticizing the Mahdi Army, they said. The men, students from another campus, left behind a list with three other professors’ names on it. A month later, a Shiite professor whose name was on the list was beaten and killed on his way home from campus. He died only a hundred metres from the university. Jassim, the Sunni former lecturer at Mustansariyah, where he earned his degree, doesn’t want to share that fate. Jassim, who asked that his full name not be used for his own safety, already had watched his classes shrink. One week a Shiite student was killed. The next week, a Sunni was killed in revenge. Jassim got his first death threat in early March, shortly after the bombing in Samarra. The letter called him a Wahhabi, a follower of a fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam. It gave him 48 hours to get out. He fled to Jordan, but returned after two weeks, hoping the rage had receded. On his first day back, a colleague connected to the Mahdi Army warned Jassim to leave. He hasn’t been back. He’s trying to get a post at another university, and a friend with connections to the Mahdi Army is attempting to get him a letter from the militia to protect him. Without it he may have to flee, he said. He said he knew of colleagues who’d been chased down and killed even after they left the university. “Sadrists can move from Sadr City to the university in five minutes,” he says. “By one phone call students can do anything.” For students who aren’t affiliated with the warring sides, campus life is filled with fear. “How do you expect the campus to be?” whispers Khalid Mohammed, 22, who attends Mosul University. “It’s like a dictatorship wearing a democratic uniform.” KRT special correspondents Zaineb Obeid and Huda Ahmed in Baghdad and Dana Asaad in Mosul contributed to this report. A special correspondent who couldn’t be named for security reasons contributed from Basra.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 57

thinkLIFE money

Why the tortoise beat the hare

Peter Hensley argues debt-reduction is a more sure-fire way of generating income

im was constantly on to George about going to see his financial adviser. George resisted saying that he was perfectly happy with the advice he was receiving as it suited his circumstances. To be fair, George was a trifle younger than Jim and they only really got to catch up at bowls on the weekend. George was still fully employed, with two children yet to finish university. Jim and his long-standing wife of 46 years, Moira, had ceased full time work three years earlier. George endeavoured to put Jim in his place and say that the main section of their investment portfolio had increased in value by over 13% after tax last year. He could see that this information was a bit of a surprise for Jim and was able to successfully change the topic to the upcoming Super 14 final. Now Jim was a little put out about the outstanding return that George had received on his portfolio and he shared his disappointment with Moira when he arrived home from bowls. He had always held his investment adviser in very high regard and was more than a little miffed when he realised that the performance that George had received was close on double what he and Moira had achieved. He pulled out their annual report and spent some time trying to identify where they had missed out. Once Moira worked out what he was spending his time on, she scolded him severely. She could not believe that after all the time they had been with their adviser that Jim had failed once again to fully appreciate the service that he was providing. She knew that their portfolio was not structured to provide double digit returns. They were invested for income with only a little exposure to growth-

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styled assets. George’s investments were obviously structured differently and so when the markets performed, the gains were reflected in the portfolio. Ah hah, Jim said, if our adviser is so smart, why didn’t he increase our exposure to growth assets so that we could take advantage of the market performance? Moira shook her head and said that he tried that for them in the beginning. They had asked for higher risk investments, expecting higher returns, however she reminded her husband that their appetite for risk had suddenly reduced when the markets turned south. He remembered that time and shivered. It was not a happy memory, yet the restructured portfolio they ended up with following the market shake-up had withstood the test. Moira reminded him that the performance of their portfolio since the restructuring had been steady and reliable. They had adequate income being produced which they could elect to spend or compound back into their portfolio. Their adviser had suggested a purchase of gold warrants from the Perth Mint. At the time they were not sure about this. It seemed a bit unusual, however over the past four years their value had doubled and the regular newsletters suggested that this could happen again. Moira reminded Jim that their adviser had spent a huge amount of effort identifying a suitable strategy for their circumstances. George’s age, stage and appetite for investment risk was different to theirs and the adviser he had chosen suited his family. Jim thought that this was good time to change the topic and started putting their six monthly reports away. He knew that she was right, and he marvelled at the way she was able to remember the parables that

their adviser had told to explain how the investment markets worked. Although Jim filed the reports away, he could not stop thinking about the different investment strategies that people adopt. He made a point of discussing it with George that next weekend. Now this was a subject that George was interested in debating. His adviser appeared to be more interested in getting them fully invested and clearly favoured managed funds, as these vehicles shifted the equity selection skill onto the fund manager. History shows that over time the markets do perform and that in order to get access to the gains, one has to be in the markets. Jim could not disagree with those arguments, however he suggested that George could be starting from the wrong set of blocks. Instead of getting involved with the markets straight away Jim proposed that they adopt a wider perspective and consider including some other lifestyle aspects, such as debt. Jim’s adviser has always been very clear on all sorts of debt. In short it should be eliminated. His adviser often repeated the saying: “Those that understand interest, collect it; those that do not, pay it”. Whichever way one looks at it, debt is expensive and should be avoided. Jim recalled his upbringing, of often being short of cash and vividly remembered his parents’ friends holding mortgage-free parties. Nothing like that happens nowadays. His folks taught him the difference between good debt (mortgage) and bad (buy now, pay later) debt and he had been an excellent student. It was no wonder that he strongly aligned himself with his adviser’s denouncement of debt. George on the other hand was comfortable with his bor-

rowings and accordingly struggled with the concept of being debt free. He viewed the bank manager as a friend and ally who was assisting him build a property empire. His managed funds portfolio was part of his diversification strategy. Jim knew that George had invested in a few properties, but he could not comprehend a million dollar mortgage. Crikey, interest payments alone would be close to double Jim and Moira’s annual income. Not long after this Jim was called away to his game and the conversation finished. Jim’s mind ticked away and again he took his thoughts home to his long-suffering and faithful partner Moira. She listened to his latest story and expressed no surprise when Jim told her of George’s investment strategy and the size of his mortgage. Moira understood that George and many like him were attempting to play

catch up with their retirement planning. Their retirement goal was basically to be as well off as her and Jim, debt free with enough assets to produce a passive retirement income of approximately $40,000 including NZ Super. Jim and Moira on the other hand had taken the old fashioned route of spending less than they earned, working hard to become debt free and then saving for their retirement. It was boring but effective. Moira correctly observed that the next generation wanted to shortcut the process and were prepared to accept the risks that were built into the strategy. For some it would work, for many others it would not. Moira and her adviser knew that the old fashioned method had a much higher success rate and they had enough patience between them to wait for Jim to work it out for himself.

“

Jim knew that George had invested in a few properties, but he could not comprehend a million dollar mortgage. Crikey, interest payments alone would be close to double Jim and Moira’s annual income

”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 59

thinkLIFE education

Gender differences in educational achievement – permanent or temporary? Girls might perform well at school, argues Len Restall, but don't right off the boys just yet

ecent results, and an article by Miranda Devine in a copy of Investigate stated that girls gain higher results than boys in school exams. How accurate is this? (not the article, but the fact that there have been similar findings reported over time, which may suggest that girls have greater brainpower than boys). Is this a cognition factor linked to brain performance that remains throughout life or is it a temporary factor influenced by other factors? Certainly results can be accurate, although with the hullabaloo over NCEA results, many will doubt it. But let us assume for the moment that the results are accurate, what are some of the reasons to think that this is general for all ages of girls and boys and for all schools. If this is a developmental difference between girls and boys then in co-educational schools each or either gender could be disadvantaged. In one report given to an educational conference one researcher found that in the early years of schooling girls certainly tended to show better results than for boys of a corresponding age, but at tertiary level the position reversed. This was found to be a consistent trend. Is this due to a developmental physical factor, which it could well be, because girls do mature earlier than boys, or is it a motivational factor related to the different thinking and action styles of both genders? It is possibly too simplistic to say that it is either a developmental factor, or a motivational one. Each of these factors could be interrelated, which make it an important thing to recognise within schools for

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teaching and learning, and when considering the results from examinations. Certainly girls may be more motivated to achieve. In recent years. there have been programmes and emphasis on such as, ‘Girls can do anything’, being the catchword, and with the greater sense of equality gained by females has opened the way for them. This is not contested in this article but to show that intellectual power and ability is invested within us all – male and female. There are many advocates for promoting a better balance among professions, and with the striving for equality in wages and salaries for them. Women are now holding key positions with distinction in NZ: Governor General, Prime Minister, Chief High Court Judge, as well as a number of CEO’s for large business companies. One reason for achievement differences, other than the development one is found within gender inclusiveness factors in which learning is enhanced. These are trends and not factors fixed in stone. Girls tend to prefer

Boys tend to prefer

Co-operation

Competition

Involvement

Detachment

Reflection

Action

Everyday content

Esoteric content

Loosely defined tasks

Tightly defined tasks

People context

Industry context

Perhaps no correct answer

Correct answer

“

After all, how many famous female scientists can one name, as compared with the number of male?

”

Each of these factors can have an effect upon the student’s motivation especially if the contrasting emphasis is made during the learning activity. I had found during my research that a lack of motivation was the major cause given by students for their lack of achievement. This was equally so for boys and girls, and most students didn’t know what was needed to raise their motivation level. Consider if we have more women teachers in boys’ schools, or more men teachers in girls schools: both groups could be affected by the different emphasis placed upon these learning factors. It is not that one set of factors is better than the other, but it is the likely affect that may occur with a mismatch between preferences. In the long run, if a girl’s cognitive development is slightly ahead of the boy’s, what does it matter, as long as the difference can be recognised and that it does not have to remain different for the rest of one’s life. After all, how many famous female scientists can one name, as compared with the number of male? No prize! But the answer may be useful for Trivial Pursuit.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 61

thinkLIFE science

Global hot air

Policy analyst Jack Strayer argues the public are being played for suckers over global warming

ven in the best of times there’s a thin-line between scientific fact and unadulterated baloney and, to be sure, these aren’t the best of times. Nowhere is the yawning gap between science and alarmism better illustrated these days than the rancorous, decade-long debate over the extent of human contribution to global warming – which, pardon the pun, is on the verge of boiling over. The argument has created zigzag fissures in the scientific community and among politicians – usually, but not always – with advocates of an unrestrained free market on one side and those who favor rigid government controls on the other. It’s not quite to the point of becoming another one of those “red state vs. blue state” cross-fires, but it’s getting close. In late March, Time magazine, CBS’s 60 Minutes and ABC News with former Clinton administration spinmeister George Stephanopoulos all weighed

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in with lengthy reports pronouncing the ongoing debate about the cause of global warming all but over. No right-thinking American, they implied, could seriously question the fashionable wisdom that SUVs, jet planes, electric utilities, chemical plants and, yes, even fast-food outlets are belching megatons of carbon dioxide into the air and causing our fragile planet to rapidly overheat. Most egregious of all was Time, which resorted to the scare tactics of a supermarket tabloid – perhaps, to shore up slumping circulation and ad revenues. “Be Worried, Be Very Worried,” its global warming cover all but blared. Was the media’s latest campaign to stampede Americans into accepting higher taxes and rigid restrictions on their personal freedoms part of an orchestrated campaign? Well, Time and ABC – in a special collaboration – released a new poll that found 85 percent of Americans now believe global

warming probably is occurring and 62 percent believe it threatens them personally. This despite recent reports from the National Academy of Sciences and scientists at Harvard’s prestigious Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, among others, pointing out that the rise in the Earth’s temperature has been roughly one degree Fahrenheit over the last 120 years. That’s well in line with the gradual pattern of warming and chilling that has occurred since humans began walking upright. The Time-ABC poll strikes me as a bit peculiar. I don’t recall ever hearing anyone express fears about global warming in the workplace, on vacation, or in my friendly local pub, where every controversial topic pops up and is discussed ad infinitum. Almost all of the buzz about extreme climate change appears to be coming from the mainstream media. And no wonder! For the past decade, members of such groups as the Pew Center on Climate Change, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund have spent money like drunken sailors in an attempt to convince us the sky finally is falling. Unfortunately for them, many of the same people now tub-thumping for global warming legislation were once warning us about the perils of global chilling. In mid1970s, for instance, The New York Times predicted that cooling temperatures “may mark the return of the Ice Age.” Newsweek chimed in with a story declaring meteorologists were almost unanimous in their opinion that a “cooling world” might well cause catastrophic famine. The Christian Science Monitor solemnly noted that glaciers were advancing, growing seasons in England and Scandinavia were getting shorter and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can.” This isn’t sound science folks, it is pure politics – fed like hog-swill to a ravenous media that often is far too lazy to do a modicum of original research on the issue. Certainly scientists should study the impact of climate change and journalists should report about it. What they shouldn’t be doing is trying to panic Americans over a dubious hypothetical. We have enough to worry about already, including Iraq, Avian flu, fanatic terrorists, AIDS and the decline in our nation’s industrial might. Jack Strayer is a writer for the National Center for Policy Analysis, www.ncpa.org

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 63

thinkLIFE technology

‘Black hole’ of convergence

The future has finally arrived, argues Gene Koprowski

or decades, it seems, esteemed technosages have been touting the coming of convergence. Personal computers were said to be poised to merge with home stereo systems – back in the 1980s. Then settop boxes were said to be ready to overtake PCs at home. None of that has ever, even remotely, come close to happening. But, experts are telling United Press International’s Wireless World, the technology dreamers shifted their soft focus, subtly, during this decade to the mobile phone, and, all of a sudden, their predictions of convergence are starting to come true. Mobile phones are being combined with computers to make smart phones. Video and picture applications are being

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brought to these personal digital assistants, like the Sprint PPC-6700, among others. Mobile phones have become a black hole of sorts – in a good way – drawing all manner of technology with their gravitational pull. Two-way walkie talkies, Web browsing, e-mail, e-commerce, instant text messaging, games, music, photos, videos, TV shows, even full-length feature films, a spokesperson for dotPhoto, a wireless technology developer, told Wireless World. Simply put, the wireless phone has become a black hole of convergence, sucking in every new digital technology that comes along, often in ways that the experts didn’t foresee.

