Investigate, June 2007

INVESTIGATE

June 2007:

Corrupted Police Officers • Gun Control • Neo-communists • Radical Islam

Issue 77

Volume 7, Issue 77, June 2007

FEATURES TO SERVE & PROTECT

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There are major new allegations this month about widespread corruption within the New Zealand Police. As IAN WISHART reports, the story is far more explosive than the Louise Nicholas case and reaches far higher, both within the police and politically

GUN-SHY

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THE RISE OF THE NEO-COMS

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MEDIA PRESSURE

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CAMILLE PAGLIA’S WARNING

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In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, it’s been suggested that America should learn from countries like New Zealand. So would you believe it if we told you New Zealand has a higher violent crime rate than the US, and far higher than those American states with liberal gun laws? IAN WISHART runs the numbers in this surprising twist to the debate

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A massive protest letter has been sent to Investigate over the magazine’s decision to expose Islamic radicals in New Zealand. But the letter exposes a few plots of its own, as IAN WISHART discovers, and unmasks the “New Communists” infiltrating Islam

Hard on the heels of the Left’s attempt to silence exposure of radical Islam here, KAROUN DEMIRJIAN has the case of liberal pressure to prevent a similar documentary being aired on America’s PBS network this month

The Chinese had a saying, ‘May you live in interesting times’. So when left-wing atheist feminist icon Camille Paglia starts sounding as though she’s reading Eve’s Bite, it probably pays to listen. ROD DREHER reports

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Cover: Herald/Presspix

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION Volume 7, issue 77, ISSN 1175-1290

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL Our biggest story ever

A

s this issue goes to press, some tragic ironies are playing themselves out in the daily news. A little toddler is shot dead in a gang drive-by in Wanganui, the latest act of lawlessness in Lawsville. The local police chief told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking that regardless of how difficult the task, gangs need to be banned. Prime Minister Helen Clark, speaking to the same Hosking, said it was too difficult, that legislation needed to be workable and enforceable.

Ironic, coming from a Government hellbent on banning smacking despite 87% of the population being against the new law. In that sense, the politicians have fallen over one another to say that regardless of whether the laws can be properly enforced, it is all “In some cases, senior Labour about “sending a message”.

It is easy, apparently, to politicians have been implicated apply laws against ordieither directly or as part of the nary law-abiding kiwis. It cover-up attempts” is easy to send CYFS shock troops into ordinary homes in a make-work scheme for social workers, but far harder apparently to tackle the people who actually do kill and harm children. The little child in Wanganui did not die of a smack, but a shotgun blast from a criminal’s gun.

How difficult is it, though, to dream up some laws tackling a chunk of Labour and Maori Party voters who wear gang patches to bring them to heel? Non-association orders used to be common in the seventies, when it was a crime for convicted persons to be seen together.

The laws were abolished by the Lange Labour government, if I recall, as draconian. Since then, however, gang crime and organised crime have escalated.

As you will see in this issue, New Zealand’s violent crime rate is actually worse than America’s, and far worse than those American states who allow ordinary law-abiding people to carry guns. This, too, is ironic.

But there is another extremely disturbing element to all this: police corruption. In this issue, as you may now have guessed, Investigate is blowing the lid on decades worth of major police corruption in New Zealand, extending from the early 1980s through to today. This is the biggest story our magazine has ever published, and we have far more detail than we have so far released.

Those of you who have now read Eve’s Bite will realise

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

that I'm not fond of spin and propaganda campaigns.

One of the popular propaganda myths in New Zealand is that the police are not corrupt – not on the scale of Queensland or New South Wales, anyway.

I think we repeat the mantra to ourselves as much for our own sakes as for the reputation of the police. To face the horrific reality, that corruption is embedded in our police and justice system, is to open up a nightmare Pandora’s Box – who do we trust? Sadly, as court cases over the past 12 months have shown, sometimes you can’t trust the police and there’s a reason for that.

In this issue we name ranking senior police and former police officers in a web that stretches from unwanted groping at one end of the scale to watching bestiality, to taking part in rapes, drug dealing, extortion, kidnapping, abduction and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. These were not isolated incidents. In some cases, senior Labour politicians have been implicated either directly or as part of the cover-up attempts.

We allege that police have framed people for murder and threatened to harm their loved ones, in order to prevent them from talking about police corruption.

No matter what we think of the average cop, and the hard job that they face on a daily basis, New Zealand cannot move on without a full Royal Commission of Inquiry with wide terms of reference and power to compel attendance, like the Winebox Inquiry.

I urge the communist agitators amongst us (who we also profile in this issue) not to get excited into whipping up anti-police demonstrations. All police are NOT rapists or criminals, and the public will see through any efforts to leap on the bandwagon. But some are, and they are protected by allegedly having enough information to blackmail their colleagues and politicians into staying silent.

Only a Royal Commission can now unravel this, as no other agency in New Zealand has the powers or the independence from political interference to get to the bottom of these allegations.

The allegations in this magazine are the most serious ever to have been levelled against the New Zealand Police. It is time for Howard Broad and his team to face the music.

The people of New Zealand deserve some answers.

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VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES A LETTER FROM THE FRINGES

Negative stereotyping of New Zealand Muslims. That was the real content of the 18-page article “Helen Hoodwinked

by Preachers of Hate” written by Ian Wishart in the March 2007 edition of his Investigate magazine.

Wishart, who describes himself as a “social conservative”, had previously labelled people in the peace movement as “extremists” and thereby tried to discredit the global majority who are opposed to George Bush’s imperial crusade for oil and power.

A similar method was used in Wishart’s article about our Muslim community. His article used the word “extremist” 34 times, “terror”/”terrorist”/”terrorism” 52 times, “suicide attacks/bombings” 13 times, “hate” 7 times, “al Qa’ida” 25 times, “Osama bin Laden” 10 times and “Wahhabism” (supposedly an “extreme” form of Islam) 20 times.

Alongside these negative labels he inserted the names of New Zealand Muslim groups and individuals, like the Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ (33 times), FIANZ president Javed Khan (21 times) and Al Manar (17 times).

Wishart is resorting to the trick of negative transference, where an express or implied association with “bad” people, groups and happenings is used to discredit a viewpoint, in this case Islam.

Here is the most basic fact: Nobody in the New Zealand Muslim community has ever been charged with any act of “terrorism”, let alone convicted.

Yet this most basic fact isn’t what Wishart wants to hear. Instead, his subtext is that all Muslims adhere to the same ideas, and from this absurd generalisation he attempts to link peaceful Muslims to violent extremists.

Let’s use Wishart’s absurd generalisation in another context.

Because of the “ethnic cleansing” conducted by a faction of Serb Christians in the Bosnian conflict a few years ago, we must condemn as “terrorists” all Christians, including Wishart himself. But that, of course, would be crazy.

In the latest report by the NZ Security Intelligence Service, “local jihadis” are no longer considered a visible threat inside New Zealand. (See intelligence expert Paul G. Buchanan’s informative article “A Change of Focus at the SIS” at http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0702/ S00257.htm.)

At the very time that New Zealand’s internal security agency finally comes to the realisation that chasing New

10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

Zealand Muslim “terrorists” is really silly, because they don’t exist, Wishart starts a witch-hunt for this nonexistent “threat”.

You have to ask “Why?” And that brings us back to Wishart’s “social conservative” ideology. His article poses 305 references to “Islam” and “Muslims” against 145 references to “New Zealand”, “Western”, “Christians” and “non-Muslims”.

Wishart’s subtext is clear: Muslims represent a danger to the values and beliefs of “mainstream New Zealand”, to borrow Don Brash’s ill-fated phrase. Therefore, instead of conducting a dialogue with New Zealand Muslims, the government should be ordering the security agencies to put local Muslims under severe state control and scrutiny.

This message of community division, which seems designed to pit non-Muslims against Muslims, and also to divide the ranks of Muslims and make them fearful, would of course suit a “social conservative” agenda.

Wishart’s negative stereotyping is not investigative journalism, but rather a message of suspicion, fear and hate. It’s a message that echoes the Islamophobic racism fuelled by George Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq and the US state’s other armed attacks on peoples who stand in the way of American domination of our planet.

The positive alternative is for people across all New Zealand communities, including our Muslim sisters and brothers, to unite for peace, not war. This is a message of hope. On a global scale, it offers humanity a way out of imperial warfare and social injustice.

SIGNED (personal capacity): Grant Morgan, Robyn Hughes, Bob Harvey, Richard Randerson, Su’a William Sio, Penny Hulse, Dr. John Hinchcliff, Christine Rose, Dr. David Williams, Anthony Dancer, Barry Wilson, Javed Khan, Sue Bradford, David Wong, Paul G. Buchanan, Dr. James Liu, Bill Cooke, Raymond Bradley, Robert White, David Tutty, Matt McCarten, Gul Zaman, Heather Mackay, Roger Fowler, Mere Kepa, Mustafa Farouk, John Minto, Campbell Duignan, Haider Lone, Shaun Davison, Mua Strickson-Pua, Omar Fahmy, Andrew Campbell, Margo Baars, Jim Miller, Nasreen Hannif, Gillian Watkin, Judith McMorland, Israr Sheikh, Bruce Keely, Jill Ovens, Marion Hancock, Amala Wrightson, Mohamed Moses, Giampietro Fren, Joan Brock, Maan Alzaher, Clare O’Connor, Hannah Spierer, Joe

Carolan, Maurice Ward, Abdul Elah Arwani, Stuart Vogel, Syd Keepa, Oliver Woods, Denise Kelsall, Fiona Lovatt-Davis, Anne Moody, Julia Espinoza, Anila Ketan, Leigh Cookson, Mike Williams, Bernie Hornfeck, Clive Aspin, Don Borrie, Len Parker, Rosemary Arnoux, Baker Postelnik, Ismail Waja, Luke Coxon, Gerard Burns, Paul Bruce, Nuredin Hassan, Dr. Lisa Guenther, Kyle Webster, Jibril Mussa, Vaughan Gunson, Cameron Broadhurst, Janfrie Wakim, Daphne Lawless, Dr. Malcolm Brown, Shawn Tan, Tahae Tait, Jo McVeagh, Simon Oosterman, Mohammad Thompson, Pat O’dea, Dean Parker, Dr. Hilary Chung, Jim Hunt, Mike Treen, Ahmad Esau, Donna Gaediner, Malcolm France, Omar Hamed, Jim Holdom, Valerie Jabir, Dion Martin, Mohamed Hassan, Paul Maunder, Nik Janiurek, Tayyaba Khan, Tom Buckley, Meryl Zohrab, Tracey McIntosh, Eva Naylor, Quentin Findlay, Meredydd Barrar, Catherine Bindon, Don Polly, Mohamed & Farhana Nalar, Valerie Morse, Felicity Perry, Anjum Rahman, Graeme Young, Chris Sullivan, Lyn Doherty, Richard Keller, Heather Lyall, Iliyas Daud, Don Archer, Madeneyah Gamildien, Franco Manai, Bill Rosenberg, Grant Brookes, Nibras Kardaman, Sally McAra, Garrick Martin, Victor Billot, Emily Bailey, Omar Khamoun, Glynnis Paraha, Afifa Chida, Warren Brewer, Tim Howard, John Polkinghorne, Hoosein Ismail, Michael Neill, Verpal Singh, Branwen Lorigan, Ataur Rahman, Maria Hayward, Rafiq Sahib, Edwin De Ronde, Muhammad Umar Chand, Jocelyn Brooks, Marzan Amera, Gaille Boyd, Nur Jahangir, Andy Kingston, Sahar Ghumkhor, Maire Leadbeater, Waseem Alzaher, Adly Raslan, Jennifer Carmichael EDITOR RESPONDS:

I’ ll tackle your dishonest list of signatories and who they really are in the “Neo-Coms” feature later in this issue (there was no space to include your sanitised biographies in the letters pages), but I will make one very telling point: If local “peaceful” Muslims have nothing to hide, why has the Al Manar trust website, www.almanarnz. com, suddenly stripped all of the pages featuring its links to terror organisations off its website and replaced all the English language pages with Arabic ones?

A little bit of Taqiyya (lying to infidels, permitted in the Qu’ran) taking place, I suspect. Unfortunately for Al Manar, and others, we saved the pages prior to destruction.

WHAT OTHERS SEE

Your special report and follow-up comments on Islamic extremists visiting New Zealand were very disturbing. After reading them, I couldn’t help thinking why can’t we learn from other countries’ mistakes?

On a visit to Britain last year I was struck by how dominant and radical the Muslim population had become compared with when I was last there in the 1960s. I travelled on the same London Underground lines on which, just over a year previously, British-born Muslims had killed 52 people and injured 700 more in suicide bombings. Any thoughts that this was just the work of a few aberrant fanatics were dismissed when the head of Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terrorism Branch revealed that 70 more such terrorist plots were under investigation.

A Populus opinion poll published at the same time found that 13% of Britain’s Muslims believe that the 7/7 bombers should

be regarded as martyrs. That’s more than 200,000 Muslims in Britain who justify the indiscriminate mass murder of their fellow citizens in the name of Islam.

The views of so-called moderate British Muslim leaders in Britain don’t offer much comfort. According to the Daily Telegraph, a Muslim barrister, Ahmad Thompson, who advises the Prime Minister, has said that Mr Blair is a victim of a sinister conspiracy between the Freemasons and the Jews. He has denied that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, claiming it is a “big lie”.

Sir Izbal Sacranie, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, who previously said that death was “too easy” for Salman Rushdie, wants the Holocaust Memorial Day scrapped because it’s “offensive to Muslims”. Sir Izbal’s views seem to be in accord with other “moderates”.

The radicalisation of British Muslims has not just come about because successive governments allowed more and more extremists to preach their message of hate. For such bigotry to be so widespread there must have already been a receptive audience.

The increasingly discredited doctrine of multi-culturalism is much blamed for the situation for fostering a climate of selfcensorship of any criticism of Islam and for encouraging Shari’a Law creep, as well as devaluing the majority culture. Does any of this sound familiar?

As I was about to return home, 20 or so more British Muslims were arrested in London for allegedly plotting to blow up USbound airliners. The increasing radicalisation of Europe’s burgeoning Muslim population seems intractable. There is a growing realisation that the core ideology of Islam is the problem, that it is incompatible with liberal democracy. By allowing mass immigration from Islamic countries Western Europeans have dragged into their midst a Trojan Horse of epic proportions. Will we learn anything from their experience?

D J Lee, Wellington EDITOR RESPONDS:

No. In fact, Helen Clark’s solution is a compulsory propaganda campaign called the Alliance of Civilisations, which will be unveiled in Auckland and Waitangi later this month. It is expected to involve a declaration that New Zealand is no longer to be regarded as a Christian nation. It is also expected to require greater tolerance by New Zealanders of Islamic values and Islamic immigration here.

More details are in our feature later in this issue.

MINISTRY OF CENSORSHIP

I have just finished reading your book Eve’s Bite and I am pleased with the way you have put things down in black and white. I follow avidly what is happening in our society and the rapid decline of what was. I work for a Government agency that has blocked access to your website because of the content (clue: the MP has been investigated by your magazine) – I feel that there is no expression of freedom or even a chance to air a differing opinion and I am quite scared at the rate of personal liberties and personal freedom being eroded in this country.

I see it in my job as the organisation leading Social Engineering (clue!) and the ever changing reforms that are being implemented.

It is very interesting to read Helen Clark’s statements and motivations (attached), which indicate that the Labour Party is well involved to introduce the Alliance Of Civilisations into

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 11

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Asia Pacific, and yet there appears to have been no discussion of such in Parliament that I am aware of, and the people of New Zealand have not been well informed about such developments by the national media (why is there such lack of transparency?).

This from one briefing: “Helen Clark, with co-sponsorship by the government of Norway, will host a high level symposium in Auckland on 24 May 2007 to discuss the report of the Alliance of Civilisations High Level Group.

“Prime Minister Clark wishes to ensure that the report receives full consideration including in the Asia-Pacific region. The symposium, which will be by invitation only, will bring together a small group of leaders, community representatives and experts to discuss the implications of the report for the region.”

Basically the Alliance of Civilisations is a UN strategy whereby the secularism of the West can accommodate Islam peacefully – the focus appears to be on reconciliation of secularism with Islam with isolation of evangelicalism. Helen Clark has recently stated that NZ is no longer a Christian country – meaning that Evangelical Christianity no longer has a place in NZ. It will be interesting to see who attends (“by invitation only”) the coming meetings in NZ on the AoC, which Helen states she is going to personally facilitate, and who is not going to be invited – this may tell a story in itself.

Name & address supplied

that have been ignored and superceded by Dewey’s and Beeby’s manifesto have produced a society afraid to face up to the responsibilities of under-achievement? This society has been too delicately conditioned to be shamed by any sense of failure -- a stimulation to try again, try harder.

The Socratic principle of shame being the chief device where the teacher’s correction is met by the hot blush was the signal that the student was educable. Such a student had dignity in his very shame.

Today, this would be interpreted as psychologically damaging.

The international dissemination of Dewey’s pragmatic theory of learning prescribed a series of steps to guide students to identify problems, selecting various hypothetical possibilities, testing each one until a solution was found to work. And this process, theoretically, had to be done against any pre-existing moral prejudices. This process, according to Dewey, would teach children how to construct their own knowledge. And that knowledge can have some rather disturbing content.

The approach now built into the fabric of a modern educational programme promoted by the liberal Left has created, or at least has contributed, to the present dilemma in our education system which Brooke has criticized. The Dewey/Beeby cabal and their more modern colleagues believe their methods will ‘liberate’ students from what they consider to be the stultifying moral straight-jacket of our Judeo-Christian Western heritage. But it appears to be a ‘liberation’ into a New Age of unstructured licence to “do it my way”.