Managing this kind of convergence – experts are saying – is going to generate massive amounts of revenues for the industry in the coming years. A new study by Compass Intelligence, an industry research firm based in the Netherlands, indicates that, with all of the new applications and features available for wireless, business customers are starting to ask solution providers for detailed advice. Right now, 35 percent of the 1,600 firms surveyed by Compass said that they ask for ideas as to how to use new voice and data applications from wireless providers. That is going to increase by at least 3 percent in the next three years, the survey said.

That means that solution providers – systems integrators, as well as wireless carriers themselves – are going to have more influence on what is purchased and why. This will lead to greater efforts to educate customers about what technologies can accomplish which tasks – a bureaucratization of the process of selling mobile technologies that are widely seen as having democratizing value. The gravitational pull of mobile-phone technology just keeps getting stronger, experts tell Wireless World. Another new survey, released recently, indicates that global wireless phone shipments grew at a 31 percent rate during the first quarter of 2006, reaching 229 million units sold during that time frame. We expect strong demand to continue throughout the coming months, and we forecast that full-year sales will reach a record 1 billion units by the end of 2006, said Neil Mawston, a London-based analyst with Strategy Analytics, an IT market research firm. This represents a 22 percent growth from 817 million units in 2005.

There are a handful of firms benefiting from the hardware sales now – Motorola, Sony and Korea’s Samsung and LG. Motorola was the star performer in terms of volumes, but the growing need to compete in low-cost markets adds fuel to the theory that it has reached its profit ceiling, said Chris Ambrosio, an analyst with Strategy Analytics. Samsung and LG are also both feeling the profit pressure. This is a strong illustration of the need for design and platform balance, in order to maximize profits as a global competitor. Otherwise, profits rest in niche products aligned to emerging mobile demands. In other words, convergence now pays, somewhat handsomely, for mobile-phone makers, and the consulting companies that work in their wake. That may be a supernova, rather than a black hole, of profitability for the technology industry. Gene Koprowski is a Lilly Endowment Award-winning columnist for United Press International, for whom he covers communications and networking.

“

The gravitational pull of mobile-phone technology just keeps getting stronger, experts tell Wireless World. Another new survey, released recently, indicates that global wireless phone shipments grew at a 31 percent rate during the first quarter of 2006, reaching 229 million units sold during that time frame

”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 65

feelLIFE

sport

New Zealand cricket’s fading glory Cricket bosses may be stumped, but Investigate sports editor Chris Forster reckons the reasons are simple

t’s been 20 long years since the heyday off the great New Zealand fast bowler Richard Hadlee. “King Dick” came thundering in off his long run-up, with a distinctive side shuffle and – with machine-like precision – rifled the eight ounce sphere of red leather towards legends of the game like Viv Richards, Greg Chappell and Ian Botham. I remember, one memorable afternoon as a wide-eyed boy in the packed open terraces of Eden Park, joining the repeated chants of “Hadlee, Hadlee, Hadlee” as he embarked on a one-man search and destroy mission to dislodge the stubborn Australian batsmen. Fourteen years ago the same sporting arena was packed for a New Zealand sporting tragedy as our World Cup dream evaporated in a dramatic semi-final against Pakistan. It was a campaign which captured the public’s imagination and seemed destined to catapult the summer game to new heights. How times have changed. Fast forward to the end of March 2006: A few hundred hardy spectators holding out at Napier’s McLean Park as the third test against the West Indies fizzled to a rain-blighted draw. The Black Caps had already won the test series against decidedly average opposition, but the drawn-out summer had been less than captivating. It seems cricket has lost its time honoured place as New Zealand’s summer game. Sure there’ll always be the diehard fans to swallow every statistical twist and turn of five day gladiatorial contests. Stephen Fleming, Shane Bond, Nathan Astle and Daniel Vettori are household names and cricket chews up hours of live air time on Sky Sport, and helps secure truck loads of subscribers’ cash.

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But where are the fans? Where are the packed terraces shouting “Bondie, Bondie, Bondie” as the Black Caps strike weapon thunders another lightning bolt into the pads of Ricky Ponting? The biggest crowd of the summer was easily the twenty thousand throng who turned up at the Garden of Eden for the new cricket craze of 20/20. New Zealand won the match against the West Indies in farcical and entertaining fashion. The runs flowed, the wickets tumbled, the beer in plastic cups flowed and it was all over in 3-and-a-half whiz bang hours. The contrast of that balmy Thursday night in Auckland with the gloom and inevitable stalemate of the Napier test is alarming. Sure, the cricket purists hate 20/20. It’s just not cricket they protest. But the great unwashed love it. And the great unwashed fill up grandstands. They don’t buy into five days of purist action, with declarations, maidens and, god forbid …draws. Of course the gentleman’s game’s lustre and popularity has also been dimmed by the encroaching threat of Super 14 rugby. SANZAR is lining its pockets with extended TV coverage and an 11 month season and damn the consequences. What was a winter code is now a summer starter. The first Super game kicked off in mid-February, at the same time as the West Indians were unpacking their one day pyjamas to face New Zealand. The NZRU makes no excuses for the aggressive scheduling of their code, even though it works in harness with cricket for so many of our country’s iconic grounds. The Rugby Union’s latest figures would make New Zealand Cricket blush with excitement. They’ve turned over a record $146.7 million, including a profit of $23.7

million and there’s the small matter of winning the rights to the Rugby World Cup in 2011. Cricket’s ruling body has yet to post a result for the 2005/2006 season, but the signs aren’t promising. The big drawcard of the summer was the three-match oneday series against the world champion Australians. It produced two stunning run chases by the Black Caps, including a thenworld record victory at Jade Stadium in Christchurch, on December the 10th. Lou Vincent, Chris Cairns in his swansong season, and Brendon McCullum were despatching the Aussie bowlers to, through and over every boundary. But the stands were only half full. The days of capacity crowds at these trans-Tasman battles seem to be over. Wellington’s Westpac Trust Stadium and the old Lancaster Park were buzzing, but hardly electric as the drama unfolded. A catch-up one day series with Sri Lanka over the New Year attracted a holiday crowd in Queenstown then moderate turnouts in Christchurch, Wellington and Napier. That was followed by a yawning gap of 7 weeks until the West Indies hit our shores for a mix of 20-20, O.D.Is and tests. Hardly the international diet to get the accountants at Cricket HQ salivating. Next summer’s looking even more barren. India’s planned series here has been canned as the financial powerhouse behind the global game focuses on the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies. The pain of New Zealand’s green top pitches a couple of years ago and the prospect of taking an out of touch Sachin Tendulkar to the game’s big event, clearly scared off the Indians. And the sheer financial clout the game

has there means New Zealand Cricket’s in no position to argue. Black Caps selector and former national coach Glenn Turner put it bluntly on Radio Live the other day. “70% of the world cricket’s revenue comes out of India and money talks”. Turner was referring to the game’s ruling body – the International Cricket Council – deciding to change the rules for the 2011 World Cup. Australia and New Zealand had high hopes of persuading the I.C.C to give them another roll of the dice. After all the tournament down under in 1992 was a huge success and it was our turn on the rotational system. But India’s powerbrokers jumped the queue in a joint bid with their sub-continental neighbours Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. New Zealand’s hopes of a financial windfall are on hold until 2015, and that’s a mighty long time. CEO Martin Snedden’s had a torrid time since taking over the top office at NZ Cricket in Hereford Street, Christchurch. Just after Christmas in 2004 he was dealing with a cancelled Sri Lankan tour after the killer tsunami. He also had to

deal with distressed New Zealand cricketers, most notably Stephen Fleming, after the killer terrorist attack outside their Karachi hotel in 2002. He had no choice but to cancel the rest of the tour. Snedden also took evasive action, with severe financial consequences, and cancelled a match in Kenya, over terrorism fears, at the 2003 World Cup. He’s been forced to roll with the punches after the latest setback of having to wait nine long years for their next crack at the World Cup. “Not many of the current players will be around then”, he wryly noted. He remains upbeat about next summer’s diet of one-day internationals against Australia, on both sides of the Tasman. The only other international cricket on our shores will be a visit from lowly Bangladesh. Snedden is also blunt about prospects of hosting a World Cup alone. “If we were to compete with Australia we’d probably lose and our next turn would be in something like 2050”. So what about star power and the future of the game? India’s cricket mad population of 1-billion people help keep

the global game buzzing along financially. But here in New Zealand our biggest drawcard Chris Cairns has pulled stumps on his illustrious all-round career. Stephen Fleming, Nathan Astle and the injury-prone Shane Bond are all in their 30s and may not want to push their bodies beyond next year’s showpiece in the West Indies. May be it’s Bond’s plight which is symptomatic of the waning popularity of cricket. The genial fast bowler is relentlessly upbeat about the string of injuries and illness which have stymied his comeback since a career-threatening back injury. When Bond’s on song and fully fit – he’s a modern day Hadlee. His test and one day averages are right up there with the best in the business. The trouble is Bond’s been fully fit for the likes of Bangladesh and the West Indies, but fate has intervened for series against the big guns Australia and South Africa. May be a fully fit Bond can help stem New Zealand Cricket’s waning popularity and conjure up a fairytale performance at nest year’s World Cup. The future of the game here may well depend on it.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 67

feelLIFE

health

Long-term study supports virus-MS link With Claire Morrow on leave this month, UPI’s Christine Dell’Amore documents a breakthrough on multiple sclerosis

nfection from a common virus may signal later development of multiple sclerosis, according to the longest study so far to bolster a connection. In a prospective study with more than 30 years of followup, researchers found antibodies to two types of Epstein-Barr antigens were twice as high in MS patients. The study’s lengthy span also allowed scientists to determine that the antibodies spiked between 15 to 20 years before the onset of MS symptoms. “This adds more, very useful evidence. The fact that it is a longterm follow-up adds much more credibility to what has been done in the past,” says lead author Gerald N. DeLorenze, a research scientist at Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research in Oakland, California. His research appeared online this month in the Archives of Neurology. DeLorenze and colleagues tested the frozen blood serum of 42 people, who were members of the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health plan. The subjects, who had their blood taken between 1965 and 1974, agreed to its use for research purposes. Their average age at the time of blood collection was 32 years, and the average age of MS onset was 47 years. The link between MS and Epstein-Barr – a herpes virus perhaps most well-known for causing mononucleosis – was first proposed in the early 1980s, but it wasn’t until the early part of this century that a large number of studies have concentrated on investigating the association. A recent metanalysis published in the February issue of the Annals of Neurology, evaluated 14 previous studies and determined the risk of MS increases after infection with Epstein-Barr. In addition, studies in children have turned up the same association between the virus and MS, the study said. Although 47 is older than the aver-

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age age for MS onset, DeLorenze said his results are consistent with previous studies showing Epstein-Barr antibodies rise around the early 20s, and that this increase may precede MS symptoms by 10 years or more. Why the antibodies increase in early adulthood is not completely understood, however. About 95 percent of people in the world become infected with Epstein-Barr during their lives, and some will never experience symptoms. Epstein-Barr also stays dormant in the cells of the body’s immune system for life; DeLorenze found the antibody levels of the study subjects remained constant even after developing MS. Although it’s not certain how the virus might bring on MS, DeLorenze believes the heightened antibody response from the virus could set the stage for a hyperactive immune system. In this situation, immune cells attack normal cells, such as protein cells in the myelin of the brain. Multiple sclerosis slowly degrades the myelin sheath, which protects nerve cells. Approximately 4,000 New Zealanders and 20,000 Australians have MS, according to the MS Society figures. The virus may also have a broad role in predisposing people to other auto-immune diseases, such as lupus, DeLorenze says. Now, the burden is on the scientists to investigate this mechanism, and perhaps speed up treatment for the condition. Currently, treatment of MS focuses on preventing relapses after the patient becomes ill. If scientists can pinpoint the virus’ exact role in MS, a vaccine against the virus could be a potential barrier against developing the disease, DeLorenze said. Even if Epstein-Barr isn’t the simple cause of MS, there may be enough ammunition – both in this study and past research – to warrant making a vaccine to

this virus for people at high-risk for MS, says Dr. Anne H. Cross, director of the John L. Trotter Multiple Sclerosis Center at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. High-risk people include those whose parent has the disease, she adds. If vaccinating high-risk people resulted in a lower rate of MS, that would represent even more evidence for the role of Epstein Barr virus in the initiation of MS. “This isn’t likely to be the end-all for MS, but it’s a piece of the puzzle that’s interesting,” Cross says. She adds an Epstein-Barr vaccine would be useful for preventing other conditions, such as a rare lymphoma that some AIDS patients develop from infection of Epstein-Barr. However, Michael Olek, associate professor of neurology at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, argues an Epstein-Barr virus would not be effective in preventing the incidence of MS. He points out a linear connection between getting Epstein-Barr and developing MS doesn’t exist. “It’s a very good study, but I don’t think it’s necessarily ground-breaking,” says Olek, who did research in Epstein-Barr and MS for seven years, and worked with some of the authors on the current prospective study. He continues to conduct research on MS at UT Southwestern. Since some immune dysregulation occurs with any virus, Olek says he doesn’t suspect people will get excited about the results. DeLorenze points out the debilitating effects of MS, as well as the often spotty success of the treatments, are reason enough to pursue the possibility of the virus’ role in the disease. “It affects a lot of people in our society, and the need for better treatment is really paramount,” he says.

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feelLIFE

alt.health

Eat to live

To omega-3 or not to omega-3? That is the question, writes Craig Butler

hat are you supposed to think, how are you supposed to act, when two reputable groups of scientists publish apparently contradictory research in the same week? In an analysis published online by the British Medical Journal, a study concludes that intake of omega-3 fatty acids from oily fish and fish oil supplements has no effect on cancer, heart disease and mortality. At the same time, the British Journal of Cancer reports that scientists from the Paterson Institute at the Christie Hospital in Manchester, England, have found that eating foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, like oily fish, may help to prevent the spread of the cancerous cells that lead to prostate cancer. Neither are conclusions to be ignored because the body can’t make on its own the omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids that work together to promote good health. It needs to get them from food. Omega-6

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fatty acids are found in vegetable oils, raw nuts and seeds. Omega-3 fatty acids come from oily fish. So should you be making an effort to include salmon, mackerel, herring and other oily fishes in your weekly menus? Is there any point in taking cod liver oil supplements? According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, 543,000 men worldwide are diagnosed each year with prostate cancer, the thirdmost-common cancer in men. Noel Clarke, a co-author of the Paterson Institute study, believes, eating a diet with the right balance of omega-3 and omega6 fats may well help to keep prostate cancer within the prostate gland where it may be monitored safely or more easily treated with surgery or radiotherapy. To stop cancer cells from spreading we need, the researchers advise, twice as much omega-6 fatty acids as omega-3s, and it is important to maintain a balance of the two.

Baked Sardines • 2 fresh filleted sardines per person • ½ loaf of fresh white bread • zest of 1 lemon • 1 small handful flat-leaf parsley • 2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped • 4 tablespoons olive oil • Pre-heat oven to 220C. • Remove the crusts from the loaf and blitz the bread in a blender to make crumbs. • Dump into a mixing bowl. • In the blender, blitz the parsley with the olive oil, lemon zest and garlic then mix well into the breadcrumbs. • Open out the sardines and lay them skin side down in a lightly oiled baking dish. • Grind black pepper generously over them then lightly scatter over the breadcrumb mixture and bake till the crumbs are brown and the fish cooked through, 8-10 minutes.

The University of Wales College of Medicine study, published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, reviewed 48 randomized clinical trials with 36,913 participants and follow-ups between six months and six years. It also examined 41 studies with more than a half million participants and followup of up to 25 years. It found that men with angina taking fish oil were at a greater risk of heart disease than those who didn’t. Omega3 fatty acids reduced the risk of mortality by 13 percent, a figure that wasn’t deemed significant. Nor did the researchers find any noteworthy decreases in risk for cardiovascular events, stroke or cancer. Given the study focused primarily on men at risk of heart disease, the researchers concluded that the rest of us should still be encouraged to carry on with our fish oil supplements or oily fish eating. Wrote Eric Brunner from the Royal Free and University College London Medical School: For the general public some omega-3 fat is good for health. Those of us who like oily fish enough to have faith in its power and who remember those studies that first warned of the dangers of salt and butter, then later concluded margarine and a lack of salt were worse, will probably keep on eating as wisely as we can. And sit back for the next new findings to stir the waters.

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tasteLIFE

TRAVEL

Peru ... beyond the beaten path Adam Jadhav discovers a country searching for its heart

ACHU PICCHU, Peru – Green jungle covered mountainsides all around. Atop the peak of Huayna Picchu, I stood on an island in a sea of air, the valleys dipping thousands of feet below. The roughly hewn rocks – hardly steps – leading here seemed impossibly steep. I collapsed onto a boulder to catch my breath and take in my surroundings. A thousand feet below sat Machu Picchu – tiny from that height. At a glance, the lost Incan city tucked away in the Peruvian Andes seemed still. For a brief moment, I was an explorer, discovering the untouched. Though I had gone to Peru for a journalistic excursion to research and report the economics of the country, I had acquired a side goal: Find the real Peru. I was one of ten aspiring foreign correspondents on a three-week journey led by University of Illinois journalism pro-

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fessor Nancy Benson. The trip also took me through the trendy socialite districts and the urban slums of Lima to a remote jungle village and lastly a gritty mountain industrial town. But from that boulder, as I looked closer, I could see little specks – hundreds of tourists just like me – crisscrossing the open grassy knolls and weaving between the mazelike walls of the ancient city’s remnants. As grand as the view was, I was disappointed. The feeling was gone. I was no longer an explorer or a conqueror. I was just another tourist. Though Peru’s principal attraction is Machu Picchu, other draws include boat trips on the Amazon headwaters in the north and the Colca Canyon, where massive Andean condors fly, in the south. The country has a reputation as a haven of antiquity, dating to pre-Columbian days. It was the center of the Incan Empire.

Outside the major cities, many people still speak Quechua instead of Spanish and dress in traditional clothing – widebrimmed hats or woolly skullcaps and multicolored ponchos, though often for the benefit of tourists. “We have living cultures here,” says Carlos Zamorano, the general manager of PromPeru, the government’s tourism wing. “Wherever you go – to the Andes, to the rain forest, to the jungle – you’re going to find people living as they lived many years ago.” Zamorano estimates that seven percent of the gross domestic product comes from the tourism industry. But the increased emphasis on the tourist dollar also increases the competition for it. More and more people scratch out a meager livelihood by living a museum lifestyle that caters to foreign travelers, explains Helaine Silverman, an anthro-

pologist from the University of Illinois who has studied the country. The city of Cusco, the main jumpingoff point for tourists headed to Machu Picchu, has undergone a “Disneyland effect,” Silverman notes, where people dress in traditional hats, brightly colored skirts and sweaters and old-fashioned shoes; they are shop owners, drivers, porters, guides and more. In Cusco’s center, the law prohibits construction higher than three stories, to preserve the historic feel. Meanwhile, infrastructure and public services such as education suffer. Officials acknowledge the pressure to use but not abuse the industry. “How can you say to a farmer who is a porter on the Inca trail, `OK, you have to wear the shoes you always used to. They are not very suitable for trekking, but please use them because tourists are expecting to see you in those shoes,’” says Diana Tamashiro, an internal tourism manager for PromPeru in Lima. The truck bounced along at 40 mph. To the left, the rushing whitewater of the Urubamba River cut through the valley surrounding Machu Picchu. To the right, a rock face flew by inches from the truck bed’s wooden rails. I stood in the back, with a group of other students from the University of Illinois, and held on with a white-knuckle grip. A foot to the left and we would have plunged into the rushing water. The bumpy road rose and fell, along with my stomach. We had hiked more than five miles along a railroad to catch the truck. At that time of day, it’s the only way to get from Aguas Calientes, the small tourist town at the base of Machu Picchu, to the hinterlands. We were headed for Ciudad Grande – “big city” in Spanish – an ironically named remote village. On our hike, we passed shacks where beans and seeds lay drying in the sun. The tracks, and the truck ride, are the corridor for locals taking their avocados, bananas and other produce to markets in Aguas Calientes and Cusco beyond. In the valley, water spills hundreds of feet out of cracks in the mountain walls, feeding the river. The remote village lacks even a bridge; the only way to the other side is a bucket attached to a precarious zip line. Ciudad Grande is really no more than a grouping of houses scattered on a mountainside.

When the truck pulled to a stop, women carrying goods on their backs took my place for the ride back to the train tracks. There, I immediately saw the spoiler: a small stand with a bucket of sodas: Sprite, Coke and the local favorite soda, Inca Cola, kept barely cool in water for the more courageous tourists who ventured off the beaten path. Once again, I was no explorer. Instead, I was to witness the continual struggle in the backcountry of Peru. The region’s mayor, Oscar Valencia, receives less than ten percent annually of the more than US$10 million in revenues from Machu Picchu. He uses the money to pay for local teachers’ salaries, police, basic infrastructure, some sports programs and projects such as a brand-new water treatment plant for Ciudad Grande, which doesn’t have clean running water. The average resident here lives on a subsistence budget. For example, Valencia said, a farmer will make a gross profit of about three soles – roughly US$1 – for 5kg pounds of potatoes. The needs of these people present a stark picture of Peru. “Some very basic things that we would ask for: more of these types of sanitary conditions for the small communities, so that they would have more potable water, and industrialization for agricultural products,” said Jaime Cata Cora Flores, the contractor for Ciudad Grande’s new treatment plant. Deep in the jungle, I couldn’t help but think Peru’s “living culture” was little more than propaganda. A cool ocean breeze whipped through Larco Mar, a glitzy shopping mall set on the cliffs of Lima overlooking the Pacific. I sat drinking a Cusquena, the country’s most popular beer, at a small cafe. Tourists scoured expensive stores that sold garments made of alpaca, a stout, llamalike animal indigenous to Peru. Tony Roma’s, Hard Rock Cafe and other American chains are here. The movie theater gets U.S. releases on time. Most storeowners and cabdrivers speak a fair amount of English. The upscale sector of Mira Flores, in the country’s capital, is hardly the Peru pictured in travel brochures. “We also at the same time are a very modern country,” says Zamorano, the tourism official. “We have a lot of accom-

“

The city of Cusco, the main jumpingoff point for tourists headed to Machu Picchu, has undergone a “Disneyland effect,” where people dress in traditional hats, brightly colored skirts and sweaters and old-fashioned shoes; they are shop owners, drivers, porters, guides and more

”

modations, eating facilities and transport which make our main cities –PictureArts Lima, for example – very pleasant to visit. You can find American hotel chains, even facilities: Friday’s, Chili’s, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Burger King, whatever.” Across the street from Larco Mar, casinos and hotels rise above palm trees. This district of Lima is the progressive side of Peru, hotel concierges say. It’s a world away from most of the country, and even much of rest of the city. Lima’s outskirts are another kind of jungle, one of concrete and plaster, where infrastructure can be as poor as in the villages. Garbage collects in gutters. Homeless pander the streets; iron bars cover windows. The barrios hardly ever see Westerners. One cabdriver forcefully asked me to stop taking pictures and roll up the window as we drove through Rimac, one of Lima’s slums. He feared a mugger would reach through and grab my camera. But I kept shooting; I had pressed hard to see the run-down neighborhood, where children play soccer on dirty roads. It was here that Gustavo Gutierrez, a famous Catholic priest, got his inspiration for “A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation.”