Malcolm Ford, Whangarei

EVE’S BITE

THE SMACKING DEBATE

Congratulations on your latest book and saying what has been needed to be said for a very long time. I wish I had enough cash to provide each politician with a copy as well as all the teachers here in Wanganui – this is a must-read book! I will spread my copy around to as many as possible. Thanks for the inspiration for me to carry on writing to my local papers & politicians and pointing out the same issues. I look forward to a sequel from you on PCspeak and actions by Helen Clark’s government, Labour bending over backwards to spend increasing funding on beneficiaries and others who are not contributing to our taxes, an ever-increasing cost associated with an expanding state service sector.

Calvyn Jonker, Wanganui

AMY’S RIGHT

Amy Brooke’s perceptive analysis of the modern New Zealand educational system is right on target. I refer particularly to ‘Teachaz Petz’ and also her other previous articles relating to the lowering of standards in reading and writing and the dismal example certain acclaimed authors have set. And of course her criticism of NCEA just reflects the reality of the situation in some of the schools unimpressed by the soft option approach.

She attributes the decline in educational values to the influence of Dr Clarence Beeby. But perhaps she could go further back in time and well offshore to America, to the ‘Daddy’ of that country’s educational reforms, John Dewey. In his The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus, he dissociates his educational ideals from historic, cultural and moral influences – “charity, kindness, honesty, patriotism, modesty, toleration, bravery etc” because they are meaningless unless understood in the social context of the time.

Is it any surprise then, that the proven basic teaching skills

The row over the Bradford/Labour “anti-smacking” bill is more about the limits of state power than the welfare of children. Those of a socialist bent appear to believe that there should be no limits, (it’s called totalitarianism), while others know better.

The few barbarians who really do bash children – even if they don’t know that inflicting grievous bodily harm has always been a crime – would consider involvement in the issue to be a waste of their precious time. They would reason that as they largely ignore society’s laws anyway, the final fate of the anti-smacking bill is a matter of indifference.

This admirable logic is of course, lost on the socialists who, on any pretext are always happy to surrender control of their lives, (and of everyone else’s) to other socialists.

Thus, as always, the battle is left to those spellbound by socialism on the one hand, and the free spirits who believe in ethical individualism and personal responsibility on the other.

The latter, despite usually acknowledging higher laws of morality which the secular Left rules out of the question, have nevertheless been manoeuvered into the position of having to defend their inalienable right to moral and spiritual autonomy.

Only a socialist could believe that the so-called anti-smacking bill is anything but another step on the path to complete state control of children.

Those who doubt this should read what the founder of socialism, Karl Marx, has to say on the subject in his “Communist Manifesto”.

Colin Rawle, Dunedin

A PLEDGE TO REPEAL

The Direct Democracy Party is disappointed that the National Party have decided to now support the anti smacking Bill being

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 13

promoted by Green MP Sue Bradford, despite overwhelming public opposition to the Bill.

There have been multiple polls, both public and privately monitored, that have recorded anywhere between 70% – 90% public opposition to Sue Bradford’s Bill – if a Binding Referendum (a cornerstone of Direct Democracy Party policy) were held on this issue, this legislation would have been consigned to the political scrapheap long ago.

It is clear that Police discretion not to prosecute will still allow police discretion to prosecute, thereby criminalising parents by default – however, the Police are not our greatest concern, but rather Child, Youth, and Family (CYF).

CYF will most certainly not “exercise discretion” as the Bill encourages the police to do. CYF will not be concerned with any “public interest” whatsoever. If this legislation passes in its current form, CYF will be able to say that smacking is illegal, and then arbitrarily intervene into the lives of innocent, decent, lawabiding families, families who now have everything to fear from this legislation becoming law in its current form.

The Bradford anti-smacking Bill, now supported by the National Party, is a body blow to Democracy and for New Zealand families.”

The Direct Democracy Party gives an unequivocal commitment to the people of New Zealand that, if elected to Parliament in 2008, we will repeal the anti-smacking Bill in its entirety – the

people of New Zealand who so overwhelmingly oppose this legislation deserve no less.

Kelvyn Alp , Party Leader, Direct Democracy Party – DDP www.ddp.co.nz

GET READY FOR CYFS

It is delightful putting our eight year old twin boys to bed at night and enjoying hugs and kisses and being told I am the best mum in the world. Yet Bradford’s bill puts us and other parents at risk of some malicious or agenda-driven person lodging a smacking complaint with the police and CYFS taking our darlings. A stranger putting my boys to bed each night would be unthinkable, unbearable – but soon possible. Where is CYFS legal directive to use discretion?

This legislation should never be passed while there is little public trust in the power, accountability and reasonableness of CYFS who will play a major role in administering the bill. I have recently heard of two separate cases where parents fought, tooth and nail, through the courts for eight months to get their children returned by CYFS. The children are back but eight months are lost. With the bar for legally justified physical discipline being lowered right to the ground will other parents be able to get their precious kids back? Will NZers stand by in apathy when a darling child is removed from a good family because of the Bill? Hope not.

J.M. Kaukapakapa

THE REVIEW WAS A CROC

WHY

do Atheists persist in proving there is a God?

WHY

do all Evolutionists deny evolution?

WHY

do Rationalists disagree with their own theories?

Did you know that even you support the idea of a God? And you would not be seen dead living as though he did not exist?

This website proves that God exists. It exposes the most giant cover-up ever foisted on mankind and explains why, even after a century’s brainwashing, the majority still believe in a God. VISIT: www.lifewhy.org

14, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

Perhaps someone has already told you that it’s not the freshwater crocs that are dangerous and feared, it’s the saltwater crocs (salties). Anyone who has spent any time in the Northern Territory knows the difference! I’m pretty sure the author didn’t get it wrong, maybe the reviewer...

Ruve Wallace, via email

POLYGAMISTS

I certainly believe that people should be allowed to choose their own course in life as long as it does not have a negative impact on others. However, I pity these women. I really doubt that they have not been brain washed from an early age to believe that it is to their advantage to be a member of a plural marriage. Who told these women that 25% of a 100% man was enough?

Only a woman with low self esteem would believe that she did not deserve 100% of a 100% man. Another thing, why do they need three or four wives to have 14 children. The Catholics have been quite successful in having that number of children in a monogamous marriage for generations. My husband and I have seven children. We are Christian but not Catholic. I question their motives. God created Adam and Eve to live in the Garden – not Adam, Eve, Wendy, Martha, Gertrude...

Marie-Therese, Kerikeri

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

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www.dilmahtea.com INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 15

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE Live in sin, pay the price

P

oor Kate Middleton, dumped by the second in line to the British throne then displayed humiliatingly to the world as Prince William’s “practice chick”, the mere recipient of some of his wild oats. But judging by the astonishing Pommy snobbery unleashed in the weeks since the break-up of her almost five-year relationship, Middleton, 25, is well off out of it.

British newspapers are full of quotes from the supposed upper classes about how Kate was too “common” to marry William, 24.

Her mother, Carole Middleton, was “pushy, rather twee and incredibly middle-class”, according to a royal source quoted by the Daily Mail.

Mrs Middleton’s crimes?

“If Middleton had really wanted She says “Pleased to meet to marry William she never should you” instead of “How do you do”, “toilet” instead of have set up house with him. Smart “lavatory” and “pardon?” girls don’t give away marital instead of “what?”.

Senior courtiers at perks free” Buckingham Palace were said to be whispering that Carole, a former flight attendant who married a pilot, was really “not the thing”. Therefore, nor was her daughter, despite the fact that Kate has behaved impeccably in the five years since she met William at university in Scotland and moved in with him.

Another element of Toiletgate, as it has been dubbed, is the claim that William’s friends used to mock Middleton by whispering “Doors to Manual” whenever she entered a room, a dig at her mother’s trolley-dolly past.

“There’d be jibes asking Kate if she was going to wheel in the trolley and when the food service would start. All pretty juvenile stuff, but these are former Eton chaps who are permanently stuck in that sort of humour.”

The snobs are anonymous but there is a ring of truth to the slurs, which have a long history in Britain, as a contrived way of separating the anxious U (upper classes) from the aspirational non-U, terms immortalised by the English author Nancy Mitford in a 1956 essay.

The U might be under threat of extinction in the new classless Britain but the fact its secret code remained un-cracked by bourgeois Carole Middleton and her daughter apparently is cause for crowing celebration in the aristocracy, a sign that all is not yet lost.

16, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

“I am a firm believer in people marrying into the same class,” the self-described aristocrat Kishanda Fulford wrote in the Daily Mail, which described her as “the wife of Francis Fulford, whose family has lived in their stately home for 800 years”, and obviously has never had to buy his own furniture – another distinction between U and non-U. “There is no confusion over what time ‘dinner’ is and what to call the ‘loo’… There are many pretty girls from the lower and middle classes who have married into the aristocracy, indeed, Duchesses past and present have bloodlines which could be considered as ordinary as Kate’s – but they never ended up queen.”

According to another “insider”: “Carole’s whole approach is very aspirational. But re-laying your front drive and trimming the wisteria around your front door isn’t going to make your home, or your daughter, fit for a prince.”

Ouch.

Seen from a middle-class meritocracy such as Australia, the attacks on the Middletons are bafflingly petty, especially when William, his brother, Harry, and their mates are so often seen behaving with as much class as Paris Hilton.

Last month, for instance, British tabloids ran a front-page photo of William posing for the camera while squeezing the breast of a young woman – not Kate. His pick-up line is reported to be: “Hi, I’m going to be king; d’ya fancy a pull?”, which may, of course, be an urban myth.

The more we see of the Queen’s descendants, the less suitable they appear to be to reign over an egalitarian country such as ours.

Of course, there is goodwill and sympathy for William in Australia, mainly because of the tragic end of his mother, Princess Diana. And it is silly for the British press to chastise him for doing what practically every other man his age does – extending his promiscuous bachelor days as long as possible.

Still, as the British TV agony aunt Denise Robertson wrote this week of the break-up: “There are undertones of ‘droit du seigneur’ – a maiden dishonoured and then discarded.”

It is an old-fashioned concept, but Middleton’s fate is a salutary lesson for young women contemplating shacking up with the love of their lives rather than holding out for a firm commitment.

Newscom

In 2005 the median age at marriage for Australian men was 32 (up from 26 in 1985), and for women it was 29.7 (up from 24) and leaving a shrinking window of fertility. In the expanding period of singledom, cohabitation has become an almost mandatory stepping stone to marriage. A whopping 76 per cent of couples (69 per cent in NSW) who married in 2005 had been “living in sin”, as they used to say.

But the idea of “try before you buy” gives all the advantages to men, who get the benefits of marriage with none of the responsibilities. They get sex on tap, domesticity, companionship,

and probably nutritional and hygiene improvements. They can test-drive the merchandise for as long as they like.

But for women, the immovable biological fact of declining fertility means the deal is inevitably unfair. And if marriage comes at all, it often is a utilitarian choice after all the magic and mystery has been used up in a tenuous coexistence in which neither partner fully trusts the other and one foot is always out the door.

If Middleton had really wanted to marry William she never should have set up house with him. Smart girls don’t give away marital perks free.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 17

STRAIGHT TALK

MARK STEYN The lights are going out

E

verything’s difficult, isn’t it? In the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate, Senator Barack Obama was asked what he personally was doing to save the environment and replied that his family was “working on” changing their light bulbs.

Is this the new version of the old joke? How many Senators does it take to “work on” changing a light bulb? One to propose a bipartisan commission. One to threaten to de-fund the light bulbs. One to demand the impeachment of Bush and Cheney for keeping us all in the dark. One to vote to pull out the first of the light bulbs by fall of this year with a view to getting them all pulled out by the end of 2008.

In 1914, on the eve of “Western Europe is increasingly the Great War, the British dependent on Russia as an energy Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey observed, supplier. Putin calculates that “The lamps are going out even a weak Kremlin can make all over Europe. We shall see them lit again in mischief for America” not our lifetime.” Whether he was proposing a solution to global warming is unclear.

But he would be impressed to hear that nine decades later the lights are going out all over Washington.

This week, both the House and the Senate voted for defeat in Iraq. That’s to say, Congress got tired of waiting for these deadbeat insurgents to get their act together and inflict some devastating military humiliation on U.S. forces. So instead America’s legislators have voted to mandate the certainty of defeat. They want the withdrawal of American forces to begin this October, which is a faintly surreal concept: Watching CNN International around the world, many viewers unversed in America’s constitutional arrangements will have been puzzled by the spectacle of a nation giving six months’ notice of surrender. But the cannier types in the presidential palaces will have drawn their own conclusions.

For example, as Congress was voting, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would withdraw from the postCold War arrangements of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty in protest at American plans to install missile defense systems on the Continent. In the first months of the Bush Administration – pre-9/11 – this issue was mostly theoretical. European leaders couldn’t quite figure

18, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

out why anyone would need a system to take out incoming nukes but Bush seemed hot for it and, that being so, you might as well be inside the system rather than out.

Six years on Iran is going nuclear and nobody seems minded to stop them. So a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe is a more practical benefit than it once seemed. In fact, the mullahs are precisely the kind of fellows the system’s intended for: small nuclear powers less susceptible to conventional deterrence theory. There might be quite a few of these a decade down the line.

Reluctant to find themselves living under a Shia Persian nuclear umbrella, the Sunni Arab dictatorships are said to be pondering whether they might benefit from going the nuke route. The Saudis and Egyptians could certainly afford it very easily.

So what’s Putin’s game? Well, he leads a country with severe structural defects (a collapsed birth rate for everyone except Russia’s Muslims, a depopulating east, disease-ridden menfolk face down in the vodka) but a relatively buoyant economy – or, to be more precise, kleptocracy. In particular, western Europe is increasingly dependent on Russia as an energy supplier. Putin calculates that even a weak Kremlin can make mischief for America. The missile-defense interceptors might have been expressly designed for fin-du-civilisation Europe: You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to attack anyone, you don’t have to be beastly and aggressive like the swaggering Texan cowboy. You just have to go about your business and, if anything’s heading your way, the Yanks will press a button and blow it to smithereens and send you a confirmatory e-mail afterwards. But Putin is putting Continental leaders in the position of having to choose between even this benign defensive technology and relations with Russia. And, given European dispositions, he must surely feel he’s got a sporting chance of winning this one. And, if he does, he will in effect be making the world safe for Iranian nuclear blackmail.

Why would he do this? Well, why wouldn’t he? As I always say, if you live in Tikrit and Ramadi, the Iraq issue is about Iraq. But, if you live anywhere else on the planet, Iraq is about America. In Tehran, Pyongyang, Khartoum, Caracas, Beijing, Moscow and the South Sandwich Islands, they watch Harry Reid and co on the 24/7 cable channels and draw their own conclusions about American will.

The Defeaticrats are being opportunist: they think they can calibrate the precise degree of U.S. defeat in Mesopotamia that will bring victory for them in Ohio and Florida. Contemptible as this is, it wouldn’t be possible had the Administration not lost the support of many of the American people over this war. The losses are devastating for the individuals’ families but they are historically among the lowest in any conflict this nation or any other has fought.

So I don’t believe the nightly plume of smoke over Baghdad on the evening news explains the national disenchantment.

Rather, the mission as framed by the President – help the Iraqi people build a free and stable Iraq – is simply not accepted by the American people. On the right, between the unrealpolitik “realists” and the “rubble doesn’t cause trouble” isolationists and the hit-em-harder-faster crowd, the President has fewer and fewer takers for a hunkered down, defensive, thankless semi-colonial policing operation. Regardless of how it works on the ground, it has limited appeal at home.

Meanwhile, the left don’t accept it because, while they’re fond of “causes,” they dislike those that require meaningful action: ask Tibetans about how effective half-a-century of America’s “Free Tibet” campaign has been; or ask Darfuris, assuming you can find one still breathing, how the left’s latest fetishization is going from their perspective: “On Sunday, April 29, Salt Lake Saves Darfur invites the greater Salt Lake community of compassion to join with us as we

“As I always say, if you live in Tikrit and Ramadi, the Iraq issue is about Iraq. But, if you live anywhere else on the planet, Iraq is about America.

In Tehran, Pyongyang, Khartoum, Caracas, Beijing, Moscow and the South Sandwich Islands, they watch Harry Reid and co on the 24/7 cable channels and draw their own conclusions about American will” honor the fallen and suffering Darfuris in a day of films, discussion and dance with a Sudanese dance troupe.”

Marvelous. I hope as the “Salt Lake Saves Darfur” campaign intensifies in the decades ahead there’ll still be enough Darfuris to man the dance troupe. It would be truer to say that the greater Salt Lake community of compassion, like Senator Obama with his light bulbs, is “working on” saving Darfur.

And in Khartoum, Tehran, Moscow and elsewhere the world’s mischief makers have reached their own conclusions about just how much serious “work” America is prepared to do. © 2007 Mark Steyn

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IT’S WHAT YOU HEAR THAT COUNTS. Tour arrangements can be slightly different depending on town and weather. ph 07 8660036 • 6 Albert Street Whitianga www.barbaradoylesmysteryintrigueandmurderwknd.co.nz INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 19

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER The iceman cometh

I

was going to sound off about electoral reform this month. I got quite fired up about it; BCIR and why “They” don’t want us to have it, unaccountable list MPs with hidden agendas (such as anti-smacking bills), State-sanctioned propaganda campaigns funded by stolen taxpayers’ money (oops, I mean State funding of political Parties), the advantages of the Preferential system over MMP, and the like. Then, with the Smacking Debate still raging, I thought a rant about the merits of corporal punishment might be apropos.

However, there is another pressing issue, which simply won’t go away. I have gone into it before, including recently.

It’s Global Warming, of course; but more to the point, it’s that Global Warming “How quickly might the next Ice actually isn’t happening.

It’s not only not happenAge be upon us? Some people think ing because of any of the it may impact over as short various activities of mana timeframe as three years; kind – burning fossil fuels, cattle, wanting to others, even faster” farming have selfish and non-ecofriendly things like electricity and houses and jobs and so forth; it’s simply not happening at all.