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Gutierrez’s work has been tied to some Marxist ideas; it emphasizes social justice and even political activism to help the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The Vatican has been critical of his writing, but the ideas were still key in developing the Catholic doctrine of “a preferential option for the poor,” says Monsignor Stuart Swetland, a professor at the University of Illinois. Gutierrez is a professor at the University of Notre Dame, but his parish still stands – a squat plaster building with a Spartan sanctuary and worn wooden pews. In a study on the second floor, pictures on the wall show young children playing outside thatched huts. A banner near the altar proclaims: “Joven, eres la luz, la luz de Cristo.” “Young ones, you are the light, the light of Christ.” In Rimac, once again I was confused. This was neither the traditional Machu Picchu nor the touted glitz of modern Lima. Where was the soul of Peru? Bouncing along in a bus at about 4,500 metres (higher than NZ’s Mt Cook), I was nauseated. The thin air left me tired and lightheaded. My breath fogged a cold window as I

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looked out on a world of desolate beauty. The mountains were bare; snow covered the tallest peaks. At that height, the horizon lay close in all directions, and the orange sky seemed only a hundred metres away, as though we would fall off the edge of the earth. During my last week in Peru, I was headed to La Oroya, an industrial town nestled in the central highlands. Little life exists in the region, except that involved in mining lead, iron, gold, silver, zinc – almost every metal imaginable. It’s a huge sector of the country’s economy, accounting for more than 50 percent of exports. In La Oroya, I toured a metal smelter owned by Doe Run Co., based in Maryland Heights. Operated for years by a stateowned corporation, it was bought by Doe Run in 1997 and since then has received continued publicity for La Oroya’s troubles: toxic levels of lead and heavy metals in the blood of many residents. The company has invested more than $140 million in upgrades, but many of the pollutants still come directly from the smokestack. Today, much of the region is utterly dependent on the smelter. Most of the money in this town comes from salaries of the more than 3,000 Doe Run employees. The company itself has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in community programs and improvements. Trucks rumble on the roads into town, carrying minerals. Crumbling, dingy adobe homes line the hillsides of the valley. On the street corners, men grind sugar cane to make a sweet juice. Giant kernels of popcorn, made from the dozens of varieties of corn grown in Peru, come in plastic bags. At the market, all manner of fruits are available, as well as live guinea pig – called cuy and served as a delicacy. “This is nothing

like the U.S. or another developed country where there’s a strong state presence sort of uniformly across the country,” explains David Lippeatt, deputy economic counsel for the U.S. State Department in Lima. “In a lot of these places, the mine is the only thing going, literally. Nobody else has any money, including the government.” Children in starched uniforms laugh, run and play on hard concrete sports fields. A nearby school held its band classes, a cacophony of youngsters indiscriminately honking horns, outside my hotel window. There are few of the rainbow ponchos and wide-brimmed hats. There are no glamorous casinos or strip malls. “No hay turistas en La Oroya,” says Johnny Fernandez Chancos, 39, a cabdriver. There are no tourists here. After three days I left, following the same road over the mountains. As the bus descended the sparsely populated mountains at night, the stars shone with immense brightness. But soon nature’s array gave way to the dense clouds that linger over urban Lima. Water off the ocean combined with smog leaves the city perpetually overcast. Like the graying clouds, Peru’s identity – the real Peru I had been searching for – remains misty. The country struggles to be a modern, cosmopolitan place, one participating in the developed world, a global force able to address the needs of its citizens. At the same time, there’s an ancient history, celebrated to be sure, but also sometimes exploited. “It’s the paradox of development,” said Diana Tamashiro, the internal tourism manager. The political attitude of the country continually waffles between embracing the future and clinging to the past. Elections held April 9 will have an impact on where the country goes from this middle ground. They’ll force the question I was trying to answer: What is the real Peru?

WHAT TO SEE AND DO Machu Picchu near Cusco; Colca Canyon near Arequipa; Nazca Lines – ancient designs in the earth in the southern plains; river running on the Amazon near Iquitos; the nightlife and glamour of Lima, the country’s cosmopolitan capital.

tasteLIFE

TRAVEL

Photography: P&O Cruises Australia

Voyage on the Aurora

Michael Morrissey fulfils a childhood dream on a P&O liner

hen I was 8, I discovered, via black and white photographs, the impressive immensity and luxury of those great nautical near-twins, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. I had a burning desire to travel on them but, alas, it was a longing too remote and too expensive to be attained. By the time I was adult enough to plan my compulsory OE, liners had been undercut by cheaper air travel, so like many, I abandoned the notion of ships and flew to my first overseas destination. Today, liner cruising has become

a hugely impressive growth industry and many are opting to take that long and leisurely jet lag-free cruise – choosing to be swooned and caressed by the sea rather than be jolted by air waves. One reassuring thing about ships – there is almost zero danger on take off and arrival. We did not even feel the ship pull out from the wharf. Thanks to the generosity of the P&O Cruises, I and my wife Ann were invited to enjoy a voyage from Auckland to Sydney then onto Brisbane – five nights at sea aboard the good ship Aurora. Though our

voyage was relatively short – compared to the numerous mature to elderly English folk aboard who were doing 80-daysaround-the-world trips – it was enough to give us a taste of that long yearned-for experience of deep sea travel. Our trip aboard the huge 76,000-ton Aurora was uniformly pleasurable. With its towering waterfall atrium, crystal canopy over one of her three pools plus three large restaurants and a 700-capacity theatre, familiarisation was like exploring a small compact town. Among its many

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attractions, the Aurora has 12 bars, five lounges, a writing room, card room, Monte Carlo casino, nightclub, disco, library, and a children’s room. We were situated in a surprisingly roomy cabin on C deck – third from the top, 10 passenger decks in total – with all mod cons. The swanky penthouse suites come with butler included! There are seven types of accommodation.. A 14-night cruise from Auckland to Singapore costs $4,111. And even shorter cruises – say Auckland to Sydney are sometimes available at proportionately lower prices – check for specials. When you consider what’s on offer, it’s more than reasonable. For me personally, there can be few delights more to be savoured than having a balcony view over the endless sea and a good book. The library, supervised by a most pleasant Indian lady, had a balanced mixture of the crassly popular (Stephen King, Tom Clancy,) and the respectable literary (John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Bernard Schlink). Only one New Zealand writer noted – Stuart Harrison. For an author, it is a heartening sight to see the main decks thickly populated with deckchaired folk relaxing with a good read with scarcely a cellphone in sight. On initial boarding, with childish adrenalin bubbling in our veins, our first encounter was with a quartet of gracious mid-seventies English ladies enjoying a companionable game of whist – a symbol of how the anxieties of twenty first century life (terrorism, oil depletion, environment damage) can be quietly forgotten aboard a luxury liner. By ethnic and historic inheritance – my father had IRA connections – I should hate the English, but many of my best friends are poms, and I made several more on the cruise. The mature to elderly passengers were reassuringly friendly and also had that marvellous gift of speaking in fully articulated sentences with elegant diction that is characteristic of the English. And it’s nice to have a conversation in which “cool” is not the adjective of first – or any – choice. The ambience aboard is extraordinarily amiable and generally slow-paced – apart from the market-like atmosphere of the ravishing buffet breakfast. The only “duties” aboard are laundry and attending some dinners in formal attire – the continuance of a timehonoured English tradition. Perhaps the most colourful among the passengers we encountered was a lady

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(Lady?) who told us she was the widow of the late Lord Delamere – and why shouldn’t she be? However, when watching Out of Africa that evening, I noticed that a Lord Delamere had a minor role in the fact-based film based on the life of author Isak Dinesen. Coincidence? When I subsequently Googled Delamere, I discovered he was a very prominent gentleman in the history of Kenya and the title dated back several hundred years. Further search revealed the fourth baron of Delamere to be alive and well, aged 75. Well, it was a good story at the time. Then there was 94-year old Margery – surprisingly, the reigning champion of deck quoits. She was content to rest on her laurels chatting to my wife while I had a toss. It was not clearly explained to me that the person who I thought was my team mate was actually my adversary. Even though I scored one bulls’ eye worth three points in my very first game, I was still on the losing side. I also competed in a general knowledge quiz. My years of storing up lists, facts and dates didn’t help much with questions partly angled towards British history, geography and sport. The one Australian question – which had the poms stumped – had an incorrect answer. Since the clientele was, in my estimate 80 per cent English, the entertainment also reflected this ratio. I was happy to sing along with “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit bag and Smile Smile Smile” and (as a concession to the Irish?) “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary” and – from across the Atlantic – a first-rate rendition of Bob Fosse hits. Great Stuff. Many of the passengers were veteran world-cruisers, and as one cheerfully put it – “We’re going skiing – Spending Kids’ Inheritance.” On a serious note, I audited a densely packed and well-structured lecture on the subject of American foreign policy. The largely Indian, Goan and Filipino crew were always friendly and efficient and willing to go that extra mile. When the bananas had all been swiftly scoffed and my wife requested one, a willing steward descended into the bowels of the ship and emerged with a ripe specimen. When I wanted an OJ from the dining venue appropriately named the Orangery (orange-streaked carpets, staff dressed like Just Juice advertisements) after the official time for breakfast juices had ceased, the steward made an exception and fetched me a glass. Impressive service.

We were given a tour of the ship’s largest kitchen – six in all – and I was bowled over by its size, efficiency, and cleanliness. Headed by a tall athletic-looking Irishman, the 104-strong kitchen crew work a minimum of 12 hours a day, sometimes more. In former times, they hit 18 hours a day – “That’s all right – we’re tough – we can take it!” Pleas to visit the ship’s bridge and engine room were responded to with a virtual tour of the bridge and a firm no for the engine room. Post 9/11, these places are understandably strictly out of bounds. Though the ship looked huge to me – as indeed it is – two New Zealanders informed me they had travelled on much bigger ships such as the Voyager of the Seas (137,000 tons). Currently, the world’s largest passenger line is the Queen Mary 2 at 154,000 tons. But a ship weighing 220,000 tons is on the drawing board. Nevertheless, I remained impressed with the Aurora’s length – 3.2 circuits of her promenade deck equals one mile. Every morning, I saw fit oldsters striding out those circuits. Our trip gave us nothing but sea, sea and more sea. No birds, whales, fish or passing ships. Seemingly, we were alone on its vastness, the colour a deep metallic blue. Few passengers seemed devoted to those habit-forming devices called cellphones or the internet and if there is one criticism I would make, it is that making phone calls when in port was a bothersomely complex task and we had several goes at getting the ship’s Visa operation to succeed. I was informed by passengers that emails and the internet were patchy. But would I do it again? Absolutely. In a wave beat. Post-sea voyage, I felt calmer in myself. Cruising is excellent therapy for a troubled spirit – and there is a Bible in every cabin. Please make it at least – 80 (or 103) days next time. Fact Box Currently, P & O cruises is offering discounts of up to 45% on Aurora 2007 103day world cruises. Departs Southampton January 9, 2007, arrives Auckland February 24, 2007. Ports of call include Brisbane, Darwin, Singapore, Nha Trang (Vietnam), Hong Kong, Osaka and Tokyo. Website: www.pocruises.co.nz Phone: 0800-951-200

GETAWAY GET YOUR BUSINESS SEEN! This space could be yours! From $110 a month (12 mth booking) or $150 a month (3 mth booking) Email sales@investigatemagazine.com for details

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 77

tasteLIFE

FOOD

Can’t be beet

It’s not just for borscht and burgers anymore, writes Eli Jameson

hen it comes to beetroot – a redundant construction if there ever was one, since a beet is by definition a root – there are two schools of thought. On the one hand are those who happily slap slices of tinned beetroot on any sandwich, burger, or salad they can. I recently observed a customer at an innercity Sydney delicatessen order a lunchtime sandwich consisting of brown bread, cream cheese, cucumber, salami, and beetroot. Amazingly, this person wasn’t pregnant, but a 45-year-old IT manager who works in my building. And historically, beetroots have been thought of as, by turns, either a laxative or an aphrodisiac. Of course, over many months writing this column, I have discovered that if there is one thread that runs through culinary history, it is that the ancient Romans tied food and sex together with more gusto than Nigella Lawson and Antony Bourdain combined. A loaf of mouldy bread could ignite that old familiar feeling in those guys. At the opposite extreme are those who loathe the stuff and recoil at the thought of the root vegetable’s pink blood oozing onto their dish like a toddler panics when foods touch each other. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss very likely fell into this camp, having written in 1955, “[C]ivilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species

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[…] Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man’s daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.” For a root that stirs such passion, I have to confess being lukewarm on the whole topic. Growing up in America, I always associated beetroots with yogurt-knitting hippies or elderly relatives. It wasn’t until I had an Albanian beetroot, walnut and garlic dip in Sydney some years ago – with the amusingly charming name, pantzarosalata – that I discovered I liked the things. A similar experience happened to an Australian friend who, having grown up in a working-class suburb with a mother whose entire kitchen repertoire consisted of microwave cookery (she even bought those Women’s Weekly cookbooks from the 1970s which purported to show readers how to make an entire Christmas roast dinner in the old “radar range”) always thought beetroots were bland, sliced and tinned. All this changed when he took up with an Italian girl and confirmed foodie, who showed him the proper way to enjoy them. There are multiple schools of thought on the best way to cook beetroot. Some people are confirmed boilers. Me, I think this costs an awful lot in the way of flavour. I like to put them in a hot oven, wrapped in aluminium foil, and let them roast until a skewer sinks in without resistance. (Oh yeah, save those greens: they’re

“

It wasn’t until I had an Albanian beetroot, walnut and garlic dip in Sydney some years ago – with the amusingly charming name, pantzarosalata – that I discovered I liked the things

”

great in a salad, or sautéed like spinach). Once that’s done, the rest is up to you. The great American chef Charlie Palmer builds beetroot gateaux by layering slices with fresh chevre and finishing with a scattering of mizuna and drizzle of sherry-eshallot vinaigrette, which complements the earthy flavours of the vegetable and the cheese. A warm salad of beetroot, orange, feta cheese and greens is a wonderfully easy and healthy lunch. Pasta-makers like myself can stuff ravioli with paste of beetroot, and serve in a sauce utilising the greens. Soups, beyond the classic Ukranian borscht, are another option. And when cooking with beetroot, great lashings of red wine or sherry vinaigre are always encouraged.

Don’t tell them it’s healthy, and they’ll slurp it by the bowlful Roast Beet Soup

Beet Carpaccio (that’s right, beet, not beef!)

You’ll need: About 5 medium beets, tops trimmed 300 grams brushed potatoes 2 1/2 cups milk Chopped red onion Fresh dill 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar 1/2 cup yogurt Fresh dill sprigs

You’ll need: 12 beets, 5cm diameter trimmed 250g crumbled soft fresh goat cheese 2 tablespoons minced shallot 85ml unseasoned rice vinegar 85ml chopped fresh mint 60ml cup walnut oil or olive oil 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar Chopped fresh chives

1. Preheat oven to 200C. Wrap beets and potatoes separately in foil; seal tightly. Roast on oven rack until tender when pierced with skewer, about 45 minutes for potatoes and 1 1/2 hours for beets. Unwrap and cool completely.

1. Preheat oven to 200C. Line rimmed baking sheet with foil. Place beets on sheet, cover tightly with foil, and bake until beets can be pierced by a skewer, as above. Cool and peel beets.

2. Peel beets; cut into pieces and place in blender. Add milk, 2 tablespoons onion, 2 tablespoons chopped dill and vinegar; blend until smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Refrigerate soup until cold, about one hour. 3. Peel potatoes and cut into 1/2-cm dice. Place in medium bowl. Add remaining 2 tablespoons each of onion and chopped dill. Fold in yogurt. Ladle beet soup into 4 bowls. Top with potato salad; garnish with dill sprigs. Serves 4

2. Using cheese slicer or knife, slice beets very thinly. Slightly overlap slices on 6 plates, dividing equally. Sprinkle with cheese, then shallot, salt, and pepper. Whisk vinegar, mint, oil, and sugar in small bowl. Season with salt and pepper, drizzle over beets, and sprinkle with chives.

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seeLIFE PAGES

Into the freying pan

Timaru’s Turgenev, and an ecologist calls for nuclear power stations: Michael Morrissey’s latest picks are fascinating SOMETHING FOR THE BIRDS By Jacqueline Fahey, Auckland University Press, $39.99

rominent painter Jacqueline Fahey has written a passionate family memoir that is stunningly elegant in style. For those who know Jacqui in person this will be no surprise – she and her book are in wonderfully satisfying harmony. Fahey presents a tableau of high culture in the Deep South that is startlingly rich given the small size of Timaru then, as now, no metropolis. In pages that might have graced those of Turgenev recounting provincial life lived to the full, we read of cultured German priests, musical prodigies, hastily bought grand pianos, proud defenders of Irish culture, identity and history, people of wit and culture who also enjoyed a glass of wine, animated conversation and a lively sense of bohemian but stylish dress. This is a New Zealand that is a far cry from the one we have been exposed to ad nauseam – a rugged, bush-covered land inhabited by tough blokes in black singlets swigging down copious beers and placing weekend bets as they clamp their thin lips round a smoking roll-your-own fag. Fahey portrays this culture in a southern province as being imbalanced.

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To get a decent education, the Catholic boys might have to attend a better class of state school though this often would not happen. The unhappy result? Undereducated boys and by comparison, overeducated girls which Fahey says is why several of her aunts did not marry – a lack of suitable partners. Not that this social vacuum held them back from enjoying a well-lived life. Fahey’s spirited memoir reveals a dialectic between the ethnic passion of being Irish and the imposed ideology of Catholicism. Fahey often throws light into dusty corners – she quotes Max Beckman thus: “the worker should appear in tuxedo”. Beckman wanted an “aristocratic bolshevism” which Fahey cleverly rephrases as”a socialism that frees people up to indulge in style” – as resonant a statement of her credo as any. Here is another, just as telling – ‘”how you presented yourself was an act of imagination”. In the latter part of the book, we read of her sometimes difficult relationship with Fraser MacDonald, reformer psychiatrist of high repute but a man troubled by ill health with a drinking problem. The book use a relaxed narrative manner that is deceptively casual. Fahey is, as it were, chatting to us over a glass of wine but the wit, aplomb and con-

fidence that introduces us to Fahey’s rich family life and background is a good deal more sophisticated and complex than its informal patina might suggest. So we meet the Dennehys, O’Connells, O’Driscolls, Geritys, and, of course the Faheys, who proudly claim descent from the Tiatha De Danaan who arrived in Ireland some 4000 years ago. As Fahey puts it, “To the Irish that was oral history; to the English it is legend. For empires, the only history is their own”. Speaking of history, in particular Irish history in which Fahey is richly versed, it was a revelation to me – though to my shame, it should not have been – that Cromwell enslaved numbers of Irish and packed them off to the Caribbean. Fahey has a witty way to summarise social class – “if you went to the gallops you most likely had your own teeth, but if you fancied the trots the chances were you would be wearing false teeth”. Meaning? Gallops fans were better off. At the Teschemakers boarding school that Fahey attended, life could be tough – intake of vitamin C was minimal, as was the heating, resulting in chilblains treated with a peculiar concoction that looked like scrambled eggs but smelt of rotting eggs. Then there was Black Jack, a neo-Victorian purgative used to cure constipation.

While freezing atop Victorian lavatories, the ensconced but ever poetic Fahey found in this indignity a chance to discover the voice of sanity within the “the realm of the owls” to be found under starry skies, and “the pale powerful pull of the moon”. From this tapestry of influences, pressures and privations, there has merged Fahey’s art. With this book, a second burgeoning career as writer has been launched. Owen Marshall has been hailed as the Chekhov of Timaru. With this richly detailed and warm-toned memoir, Fahey looks set to be Timaru’s Turgenev – with a sprinkling of Irish pepper.

MY FRIEND LEONARD By James Frey, John Murray, $ 29.99

e are constantly being bombarded with images of crime and the lives of criminals. So where does My Friend Leonard fit into this dark mosaic of gangster portrayal? First of all, Frey is a criminal himself, so rather than being a fiction writer like Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather et al or the scriptwriters of The Sopranos, this guy has done time. Like the author of notorious The Belly of the Beast, Frey is the genuine article with a real not invented story to tell us. Or is he? His earlier best selling book A Million Little Pieces chosen by Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club – the first chosen by a contemporary author – guaranteed best seller status. In like manner, Leonard is topping the charts. So far so good. Then the controversial website The Smoking Gun dubbed the book A Million Little Lies and alleged Frey was more of a onetime drunk goody two shoes who had spent no more than five hours in jail rather than the three months he claimed. And that he wasn’t the vicious hoodlum with a long string of convictions that he made himself out to be. Initially, Frey threatened to sue but it seemed the TSG had more than blue vapour in its barrel because in February of this year, Frey admitted the truth of the allegation though he defended himself as writing a story about drug addiction and “that I was writing about the person I had created in my mind to help me cope”. So if his factual account was a fib – wasn’t it really fiction? The original fiction version had been turned down by 17 publishers before being re-rendered as “fact”. At this

point, one might ask, will the real James Frey please stand up? Or is he too busy sitting down on talk shows? My Friend Leonard is a sequel to A Million Little Pieces. Though there is much about crime, drug addiction and down at heels desperation in it, the book is more about the odd paternalistic relationship between actual gangster Leonard and the sad sack Frey whom he takes on board as his virtual son. If you like the idea of men with feelings, Leonard reveals Frey drowning in tears and sorrow in just about every chapter. At times I felt like saying either get a grip or get some Prozac.(Sample quote: “Grief, sorrow, sadness, pain pain pain.”) But it’s a tough life being an ex-junkie surrounded by criminal temptation. The book is written in a fast food laconic style that requires email level reading ability. It’s third rate Hemingway minus the old master’s shrewd and compelling subtext or the witty telegraphese of James Elroy. For this reader, Leonard is a lot more interesting than Frey and to that degree naming the book after the unusual gangster is a deft strategy. To counterbalance the theatrical dynamics of Leonard/Frey, there is the flatter-than-flat Snapper, Leonard’s thuggish right hand heavy who oozes never quite realised menace and fails to develop as a character – but then he is meant to be boringly real, isn’t he? With its punchy one word paragraphs, Leonard is an easy read and despite my suspicions as to its fidelity and dislike of its stodgy B-grade style, I read it at a gallop – just as the author intended. Time (or talkshows) may one day reveal if Frey has any further admissions to make. Currently, Frey is apparently planning to write a big novel. If it comes to pass, Frey and his publishers may be spared further embarrassment of not telling the truth. I wonder if Oprah will have him back?