Now before the Greenies start frothing at the mouth, and I get labeled a “Climate Change Denier” – a title I would actually wear as a badge of honour, rather than reviling it as one would a swastika – climate data from around the world shows very clearly that Global Warming, if indeed any such thing ever existed, finished almost ten years ago. We are now in a period of cooling.

NIWA’s own figures show that New Zealand’s annual average mean temperature peaked in 1998. Every year since then has been successively colder, with the summer gone being the coldest recorded in 14 years.

Are we in fact heading for an Ice Age? Quite possibly, and quite possibly very soon. Russian scientists believe that it could begin as early as 2012 – ironically, the year in which the Kyoto Treaty is due to expire.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov, from the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory in St Petersburg, suggests that reduced output from the sun will trigger a period of global cooling similar to the so-called “Little Ice Age” of the 17th century, which lasted for more than sixty years. During this period, canals in Holland froze solid, and ice fairs were held on the fro-

20, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

zen surface of the River Thames in London. Curiously, weather records from this time regularly, and inexplicably, fail to appear on the graphs and charts produced by Global Warming doomsayers, including the famous (or should that be infamous) “hockey stick” model much beloved of a certain US ex-Vice President. Abdusamatov believes that the effects of cooling could begin to be seen in as little as five to seven years from now, and be at their most extreme between 2055 and 2060, following a major decline in solar output between 2035 and 2045.

Now isn’t this a turn-up for the books. Just when we think everything is sorted as regards Global Warming – which appears to have morphed into “Climate Change” as even the most ardent opponents of human civilisation’s advancement, realise they may have been sold a pup in terms of the now entirely discredited Greenhouse Theory – those pesky Russians come along with a bunch of irrefutable facts, which shoot the whole “Inconvenient Truth” campaign down in flames.

So how does Ivan know that the sun is going to have a wee snooze between 2035 and 2045? Well, because it’s done it before. Often. Predictably, and regular as clockwork. The Big Yellow, it would seem, is quite a creature of habit.

Ice Core data from Vostok Station in East Antarctica has faithfully recorded the true patterns of the earth’s climate, over the past 415,000 years. The graph resulting from it is quite chilling, no pun intended. We do, it would appear, stand poised on the very brink of an Ice Age. The data records the Milankovitch Cycles, variations in the angle of tilt of the earth and in her orbit around the sun, and in the sun’s own output. It doesn’t leave out “inconvenient” bits like the Little Ice Age, or the Mediaeval Warm Period, when the Vikings were grazing cattle in Greenland.

There are other inconvenient truths out there as well.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is thickening, not thinning.

Ditto the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which covers about 97% of the Antarctic land mass, and accounts for almost nine-tenths of the fresh water on planet earth. Why, I cannot help but wonder, do a small but vocal group of somewhat fringe scientists, and a large number of politicians and broadcast journalists, insist on showing us repeated images of ice thinning on the 3% of Antarctica (mostly on the Antarctic Peninsular, and to a degree on

West Antarctica) where it is actually happening, probably because of temperature changes brought about by shifting ocean currents, and demanding that we believe the world is undergoing disastrous warming as a consequence?

And then there’s the famous picture of the sad-looking polar bear, hopelessly marooned on a tiny shrinking ice floe, drifting forlornly in the middle of a huge and warming ocean, and staring oblivion down the barrel…as it turns out, the picture was taken several years ago, in the summertime, when the ice always breaks up, by a geology student who never knew it had been hijacked until she saw it on the Internet, let alone gave permission for it to be used or captioned in the way it was. The bear (who, being a polar bear, is a good swimmer anyway) was apparently very close to the shore, and according to the photographer, appeared quite contented. Polar bear numbers, incidentally, are on the increase in Canada – where, as a further aside, this year’s annual seal cull has been set back because many of the ships used by the cullers have become trapped in unseasonably heavy pack ice. “The worst in 20 years”, was how one veteran described it.

And New Zealand’s glaciers are growing! That’s right; Fox and Franz Joseph are advancing, not retreating. So are 35 other glaciers in the Southern Alps. OK, this probably isn’t an entirely fair observation, because glacial advance actually has more to do with relative precipitation in the mountains than it does with temperature; but this writer finds it intriguing that glaciers are also advancing in Chile, North America, and the Indian Himalayas.

How quickly might the next Ice Age be upon us? Some people think it may impact over as short a timeframe as three years; others, even faster. Author Robert Felix (http://www.iceagenow. com/index.htm) certainly thinks so.

Doomsday scenarios such as the one portrayed in the film The Day After Tomorrow may be a little far-fetched; or maybe they’re not. Woolly Mammoths frozen in the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, have been discovered with green food still in their mouths.

Maybe they were just in the habit of chewing their food for a really long time – you know, for several years – or maybe the onset of cold, in some places at least, was rather quick.

We don’t know exactly when this next Ice Age will begin. We do know that there will be one, because that is what our planet does, in regular cycles, and we also know that it is, at the very least, if not overdue, then due to happen right about now. In fact if the temperature of the breeze outside is anything to go by, it may have started already.

So why, in the face of physical evidence, current weather recordings, the historical record, fossils, tree rings, ice cores, satellite data, and a majority of scientific opinion – or at least question – are we being fed the complete opposite of what is actually happening?

Has belief in Global Warming become, as Czech President Vaclav Klaus has asked publicly, a religion in its own right? Ask the Believers, and they will say that any who question the doctrine of Climate Change, must be in the pay of Big Business, the Oil Companies, or other Evil Anti-Ecologists. Personally I think such conspiracy stuff is a bit crank, but then I believe the Yanks did actually go to the Moon, too.

There is plenty of international commentary on the misinformation distributed by the global warming industry. Our media in New Zealand, particularly – and once again, predict-

“Has belief in Global Warming become, as Czech President Vaclav Klaus has asked publicly, a religion in its own right? Ask the Believers, and they will say that any who question the doctrine of Climate Change, must be in the pay of Big Business, the Oil Companies, or other Evil Anti-Ecologists.

Personally I think such conspiracy stuff is a bit crank, but then I believe the Yanks did actually go to the Moon, too”

ably – the State-owned broadcast media, have shown little interest in reporting such commentary. The excellent documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle which screened on Britain’s Channel Four a month or so back, may be found in its entirety on YouTube, free from editing, censorship, or plain indifference, at http://youtube.com/results?search_query=global+warming+ swindle , along with several other serious and sober investigations. I don’t imagine TVNZ will be showing it, while the present Government has plans to indoctrinate our schoolchildren with the Al Gore film instead.

I leave the last words to two commentators who have neither vested interest, nor reason to oppose any view of the majority of the scientific community; “It could not be a worse time to abandon our own traditions of reason and tolerance, and to embrace instead the irrationality and intolerance of ecofundamentalism, where reasoned questioning of its mantras is regarded as a form of blasphemy. There is no greater threat to the people of this planet than the retreat from reason we see all around us today.”

Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain, address to the Centre for Policy studies, 1 November 2006.

“The climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90% of the last two million years the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today.

The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.”

Professor Bob Carter, geologist and paleoclimate researcher, James Cook University, Queensland.

Here endeth the lesson.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 21

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER The ant & the grasshopper

T

he English, relatively few in number and coming from an insignificant little island just off the European coast, in an historically short period of time built an Empire the like of which had never, or in the future even, may ever, be seen again. United in purpose, and with an advanced penchant for long term planning, they quickly ended up controlling around a third of the Earth’s surface. Contrary to today’s re-written history, the British rarely involved themselves in military conquest, finding that good forward planning combined with persuasion, and enhanced by excellent communication skills, invariably did the job quite nicely for them, although of course, if necessary, all else having failed, the small but highly efficient “We have become a now society British Army was there to enforce Westminster’s will. that is almost entirely bereft of the All was well until the end ability to do anything other than of the Second World War, a suddenly bankto sort out problems on a day to when rupted Britain, having at day basis, rather, than to engage this same time lost most in sensible problem prevention, of its empire, needed to do some very serious re-planthrough forward planning” ning if it were to restore its fortunes. Within the space of three or four decades the United Kingdom is once again a financial power house and better still, without the need to rule, try to defend and administer a far flung empire.

OK, the point of the lesson thus far? Well, how about where New Zealand fits in to all of this. How have things changed for our small country since the war? Would a wee bit like having been on a sort of roller coaster ride both economically and socially be a fair description?

Once having been directly ruled from London in the early days, through to now being dictated to through our own parliament in Wellington, and having more or less decided to paddle our own canoe as a fully independent little nation, how have we been faring? Well, all in all, pretty well, most of us seem to think, particularly if we overlook the comparisons provided by such listings from the OECD, where it appears that in the last three or four decades we have drifted back to around half way, from an original position, in the top three. All sorts of seemingly disjointed comparisons with other countries seem

22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

to go together to make up the statistics necessary for our OECD report card, all of which, however, when analysed, point towards one factor that particularly stands out, and yet, is never ever discussed. An almost pathological inability on the part of Kiwi Officialdom, either central or locally based, to plan for the future.

We have become a now society that is almost entirely bereft of the ability to do anything other than to sort out problems on a day to day basis, rather, than to engage in sensible problem prevention, through forward planning.

Wherever we look, examples of short term thinking leap out at us, as the working population at large is taxed to hell and back to provide the enormous numbers of tax dollars that are now increasingly required to constantly repair our poor old ship of state, instead perhaps of planning to buy a new one. From the almost laughable short term thinking of the Reserve Bank as it tinkers with our economy on an increasingly ad-hoc basis, trying on the one hand to “cool down” the local property market, yet apparently, completely unaware that it is at the same time destroying our ability to export.

A number of our major cities are now falling into transport and commuter deadlock simply because of monumental stupidity on the part of those who must have been well aware that this was bound to happen, and have known this for several decades. The same with city infrastructure, sewage disposal, water, and electricity shortages that are now on the horizon. Short term governmental taxation policies now have large NZ companies heading off shore in frightening numbers. There’s the almost instant adoption of highly emotive, yet largely unproven leftist theories that the sky is falling in an ecological sense, and so leaping in to sign us all up in the economically crippling Kyoto agreement without really having a clue as to what it will eventually cost us in the future. (The nitwits who signed it of course, having little concept of any future, economic or otherwise that goes beyond the next election!) However, at least we have probably become world leaders in one area that also is not being fully realised, and that being world champion experts in the area of crisis management, simply because of our almost childlike inability to plan for the future, crises have now become a daily part of New Zealand life, that we endeavour so solve, as they occur, with emergency injections of the nation’s tax wealth.

It is all very well for Dr Cullen, our current Ned Kelly-like Finance Minister to berate the peasants for not having saved sufficient for either our eventual retirement, or indeed his liking.

Unfortunately it is still against the law for the rest of us to steal other citizen’s money to cover our own ineptitude in the area of forward planning, whilst Cullen and friends can gaily finance their fire brigade approach to the solving of the nation’s immediate problems by simply picking our pockets to do so. Any serious pressure on any of these governmental worthies to plan for the future?

Well not really, is there? After all, what need to plan exists for any politician beyond being able to have at hand enough stolen money to buy our votes with! Go back to the middle of last century and before the forward planning lessons learnt at Mother England’s knee had been completely forgotten, and we really used to do very well in this area. The enormous and very expensive projects that gave us our world leading and inexpensive electricity production system. Roads and highways that were built, far beyond the then average traffic needs but with an eye to the future.

Mayors like Sir John Allum who bullied the Government into allowing the Auckland Harbour bridge construction and the then opening up of the North Shore. Sir Dove Meyer Robinson, who by sheer will power forced through the then, and future, solution to Auckland’s sewage problems. Leaders with a genuine vision of the future, unlike many of the current incumbents who only seem to adopt policies of infantile tinkering and the utterance of petty slogans of a kind that might just keep the mayoral chains swinging around their scrawny necks past the next local body elections. And, when you think about it, if we allow, that thoughts of planning for the future now play a very minor part in most Kiwi thinking, as demonstrated by dozens of different examples that we all know are true, then pray tell me how either, individually, or even collectively, we can possibly escape the ultimate fate that history has always prescribed for those societies that fail to plan ahead.

At the risk of simply increasing a number of people’s perception as to the writer of this piece being a bit locked into yesteryear, nevertheless, the Aesop fable that guided much thinking when we baby boomers were still kids is still worth re-discovering I reckon…Remember the grasshopper that gambolled in the sun, while the industrious ant with an eye to his future packed away heaps of tucker for the long winter ahead? The ant, when things got real cold and unpleasant telling a now much sadder and wiser grasshopper to buzz off, and that it was his own silly fault that he was about to starve to death...No thoughts here of anything, but the need to work hard with an eye to the future, and even worse, to modern socialist thinking, the miserable ant didn’t even point the lazy grasshopper towards the nearest social welfare office!

We used to teach kids all sorts of life’s little truisms through this sort of stuff didn’t we? Like if you have some sort of plan for the future and work reasonably hard you should have a pretty good life. Room here of course even then to help the truly unfortunate, but not much hope in the way of benefits as an acceptable way of life for the out and out lazy that’s for sure. Heck, can you imagine trying to teach this sort of stuff in the modern classroom? Hell’s teeth, those bearded and sandal wearing social engineers that now are mostly teaching life’s little lessons there would be simply horrified. The choices these folk much prefer to have on offer are essentially these...Eat, drink and be merry and when the economic

“Short term governmental taxation policies now have large NZ companies heading off shore in frightening numbers” winter comes along we will have our Helen tax the crap out of the ever decreasing number of ants who have been working hard, planning their futures and therefore have some stuff, that Helen can then steal, and then give you...for your votes of course!

Years of out of control social welfare have almost completely removed the need, in the minds of many, to even think about planning for a rainy day, so is it any wonder that many people have simply tucked away there at the back of their minds, “She’ll be right... we’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes”. And to be honest who can really blame people for thinking that way. What is of course worrying is when we elect people to rule our cities and indeed our country who also are devotees of the cargo cult, and when most of the ants with any vestige of common sense have long since fled to – say – the Gold Coast, eventually will come the unhappy realisation that perhaps the time has finally come to re-name our country to more accurately reflect our social beliefs and plans for the future.

Anyone know the Maori word for Grasshopper?

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

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 23

The devastating truth about police corruption in New Zealand Explosive new allegations of widespread police sexual misconduct reaching as high as current police commissioner Howard Broad have emerged in a major Investigate magazine inquiry into police corruption, along with evidence of a political cover-up by senior Labour politicians including the current Attorney-General Michael Cullen, and CYFS Minister David Benson-Pope.

IAN WISHART has this exclusive report 24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

W

hen Investigate magazine broke the story last month of a young court worker allegedly raped by an off duty police officer, many people suspected there was more to our story than met the eye. Although Dunedin police moved swiftly to “investigate” and announce no offence had taken place, they didn’t realise the story wasn’t over – instead, it was the jaws of a trap closing around a police unit whose members have, for at least three decades, been amongst the most corrupt police officers in Australasia.

Last month’s cover story was merely a shot across the bows of Police National Headquarters. Today, Investigate brings you a devastating exposé that’s taken two years to pull together, an exposé linking Dunedin police officers to extortion, bribery, rape, indecent assault, underage sex, drug dealing, bestiality and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. As one former police officer told us, “A large chunk of Dunedin police were effectively the biggest organized crime syndicate in the city – even more powerful than the gangs”.

Some of the Dunedin police officers involved in some of these activities have since graduated to senior positions elsewhere around the country, including Police Commissioner Howard Broad and some of his district commanders.

When Broad apologised “unreservedly and unequivocally” to the women at the centre of the Bazley report on police sexual

Martin Sykes/NZ Herald

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 25

misconduct last month, he suggested the corruption was confined to “a very few officers who have behaved disgracefully.

Their actions were wrong and contrary to their oath of office.”

That’s what Police National Headquarters wanted the public and the news media to believe. It is not, however, the reality.

Howard Broad himself, according to former colleagues, was part of that police culture when he worked in Dunedin in the 1980s.

One colleague approached by Investigate alleges Broad screened bestiality videos at his going away party from Dunedin’s CIB in the mid 1980s, a party held at 19 Arawa St, Dunedin.

“There was one particular video being shown, of a naked woman holding a chicken while a man had sex with it. The chicken basically expired, and then the woman immediately performed [a sexual act] on the man. I remember it very clearly, because it’s the only time I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness bestiality.”

Another colleague, former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis, was Howard Broad’s boss in Dunedin, and recalls incidents of indecent assault.

“He was a bit of a groper...He didn’t take much to get him drunk, and when he got pissed he got a bit of Dutch courage.

“He was never charged with anything, and I don’t know that he was even investigated properly – it might have just been something that was written off.

“Women had complained about him when he got drunk. But certainly I don’t think they ever initiated any proper investigation into him. He might have had a smack on the hand, but that was about all.”

T

he future police commissioner’s actions reflect the police culture he tried to distance himself from when he spoke last month at the release of the Bazley report: “To the women of New Zealand I say: I have been disgusted and sickened, as you will be, by the behaviour put before the Commission of Inquiry in many of the files that covered some 25 years of our recent history.

“To all New Zealanders, I am truly sorry that a very few of our number have undermined the high expectations you rightly have of your police.

“We are encouraging every staff member to have the fortitude to come forward where they perceive things aren’t right.

I am personally sponsoring our leadership, management and accountability programme.

“Thankfully, the Commission did not find evidence of any concerted efforts across Police to cover up unacceptable behaviour and I hope the report will provide reassurance that we all take sexual abuse complaints seriously.

“To any victims of sexual abuse who have perhaps been reluctant to make a complaint, please come forward.”

Howard Broad should know. As a member of the Dunedin CIB in the early to mid-eighties he would, or should, have been well aware of the parties that went on inside the CIB offices after hours.

“Let me tell you about Dunedin police in the eighties and nineties,” says one source. “If there is a Royal Commission of Inquiry, it will hear evidence of rookie female police officers being forced to have sex or perform sexual acts on senior officers as part of a ‘rite of passage’ when they joined the force down here.

26, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

“Because they were sworn staff, the senior ranks held enormous power over the careers of those girls.”

One Dunedin policewoman was run out of town in the nineties after being sodomised by the police officer son of one of the city’s highest-ranked detectives.

“She was told by National Headquarters staff that making a complaint ‘would not be good’ for her career,” says our source.

Additionally, he says, the CIB had raucous Christmas parties where women were fair game.

“There were a couple of civilian typists on our floor, and I remember at one party seeing both of them naked, legs spread, in two police interview rooms side by side, while a large group of male police officers waited in line to gang-bang these women.”

Former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis is another who remembers wild behaviour.

“There used to be the early morning shift parties, and they finished at five or seven, they used to allow them the key to the police club. They could help themselves to grog and they worked an honesty system. It was the craziest thing that ever happened. When I was doing internal investigations within the police for [CIB boss Laurie] Dalziel and the CIB, I was attached to him to inquire into police crime and misbehaviour.

By God, I reckon at least 60 to 70% evolved from those early morning or party situations. We even had indecent assaults then. In fact even in the book [Cover-ups & Cop-outs] I mention John Kelly [not to be confused with John Kelly from the traffic safety branch of the police] who became a Superintendent in Wellington and would probably have been Commissioner until the book came out. I named him as indecently assaulting policewomen at parties. He didn’t dare sue me because I would be able to name names.

“He actually indecently assaulted the-then police commissioner’s daughter,” exclaims Lewis down the phone from his home in Australia. “Do you know what he got for it? He got put back to uniform branch for seven or eight months. If you were the police commissioner and some jerk had indecently assaulted your daughter, do you think the punishment would fit if you just put him back to uniform branch for six months and transferred him as a detective sergeant to Dunedin?

“From my recollection it was breast grabbing and crotch grabbing. But he had a penchant for indecently assaulting females in social company.”

John Kelly is still attached to Police National Headquarters in a senior role.

But when Police Commissioner Howard Broad said last month there was “no evidence” of any “concerted efforts” to “cover up unacceptable behaviour”, it appears one key incident slipped his mind: an incident that happened while he was based in Dunedin, working under Tom Lewis.

Investigate’s inquiries into this particular incident have uncovered a major political dimension – allegations that senior Labour MPs Michael Cullen (now the Attorney-General) and Minister in charge of CYFS, David Benson-Pope – a schoolteacher at the time – helped police cover-up a major pedophilia, bondage and bestiality ring in the city in the mid-1980s. We’ll have full details of the political angle shortly, but first we’ll take you through the incident itself.

“In June 1984,” writes former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis in his 1998 book, “I was absent from the office for approxi-

NZPA/Tim Hales

“One colleague approached by Investigate alleges Broad screened bestiality videos at his going away party from Dunedin’s CIB in the mid 1980s: “There was one particular video being shown, of a naked woman holding a chicken...” mately three weeks. During that time, a number of complaints were received about what appeared to be attempts to recruit young girls for sex shows. One mother of a 14 year old girl went to the Dunedin CIB office to report that not only had her daughter been approached in the street regarding the sex show, she had also been telephoned at home and propositioned.

“The fourteen year old was able to graphically describe the details of the proposed sex show and describe the young woman she had met in the street who tried to recruit her.

“The mother, Cathy, had also spoken to the woman while she was on the phone. This person, who introduced herself as

‘Audrey’, told Cathy that, for $1,000 a performance, her daughter would be required to dress in a sheer nightie and perform in the private suite of one of the upmarket hotels in the city [The Parkside, now known as The Carisbrook].

“The audience would be mixed, with well-to-do people including members of Parliament, lawyers, doctors, ministers of religion, councilors and businessmen present. She told her that it was essential that confidentiality be maintained at all times even if some of the audience were recognised.

“Audrey then said her daughter would be required to lead a naked man, wearing a dog collar, around a small stage. She INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 27

In 1982, Labour’s David BensonPope gagged a student with a tennis ball and bound him up.

In 1984, BDSM sex shows featuring bondage, pedophilia and bestiality were being secretly held in Dunedin. In 1985, Benson-Pope and the current Attorney-General Michael Cullen helped quash community demand for a full investigation of the child sex ring would be shown how to whip him and later would masturbate him. If she [the fourteen year old] then had sex with him on stage in front of the audience she could earn a bonus. She would also receive a bonus if she had sex with those members of the audience prepared to pay for the privilege.”

As Detective Sergeant Lewis records in his book, Cathy, 28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

although shocked, had sufficient presence of mind to play along with the idea in order to get more information and, if possible, a contact phone number from Audrey [Audrey had rung the 14 year old at home].

Cathy was even more stunned, however, when she took the information to the Dunedin CIB only to be met with a “get lost” attitude. Instead, the CIB clerk suggested Cathy conduct her own inquiries if she was bothered by it.

“To instruct a complainant to take on what was a police function was unethical and unprofessional,” wrote Tom Lewis in 1998. “It could also have put Cathy in danger. The CIB clerk was also aware that this was not an isolated complaint as by that time other complaints had been received.”

Non-plussed, Cathy nonetheless pushed ahead under her own steam, and managed to convince Audrey to put her in touch with Audrey’s boss, a man known only as ‘John’.

When Cathy phoned John, the call went to his answering service. When he rang back, Cathy had a tape recorder rolling, as Tom Lewis writes: “[John] suggested to Cathy that a mother and daughter act would go down well with the type of clientele he catered for at his sex shows. She expressed her interest in his suggestion and asked exactly what he had in mind.

“John told her that for the sort of money he was proposing – $1,500 for each show – they would be required to indulge in sex and masturbation. He explained that the format of the sex show would be Cathy’s daughter leading a naked man around the stage on a dog lead while clad in a see-through nightie.

She would be required to verbally abuse him and to whip him before masturbating him.

“Cathy was told that if she ‘measured up’ she would be required to appear on stage naked and to have intercourse with the ‘slave’ while her daughter whipped and verbally abused him.

“In the latter stages, a dog would be introduced to the act and she would be paid a substantial bonus for having sex with the dog. After the main show was over, male members of the audience might request sex with her on stage. The price would be $150, of which she would receive half.

“John reiterated Audrey’s warning about the need for confidentiality as many prominent people attended these sex shows – lawyers, Members of Parliament and the like – and they could be ruined by loose talk.”

By the time Cathy stumped up to the CIB with her taped conversation with John in hand, it was July 1984, and Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis was back on deck in Vice Squad. For the record, it was against the law for anyone under the age of 18 to be employed in a “parlour” – a euphemism for being involved in commercial sex work. Cathy’s daughter, a student at Otago Girls High School, was only 14.

The girl told Lewis that Audrey had been hanging around the school gates waiting for students to come out each afternoon, and approaching attractive 14 and 15 year olds with an offer of several hundred dollars to appear in a “modeling show”.

If a girl expressed interest, Audrey took her phone number and arranged to ring later, which is how Cathy became involved.

Lewis immediately went to check what other complaints police had received.

“What I found was disturbing indeed – pieces of paper recording alleged incidents outside Otago Girls High School,

in many cases without even the name or phone number of the complainants. Those that I could contact I did, and I found the approaches that had been made were similar to that made to Cathy’s daughter.”

When Lewis raised the slack attitude of CIB staff to taking complaints with his boss, Detective Chief Inspector Laurie Dalziel, Dalziel told him: “That’s why I have a uniform branch police officer on the front desk, to sort the wheat from the chaff…It was a victimless crime, they [the schoolgirls] hadn’t been hurt, it’s low priority as far as I am concerned.”

Regardless of his boss, Tom Lewis asked a young policewoman, Judy Devlin, whether she would volunteer to go undercover for ‘Operation Audrey”. Devlin agreed, and responded to a newspaper ad that appeared to have been placed by Audrey seeking “models”.

“Audrey…mentioned the show was an adult show which regularly took place in private suites at top hotels in the city,” writes Lewis. “The audience would comprise men and women, many of whom were well known professional people.

“Audrey then proceeded to ask the constable her age, her measurements, in particular the size of her breasts, and then she told her that they had a show organized for Christchurch that weekend. She asked her if she was prepared to travel to Christchurch to perform.”

Constable Devlin declined, expressing a preference for Dunedin. Further conversations followed over the next three weeks, and by the end of it Devlin had been given the same information Cathy had: she would be leading a naked man wearing a dog collar around the stage while whipping and abusing him. She would perform sexual acts on the man and invite women from the audience to participate, and she was then required to have sex with the bondage slave on stage.

“Audrey also told the constable she could double her fee by having sex with as many of the audience as she could manage.

The more she serviced, the more she would be paid. She was, like Cathy, told that if she had sexual intercourse with the dog she would receive a large bonus.”

Audrey and Devlin – using the name ‘Jenny’ – agreed to meet at a city coffee bar, and Devlin was given John’s phone number to call the next morning. Detective Sergeant Lewis traced the phone number – it belonged to the Parkside Hotel, now known as “The Carisbrook”, owned and operated by John Lewis, the father of another Dunedin police officer, Murray Lewis.

John Lewis told Devlin that his sex shows were based on the Marquis de Sade’s book, and that people attending the show “were right into bondage and perversion”. He warned her however that confidentiality was extremely important because “prominent people such as members of Parliament” would be present.

John Lewis, however, wanted to inspect his merchandise, and asked ‘Jenny’ – constable Devlin – to meet him at the hotel the following afternoon. Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis (no relation) tried to put a full surveillance team in place but was lumbered with Detective Sergeant John Scott. Scott had been run out of a small South Island town after being found getting rather too close to the young daughter of a local farmer. The farmer and his sons confronted Scott in a barn where he had the girl with him, and the farmer fired up his Poulan chainsaw – threatening to chop off the policeman’s tender portions.

PHOTO: Tom Lewis, Cover-ups & Cop-outs

‘Audrey’, real name Lynley Deaker, under police surveillance in 1984. She tried to recruit children to take part in sex and bestiality shows for “prominent people”, including a Labour cabinet minister who would visit at the time.

Scott was subsequently transferred to Dunedin, where his nickname around the office was “Poulan”.

“Even [current police commissioner] Howard Broad used to get in on the act,” one former officer told Investigate. “He would stand outside Scott’s office pretending to pull a chainsaw and making the appropriate noises.”

Scott organised only three detectives for the surveillance, not the required six, so when undercover agent Judy Devlin entered the Parkside to meet sex show boss ‘John’, Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis was not a happy man.

Over the concealed microphone embedded in the policewoman’s bra, they could hear John talking about the bondage and sado-masochism of his sex shows, which included “group INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 29

and kinky sex”. An alsation dog was a regular peformer at the sex shows, he told the woman, and she would be extremely well paid if she allowed the dog to have sex with her on the stage.

“You look young and pretty good to me,” John could be heard saying lecherously, “but I like to inspect my merchandise more closely...let me see you naked. I want to look over you closely. Take off your clothes.”

Constable Devlin made an excuse that she needed to use the bathroom first – a pre-arranged signal to the surveillance team that she needed back-up.

When police burst in, they found John clutching a bottle of baby oil and whip, while on the bed nearby lay a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s book as well as a dog collar and leash. A videotape was found of one of the previous Dunedin sex shows, and included the type of sexual acts John and Audrey had described to Cathy and Constable Devlin. One local man on the videotape was instantly recognisable to police.

“This film was later placed in the custody of [Detective Sergeant] John Scott,” wrote Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis.

“It subsequently disappeared without trace.”

The suspect, John, was panicking meanwhile. As the father of Murray Lewis – now Tauranga’s Area Police Commander – he recognised Tom as a colleague of his son’s. He initially tried to suggest that the policewoman was simply a prostitute he had picked up, but slumped in his chair when Tom Lewis informed him they knew he had been attempting to recruit 14 year old schoolgirls for the sex shows through Audrey.

“Yeah, it’s true she did recruit them for me but it was just for me to screw,” he told the police officer. His hands were shaking and he was described as “sweating profusely”.

“I paid Audrey to get young girls for me as I enjoy sex with young girls. It’s just one of those things, a lot of men do.”

Detective Sergeant Lewis asked him how many young girls Audrey had arranged.

“I can’t remember. Not many. I only remember the name of one, Bonnie. I think she was over sixteen but you can’t be sure these days. I admit I’ve had sex with a few but I honestly can’t remember their names Tom.” John initially denied knowing that Cathy’s daughter was only 14, but folded when the police officer confronted him with the existence of his taped phone call to Cathy. In it, he had told the mother that the fact her daughter was only 14 “did not bother” him when it came to letting her take part in the sex shows.

“I’ve had nightmares about this,” John confessed. “Yes, I did say that.”

Tom Lewis’ book, based on his copy of the police files, reveals John admitted he was hiring the children to have sex with “people in high places”. He would not, however, reveal specifically who. He did, however, provide contact details for ‘Audrey’ – real name Lynley Deaker.

Tom Lewis immediately instructed Detective Sergeant John “Poulan” Scott to action a search warrant at Audrey’s home and bring her in for questioning. The events that followed are the first evidence of a massive police cover-up operation beginning.

John Scott had instead gone to Dunedin’s police chief, District Commander Ross McLennan, and informed him that they’d just picked up Detective Murray Lewis’ father in the pedophile sex ring investigation.

McLennan wanted the father released into the custody of his 30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

son, and immediately bailed. Detective Sergeant Lewis wasn’t happy with that idea, especially as Audrey had not yet been brought in. The bailed suspect could easily alert other key suspects and evidence could be destroyed. The police officer also knew that some of his colleagues had a very close relationship with John and his hotel.

“I was aware that John Lewis was the ‘host with the most’ among the hierarchy of the Dunedin Police. I had been to his hotel on more than one occasion, with the head of the Dunedin CIB, and partaken of his hospitality as he curried favour with his son’s bosses. I also knew that Scott was a regular visitor to the hotel and I suspected this was the start of a campaign to minimise the seriousness of the charges against Lewis.”

Despite Tom Lewis’ protestations, Scott was adamant that releasing John was the District Commander’s explicit instruction. Although Audrey was subsequently located, John Scott’s team “forgot” to obtain a search warrant, so no evidence was seized and she was now at the police station refusing to answer questions and demanding to be either released or charged.

John Scott had also decided to send undercover agent Judy Devlin home, so nobody was available to run an identification line-up. If they had, Audrey could have been pinged and locked up for attempting to procure schoolgirls for sex. Instead, with events collapsing around him, and Devlin unable to be located, Tom Lewis was forced to release Audrey as well.

T

he following day, August 9, 1984, an unbowed Tom Lewis organised his own search warrant of Audrey’s house, and arranged for Constable Devlin to accompany him so she could identify Audrey as part of the process. Just as they were about to head out the door, John ‘Poulan’ Scott pulled Lewis aside and told him CIB chief Laurie Dalziel had ordered “the sex inquiry is to be stopped until he gets back tomorrow”.

The wheels of a police cover-up were well and truly spinning by now.

When Dalziel returned, he came to Lewis’ office and allegedly urged him to drop the case.

“He wanted me to report the John Lewis offences along favourable lines,” says Tom Lewis in his book, “even to the extent of changing my report to say there was insufficient evidence to charge him.”

“Don’t you understand?” urged Dalziel, “It’s a victimless crime!”

In a nutshell, that summed up the attitude of Dunedin Police – a sex ring where 14 year old girls were offered huge sums of money to have sex with old men in bondage gear and an alsation dog, was a “victimless crime” – a statement the parents of Dunedin schoolchildren would have been less than happy to hear.

The investigation, however, was quashed.

Tom Lewis responded by trying to file an official complaint about Detective Chief Inspector Dalziel attempting to pervert the course of justice by preventing an active investigation of a pedophile/BDSM/bestiality ring involving prominent Labour government MPs and Dunedin business leaders.

“I went upstairs and reported it to the District Commander that the head of CIB had tried to pervert the course of justice by stopping me with my inquiry. And of course for 9 months they wouldn’t take my complaint, so I can sort of see how these women went when they tried to complain about being raped.

“Don’t you understand?” urged Dalziel. “It’s a victimless crime!”

In a nutshell, that summed up the attitude of Dunedin Police – a sex ring where 14 year old girls were offered huge sums of money to have sex with old men in bondage gear and an alsation dog, was a “victimless crime” Here was I, a detective sergeant, with 20 years experience and I couldn’t get a complaint laid, so you can see the problems they must have had,” Lewis told Investigate.

Audrey had named a high-ranking Labour cabinet minister as one of those attending the shows, but Lewis wasn’t allowed to question him either.

A phony war broke out, with Dalziel trying to convince Lewis to withdraw his complaint and drop charges against the publican, John.

“Eventually I decided to force the issue,” Tom Lewis records in his book. “I obtained a search warrant from the District Court for Audrey’s address. I took Constable Devlin and another police officer and we raided her address in midSeptember 1984.

“When I spoke to Audrey at the door, she said, ‘What’s going on? I was told this had all been squared off and all charges dropped. I better not be taking the rap on my own. Are you doing a warrant on John again? If I’ve been set up to take the

rap for this then I’ll take him and his mates with me’.”

Constable Devlin made a positive ID, although Audrey denied meeting her, and inside the unit police found an alsation dog, BDSM bondage gear, and handwriting samples that matched copy supplied to the Otago Daily Times newspaper seeking girls for sex shows.

In other words, they had Audrey dead to rights.

It was during one of these conversations that Tom Lewis says Audrey coughed to the identity of the high-ranking Labour cabinet minister visiting the sex shows when he had the chance to get into Dunedin. Investigate has the minister’s name – for the record they are no longer in parliament.

Audrey’s boss, John, had however already talked of Labour MPs in the plural sense, not the singular.

Despite now having enough evidence to charge both Audrey and John, Tom Lewis was still running up against a corruption wall inside the police when it came to getting action on the file.

“A week later, I learned that the Dunedin children’s sex file INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 31

Former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis: “Yes, Benson-Pope was active, his name did come up.