THE PAINTED DRUM By Louise Erdrich, HarperCollins, $26.99

he Painted Drum has a slow measured beginning filled with atmospheric gloom and ravens; the narrative takes a welcome lift when the majestic moose skin-covered drum makes its appearance around page 40 and better still when narrator Faye Travers, a member of the Ojibwe tribe and an estate

administrator, decides to take and return it to its rightful owners. This action sets in motion a number of unfolding stories that involve the making of the drum (not that riveting) by grandfather Shaawano and its special place in the dreary life of Ira, a young Ojibwe mother, a much more interesting story, though I fear it may lend itself to a corny Hollywood treatment. Travers has a mysterious lover who arrives almost like a thief by night – and she has plenty of acute and sardonic self analysis to make on the subject of love. Erdrich’s tenth novel, prominently foregrounds two qualities – a variety of ethnic romanticism with which I feel somewhat ill at ease, and what has been disparagingly referred to as “fine writing” i.e. beautiful descriptions in an elegant style that add little or nothing to the story. By ethnic romanticism (which can also pass muster as ethical compensation), I mean accounts of ethnic people treated almost invariably with tyranny by a conquering nation (often European) but who suddenly find some unexpected power through an artefact or practice within their damaged culture. Obviously, the subtext is that the ill-fated tribe, people or culture, have something worth saving and the powerful object may work in favour of their survival. A worthy aim – but does it have any real force or veracity? Might it not be a well-intentioned re-working of the artefact that carries a curse tale (i.e. stolen jewel eye from a Hindu stone deity) given a more worthy spin? On another level, the romance – often written by a guilty member of the oppressor culture – may be a way of offering New Age compensation or more positively, offering an example that might be emulated by a more enlightened society. In my view, tales of “half breeds” (as they were once sneeringly called) reverting to their original ethnic culture, old medicine men or witches having real magical powers, objects that bless or curse are best rendered in films – a media which revels in showing the necessary special effects that the exercise of such powers usually puts on display. The Painted Drum neatly sidesteps this cornball scenario by having the powers of the tribal painted drum manifesting as an inner sound, presumably only felt by those attuned to its powers i.e. those who belong to the tribe in question. I can’t help wondering if an ethnic tribe was offered their stolen land or a drum might not they gravitate towards the land first, then the

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drum as an extra. That the dominant culture might offer either or both has become a revitalising nexus in our own contemporary political landscape. Some readers might spot parallels with disenfranchised Maori or Polynesian mothers who, like Ira, leave young children alone at home while heading for the pub and then later discover the children have lit a fire and burnt the house down – in this case, a desperate attempt to stay warm. Then there’s the junk food – chocolate milk, flavoured yoghurts, green Jell-o. Sound familiar? The sequences – teasing mock seductive bantering between Ira and the sleepless Morris and the plight of the children – are much more moving than the admittedly sophisticated rendition of cultural rescue via mysterious drum sounds which often have the flavour of a set piece of cultural duty. However, to continue the parallel, if the drum is transformed into (say) a preserved Maori head, its rightful return acquires a more poignant resonance. Following its somewhat ponderous beginning, some of the “fine writing” which at times irritates, turns out to be actually quite fine indeed.

BURIED TREASURE By Victoria Finlay, Sceptre, $36.99

very so often in my readings of the specialist histories, of which I have become passionately fond, if not addicted, I come across something so improbably colourful that I am thrown back on that old canard of the sceptical – they’re making it up! Leading among their number is the redoubtable Mark Kurlansky who has given us Cod, Salt and the Oyster, which surely can only lead to Herrings, Pepper and Mussels. Serve it up Mark, I will be a consumer! Now Ms Finlay, an adventurous English lass, has braved the hostile zones ruled by Colombian emerald barons with private armies and the once ruby-rich cities of war-torn Burma (also forbidden to foreigners unless they pay fat bribes), to bring us this dazzling history of gems. Improbable fact number one: peanut butter can be turned into ...diamonds! If that’s not outlandish enough, so can the thoroughly carbonised remains of human dust. They call them lifegems. After I got “used” to the idea (there is something disturbing about it), it has strange appeal.

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Widows can now wear their husband’s ring, except that the ring is actually the remains of their husbands. While ashes can never have much eye appeal, imagine showing off your nearest and dearest alongside the wedding ring that he once gave you ... Double or nothing! Improbable fact number two: Frederick William of Prussia disliked his father’s amber room so much that he packed up it up – all six tons of it – and sent it off to Peter the Great of Russia to get him on side. It was also a not so subtle reminder that Prussia still controlled the Baltic where the amber ( “Baltic gold”) had come from. The Tzar, for his part, sent back an even more exotic present – fifty-five giant Russians, all over seven feet tall, which he knew Frederick would like to draft in to his Prussian army. Peter the Great was a collector of human oddities, and besides giants had a large collection of dwarfs. Well, these were two items that surprised this reviewer. No doubt readers will find plenty more. Finlay takes nine of the most well known gems – Amber, Jet, Pearl, Opal, Peridot, Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby and Diamond. (Alright, I’ll admit peridot was not known to me. Now I have learnt they can come from outer space.) Reading this wonderful book was a bit like revisiting, in a sophisticated and stylish way, half forgotten fables from childhood reading, fabulous stories of fabulous jewels like the Cullinan diamond, tales of Cleopatra’s emeralds and mysterious curses from rubies plucked from the eyes of Hindu deities. Finlay isn’t afraid to kill off a legend in the name of truth and if she takes scholarly glee in the dispelling of myth, she has another true story just as fantastic to replace it. The dark story of the Hope diamond, for instance, has oft been recounted – it includes “curses, daring thefts, unusual deaths, bitter divorces, alcoholism, public executions and numerous other misfortunes”. Who in their right mind would want to own it? But as Finlay tells us, Pierre Cartier simply concocted this litany of woe in 1909 which curiously whetted the appetite of buyers. Today, the Hope diamond endlessly (and harmlessly) rotates in the Smithsonian. Cleopatra, most alluring of Queens, becomes even more alluring when we discover that her name has been linked in the most dramatic way with pearls, opals and emeralds.

On the more sober side, Finlay considers what happens when science catches up with nature and synthetic gems are made in laboratories. Fake amber has begun to challenge the skill of experts as have the latest synthetic diamonds and emeralds. In her modest English way, Finlay also has a personal jewel story just as colourful as the many she relates. She was given an engagement ring containing three small square glass stones. They had been purloined from a wall within the Hagia Sophia, the famous ex-church and exmosque of Constantinople, by a boy who later became a bishop. These 800-year old stones set her on a journey to find the story behind the stones. Complete with fluorescent footnotes, glittering indices and well-cut appendices, this book is a gem. Do buy it – though you won’t be able to mount it in a ring. Not yet. But remember what happened to peanut butter?

THE REVENGE OF GAIA By James Lovelock, Penguin, $35

nyway you look at it, Lovelock is a heavyweight in the environmental sphere. He has published over 200 papers and been named among the world’s top 100 global public intellectuals. His Gaia hypothesis has been widely circulated and commented on. The Revenge of Gaia – Lovelock’s third book on the subject – is short but it packs it in. And for those unfamiliar with the notion just what is Gaia? Gaia is of course the Greek goddess of the earth with a modernised Lovelockian spin. Wellknown English novelist William Golding suggested the name to carry the notion of Lovelock’s theory. Lovelock now distinguishes between the original Gaia Hypothesis and its more recent cousin, Gaia Theory. The former, formulated back in the early 70s, argues that “life on Earth actively keeps the surface conditions always favourable for whatever is the contemporary assemble of organisms“. At the time, it was contrary to the conventional wisdom that life adapted to planetary conditions and evolved in separate ways. Gaia theory sees the earth as a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks and the ocean and the atmosphere. Lovelock claims it has made ten successful predictions – which alas he does not

list. Being a scientist, Lovelock is at pains to point out that Gaia is a regulatory system rather than a living entity. He turns to Stephenson’s steam engine for a straightforward technological parallel to a system that regulates itself. Nonetheless, whether by poetic licence or trying to get his ideas across in a more urgent way, he sometimes speaks of Gaia as though it was more than just a principle, albeit a vast one. Being a contemporary ecologist, Lovelock is deeply alarmed by the mounting greenhouse gases and our profligate use of fossil fuels. In his pessimistic view, neither wind, sun and tides etc nor hydrogen fusion – now actually achieved in the laboratory – are going to solve our energy problem. Consequently, he puts in a strong plug for nuclear power. He quotes a shockingly low statistic for nuclear plant fatalities and puts the figure of Chernobyl dead at 75 but doesn’t adequately deal with the large numbers of predicted cancer-related deaths variously estimated as 9,300 (United Nations) or 93,000 (Greenpeace). The quantity of nuclear waste, Lovelock contends, is a lot smaller than that from other energy sources and there is a superabundance of low-grade uranium eg in granite. While he doesn’t view nuclear power as a long term solution, he maintains that is needed in the present crisis. I was almost, though very reluctantly, half-persuaded until I talked to environmentalist Denys Trussell, founder of the New Zealand Friends of the Earth. Trussell says that Lovelock’s argument is flawed for a variety of reasons – nuclear power stations cost too much to build and are hideously expensive to run; their production of kilowatt hours is very inefficient because they are down more than half the time. In his view, Lovelock plays down the dangers and inefficiency of nuclear power stations not to mention various cancers that radiation has often proven to have caused. Lovelock counters that breathing oxygen in itself sets in motion a series of chemical reactions that lead to cancer in a significant proportion of human beings and thinks our fear of cancer is wildly exaggerated. On balance, my uneasiness about nuclear energy remains, and I believe or at any rate hope, that we will find a way to more efficiently harness solar power. Lovelock concludes his provocative overview with a plea for a permanent record in the form of a book (yes, you read right) that will serve as a kind of secular scientific bible of the earth’s biological history to be placed in every home as a safeguard measure. He says that information using computers or electricity will not survive catastrophe. Much as I believe in books, I was struck by the parallel to Isaac Asimov’s famous novel Foundation where an Encyclopaedia Galactica is composed to preserve knowledge, when a vast and surprisingly computerless galactic empire collapsed. I find the idea appealing, but wildly romantic. But then any scheme for saving the human race from its present energy dilemma is probably just that.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 83

seeLIFE MUSIC

On the wild side

Chris Philpott finds Lou Reed still relevant, Ben Harper short of a bullet and Massive Attack in command Ben Harper Both Sides of the Gun

Lou Reed Transformer

Massive Attack Collected – The Best Of

s Ben Harper himself says, “there has to come a point in your creative world where you’re the only one that can raise the bar.” The question is whether taking control of production on new album Both Sides of the Gun has helped Harper achieve that. Both Sides of the Gun is a 2-disc affair, with the first disc comprised entirely of the slower ballads we’re used to hearing on some of Harper’s previous work. Unfortunately this is where the album stutters, suffering from repetition as several tracks end up sounding the same. However, Both Sides of the Gun really comes to life on the rockier second disc, right from opening track “Better Way”. Each song is wrapped tightly by Harper’s voice, which sounds as good here as it ever has, while the music itself harks back to Hendrix and Stevie Wonder, particularly on stand-out “Get It How You Like It”. All in all, Both Sides of the Gun is a kind of hit-and-miss record. There is plenty of good music to digest here, but I think the 2-disc gimmick could have been avoided. Still, Both Sides of the Gun is a marked improvement for Harper and worth checking out.

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hen we look back at the history of music, certain records, songs and artists stick out – for example, the frightening, if not downright bizarre, visage of David Bowie, or Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” have become almost synonymous with the 1970s. By the same token, many albums or songs become almost forgotten over time (when was the last time you heard a Journey song? My point exactly). Somewhere between these 2 extremes lies Lou Reed’s epic Transformer, his second solo release from 1972, and re-released in New Zealand this year. Transformer is Reed’s best and most penetrating release, dealing with several topics that were previously taboo in the mainstream media, and spawning a string of successful singles like “Walk on the Wild Side”, “Perfect Day” and “Satellite of Love”. Transformer is listed in many critics ‘Best of All Time’ lists, and this re-release serves to remind us that there is great music from every era in music history that holds up as well today as it did back then. Also included is a fascinating essay on the making of the album, but the centrepiece here remains Reed’s innate talent for writing such unique music. Let’s hope we never forget that.

eaders of the mid-90s trip-hop revolution and arguably one of Britain’s finest exports, Massive Attack have quietly influenced a decade of electronic music and fashioned a career from producing some of the best quality tunes around. Collected, a best-of CD incorporating highlights from their entire back catalogue, contains everything you will need to know about this ground-breaking band. Massive Attack’s style is eclectic, combining electronica with elements and influences from a number of genres to create an extremely unique sound. A peppering of guest vocalists adds another dimension to the music and each song brings something new to the table. Despite this, Massive Attack have remained largely under-rated; however, don’t let that fool you. Clocking in at nearly 80 minutes, Collected is the very definition of value for money, as there isn’t a weak track on here. Songs like “Inertia Creeps”, “Angel” or “Teardrop” sound as good today as they did when they were first released - a testament to the lasting impact Massive Attack have had. New single “Live With Me” is also included here and shows that this group have still got it. Overall, Collected is a brilliant CD and a necessity for anyone interested in good music.

seeLIFE MOVIES

Mission: Impossible III

Cruise controls MI3 goes off

Mission: Impossible III Rated: M Starring: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman Directed by: J.J. Abrams 126 minutes

ne scene in Mission: Impossible III takes place on board a helicopter that is: in pursuit of another aircraft, flying through a windmill farm and dodging missiles while, on board, a bomb is about to explode and one character is attempting to defibrillate another. This is a movie that knows how to multitask. Not quite as good as the stylish first Mission, but an improvement over the blunt, chaotic second one, this Mission doesn’t stint on the big action scenes. In fact, there’s an extended sequence set amid the wacky, colorful skyscrapers of Shanghai that sets the bar for this summer’s explode-a-thons. But it balances those scenes with entertaining character detail, like the playfulness of Michelle Monaghan (the youngest abuse victim in