That name was definitely prominent around that time.” had been hastily sent to the police legal section in Wellington without the additional evidence. Still later, I learned that the file that was sent had been interfered with and much of the documentary evidence against Lewis removed before being sent.”

Dunedin police perverting the course of justice? Again, dead to rights.

The trail, and the chance to bring a pedophile ring to justice, was going cold.

Simultaneously, Lewis’ colleagues slipped him photocopied pages from Detective Sergeant John ‘Poulan’ Scott’s diary, revealing Scott had apparently been stalking Tom Lewis’ wife and teenage daughter, even though neither had anything to do with the case.

Tom Lewis engaged a lawyer, Bruce Robertson, later to become a Court of Appeal judge, who suggested a complaint was laid directly with Labour’s Police Minister, Ann Hercus.

But Labour refused to act. Lewis believes police bosses may have been blackmailing the Labour Government: “They had a file in CIS [Criminal Intelligence Section] on her [Hercus] which I was aware of because I was in CIS at the time. They had a couple of things on her so she was under quite 32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

a bit of pressure, so the Labour government were very keen to cover this up.”

Instead, amid mounting public pressure and increasing media speculation, the government appointed what it called an “independent examiner” to review the allegations. Except the “examiner” wasn’t independent, but instead was closely allied to police bosses.

His report, issued in 1985, whitewashed the claims, stating there was insufficient evidence to lay charges in the sex ring case. Tom Lewis choked on his cornflakes. The only reason there was insufficient evidence, he knew, was because senior police – backed up by the Labour government – had shut down the investigation. Furthermore, when you added back the hard evidence stripped from the file sent to headquarters, there was indeed sufficient evidence. The whole case reeked.

B ut it was what happened next that adds a political dimension to this case. Local Labour MP Michael Cullen – now the Attorney-General – and one of his enthusiastic party workers, a schoolteacher by the name of David Benson-Pope, helped quash public concern about a cover-up by circulating copies of the “independent” examiner’s whitewash report to service clubs and high schools, along with a covering letter expressing the hope that it would “dispel unrest in your community”.

Their line: “there’s nothing in it, the claims are unsubstantiated, move on”.

Who were they protecting, and why?

It was not as if Labour was unaware of the central allegations: that the father of a police officer had procured underage schoolgirls for a bondage and discipline sex show that also included bestiality. Why would Michael Cullen, now the AttorneyGeneral and Deputy Prime Minister, want to pour cold water on such a devastating allegation? Why would David BensonPope, a schoolteacher, want to reassure teachers and parents that there was no truth to the allegations?

Lewis firmly believes the whole affair – with the implication that a senior Labour politician was involved in bondage and discipline, underage sex and bestiality – was ultimately shut down for political reasons, not just the fact that the man organising it was the father of a police officer.

It is significant that while Prime Minister Helen Clark was fully prepared to set up a Commission of Inquiry into historic police rape allegations from the Bay of Plenty, equally serious allegations with a political overtone have been strangely ignored – even though two politicians involved in damage-control at the time are now senior figures in Helen Clark’s cabinet.

It is significant that former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis, now resident in Australia, was unaware that David BensonPope had even become an MP himself.

“Did you come across any junior Labour people like David Benson-Pope?” Investigate asked Lewis.

“Yes I did. Now he was a schoolteacher wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” we confirmed, adding that he was now an MP. “At Bayfield High,” continued Lewis. “That’s right. Now he was one of the ones who would have helped get it into schools.

I know that he was very close to Cullen in that St Kilda electorate. Now is he an MP himself now?”

“Yes, he is. Dunedin South.”

“Well that’s where Cullen was, but I think it was called St Kilda. Yes, Benson-Pope was active, his name did come up.

“Local Labour MP Michael Cullen – now the Attorney-General – and one of his enthusiastic party workers, a schoolteacher by the name of David Benson-Pope, helped quash public concern about a coverup of the bondage and pedophile ring” That name was definitely prominent around that time. He’s a bald-headed guy isn’t he?”

“He is.”

“Yeah. And he was a teacher, something to do with Bayfield High. I think at that stage he might have even been involved in Cullen’s campaign. His name certainly came up in relation to those schools and I think he was the man who distributed them at Bayfield High.

“The examiner’s report was very widely spread,” Lewis told Investigate. “These MPs took them to those service groups and asked them to distribute them. Detective Murray Gallagher was the head of the Lions in Dunedin, and he came to me pretty disgusted.

“I suppose they worked on the basis that if they got all the service groups, the movers and shakers of Dunedin, and into the headmasters when concerned parents tried to talk about the cover-up, that they could dampen the fires a bit.

“They defended their actions, they said there was so much innuendo going on about the inquiry, and they were sorry the guy they appointed as an independent examiner wasn’t independent at all – he’d been a member of the police tribunal – but they didn’t think that influenced his report...Nobody wore that, and that was the thing that was going on then with regard to that inquiry.

“It was Cullen, the whole lot, carte blanche across the board, all the Dunedin MPs. Cullen I think was the MP for St Kilda. There was another guy, a younger guy, Clive Matthewson as well.”

It is here that the story takes a much more sinister turn. Had Dunedin’s rogue police team been brought under control by the Labour government in 1986 – when Tom Lewis finally gave up the fight and left the country – much of what followed might not have happened.

If, instead of running damage control, the current AttorneyGeneral Michael Cullen had pushed for an open and hon-

est police investigation, and prosecution of any officer found perverting the course of justice, history might have changed.

Cullen, even then, had influence in the Labour government in his position as senior government whip.

It didn’t happen, and instead the corruption in Dunedin worsened, setting the scene for even grislier offending, as you’re about to read.

One of the unspoken themes in the 1984 investigation outlined above was the possibility that the audience in the sex shows may have included Dunedin police officers, as well as the aforementioned Labour cabinet minister. Investigate has now been able to document instances of senior police officers visiting the city’s brothels and demanding free sex in return for not busting the joints.

You’ve already seen us quoting one police officer about the fact that rookie policewomen were forced to have sex with higher ranked officers, now we can reveal how police were pulling a similar stunt in at least one major establishment, Reflections, owned and run by Jack and Winnie Ingersoll.

‘Megan’, a former escort interviewed by Investigate in Dunedin says police had an “arrangement” for free sex in the brothels.

“I worked at a parlour at one stage and there were police that came in there. They never paid. They thought they had every right to come in there and have the services.

It was all quite shocking to me and I didn’t know what the procedure was, I was a bit naive about it all and I wasn’t very impressed. But obviously if a person can do that with me, and I had more clues than some of them, then yes, girls could be taken advantage of.

“Definitely it went on, without a doubt, that police took advantage of the girls...This was about 1991, 92, when I worked there.”

There was, she says, a mixture of uniform branch and plainclothes detectives. She also recalls one police officer who had INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 33

Detective Senior Sergeant Jim Doyle, 2IC on the Bain murder investigation. TVNZ/EYEWITNESS

sex with her then tried to get her to smoke a cannabis joint with him.

“He had a big bag of this dope, a huge bag. When he went to the toilet I reached across for an ordinary cigarette and accidentally knocked some of his papers on the side table, and I saw he had an invitation to the police ball.”

In return for enjoying free sex with prostitutes, police officers turned a blind eye to offences such as using underage schoolgirls in the parlours.

Which brings us to yet another twist in this increasingly serious story: in late 1993, perhaps early 1994, Bayfield High School dropout Laniet Bain began working part time at the Reflections massage parlour. She would have been aged just 17. It is extremely likely that part of her “initiation” involved being forced to have sex with Dunedin police officers. And one of those officers was quite likely Detective Sergeant Milton Weir – the man who later controversially spearheaded the Bain family murder investigation and allegedly planted evidence to implicate David Bain.

In a statement dictated to Colin Withnall QC in his presence but left unsigned amid fears for her life, Dunedin woman Susan Sutton recounts a conversation where one of her friends told her about Milton Weir’s behaviour.

“Joyce has also told me about what Milton used to do when he was in the squad that was in charge of the Dunedin massage parlours. She said he would insist on having sex with the new young girls at the parlours as a perk of the job, and that Jack 34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

Det Sgt Milton Weir. NZHERALD

and Winnie Ingersoll would arrange it for him.

“Also, some of the girls who were under age or had a drug conviction and accordingly weren’t allowed to work in the parlour would be allowed to work in parlours provided that they gave Weir free sex, not only for him but for his mates.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

Susan Sutton’s statement confirms what Investigate had already heard from Megan. But there’s even more corroboration – Megan doesn’t know either Sutton or her friend Joyce Conwell (aka Joyce Blondell); she’d already quit the parlours to work as a private escort before their time there.

Were senior Dunedin police officers sexual clients of underage prostitute Laniet Bain? Did that have a bearing on how the police conducted their investigation into the Bain homicides of June 20, 1994?

One man who knows something is Dean Cottle, who told police he’d met Laniet in a bar in Dunedin in August 1993.

Cottle’s statement was taken by Detective Malcolm Inglis, who later worked on the David Benson-Pope tennis balls investigation.

The statement is intriguing for both its explosive content, and the apparent lack of interest of police in what Cottle was telling them.

For example, he reveals: “About the family, she told me that her father Robin had been having sex with her and this had been happening for year [sic].

That he was still doing this as I believed it...she didn’t want it coming out what had happened to her, I wasn’t to tell anyone.”

T

he Bain family had lived in Papua New Guinea for years, in a region where incest and group sex were cultural traditions. One book on the Bain murders alleges the family fell victim to sexual misconduct there and that the practice took hold. Cottle’s statement seems to back that up to an extent: “The night she told me about what her father had done to her, she also told me before this that something had happened to her in Papua New Guinea. She didn’t say what, but I presumed she meant something sexual. After that she started crying and told me about what her father did to her...She also told me that her sister Arawa had been involved in some prostitution.”

It is well documented that Laniet’s mother, Margaret Bain, was becoming increasingly deranged and obsessed with New Age rituals. It has also been alleged that Margaret Bain had a sexual relationship with her sons. It is no exaggeration to say that the Bain family was seriously dysfunctional.

While author Joe Karam has speculated that Laniet sparked the murders by threatening to reveal how her father had been having sex with her, it seems likely that such a revelation would not be news inside a family with wide incest issues resulting from their Papuan lifestyle. Indeed, Karam asserts that Laniet may have given birth at age 11 to a child resulting from her father’s incest, which was adopted out in Papua New Guinea.

Hello! If Laniet was truly pregnant at 11 to her father, how was a revelation of further incest going to add anything to the debate within the house?

A more likely explanation is that Laniet was planning to reveal her involvement in prostitution at the brothel used by Dunedin’s police force, and Cottle’s statement again appears to back this up. He says he saw Laniet just before she was murdered: “I stopped and spoke to her on the footpath for about 5-10 minutes. She told me that she was going to make a new start of everything, that her parents had been questioning her about what she was doing. She said she was going to tell them everything and make a clean start of things...She had always been very scared of her parents finding out what she was doing. I thought by saying this she was going to tell her parents about prostitution.”

You’d think with dynamite like this in Dean Cottle’s statement that police would be all over him with questions. Apparently not.

There appears to have been no major effort to follow up Cottle’s leads, and Laniet’s diary containing her list of clients’ names and phone numbers mysteriously disappeared.

The officer in charge of the scene examination at the Bain murders was Milton Weir.

Susan Sutton and Joyce Blondell were both working in the sex industry in the mid 1990s.

“I first met Milton Weir in 1995,” Sutton told Colin Withnall QC in her statement, “when Joyce Blondell asked me to perform a foursome with her and [Detective Sergeant Jim] Doyle and Weir and myself at the Golden Fleece Hotel, Waikouaiti.

“The main thing I want to talk about is his unstable nature... he had a very short fuse and would fly off the handle over virtually nothing at all, would rant and rave. He would have to take pills to get himself back under control.

“Some particular occasions that I recall was one night he took me to a barbecue at a house in Waverley, the address of which I have not yet been able [to] locate but I remember it because there [are] two ornamental lions at the entrance to the drive.

“There were about 20 people present at this barbecue and in the bathroom in the house was a supply of cocaine there for people to use. During the night we were out by the barbecue and there was a cat which started rubbing up against Milton Weir’s leg – Weir reacting by grabbing a barbecue tool and chopping the cat to death in an absolute frenzy. I was just horrified but other people there just laughed.”

Significantly, a Dunedin lawyer has independently confirmed he was told the Milton Weir Cat-killing story by another police officer who attended the same barbecue. That lawyer has never seen the statements of Susan Sutton or Joyce Blondell and is unaware they even exist. Needless to say, no police officer has ever seen the statements either until now.

Elsewhere in Sutton’s statement there are equally chilling nuggets: “Weir has told me about an incident at the Police Club one night when a police officer put a bag over the head of a girl (I think another police officer) and then raped her in the Police Station. Weir told me this because he thought it was very funny.

I wasn’t told the names of the people involved.

“Joyce also told me that she had some video tapes of Dunedin Police involved in various sexual acts. I told her that I didn’t believe her and challenged her to show me the tapes. She did show me some of the tapes although some of them I wouldn’t look at because they were just too disgusting. However, the ones I did see included a film of Detective Sergeant Doyle having sex with a dog. In another one, a ginger haired girl was tied down while four people had sex with her. She was crying and definitely not looking as if this was willing. I recognised Milton Weir as one of them and also [name withheld].”

According to Sue Sutton, this was standard M/O for Milton Weir when it came to aggressive sexual advances.

“On one occasion he rang me at work and wanted me to go out with him. When I told him that I couldn’t, he got very angry, came up to where I worked and again insisted I go with him...grabbed me by the throat and dragged me out to the car and took me to Allanton.

“On another occasion...he came around [to her work] and brought some blue cord and grabbed my wrists and tied them up, and said I was going with him and I could either get in the front of the car or he would put me in the boot.

“I have been asked by Mr Withnall why I didn’t go to the Police about Weir’s behaviour. My answer is that Milton Weir was the Police, and I was scared of him – I am still scared of him – and I didn’t think that going to the Police would help.

My father is a retired policeman and believes that the Police can do no wrong, and I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”

Sutton wrote that Weir knew she’d been talking to the David Bain defence team for several months, “and over that period I have been receiving dead budgies in my letterbox wrapped up in newspaper. I believe Weir is sending me these.”

When she confronted Weir, he claimed to know the birdbreeding habits of the Bain defence team and claimed one in particular had an aviary. He didn’t.

But the police were prepared to fight even dirtier. A file note

by Colin Withnall QC reveals : “On Thursday June 1 I was told by a person who is closely associated with and influential in the Black Power movement in Dunedin that police have been spreading the word to gangs and to ‘lifers’ in prison that [a Bain defence associate] ‘was INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 35

“In the context of dead budgies in the letterbox, rape threats, violence and intimidation, this criminal slander by members of the Dunedin Police was par for the course” kicked out of the police for sodomising his son’.”

The clear intent of the police, records Withnall, was to make the associate a marked man in the criminal world where “kiddy-fiddlers” are not tolerated. The man, of course, had done no such thing and the official records show he resigned from Dunedin Police in 1992 honourably. But in the context of dead budgies in the letterbox, rape threats, violence and intimidation, this criminal slander by members of the Dunedin Police was par for the course.

Joyce Blondell’s statement records similar intimidation and slander: “Milton Weir and other police have gone out of their way to try and stop me from talking to [the Bain defence team] and others...more importantly the threats and violence we have suffered at the hands of certain police to stuff us up and stop us from talking to [them].

“Last year, 1999, Milton Weir visited me at my Mum’s after he had finished in the police and threatened me not to talk to [the Bain team]...or there would be serious repercussions.”

Are you starting to see the pattern? These are police officers, sworn to uphold the law, knowingly lying in order to intimi36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

date witnesses who could testify about police rape, drug use and corruption.

In another report obtained by Investigate, it is alleged that the corruption extends far higher than Milton Weir, and much further than Dunedin: “It has come to our attention that Weir has been afforded a level of protection from a very high rank within the Police,” says the report, before naming the individual and his position in another major city police force.

The report tracks Weir’s activities at other locations where he has been stationed, including this from Christchurch: “Whilst in Christchurch we managed to ascertain that Milton Weir was a regular visitor to certain parlours as a client.

Information gleaned was that he looked after at least three of the parlours, meaning they were left alone and allowed to break the law openly in the following areas: 1. Running an unlicensed bar 2. Live sex shows which included audience participation 3. Drug dealing 4. Underage sex “Weir left these places alone on a professional basis on the

condition that he and his mates could visit them at any time free of charge and obtain free sexual pleasures for turning a blind eye to any breaches of the law. The establishments where Weir was indulging are the following: 1. Atami Bath House 2. Felicity’s 140 3. Penthouse 4. The Boutique Lounge “Weir regularly arranged private shows for him and his friends away from the Atami in places such as the Ferrymead Tavern and the Christchurch Police Club. At the Ferrymead Tavern it became public that a uniformed police officer actively took part in indecencies on stage. This was covered up by Weir who conducted the inquiry.

“There was an incident on one occasion at the Police Club which involved hookers and Weir bundled one of them into the boot of an unmarked police car after striking her.

“From all the information gleaned whilst in Christchurch the picture which was painted for us was one of police corruption on a large scale. A lot of other information [about] offending by police was obtained but not relevant to your matter or the person you are interested in. For example, we have the names of several police officers who are dealing in illicit substances (drugs) and using.”

The report also reveals that TVNZ’s Holmes show conducted an on-camera interview with a prostitute detailing “very compelling complaints about Milton Weir criminally offending”, but didn’t run the story because other sex workers were too scared to go on tape.

While investigators were talking to the woman concerned, a CIB car pulled up and, as the report notes, “she was visited by members of the local CIB who intimidated her. Colin Withnall QC was contacted immediately – he proceeded to the property where he ordered them to leave. This is documented on a television news broadcast.

“As a result of this ‘lady’ not only talking to [TV reporter] Mike Valintine, but also to Colin Withnall QC and Stephen O’Driscoll, solicitor [now a judge], [it] led to Withnall having a private meeting with the Commissioner of Police and tabling a formal complaint of police corruption. The Commissioner of Police then appointed a police member from outside the district to conduct an inquiry...unfortunately, when this officer interviewed the said lady she then started to recant...the matter then fell over. It could be said the Police obtained the statement they desired.”

It was, of course, simply a matter of police protecting their own by intimidating the witnesses. And the sheer scale of that intimidation is incredible. According to Joyce Blondell, she confessed to two crimes she did not commit – one of them murder – because of Milton Weir’s threats if she didn’t take the rap.

Blondell is now serving a life sentence at Christchurch Women’s Prison for murder. Her first inkling of trouble was when police reopened a case originally determined as death by natural causes. Nursing home resident Doreen Middlemiss was found dead in June 1998, as elderly rest home patients often are. An autopsy was performed, no foul play was found: death by natural causes was the verdict.

It so happened that Joyce Blondell worked at the rest home, but this was purely coincidental – the rest home had other staff

“I live in fear of Milton Weir and some of his friends in the police, even to this day...he raped me on a number of occasions” as well. But Milton Weir knew Joyce worked there.

And when he found out later in 1998 that Blondell had been talking to the Bain defence team, he hit the roof, as you’ve already seen. Blondell alleges the pressure hit boiling point in late 1999.

“I went into the Dunedin Police station late last year and made a statement admitting hiding in Doreen Middlemiss’ wardrobe and then attacking her and leaving her for dead,” says Blondell in her statement.

Before we continue, how often do you see people – especially former sex workers – turn themselves in voluntarily on an attempted murder when the death had already been ruled natural 18 months earlier? The correct answer, of course, is that you are more likely to see a herd of pigs fly past in RNZAF colours.

Sure enough, Joyce Blondell alleges it was a forced confession.

“I didn’t kill Doreen Middlemiss, I did not hide in her wardrobe, I did not attack or assault her. I made the statement and pleaded guilty because of threats made to me last year [1999] by Milton Weir, a former detective with the Dunedin CIB. “Late last year I was walking down the street in Dunedin INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 37

when Milton Weir came up behind me and said to me to keep walking and not to turn around. He told me that I had to plead guilty and confess to murdering Doreen Middlemiss. Weir further told me what I was to say in my confession and that if I did not, then serious injury or worse, someone I care about a lot could be killed.

“I dwelled on it for a couple of days and then went into the police station and saw Detective Senior Sergeant Kallum Croudis. When I was interviewed regarding Doreen Middlemiss late last year (1999) it was a video interview. I had to do a second video interview because what I had stated to Kallum Croudis in the first one was not what they wanted to hear – it was not what I was told to say.

“Croudis, in my opinion, knew what I was supposed to say because when I said anything he, Croudis, was not happy with my first statement and made me make a second one stating what I had been told to say.

“I have known Milton Weir over a period of four years. Over this period I have been subject to much harrassment, threats and violence by Milton Weir and other police. I live in fear of Milton Weir and some of his friends in the police, even to this day. Milton Weir used to visit me at my address regularly. He would just arrive unannounced. If I was in bed he would hop into bed with me and force me to have sex with him.

“He raped me on a number of occasions and told me that if I did not do what he wanted he would rape [name deleted] who boarded with me. [Name deleted] is the daughter of my friend Sue Sutton.

“I at no stage consented to his advances but I feared for [name deleted’s] safety and believed and still believe to this day that Weir would have abused her had I not allowed him to have sex with me. By allowed, I don’t mean willingly. Intercourse took place on a number of occasions and I can say that he hurt me when this occurred. On these occasions he would also help himself to money after having demanded money from me.

“Over four years, Milton Weir has pinched a number of wallets out of my bag...I would estimate between two to three, maybe four thousand dollars.”

As well as rape, extortion and theft, Blondell alleges Weir enticed one of Blondell’s co-workers at the rest home, Murray Childs, to attack her when he found out Blondell was talking to outsiders.

“When I was beaten up with a baseball bat in 1999...it was Murray Childs who beat me up with the baseball bat which resulted in my having to stay in hospital for a period. As Murray Childs was assaulting me he made the comment to me that I was getting the beating because I had upset Milton Weir.

“The words used were ‘You didn’t listen to Milton – this is from Milton’.”

B

londell also alleges that on one occasion when she couldn’t pay the head detective on the Bain murders $500 in extortion monies, he rang her to say she’d be sorry and there “would be repercussions”.

The following day her car was stolen – witnesses reported seeing a CIB car parked nearby at the time – and left in the raging surf at St Clair beach, with the word “murderer” graffitied on the side.

So Blondell’s “confession” to the attempted murder of Doreen 38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

Middlemiss, resulting in a four year jail sentence, was the culmination of police bullying and attempts to pervert the course of justice.

Murray Childs, who’d already shown himself as one of Milton Weir’s enforcers, then shot dead Blondell’s former partner Alec Rogers, who Blondell had hired to help protect her.

Childs then implicated Blondell, who was jailed as a co-conspirator in the murder and sentenced to life. Another crime she says she didn’t commit.

Blondell’s statement confirms that videotapes of Milton Weir and other police gang raping a woman do exist, and Blondell concludes her statement: “I was forced into confessing to the murder of Doreen Middlemiss by Milton Weir. I fear for my safety even though I am in prison as Milton Weir and Kallum Croudis and other police can arrange things to happen. I genuinely fear for my safety when they find out I have made this statement to you. I fear for my life and that of Sue Sutton and her daughter.

“You need to be talking to Murray Childs. If you can get him to talk you will get most of your answers and evidence against the police who have been criminally offending, but if Childs speaks he will be killed. That is why I don’t think he will talk to you.

“I have more to tell you but I have had enough for one day.

I am exhausted.”

Now here’s the next political twist in this explosive police corruption scandal: Labour MP Tim Barnett was sitting with Joyce Blondell the whole time she was giving her statement.

Barnett had been asked as an MP to help facilitate the urgent meeting with the prisoner, and listened to every word.

Labour cabinet minister Pete Hodgson, likewise, was briefed on the explosive nature of the revelations. Police Minister George Hawkins is recorded as telling Hodgson that the allegations are “groundless” and “old news”. For the Minister to make such a statement, he first had to obtain advice, and Hawkins’ advice would have come direct from Police National Headquarters – the same Police National Headquarters now claiming misconduct was limited to “a very few officers” and was nothing for the public to be concerned about.

Hodgson, meanwhile, appears to have been unconvinced.

He wrote to Corrections Minister Matt Robson expressing concern about the safety of Joyce Blondell in prison, particularly because: “Joyce Blondell has information that would be damaging to a number of Dunedin officers. The information has been described to me. If it exists, it is serious indeed.”

In reply to Pete Hodgson’s concerns, Corrections Minister Matt Robson sent in the elephants: “My private secretary contacted the manager of Christchurch Women’s Prison last week...Prison management interviewed Ms [Blondell] who stated she is not concerned at all for her safety.”

No, she was probably freaking out that suddenly prison bosses knew she’d spoken up.

Robson did acknowledge a key point: “This inmate has alleged she has knowledge of a videotape which demonstrates serious misconduct by members of Dunedin Police. You may wish to follow up this matter with the Minister of Police directly.”

Indeed. So where was the government-ordered inquiry into police corruption back in 2000? It didn’t happen. Labour has known about these allegations for seven years, but nothing has

Centre: Dunedin’s top detective, Chief Inspector Peter Robinson, with Jim Doyle, faces media questions outside the Bain funeral in 1994. TVNZ/EYEWITNESS

been done. A woman continues to languish in jail for crimes she probably did not commit, whilst allegations of police corruption far exceeding the Louise Nicholas case go uninvestigated.

Perhaps a clue as to how corrupt the New Zealand Police are can be found in our interview with former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis.

“Just as an aside to show you how the police work, when I was going around NZ doing the book tour [in 1998], I ended up in Christchurch in a little bar in Merivale, and [Superintendent Paul] Fitzharris who was then the head of the South Island police district asked me to join him at his table. I said no thanks, so then he came over to me and said, ‘Look, I’ll just give you a bit of information. You are not going to have your book reprinted, you will not get any more publicity after this week on your book. It’s virtually sold out now and that’s going to be the end of it. And there will not be a reprint, even though it has sold. You can believe me or not believe me, but that’s what’s going to happen.’

“And that’s exactly what did happen. My book editor at the publishing company resigned in disgust over it. And the funny thing is many of the copies of my book were actually bought by the police department!”

For a book that sold a bestselling 10,000 copies, there are remarkably few copies of Cover-ups & Cop-outs in public circulation. It was never reprinted.

IN SUMMARY:

Investigate has been shown the names and specific allegations about a large number of current and former police officers alleged to have been involved in multiple rapes, drug deals, extortion,

perversion of the course of justice, sexual misconduct, abuse of power, bringing the police into disrepute, abduction and kidnapping, fraud and a range of other crimes. Multiple police districts and National Headquarters are involved. There is far, far more than we have published in this major investigation.

Investigate understands that the people who compiled the list will only provide it if a fully independent Royal Commission of Inquiry is established into the performance of the New Zealand Police, with wide terms of reference and full powers to subpoena, compel and take evidence on oath. Our contacts do not believe the police have sufficient integrity to investigate these allegations against senior officers, and no other independent law enforcement agency exists capable of investigating the police.

If the matters had been solely historic in nature, we would have chosen not to publish. But we have obtained extensive evidence, not published as part of this report, of alleged serious criminal offending

by Dunedin police officers right up to the present moment.

Additionally, some of the people involved historically remain highly placed in the police.

One final point, in court testimony a former police inspector has confirmed that the police bond is “a brotherhood” that transcends the end of the job and continues “your whole life”.

Police officers who testify against their mates are said to have broken “the brotherhood”. Therefore, investigators trying to break through this “brotherhood” will be up against officers who may be prepared to lie on oath to support those accused.

Investigate has been told that it is common practice amongst “bent officers” to keep a notebook listing any indiscretions of their colleagues they may become aware of, so that if the need ever arises the colleague can be blackmailed into toeing the INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 39

line. Investigate understands those blackmail lists may include the names of judges and other prominent people who have visited prostitutes – it has been suggested compromised judges deliver the verdicts that their blackmailers require.

Any Royal Commission of Inquiry will need to be able to invite submissions from former police or the public, and should be able to provide immunity from prosecution to those officers willing to testify where it can be shown their own role in criminality or breach of procedure has been minor. This would prevent the criminal element within the police from exercising their blackmail “card”.

Submissions should also be invited from the criminal fraternity and prisoners – especially as the police have had no qualms about using prisoners as secret witnesses in high profile trials for years.

Because of the allegations that the Labour government has been implicated in covering-up the real extent of police corruption, decisions on immunity should not be made by the Attorney-General but by a panel of retired High Court judges untarnished by political links. Any attempt to skew either the Royal Commission or the judges panel with compromised appointees will be uncovered by Investigate magazine, if it happens.

This is not the first time a media organisation has called for a full Royal Commission – back on October 2, 1985, the national Catholic newspaper The Tablet called for just such a Commission in the wake of the Dunedin sex scandal. The Labour government refused.

Investigate has absolutely no doubt that the corruption uncovered here is of a scale similar to that afflicting the New South Wales and Queensland police forces in times past, and that New Zealanders cannot regain confidence in law enforcement until the rot has been cleared out.

For obvious legal reasons, and also because lives have been threatened already, Investigate has chosen not to seek advance comment from any of those police officers named in this article. The magazine has, however, corroborated allegations and assembled similar fact evidence that we have not published.

Finally, some may ask why Investigate has chosen to release the names of the women making the statements about Milton Weir, given the extreme fear they have for their lives.

The answer is very simple: in our experience of extortion and death threats, sunlight is the best disinfectant. For more than a decade, some of these people have lived in fear of retribution if they ever spoke up. Now that they have been named publicly, the entire country is aware of their plight.

Additionally, with the Beehive instituting clumsy inquiries about the women through both Police National Headquarters and the Corrections Department at a political level, their safety was compromised seven years ago. Investigate is, if anything, giving their evidence some much-needed context and ensuring that fresh questions are asked about Joyce Blondell’s convictions in the first instance.

Police National Headquarters, Dunedin police and other police regions need to know that a number of people now have copies of crucial documentation, and if anything happens to a witness – particularly one that documentation exists for but who we haven’t named – there will be, to use Milton Weir’s turn of phrase, “repercussions”.

To briefly recap the main points of this special report, the magazine alleges: 40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

1. That current Police Commissioner Howard Broad had, and was watching, bestiality videos at his going away party from the Dunedin CIB at 19 Arawa St 2. That current Police Commissioner Howard Broad fondled junior staff whilst stationed at the Dunedin CIB 3. That Howard Broad, when he stated that only a “few” officers were involved in sexual misconduct, either knew or should have known of the extensive sexual misconduct in the Dunedin CIB 4. That Police National Headquarters, Dunedin Police and the Labour Government helped quash an investigation into a child sex, bondage and bestiality ring operating in Dunedin in 1984 run by the father of a police officer and attended by at least one Labour cabinet minister 5. That current Attorney-General Michael Cullen and the current Minister responsible for CYFS, David BensonPope, helped run damage control over the child sex, bondage and bestiality case in 1985 6. That current Labour coalition MPs Pete Hodgson, Tim Barnett, George Hawkins and Matt Robson were aware of major allegations of police misconduct from 2000 onwards, including the existence of videotapes of police rapes and bestiality involving police officers 7. That by failing to rein in police corruption brought to their attention in the eighties and again in 2000, the Labour government has permitted the culture of corruption to widen in that time, wrecking more lives 8. That former Wellington District Commander and current Police National Headquarters officer, Superintendent John Kelly indecently assaulted a number of women, including the daughter of a previous police commissioner 9. That Dunedin and Christchurch Police had arrangements to turn a blind eye to organised crime – including underage sex and drug dealing – in return for sexual favours from brothels 10. That police have maintained files on key politicians and public figures capable of being used to blackmail the government, judges, lobby groups and even police association members into supporting the status quo 11. That Dunedin police officers, former and current, have been involved in multiple rapes of junior female police staff, prostitutes and civilians, drug deals, and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, including falsifying charges 12. That several of the top officers in the David Bain case, including Milton Weir, were allegedly corrupt police officers 13. That the officer involved in the alleged rape of a court worker, detailed in our last issue and cleared by Police National Headquarters last month, is also a corrupt officer 14. That the culture of police corruption, far from being localised to the Bay of Plenty or historic, extends to a large number of jurisdictions because of staff movements, and continues to the present day 15. That the only way to weed the bad cops out of the force is a Royal Commission, because the Old Boys Network within the police is currently looking after its own interests and bringing discredit to the many hardworking honest police who do not have the institutional power to bring change

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 41

GUN SHY

The Firearms Debate Reignites

In the wake of the Virginia Tech killings, fresh questions are being asked about gun control. The answers, however, may surprise you when we put New Zealand’s crime rate up against Virginia’s. IAN WISHART runs the numbers

I

t’s the names we remember. Not of the people, but the places. Columbine. Dunblane. Port Arthur. Aramoana.

Raurimu. Paerata. Virginia Tech. Each synonymous with carnage, terror and emotional trauma. Each with one thing in common: guns.

As news coverage broke of the Virginia Tech massacre last month, it took only hours before the news media worldwide were seeking out the opinions of anti-gun lobbyists like former Fair Go host Philip Alpers, who runs the website GunPolicy.org. Alpers told TV3’s John Campbell that while people would try and blame mental illness, drugs or violent videos, the real issue was guns.

Everywhere you looked, daily media editorials were calling for an end to America’s affinity with guns; the right to bear arms contained in the second amendment. On Newstalk ZB, callers talked of America’s “sick culture of violence”, with many of the hosts nodding in agreement.

“You’ll call me a wussy liberal,” media commentator Deborah Hill-Cone told ZB’s drive host Larry Williams, “but I can’t see why they need guns.”

42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

At one level, you can understand the sentiment. At another, though, it reveals the kneejerk mental conditioning we’ve all been subjected to. America has been awash with guns for more than a hundred years. For the vast majority of that time, school massacres were unheard of. Likewise New Zealand. Apart from Stanley Graham’s rampage 60 years ago, gun massacres were unknown in modern New Zealand until the mentallyderanged David Gray picked up an assault rifle and gunned down 13 people in Aramoana, a remote community on the tip of the Otago Peninsula where few people had guns and critics accused police of letting victims bleed to death over a 24 hour period while they followed a policy of “containment”.

The “wussy liberal” sentiment also overlooks a very fundamental reason for the right to bear arms being enshrined in the US Constitution. In every case in world history, totalitarian regimes have only been able to arise and cement control in the absence of any ability by citizens to fight back. The total disarmament of a civilian population in favour of state police and military may be tolerable in a democratic state today, but it does increase the risk of abuse of power by a future regime.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 43

The question then, is not so much whether a total ban on Given that much has been made of the US being a “sick...viogun ownership is justified, but whether tighter controls on gun lent” society, we wondered how that compared with the New ownership are justified to make it harder for criminals and the Zealand figures. mentally ill to obtain them.

In contrast, New Zealand’s violent crime rate as measured in Do guns kill people, or do people kill people? As well as the official government publication, Crime in New Zealand: being a bumper sticker, it’s a hot topic of debate right now.

1996 – 2005, was 1,180/100,000 in 2005.

Virginia is one of the most liberal states in the US when it That’s right. Gun-shy New Zealand has a violent crime rate comes to gun laws, but the killings actually took place in a gun250% higher than the US! But the comparison gets even worse free zone, a place where guns are banned. While all Virginians when compared to the American state of Vermont, which has are permitted by law to carry pistols and handguns concealed the most liberal gun laws in the US. on their person, Virginia Tech University voted to ban stuVermont’s violent crime rate in 2005, as measured by the dents from bringing their guns to campus several years ago.