North Country) as the fiancee of superspy Ethan Hunt and the wit of Philip Seymour Hoffman as a pitiless villain with the unflappable calm of a funeral director. Plot? Well, you know: A weapons dealer (Hoffman) wants to dominate the world, and Hunt (Tom Cruise) wants to stop him. But writer/director J.J. Abrams draws on his experience as creator of TV’s exceptional Lost to colour between the lines. In Mission, he reuses the technique (also a favorite on Alias) in which characters talk about something intriguing that we know nothing about, so Mission begins with a scene that is out of chronology and that puzzles us with its references to an airplane and torture. Some will be annoyed by that scene, but I think it’s an elegant way for us to meet Hoffman a lot earlier than we would otherwise and for the film to disguise that it’s mostly a series of setpieces and lively domestic scenes with Monaghan and Cruise, loosely connected by a doomsday scenario. Abrams knows what Mission fans want, and he gives most of it to us. An amus-

ing scene shows one of Cruise’s masks being constructed, there’s a “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego”-style romp through the world’s capitals and even a reprise of Hunt’s horizontal free-fall from the first Mission (this time, instead of doing it at CIA headquarters, he does it at the Vatican). All that stuff is fun, and the only disappointment is that the size of the cast (including Laurence Fishburne, Ving Rhames and a give-us-more appearance by “Shaun of the Dead” co-creator Simon Pegg) defeats Abrams’ attempt to differentiate the roles of the members of the “Impossible” team. If you know what Jonathan Rhys Meyers is up to, that makes one of you. All of which suggests that when Billy Crudup – oh yeah, he’s in it, too – says, “It’s complicated,” he’s not kidding. But the appeal of Mission: Impossible III, in which a bunch of people roam the world to break into buildings and make the occasional wisecrack? That’s actually pretty simple. Reviewed by Chris Hewitt

86, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

Match point

Match Point Rated: M Starring: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox Directed by: Woody Allen 124 minutes

he trailers for Match Point – screening with dozens of previews, ads and E! trivia at a theater near you – bear no mention of Woody Allen until the little requisite “directed by” line at the end of the spot. While this may be an indication of how low the Woodman’s star has sunk, as he has meted out a string of forgettable comedic flops (Celebrity, Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Anything Else), it is also a sign of how unWoody Allen-ish his latest entry is. A drama, not a comedy. A cast of Brits, not Americans. Shot in London, not New York. And no sign of the corduroyed, bespectacled, whiny hypochondriac quipster. Not even a surrogate Woody, a John Cusack or a Kenneth Branagh flailing around in nervous, neurotic, tics-andshtick mode. Match Point, then, is a very different Woody Allen film than we’ve come to expect, and a vastly better one. Although there are elements of his greats,

Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hannah and Her Sisters (adultery, despair, the worship of the landed gentry, and landed gentile), there are echoes, too, of George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (from the Theodore Dreiser novel) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (from Patricia Highsmith). And the scene that introduces Scarlett Johansson – the cast’s lone American – as a sultry thing sucking on cigarettes, is both a direct nod to Lauren Bacall’s You know how to whistle moment in To Have and Have Not and the most erotic exit-stage-left in moviedom’s last 20 years. Johansson’s Nola Rice is a struggling expat actress, going up for auditions (and mostly blowing them) and sidling up to Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), the dashing upper-crust scion of an investment king. Nola and Tom are an item, all smiles and public displays of affection _ the two bubble like champagne. Enter Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an ex-tennis pro who coaches Hewett, then meets his sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) and their wealthy parents (Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton). Through talent, charm and wiles, Chris insinuates himself into the family. And thereby, into the frequent company of Nola, whom he can’t keep out of his mind. A story of lust, love and the lure of money, Match Point is so thoroughly compelling, and so deftly acted by all parties concerned, that it turns and churns deep

in the gut. Even the plot’s more familiar aspects assume a gravity, and tension, that is unexpected. At the center of all this is Rhys Meyers, whose Chris is bright, ambitious, and maybe more than a little evil. But then, maybe not. As his kindred spirit, Tom Ripley, mused in The Talented Mr. Ripley: “Whatever you do, however terrible, however hurtful, it all makes sense, doesn’t it, in your head? You never meet anybody who thinks they’re a bad person.” Rhys Meyers plays Chris just like that _ with a focus, and feverishness, that’s scarily good. Allen’s screenplay has been kitted out with Britishisms (originally, the story was set in the Hamptons). The banter is volleyed in crisp strokes, like Chris’ moves at the exclusive London club where he teaches tennis. The social circles are rarefied, and so is the air in the apartment overlooking the Thames River where Chris finds himself living. London’s swankier enclaves are explored, and the bistros and boutiques are shot (by the superb Remi Adefarasin) with the same tony glow that Allen has accorded his storybook Manhattan all these years and films. Whether it’s simply the change of locale, or a change in Allen’s psyche, something is up in “Match Point.” With a dark view of humankind, and of the vagaries of chance – bad luck, good luck, dumb luck – the filmmaker has crafted a wicked, winning gem. Reviewed by Steven Rea

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 87

seeLIFE DVDs

The good, the bad & the ugly

But two out of three ain’t bad THE LION, THE WITCH & THE WARDROBE PG, 135 minutes

ne billion two hundred-million dollars later, it’s hard to believe it took Hollywood more than half a century to tackle C.S. Lewis’ beloved The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Sure, there were animated versions and live-action BBC adaptations with actors striding around in itchy animal costumes. But producers seemed spooked by the fantasy, the Christian themes and the Englishness of it all. That, of course, was before the runaway success of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and The Passion of the Christ. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the first and the most popular of the seven-book “Narnia” series, even though its publisher has since shuffled the order of the set to reflect the chronology of the stories. Four siblings (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) go to the country home of an old, eccentric professor to escape the London bombing raids of World War II. Once there, they find a mysterious wooden wardrobe. They hide in it only to find that it leads to a strange world called Narnia, where a white witch makes it always winter and never Christmas. There, as Narnia’s creatures (centaurs, fauns, unicorns, giants, goblins, satyrs and talking beasts) take sides, the children must decide whether to ally themselves with the witch or with Aslan the Lion. The youth of the children skews the movie, like the books, to a younger audience than The Lord of the Rings or even the

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later Harry Potter books. But the themes it tackles are powerful enough to engage all ages: courage, trust, betrayal, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, redemption, love. Before you can draw the kids into the emotional and spiritual truths of a fantasy, you have to make them believe in the place, which director Adamson does by making the most fantastic creatures seem absolutely natural. Another triumph: although this big-budget film is his first live-action movie, he trusted in the appeal of the story (for which he co-wrote the screenplay) instead of trying to draw audiences in with stars. The four child actors, all affecting in their parts, were unknowns. And the fine adult actors are far from the kiddie draws of the Shrek films: Jim Broadbent as the professor, Tilda Swinton as the witch and Liam Neeson as Aslan’s voice. Most remarkably, the film shouldn’t disappoint either those looking for Christian imagery or those seeking something more universal. Reviewed by Nancy Churnin

KING KONG M, 179 minutes

t is a shame Kong wasn’t the box-office blockbuster the pundits had been expecting, although at NZ$870 million in earnings, it was no slouch nonetheless. It is also something of a coup that the top films worldwide over Christmas were NZ-made. Peter Jackson’s epic remake of the 1933 original is majestic. My first brush with King Kong came in the director’s film diaries released on DVD to coincide with the movie’s release back in December. The

sight of T-Rex on a decent size plasma thumping through the undergrowth to a confrontation with Kong was enough to hook me back then, and certainly there’s no disappointment now that the full pina colada is out on DVD complete with 5.1 surround sound. Like Master and Commander, Kong is one of those movies that you actually must have in a DVD collection for the sheer majesty of its production values. If you ask me why I think it failed to fire at the box-office in a Titanic sort of way, I believe it took too long to hit its strides. An hour or so before you see the gorilla in a gorilla movie is about half an hour too long. Hopefully its three hour runtime won’t hobble (should that be ‘hobbit’?) it as much in DVD format, because three hours in the comfort or your living room is a far cry from three hours in a cramped cinema seat. And at the heart of it all is a movie not just about special effects but about the agony and ecstasy of genuine human drama; trust and betrayal through the anthropomorphic eyes of Kong. Who knows, perhaps Peter Jackson’s movie is what pushed Spain’s Socialist Party to push for legislation giving “human rights” to apes! Reviewed by Ian Wishart

KISS KISS BANG BANG R16, 98 minutes

his is Shane Black’s directorial debut, but he’s the screenwriter behind the original Lethal Weapon. Despite that success, his career kind of nosedived after that with flops like The Long Kiss Goodnight and a range of other forgettables. Perhaps it was a desire for revenge, but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is dangerous territory for Black, who succeeds in producing a massive mickey-take of Hollywood in this very dark comedy where a petty criminal ends up in LA, auditioning for the role of a detective in the movies, all the while trying to convince his dream girl that he really is a real cop. Partnered with a gay private eye, the entire recipe spells trouble and carnage. Some critics have speculated Satan himself plays a part in Shane Black’s career, which probably explains some of his darkness. Not for the fainted hearted, but entertaining for those who enjoyed Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill. Reviewed by Ian Wishart

Above or below the water, nothing on Earth comes close to Niueâ&#x20AC;Ś Immerse yourself in some of the clearest, cleanest waters in the world, that teem with whales, dolphins, turtles, rays, corals, snakes, and all manner of marine life. Niue's land-shelf drops off a mere stones' throw from shore, which means much less time spent on the water and lots more time in it. Niue Dive is professionally run by PADI Instructors and cater from novices to experts, offering PADI courses right up to Divemaster level. They also run whale and dolphin encounters for an experience you'll be hard pushed to match, anywhere on Earth. You can even meet the whales without getting wet - during July to October, pods of large migrating whales rest and perform as close as 100 metres from land.

UNFORGETTABLE

NIUE Even on land, Niue's a world apart, full of incredibly welcoming people who speak English and use the $NZ. It's also an extremely safe, politically stable Polynesian land whose cultureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s untrampled by business and undisturbed by fads.

As close as Sydney, Niue's also over four times larger than Rarotonga, and even larger than the entire 15 island Cook's group! So there's more than enough room to trek through virgin rain forest, explore stunning caves or just drift aimlessly over pristine reefs - guided professionally, or on your own. Only Air New Zealand flies to Niue, direct every week from Auckland. To find out more, please visit our website and sign up for our email newsletter, or call the dive experts at Dive Fish Snow Travel, Auckland on freephone (NZ) 0800 200238.