FBI’s UCR, was only 119/100,000, just a quarter of the US Administrators told students they wanted people to “feel safe”, average. In comparison, New Zealand’s violent crime rate is and banning all guns would achieve that.

1,000% – ten times – higher than Vermont’s, where citizens Now, with 32 innocent lives lost during a killer’s two hour can own as many handguns as they like and carry them as conslaughterfest, the big question is being asked: if other students cealed weapons in public places. had been armed that day, how many people would Cho SeungAnd what about Virginia, scene of America’s worst ever civilHui have been able to kill? ian gun massacre? The UCR records a violent crime rate of only Ironically, Virginians can point to a similar incident only five 282/100,000, a little over half the US average. years ago, when a gunman burst into a law school and opened When we put these figures to ex-pat gun control advocate fire. He managed to kill three people, but was himself brought Philip Alpers, he simply refused to believe it: to heel by two armed students and an ex-Marine who’d raced INVESTIGATE: The states in the US that have the liberal guns to retrieve guns from their cars when the shooting broke out. laws are the ones that have the lowest crime rates. What’s the The death toll would response to that? undoubtedly have been ALPERS: That’s only the higher, but for their quick gun lobby that claim that.

“Now, with 32 innocent lives lost durintervention. You’d think Those studies have been unithe trio would be hailed as versally critiqued by much ing a killer’s two hour slaughterfest, heroes but, instead, of the more established outfits like the big question is being asked: if other 280 news stories about the Harvard and so on, and 2002 shooting, only four students had been armed that day, there’s not much credibilmentioned that the gunman ity to those papers. None of how many people would Cho Seunghad been overpowered by them, or the majority, have Hui have been able to kill?” armed students. not been published in peer Gun advocate John Lott, reviewed journals. writing in the New York INVESTIGATE: I’m just lookPost a week after the tragedy, cited “the liberal, anti-gun ing at some stats on state crime rates from the FBI, and in Washington Post, which reported that the heroes had simVermont for example the FBI lists for 2005 a violent crime rate ply ‘helped subdue’ the killer. The leftist, anti-gun New York of 119/100,000, New Zealand’s is 1,180/100,000 – that’s ten Times, not surprisingly, noted only that the attacker was ‘tacktimes higher. led by fellow students’.

ALPERS: Well, that’s a statistical anomaly I’m sure nobody can “Most in the media who discussed how the attack was stopped account for. If anybody thinks that NZ has a violent crime rate said: ‘students overpowered a gunman,’ ‘students ended the – what was it, a hundred and ten times higher? rampage by tackling him,’ ‘the gunman was tackled by four INVESTIGATE: No, ten times higher. male students before being arrested,’ or ‘Students ended the ALPERS: Ten times higher than Vermont. That’s statistically rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman, who questionable I would say. I haven’t seen those figures. dropped his weapon’.”

INVESTIGATE: I’m looking at the violent crime rate for Virginia – Media coverage in New Zealand has been decidedly “antiALPERS: I’ve never seen anything like that published in a repugun” in its tone, so we decided to put the presumption that table journal. Statistics can be wildly exaggerated and distorted guns cause an increase in violence to the test. by anyone who wants to and I can’t be expected to comment on Investigate surveyed US violent crime rates between the years something I’ve never seen.

1960 to 2005. The figures are taken from the FBI’s Uniform But the statistics, of course, are not gun lobby figures but Crime Reports, or UCRs, which are a respected yardstick used FBI and NZ Police figures. Then there’s the inconvenient truth by criminologists and researchers the world over. Is it true, we about Kennesaw, Georgia. In 1982, Kennesaw passed a bylaw wondered, that states like Virginia with the most liberal gun requiring all households to maintain and keep a firearm in the laws were also the most crime-ridden? house. Since then, reported WorldNetDaily on the back of a Here’s what we found. Overall, the US violent crime rate in Reuters story just after the Virginia Tech massacre, “despite 2005 was 469.2 offences per 100,000 population (469/100,000). dire predictions of ‘Wild West’ showdowns and increased vioThat’s the average for violent crime across the entire 50 states. lence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a 44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

fatal shooting – as a victim, attacker or defender.

“The crime rate initially plummeted for several years after the passage of the ordinance, with the 2005 per capita crime rate actually significantly lower than it was in 1981, the year before passage of the law.

“Prior to enactment of the law, Kennesaw had a population of just 5,242 but a crime rate significantly higher (4,332 per 100,000) than the national average (3,899 per 100,000). The latest statistics available – for the year 2005 – show the rate at 2,027 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the population has skyrocketed to 28,189,” says the WorldNetDaily report.

Now, just to put those overall, total reported crime per capita figures in context, New Zealand’s overall crime rate in 2005 was 9,940/100,000 – admittedly down from its peak of more than 13,200/100,000 in 1992, but still nearly five times higher than gun-toting Kennesaw.

How could it be that New Zealand’s crime rates are much worse than gun-friendly states and cities in the US? Again, we continued to press for an alternative rational explanation from Philip Alpers.

INVESTIGATE: Well you’ve got the case of the town of Kennesaw in Georgia – ALPERS: Oh, look, that has been so thoroughly rebutted, and completely discredited. Utterly discredited.

INVESTIGATE: Yeah, but Reuters have just done an interview with the local police chief, 2005 stats show the crime rate has halved. In 25 years since the town required homeowners to have a gun in each house, there has not been one single incident where a resident has been involved in a fatal shooting as either a victim, attacker or a defender.

ALPERS: OK, well I think it’s clear where you are going Ian,

and I don’t want to buy into this. I’m standing on a cellphone, I’m not in front of the statistics.

INVESTIGATE: But you said it had been debunked, Philip?

ALPERS: I have read the papers that completely discredit that Kennesaw Georgia stuff! It’s one of the oldest myths in the gun industry arsenal and it is completely nutty for you to suggest that Kennesaw Georgia proves that point.

INVESTIGATE: But I’ve just quoted you the statistics – ALPERS: So thoroughly and completely rebutted by very reputable peer reviewed journal articles, not Reuters, not a police officer who’s trying to justify his tiny little town’s policy, but these have been completely rebutted by very reputable studies.

INVESTIGATE: Well, name one?

ALPERS: OK, Webster and...give me your email and I’ll email it to you.

INVESTIGATE: If I can see some figures that actually show what you are saying is correct I’m more than happy – ALPERS: No, I know exactly what you’re going to do because I read your magazine. You’re going to take your own point of view and twist everything to that. Now you can accuse me of that as well, and I can accuse the gun lobby of that – but that’s what you’re doing and it’s clear you’re not going to listen to the other side.

INVESTIGATE: Philip, I listened to you on John Campbell and listened to John Campbell not ask you any hard questions at all. All I’m doing is asking some hard questions because having looked at the stats – and I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise, I really am – but having looked at the stats – ALPERS: OK, well why don’t you ask me, not on the United States, no, OK, look, you can ask me whatever question you like, fire away.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 45

ference between criminals having guns, and householders posINVESTIGATE: NZ’s violent crime stats are three to ten times sessing guns for self defence. higher than the violent crime stats of American states where ALPERS: There seems to be very little relation between a gun concealed weapons are allowed to be carried. Why is that? crime rate and a violent crime rate. A good example is Japan ALPERS: I am not going to allow comparison between apples and where guns are virtually unused, they’re very, very rare. But pears. If you start talking about violent crime rate, that includes Japan has much the same VCR as everywhere else, just as NZ people poking each other in the eye in pubs with their fingers. has much the same VCR rate as the US. INVESTIGATE: Yeah, but statistically that’s the same everywhere.

INVESTIGATE: But on the FBI figures, NZ has a VCR more ALPERS: But why are you saying that guns have something to do than double the US overall. with people poking each other in the eye with their fingers?

ALPERS: Print that, that’s fine.

INVESTIGATE: You and I both know that most violent crime is INVESTIGATE: But you have no response to it? not eye poking in pubs.

ALPERS: I haven’t seen those figures. This is insane. Absurd. I ALPERS: They’re certainly not, and neither are gun crimes. Gun can see now how you get your articles, your technique is pretty, crimes are a very, very small proportion of violent crime, so when unusual. you talk about violent crime you’re not talking about guns.

INVESTIGATE: Philip, you make your living from being a gun INVESTIGATE: Yes, but what the gun lobby will say is that in policy advocate. You are a PR person who is putting this case those states where people are allowed to carry guns, the crime every single day. I am simply asking some hard questions and rate overall is lower because criminals don’t like to take their you can’t answer them. chances on whether a victim or potential victim is going to ALPERS: I’m happy for you to give me questions, and I’ll send shoot them. So therefore the violent crime rate in those states, you an email. on the FBI’s own figures, is showing a huge difference in crime INVESTIGATE: I will email you, and explain why these figures rates between those where guns are banned and those where are relevant. To me it is patently obvious, and it is a simple guns are allowed. And NZ’s violent crime rate far exceeds the thing. If there is some rational argument as to why they are crime rate of the US overall, so I’m kind of curious how this is not relevant then I’m happy to hear it. If the gun debate is if your logic is correct? being discussed by media ALPERS: I’m not going to types and being restricted to compare violent crime rates this narrow little area you’ve with anything that suggests “For 2005, the most recent year we got it restricted to, and is not guns affect violent crime rates. seem to be able to get comparalooking at the wider issue INVESTIGATE: Why? – that guns defend peoALPERS: Because it’s ble figures for, New Zealand’s murple from crime – and you like saying that pedestrians der rate was 2.7 per 100,000 people. say ‘I’m not willing to look somehow affect – no, I’m at that because it doesn’t fit not going to draw analogies.

Vermont’s was only 1.3, less than half my analysis’, then there’s no It’s not logical to say that a NZ’s murder rate” intelligent debate going on. tiny, tiny, tiny proportion ALPERS: I don’t say – you’re of crime, in other words, putting words in my mouth gun crime, affects all violent and I’m not going to accept that. crime. The gun lobby regularly use this as a tactic, it’s apples INVESTIGATE: Fine, then correct me. and pears. Violent crime is not the same as gun homicide or ALPERS: I don’t need to. You’re going to print what you want gun suicide. They are subcategories of each other and if you to print, and who cares, really. want me to compare stuff you have to stick to gun related crime INVESTIGATE: A hundred thousand readers, perhaps. and gun related results. There’s no point in saying that the road ALPERS: Up to you. toll somehow affects the infant mortality rate.

Investigate did email the full statistics across to Alpers, and in INVESTIGATE: No, but the speed limit might affect the road toll? return he sent back links to studies that he had suggested would ALPERS: What you’re saying is what you are going to print. “debunk” our line of questioning. Unfortunately, they didn’t.

I’m happy for you to say that, you go ahead and print it. Don’t The reason for that was their focus. Alpers did not want to disexpect me to jump into and just swallow what you’re saying. cuss the proven facts that states with higher gun ownership INVESTIGATE: Then rebut it, rebut it with some science. have lower violent crime rates. As you saw above, he wanted to ALPERS: I’m happy to send you that. For instance, in America focus only on gun crimes as the basis for comparison. all these small studies came out, then the Yales and Harvards In this regard, Alpers and other gun control advocates are and so on brought out their studies, and then all of it went entirely correct, the evidence clearly shows that states with right up the line to the National Academy of Science in the US, higher gun ownership have a higher level of gun-related inciand the NAS brought out their report so I’ll send you that and dents (not necessarily crimes – we’ll return to that point later). hopefully that’ll bring you down a bit.

But as Alpers also admits, gun crime actually makes up only INVESTIGATE: I’m not working from any obscure statistics, “a tiny, tiny, tiny proportion of crime”. Alpers wants people to these are FBI and NZ police figures. be sufficiently outraged about “a tiny, tiny, tiny proportion of ALPERS: I’m not interested in violent crime, if you’re going to crime” to the extent that all guns are banned, or at least tightly ring up and talk to me about gun deaths, that’s fine. controlled by the government.

INVESTIGATE: So you would be suggesting to me there is a dif46, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

The Webster study he offered to send, for example, found that: “In homes with guns, the homicide of a household member is about 3 times more likely to occur than in homes without guns. The risk of suicide of a household member is increased by approximately 5 times in homes with guns.”

But the gun lobby argues, with some backing based on the FBI figures, that a high level of civilian gun ownership actually deters a much larger proportion of criminals than just the “tiny, tiny, tiny proportion” who specifically misuse guns. If there’s an increased risk that burgling a house will get you shot, will a criminal take that risk? If there’s an increased risk that a potential mugging victim will grab a concealed gun and shoot his or her attackers, will a criminal take that risk? In Vermont, where there are virtually no restrictions on the ownership of Glock semi-automatic pistols and other handguns, the figures appear to speak for themselves: a violent crime rate of 119/100,000 compared to California’s gun-restricted 524/100,000.

The most tightly gun-controlled area in the whole United States is Washington DC, with a virtual total ban. You’d expect its violent crime rate to be low, right? In 2005, it was 1,459/100,000. Remember, New Zealand’s violent crime rate

at 1,180/100,000 is only marginally less than the mean streets of Washington DC. Auckland city’s rate is 1,236/100,000. Counties/Manukau police district’s violent crime rate is 1,621/100,000. In other words, for the vast majority of people in terms of their crime experiences, Manukau city is actually a more dangerous place than Washington DC. Neither Manukau nor Washington DC allows you to carry a concealed handgun, whereas Virginia, where concealed weapons are common – except on the University campus – has a violent crime rate of only 282/100,000, which is roughly only 1/6th the rate of Manukau city.

Expressed another way, you are between six and 14 times more likely to be mugged in Manukau, than you are in gunhappy Virginia or Vermont, USA. Are New Zealanders inherently more badly behaved than Americans? Is New Zealand society six times sicker than the state that produced America’s worst-ever gun massacre?

Perhaps, we wondered, the prevalence of guns in Vermont might result in a higher number of murders than New Zealand.

We checked. For 2005, the most recent year we seem to be able to get comparable figures for, New Zealand’s murder rate was INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 47

2.7 per 100,000 people. Vermont’s was only 1.3, less than half NZ’s murder rate.

In Washington DC, where no one is allowed to carry a gun at all except police and criminals, the murder rate was a staggering 35/100,000 that year.

New Zealand’s rate of sexual attacks, at 53/100,000, compares unfavourably with Washington DC on 34/100,000, the US national average of 32/100,000, or gun-happy Virginia and Vermont which are both on 23/100,000.

For robbery, New Zealand’s rate is 54/100,000, while Vermont’s is just 12/100,000. Virginia has a robbery rate of 99/100,000 – very similar to Manukau city’s 95/100,000. It is worth noting however that the just-released figures for 2006 show Manukau’s robbery rate has shot to 149/100,000.

New York, where guns are also banned however, has a robbery rate of 184/100,000. Washington DC’s is – wait for it – 672/100,000.

In the interview with Alpers, he suggested a National Academies of Science overview had taken account of all the gun research to date: “All of it went right up the line to the National Academies of 48, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

Science in the US, and the NAS brought out their report so I’ll send you that and hopefully that’ll bring you down a bit.”

So what does the NAS report actually say?

“Research linking firearms to criminal violence and suicide is seriously limited by a lack of credible information on who owns firearms and on individuals’ encounters with violence...

Moreover, many studies have methodological flaws or provide contradictory evidence; others do not determine whether gun ownership itself causes certain outcomes.”

Hardly a ringing endorsement of the gun control position.

“Research has found associations between gun availability and suicide with guns,” noted the NAS, “but it does not show whether such associations reveal genuine patterns of cause and effect.”

In other words, did owning the gun cause a suicide or would they have killed themselves by another method anyway? Or did they simply buy a gun, rather than a rope, because they were already suicidal?

Alpers told Investigate that Harvard and other institutions had thoroughly rebutted and debunked the idea that gun ownership reduces violent crime rates, but the National Academies of Science report he sent us doesn’t support his claim at all.

“Current research and data on firearms and violent crime are too weak to support strong conclusions about the effects of various measures to prevent and control gun violence...there is no credible evidence that right-to-carry laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime,” says the NAS. In other words, the studies specifically cited as “debunking” the idea are not regarded as “credible” by the National Academies of Science, even though they have been carried out

by Harvard or Yale.

Despite this, Alpers says: “I’ve sent you a bunch of studies which were published in peerreviewed journals. The hypothesis you cite, that “states with liberal gun laws are enjoying much lower crime rates overall,” is by and large not to be found in literature which survived standard academic scrutiny. Instead, your theory is roundly discounted in the scientific literature, including the National Academies of Science report. That’s the peak of US scientific consideration.”

As you’ve seen however, we’ve quoted the NAS report, which says none of the studies to date can be trusted. Which is why Investigate largely ignored the studies and just went straight to the bottom line – comparing raw FBI crime data and ignoring the spin from both the gun lobby and the gun control lobby.

It is often said that higher gun-ownership equates to higher gun related incidents. But that statement doesn’t tell the whole story. When you compare gun homicides (murders committed by gun), you find the states with the highest gun ownership generally have the lowest rates of gun homicides.

STATE

% of households w/guns

Gun homicide rate

Wyoming

59.7%

1/100,000

Alaska

57.8%

3/100,000

Montana

57.7%

1/100,000

South Dakota

56.6%

0.9/100,000

West Virginia

55.4%

3/100,000

In comparison, the states with the lowest gun ownership: STATE

% of households w/guns

Gun homicide rate

Washington DC

3.8%

25/100,000

Hawaii

8.7%

0.7/100,000

New Jersey

12.3%

3/100,000

Massachusetts

12.6%

2/100,000

Rhode Island

12.8%

2/100,000

On those figures, it is impossible to argue that gun ownership is directly related to gun homicide. For the record, the figures were taken from the CDC’s WISQARS data for 2004, used in the anti-gun Miller & Hemenway study published earlier this year by Harvard.

In a stinging critique of Miller & Hemenway, US blogger Jeff Soyer wrote: “Buried within the study, Miller and Hemenway finally admit at their ‘study’ doesn’t prove a causal relationship between homicide and guns in the home but that’s not what their press release says and it’s not how the liberal media is reporting the study results.