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www.niueisland.com INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 89

touchLIFE

TOYBOX

Ghost in the machine Convergence is coming

A talking mouse

Innovative, stylish and multi-functional – the new VAIO VN-CX1 VoIP mouse from Sony is a true all-rounder. Why use two peripherals when essentially one will do? This simple yet undeniably brilliant concept is the driving force behind the new VAIO VN-CX1 from Sony. No need to choose between navigation and calls – you can have both! The model can transform in an instant from a stylish mouse boasting an innovative and unique design to a practical Internet telephone. This multi-functional device really has its finger on the pulse. Mouse mode: Highly responsive optical mouse featuring 800 dpi resolution – makes navigating files and the Internet a breeze. Internet telephone mode: Use your VAIO VN-CX1 as an Internet telephone. You'll be amazed! Incoming calls are announced by a LED on the mouse and by a ringtone too if you prefer. The device opens at the touch of a button and becomes a handset for your Internet telephone. The ultimate convenience! www.sony.com

NOKIA N93

Nokia recently introduced the Nokia N93, the ultimate mobile device for spontaneous video recording. Offering uncompromised digital camcorder, telephony and rich Internet communication functionalities, the Nokia N93 features a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, DVD-like video capture and 3x optical zoom. You can connect the Nokia N93 directly to your TV for a widescreen movie experience or upload your images and video to online albums or blogs. Moreover, you can create high-quality home movies and burn them to DVD with the included Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 software. Part of the Nokia N series multimedia computer range, the Nokia N93 offers great functionality in one beautifully shaped connected device. Designed to work on WLAN, 3G (WCDMA 2100 MHz), EDGE and GSM (900/1800/1900 MHz) networks, the Nokia N93 provides broadband Internet access for browsing, uploading content, and sending and receiving emails, allowing you to stay connected on the move. You can also set the device on a surface, flip the display horizontally and use the landscape screen to browse the Web, watch TV over 3G networks, or make hands-free video calls. www.nokia.com

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TAPPING INTO THE FUTURE OF PURIFIED WATER

The Zenith Hydrotap; a unique water purifying system that delivers instant filtered water, boiling hot or refreshingly chilled, from a single tap on the bench top. Though unlike a tap, it doesn’t have to be installed on, or at a sink. With its unique font it can be mounted on virtually any bench top where plumbing is available, to meet a range of interior design requirements. And with the under-bench unit hidden out of sight, Zenith Hydrotap’s compact, stylish and ergonomic design will enhance the most contemporary commercial fit out or elegant modern kitchen. When it comes to energy efficiency, Zenith Hydrotap wins hands down. There is a choice of two ‘Sleep Modes’ that can be set to power down the appliance after two or four hours of inactivity. It can also be programmed to cycle on and off at a pre-determined time for each day of the week. Prices start at RRP $3250.00 for boiling and chilled. RRP $1,575.00 for boiling only. For enquiries phone 0800 ZENITH (936 484) or visit www.parex.co.nz

Epson Stylus CX5700F

The Epson Stylus CX5700F has an inbuilt fax with a 33.6K bps modem for immediate transmission, and supports the international colour fax standard for colour-tocolour communication. The Stylus CX5700F uses Epson’s DURABrite(TM) Ultra pigment ink. DURABrite Ultra ensures that prints are water resistant and will last up to 120 years#, while the four individual colour Intellidge(TM) ink cartridges provide consistent results and maximise ink usage. The Stylus CX5700F prints 6x4 inch border free photos in 51 seconds, and can print at up to 20ppm (A4 pages) in monochrome and 19ppm in colour . The 1200 x 2400dpi scanner and easy to use copying facilities mean that the Stylus CX5700F allow users to scan anything from documents to photos with outstanding results. The Epson Stylus CX5700F supports PictBridge, a camera industry standard that facilitates fast and easy to use PC-free digital printing of high quality photographs directly from digital cameras. With five card slots supporting the most popular memory card formats the Stylus CX5700F is conveniently PC-free for printing, copying and scanning. The Epson Stylus CX5700F has an RRP of $299 and it is available for purchase through Epson resellers. www.epson.co.nz.

gigabeat X30 – 30GB

With a massive 2.4” full colour screen you can view digital photos or download album covers adding colour to your music. More than just a music player, the Gigabeat is ideal for storing backup files from the PC, and transferring files between computers. The Gigabeat offers rich stereo sounds that clearly bring out the magic of every instrument. With a selection of 28 equilisers, music-lovers can pre-set bass, mid-range and treble preferences for each individual audio-track – from classical to jazz and hip-hop. Suitable for frequent travellers, the gigabeat has up to 16 hours of battery life and is easy to recharge on the road – via the USB port. www.toshiba.com INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 91

touchLIFE

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Email media@vof.org.nz, complete our survey, and be in to win one of 10 iPods. Voice of Friendship Reaching the out of reach

92, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006

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realLIFE

15 MINUTES

And they called it…

Ian Wishart catches up with Donny Osmond ahead of his upcoming tours downunder and discovers a pop survivor

t was Wellington, 1973. There was only one TV channel, it was black and white and in our home it beamed in on an old (even then) Bell TV set with an iconic late 50’s US design and a rotating dial numbered 1 to 12 that acted as a channel selector, provided you could find a spanner to wrench it with. With only one channel, programmes rated through the roof, all of them. And in kids TV that season, it didn’t get much bigger than Lost in Space and the Osmonds TV cartoon series. If it wasn’t enough watching the cartoon Donny being chased by hordes of scream-

ing cartoon chicks across the screen, you could get a dose of the real Donny later in the evening when the weekly dose of the Osmonds live screened for older audiences. In other words, the first Donster was inescapable and – being a child superstar – held out by parents everywhere to their kids: “See, look what he’s achieved, and he’s just a few years older than you”, mine would say as they read my lackluster school reports. I remind Osmond of this down the phone line to his Utah home, and he bursts out laughing. “Yeah, before they ended up hating me!”

1972

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They may have called it puppy love once, but thirty-something years later there’s a more mature mongrel edge to the former kid crooner, a sense that life has dished out the same things to Donny Osmond as it has to most of us: love, loss, pleasure, pain, success, crashing failure, hard work, making an honest living and rising again from the wreckage. Few people know that, apart from singing, Osmond is a master electrician and completely wired his recording studio and home from the ground up. These are skills you learn when the stardom rollercoaster has ground to a halt and you suddenly find yourself with time on your hands and people to feed, as Osmond did when his Donny & Marie TV show ended in 1979. The years that followed pushed him almost to bankruptcy. “Hand to mouth, basically. It was pretty lean in the early to mid 80s. I was bankrolling everything and I couldn’t get a record deal, couldn’t get a publishing deal, so I was doing demos, and whatever I could do. There was a residual interest out there for Donny and Marie, but that kind of ended in 1985, 1984 because I saw a dead end there. I thought, if I’m going to turn my career around I’ll have to do some drastic things. But I had to do Donny and Marie gigs just to feed the family. I had two mortgages to worry about, trying to sell a home.” The transition from child star – he was on US national TV at the age of six – to teen idol, was a natural one. But Osmond says the gap between teen idol and adult performer is a much wider bridge to cross. “Huge! Huge. To make that cross. How do you change the mindset of a whole generation? There’s a certain generation that

remembers me for Puppy Love. There’s a certain generation that remembers me just for the Donny and Marie show. How do you alter that, how do you alter history? You just can’t do it.” “You actually did it quite well in 89 with Soldier of Love,” I venture, recalling the out-of-nowhere hit that took all of us working in radio by surprise that year. I remember the programme director at Auckland’s 89FM playing the new track and trying to make us guess who was singing it, and a collective “you’re kidding??” when the Osmond name was mentioned. “Yeah,” concedes Osmond, “but see what’s interesting – by the time the Donny and Marie show ended, which was 79, to 89 – that’s a ten year gap. So to a lot of people it was either a surprise to hear that Donny Osmond was recording music like that again, it was a novelty, and it was a whole new generation that discovered me. When Soldier of Love hit it didn’t really feed the bank account that much, but what it did is that it brought up the notoriety to where the demand became a little bit greater. Then Joseph came along and pretty much saved us, and from that point on we were back on track.” He’s talking about Joseph & The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical, and his invitation to star in the Canadian production in the early 1990s. That, in turn, led to him starring in the movie version of the musical released worldwide in 1999, and public acclaim that continues even to this very afternoon that we’re talking. “As a matter of fact, this happened today. I was at the hospital watching over my dad, and as I was pushing him outside the hospital, giving him some sunshine in his wheelchair, this little eight year old girl was being pushed and she’d broken her foot or something, she was coming into the hospital, and she was crying but she saw me, looked up to her mum and said, ‘Mum, there’s Joseph!’ “So to her, Puppy Love – what’s that? Donny and Marie – who’s Marie, you know? I’m a different artist to that generation of people.” And just look how different they can be: “For instance, this just happened to me an hour ago. They’re building a house right behind our house, and construction workers are no-bull kind of people, and this guy came around with the biggest beard – he looks like a Deadhead follower

2005

“

When Soldier of Love hit it didn’t really feed the bank account that much, but what it did is that it brought up the notoriety to where the demand became a little bit greater

basically, or he’d go to a Stones concert – and he came over and he was staring at me. And I was putting up a playset in the back yard for my kids, and I thought – this is freakin’ me out here, you know? And so he said, ‘You Donny?’, and reluctantly I said ‘Yeah, what’s your name?’ “He says, ‘I’m Dennis. Do you need any help?’ “ ‘No, I’m fine,” I said. “ ‘OK, I just wanted to talk to you, because I’ve been following you, I quite like you’.” “But my point is that if you can have staying power, there’s an amount of respect that not just the industry but the public at large can give you.” Having endured the hard knocks, Osmond is more appreciative of success these days.

”

“I guess I’m in a better place now than I’ve ever been, because I’m in control of my career. You analyse the early years, and I was pretty much being dictated to about what to do, when to do it and where to do it. What to sing. Now I can guide the ship myself, and at this point in my life I don’t really have to worry about what next plateau I want to go to, it’s which next plateau would make me happy – just satisfy me as an artist – rather than just a good strategic move to make.” “Were you happy as a child performer?,” I venture. “I didn’t know any other life. I didn’t have anything to compare it to. Certainly some things weren’t very pleasant, like the amount of work that goes into being in show business. You analyse a lot of other

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2006, 95

careers and they’ve kind of gone to the wayside, in my opinion, directly because of the lack of work that they won’t put forth, because it takes a lot of work not only to get a career but to maintain a career.” I wonder aloud if it is a product of fastershifting tastes, a musical here-today, gonetomorrow mindset amongst the public. “Well, there’s several philosophies there,” reflects Osmond. “I’ve certainly had a lot of time to think about why that happens. I call it the iTunes society, everybody just wants little bits and pieces. Music has really become disposable, and along with it so are the bands and the artists. They become yesterday’s dinner, you know, leftovers. And more and more it becomes, instead of flavour of the month, or flavour of the moment, it’s flavour of the nano-moment, nowadays. “Because you can gain stardom quickly if you get a lucky break – what do they call it over there, New Zealand Idol – well if you can get a lucky break there you’ve got your 15 Minutes of fame, but then the work starts after that 15 minutes.” So why is Donny still in the business, still hauling in crowds? “Tenacity,” he suggests, having released his 54th album last year. Nostalgia? I ask, or is it that we’re harking back to the seventies and eighties as part of a subconscious yearning for lost innocence? “Interesting observation,” he reflects after a moment. “I have no idea whether it’s to recapture the innocence, but that’s an interesting way to look at it. I’ve never looked at it that way.” But for Osmond, he’s also been finding success with cover versions of songs like Neil Finn’s Don’t Dream It’s Over. Why that, I wonder? “Ah, because I wanted to come back to New Zealand and have a great aud –” Osmond cracks up laughing down the end of the phone, and I have a vision of his trademark grin and wall to wall teeth. “No, I just liked the song! It was weird, when I did that album “Somewhere in Time”, I thought, this is a recording artist’s dream, to be able to just take hits – cherry pick the ones you really love – and do them the way you want to do them, and that was one of them.” “You also did a good cover of Without You, the Harry Nilsson hit?”. “That is one tough song to sing. You’ll never see me sing that in concert. It took me three days to get the vocal that I kind of settled on. I mean, there’s always places

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Father of five – the youngest is eight and the oldest 26 – Donny Osmond is now a grandfather at 48, and happy to have found resonance in his life and 28year marriage to wife Debbie. “I’m pretty busy [now]. To the point where it’s nice to be able to turn down gigs. But I like to balance my life a little bit more now than I used to. So I turn down more than I accept.” Having said that, he’s also apologetic about having to postpone his NZ concerts until the end of July due to a terminal illness in the family, but says he’s looking forward to making his first trip here since 1981, trusty video iPod in hand to keep him company on the long flight, packed with thousands of songs including current favourites, Coldplay. The Donster epitomizes the drive within him. From a seventies child star when CDs hadn’t even been invented, not only has he outlasted most of his peers but he’s happily embraced the latest technology and bands. If that’s not staying power, I’m not sure what is.

where an artist wants to tweak and make it a little bit better, but my producer said ‘Leave it alone, that’s exactly the way it should be’. But it was three days of spitting blood trying to hit those high notes.” Still, according to the comments of those attending his concerts, the boy can still deliver. Nevertheless, when your fanbase stretches from unlikely ZZ-Top lookalikes to eight year olds, and then “legions of nostalgic forty-something women – all clad in de rigour Osmondmania uniform of silky scarf and over-tight spangly Tshirt” as one British reviewer put it, there are “dynamics” to be balanced. “The difficulty there though is that when you do a concert tour, and mum is all excited about coming to see Donny Osmond, the last thing the teenagers want to do is exactly what mum’s doing. Because that’s for the ‘older generation’. So there’s a dynamic that you kind of have to balance, but every once in a while you look out in the audience and it’s just such a cross-section. But primarily I would say it is the 25 to 55 year old women.”

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