“Naturally, all media need do is compare Massachusetts (2/100,000) and New Hampshire (30% ownership, 0.8/100,000) to see that the percentage of homes with firearms has nothing to do with the rate of homicide by firearms.

“The problem isn’t guns. It might be demographics, it might be a failure to lock up criminals or keep them locked up but it isn’t households with guns. That dog don’t hunt,” says Soyer.

Alpers however insists that we should pay no attention to the lower crime rates in states where guns are allowed, and instead focus on firearms deaths. He quotes firearms death rates for Virginia of 11/100,000, compared with New Zealand’s 1.3/100,000. But when homicides only are counted, the rate drops to 3.9/100,000. Vermont’s overall rate was 9/100,000.

Again, when homicides only are selected, Vermont’s rate drops to an incredibly low 0.3/100,000. The vast bulk of Vermont’s gun deaths are suicide.

It is true that a large number of American suicides involve guns, and when lobbyists like Philip Alpers talk about “firearm death rates” in media interviews they are usually including the suicide figures in there. So how do we compare on the suicide front?

In 2003, according to Ministry of Health figures, New Zealand’s suicide rate was 11.5/100,000. In the United States, it was 10.8/100,000. Despite the guns in the US, more New Zealanders are killing themselves than Americans. Virginia’s suicide rate, at 11.1/100,000, is slightly lower than New Zealand’s.

It is true that easy access to guns makes it easier for someone bent on murder-suicide to take a whole lot more people with him. But it is also true, as real incidents have shown, that armed members of the public can and have foiled mass murders in recent years by intervening.

Philip Alpers disagrees, citing the Iraq war zone as proof.

“No such effect seems apparent in the favelas of Rio or in Baghdad. To wish only for escalation, and to always discount prevention, seems to be a hallmark of the gunfight fantasist.”

Perhaps. But 32 American students were gunned down in an area where firearms prevention was already in place. It is likely that many of them, in their dying moments, wished that somebody had been able to shoot back.

Footnote: Because of space limitations caused by our major lead story this month, we could not include all of the material for or against that has been provided to us. Readers interested in hearing the full interview with Philip Alpers on MP3 can find it at www.thebriefingroom.com, along with the studies emailed to us by Philip, and other research links we perused as well. For the record, Investigate believes there is strong merit in tightening gun ownership laws to restrict undesirables, but that ideology – “guns are always good” or “guns are always bad” has no place in intelligent debate on the issue.

The statistics we have quoted here are genuine. They have not been “debunked”, and they require explanation. One final point: we absolutely reject Alpers’ assertion in his interview that he “didn’t have the figures” and we were being unfair.

Alpers was not provided with questions in advance by TV3’s CampbellLive, but was perfectly happy with the question line.

The figures we quoted from were standard FBI crime rate figures which Alpers, as a paid gun control lobbyist for a decade, should have been familiar with.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 49

Rise of the

NEO-COMS The socialists are back

50, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

New Zealand’s new communists wear designer jeans, frequent Ponsonby and Thorndon, are hypocritesextraordinaire, and have far more influence than Karl Marx ever fantasised.

IAN WISHART discovers the links between radical socialism and radical Islam in New Zealand

A

major investigative article in this magazine exposing radical Islam’s growing stranglehold on New Zealand mosques has flushed out an unlikely bunch of bedfellows, and the return of some old favourites. As you will have seen in this month’s Letters pages, more than 150 people have now signed a hateletter to Investigate for daring to delve into visits by Islamic terror-fundraisers to New Zealand.

But the letter is surprising for one big reason: the huge number of socialists and local “moderate” Muslims prepared to condone the most extreme form of Islamofascism: the Wahhabi Salafist strain followed by the al Qa’ida terror group.

Here’s what the signatories wrote in a preface to their letter published on the Scoop website: “The March 2007 edition of Investigate magazine carried a lengthy article by Ian Wishart which claimed that the New Zealand Muslim community is being infected by ‘Islamic extremism’. Mr Wishart’s 18-page rant is New Zealand’s first full-on example of Islamophobic gutter journalism,’ said Grant Morgan, organiser of RAM Residents Action Movement.

“The most basic fact is that nobody in the New Zealand Muslim community has ever been charged with any act of ‘terrorism’, let alone convicted. That puts the lie to his propaganda of fear, suspicion and hate.”

Morgan deliberately overlooks the Saudi men discovered in Hamilton trying to photocopy flight manuals for Boeing 757 jetliners – the same aircraft that were used in the 9/11 attacks just a few months later. Morgan also ignores the discovery that a roommate of the 9/11 hijackers at the time was later found living in New Zealand. Morgan ignores the plans for Sydney’s Lucas Heights nuclear reactor found in an Auckland house used by former members of the Afghan mujihadeen.

Most of all however, Morgan and the 160 or so “useful idiots” who signed his letter deliberately ignore that the local Muslim community have been inviting Islamic clerics with documented links to terrorism, to come to New Zealand and run youth camps and lectures.

Morgan’s letter talks of “our Muslim community” and “peaceful Muslims”, yet those same people invited guests here whose published literature, DVDs and comments include such gems as: “The clash of civilisations is a reality. Western culture ...is an enemy of Islam.” – Bilal Philips “We know the Prophet Muhammed practiced it [marrying a 9 year old girl], it wasn’t abuse or exploitation” – Bilal Philips “There is no such thing as a Muslim having a non-Muslim friend” – Khalid Yasin INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 51

“This whole delusion of the equality of women is a bunch of foolishness...there’s no such thing” – Khalid Yasin “If you prefer the clothing of the [infidels] over the clothing of the Muslims, most of those names that’s on most of those clothings [sic] is faggots, homosexuals and lesbians” – Khalid Yasin “Tried, convicted...punishable by death” – Khalid Yasin on the penalty for being gay “Are you ready to die?” – essay by Siraj Wahhaj on jihad martyrdom “The blessing of death” – essay by Siraj Wahhaj on the need for jihad “The easy way to Paradise – how to get there” – essay by Siraj Wahhaj on the benefits of becoming an Islamic jihadi “Kill Jews and worshippers of the Cross...as well as Hindus” – book worked on by Yahya Ibrahim “Islam is a religion of peace” – Siraj Wahhaj talking to Western reporters

O

n the strength of those claims, all documented in our March article (now available online) from firebrand Wahhabi fanatics who’ve been teaching New Zealand Muslims for at least seven years, Investigate can only conclude that the list of signatories to Grant Morgan’s letter not only endorse such Islamic hatespeech, they also welcome it in New Zealand and believe local “peaceful” Muslims should bring more of these preachers out here.

In their letter, the signatories accuse Investigate of suggesting “that all Muslims adhere to the same ideas, and from this absurd generalisation he attempts to link peaceful Muslims to violent extremists.”

Investigate did not have to “attempt” to link anything: local peaceful Muslims invited the scum of Islam to New Zealand for lecture tours every year, while encouraging followers to read their books and watch their DVDs. Are the invited guests “violent extremists”? Some were conspirators in terror plots to blow up New York landmarks. Others frequently talk of a coming battle between Islam and the West: “It is abundantly clear that the big battle is inevitably coming,” said invited guest Yahya Ibrahim, “and that the Word of Tawheed (Islam) will be victorious without a doubt.”

Siraj Wahhaj told journalists that America and the West “will be crushed” unless they “accept the Islamic agenda”.

But no, the fact that men with opinions like these are the star attraction in peaceful New Zealand mosques is merely – according to Morgan in a Three-Wise-Monkeys impersonation – an attempt at “negative transference”.

Morgan wants “all New Zealand communities, including our Muslim sisters and brothers, to unite for peace,” but it seems that could be difficult if local Muslims take the advice of the hate preachers listed above.

According to the signatories, they are ordinary New Zealanders extending the hand of friendship to local Muslims and fighting Islamophobia on their behalf. But as you’re about to discover, many of the signatories are far from ordinary, and the groups they affiliate with are linked to support of extremist Islam in Britain as well. They are, in fact, a 21st century manifestation of an old Western foe – Soviet-style communism.

52, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

In a stunning display of dishonest hypocrisy and chutzpah, the Neo-Coms last year shot their mouths off about the Exclusive Brethren failing to list their religion on an election pamphlet, yet as you’ll see from the letter to Investigate, few of the most interesting signatories to us told anywhere near the full truth about who they are and what they represent.

Of the 163 signatures listed randomly in the letter, only two – Vaughan Gunson and Warren Brewer, declared themselves openly to be socialists. But an Investigate inquiry, coupled with revelations posted on Act party member Trevor Loudon’s blog, has shown a full 40 – at minimum, are socialists or communists, with potentially a further 20 falling into those categories as well.

Why would organisations so vocal about the apparent failure of the Brethren to be open, themselves be involved in a much larger covert exercise to disguise the political organisations they represent behind a series of entities with misleading names?

Take Grant Morgan, for instance, who organised the hateletter. Morgan lists himself merely as “the organiser of RAM, Residents Action Movement”, which gained nearly 10% of the vote at the last Auckland Regional Council election in 2004.

RAM portrays itself as standing up for the rights of Auckland residents in fighting rates hikes and the like. It arguably should be forced to stand at this year’s local body elections under its real name: Socialist Worker. RAM, you see, is merely a front organisation for the New Zealand branch of the radical British communist organisation, Socialist Worker.

Robyn Hughes, listed as the second signatory to the hateletter, is a RAM member elected to the ARC. She just happens to be Grant Morgan’s partner, although this point, like the socialist background of both of them, is deliberately not declared.

But if you think this article is going to be an earnest hunt for “Reds under the Beds”, forget it, this hunt is hilarious in what it discloses about Neo-Coms. Did you know, for instance, that they still talk like party apparatchiks from a bad Cold War spy movie?

“I joined Socialist Worker,” David Colyer told an international socialist paper three years ago, “in 1997, my first year of university. I’d been a Marxist, in theory, for several years before that. The comrades, none of whom were students of the university, encouraged me to help build a movement.”

Did he just use the word “Comrades” in 2004?

“We want to replace the Labour Party with a new mass workers’ party, one in which...Marxists participate fully,” Colyer continued, veering onto his plans for a “broad left” newspaper, “which will include contributions from Socialist Worker [and] may well become the most important vehicle for spreading socialist ideas...We are still going to need some kind of Socialist Worker publication, around which to organise a Marxist current within the workers’ movement.”

And you thought Communism’s wombles had given up the ghost with the collapse of the Berlin Wall? Apparently not.

They fever away to this very moment plotting the “revolution”.

“Here in Aotearoa,” notes a recent post on Socialist Worker’s blogsite, unityaotearoa.blogspot.com, “there are a number of events to remobilise the Anti War Movement. This Saturday will be an Anti-Imperialist St Patricks Day.” Internationally, some members of the socialist groups organising “peace” marches have taken to wearing tinfoil hats in the hope of avoiding CIA “mindscans”. The CIA, however, takes the much simpler route of reading their online posts, some of

Socialists and Green Party members in the US at a beach rally calling for the impeachment of President Bush.

Tinfoil hats can clearly be seen. which will have you rolling on the floor in hoots of laughter.

“If more decisive measures on global warming aren’t taken,” panted communist ARC councilor Robyn Hughes breathlessly during an Auckland protest last November, “Queen St may be under water in a generation...and then we will be swimming, not obeying road rules.”

Oh really? Even in Al Gore’s rib-tickling Inconvenient Truth it isn’t suggested that sea levels will rise by 3 to 4 metres in 25 years. Or even a hundred years. Sixty centimetres, at most, 10 centimetres more likely.

Regardless of how you rate their chances, the tinfoil hat brigade are still intent on world domination, however, with Peter Boyle – the editor of socialist magazine Links – citing “a new climate of collaboration in the international left. This is a project involving the left from the Communist Party, the Trotskyist, Maoist, ex-Social Democratic, independent left and liberation theology (‘Christian’ Marxism) traditions.”

A guest speaker at these international communist gatherings is New Zealand’s own Matt McCarten, the telegenic former advisor to the Alliance and Maori parties who’s now behind Socialist Worker and its plans to introduce a new hard left political party before the next election.

As Trevor Loudon notes: “He began building a movement called the Workers Charter Movement, as the basis for a new mass-based political movement.

The WCM was based around the Socialist Workers Organisation

(and its front, the Residents Action Movement), elements of the Greens and Maori Party, the ‘Unite’ trade union, the late Bill Andersen’s Socialist Party of Aotearoa, and John Minto and Mike Treen’s Global Peace and Justice Aotearoa.”

The activities of the “comrades” wouldn’t normally be an issue, except for the fact that they have friends in high places.

Prime Minister Helen Clark, for example, has been a cardcarrying member of Socialist International for most of her political career, and was a keynote speaker at Socialist International’s world conference in Wellington seven years ago. The organisation’s website lists the NZ Prime Minister as a member of its ruling “Presidium”, in the capacity as “co-chair, Asia Pacific Committee”.

Clark has appointed other key socialists to commanding positions in New Zealand’s bureaucratic infrastructure. They include Human Rights Commissioner Rosslyn Noonan, and Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres.

Of de Bres, Trevor Loudon records: “While studying German at Auckland University (1965-68) de Bres became active in the Student Christian Movement. Like many Marxist groups, the SCM hid it’s real emphasis behind an innocuous name. Far from being a bunch of clean cut spiritual seekers, the SCM was and is a “Christian-Marxist” organisation. “ ‘I studied Marx, Engels and Lenin, Marcuse, Rosa Luxemburg, Frantz Fanon, and modern German writers of the revolutionary left. Students saw their hope for revolutionary change in an alliance with the working classes, through radicalised trade unions.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 53

Valerie Morse was one of the eminent New Zealanders who signed the letter against Investigate. She’s also the American woman who burnt the New Zealand flag at Wellington’s Anzac Day dawn service

They had nearly pulled it off in Paris in 1968,’ [said de Bres].”

De Bres, among many incarnations, once ran the CORSO ‘charity’, which was a front organisation for the Maoist Chinese brand of communism, and later joined some of his old CORSO colleagues in setting up OXFAM New Zealand.

“OXFAM NZ tends to focus its aid into countries that have active revolutionary movements,” writes Loudon. “This is not surprising as its staff, trustees and patrons include a significant proportion of socialists and Marxist-Leninists.”

It is de Bres’ Human Rights Commission, with Helen Clark, that is ramming through the “National Religious Diversity Statement” in time for a declaration at Waitangi on May 29 that New Zealand is no longer a Christian country, and that New Zealand is adopting as Government policy the highly controversial “Alliance of Civilisations” programme commanded by the United Nations.

U nlike those who value Western civilisation and its traditions based on Judeo-Christian laws and institutions, the “Alliance of Civilisations” project rules that all cultures, from Stone-Age and recently cannibalistic Papua New Guinea through to the US, are equal.

“There is no hierarchy among cultures, as each has contributed to the evolution of humanity.”

The Alliance of Civilisations, incidentally, was the brainchild of 54, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

Turkey’s Islamic Party Prime Minister – whose party is currently at the centre of riots in Turkey over suspicions of a plot to turn the country into an Islamic state – and also the socialist Prime Minister of Spain, whose Socialist Workers party swept to power after the al Qa’ida Madrid bombings. Under his stewardship, Spain pulled out of Iraq and legalised gay marriage.

Unlikely bedfellows, the socialist and the Islamic conservative?

Perhaps, but it reflects a fascinating development worldwide.

As the hate-letter to Investigate magazine reveals, a huge number of Neo-Coms are swinging in behind Muslim groups and individuals in a PR jihad against Investigate. But it is not just New Zealand. Socialist Worker’s sister parties in Britain and Australia are doing exactly the same thing: “The Australian media, working hand in hand with the Howard government and the opposition Labor Party, has seized upon a sermon delivered last month by a Sydney-based Islamic cleric to escalate its hysterical campaign against Muslims,” begins one report earlier this year in a socialist publication across the ditch.

“Last Thursday, the Australian published translated excerpts from a sermon delivered by Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali last month, in which the Muslim cleric appeared to blame rape victims for their plight. ‘She is the one wearing a short dress, lifting it up, lowering it down, then a look, then a smile, then a word, then a greeting, then a chat, then a date, then a meeting, then a crime,

then Long Bay Jail, then comes a merciless judge who gives you 65 years,’ he said. This was an apparent reference to the extraordinarily harsh sentence imposed on 20-year-old Bilal Skaf for gang rape convictions in Sydney six years ago.”

Pause for just a moment: the Socialist movement in Australia is describing the prison sentences handed down to a group of Lebanese men who gang-raped an Australian girl just because she was an “infidel” as “extraordinarily harsh”?

Nice to know where the tinfoil socialists really stand on women’s rights.

“There is now an inescapable necessity for all those opposed to militarism and war, and committed to the defence of democratic rights, to develop an independent political opposition to the xenophobic campaign being directed against Muslims,” the report continued.

And from Socialist Worker’s New Zealand blog: “Even amongst revolutionary socialists, there is...Socialist Worker proudly on the side of Muslim people fighting Islamophobia in countries like Aotearoa and Britain.”

In other words, if you think the hate-letter to Investigate is anything more than part of a worldwide political stunt, think again.

NZ Labour list candidate, Anjum Rahmun of the Islamic Women’s Council, told a rally in Auckland two years ago that

Muslims need to wage jihad against “those in our society who will use race and religion to divide us.”

This is the same Anjum Rahmun who signed the hate-letter, but left off the bit about being a Labour list candidate. A bigger question though is why Rahmun is not urging her fellow local Muslims to wage jihad against their guests Yahya Ibrahim, Khalid Yasin, Bilal Philips and Siraj Wahhaj for commanding that Muslims cannot be friendly with non-Muslims. If that jihad notice went out from the local “peaceful” mosques, Investigate missed it.

It is hard to work out which group is playing the role of “Useful Idiots” – the puppet of the other. Is radical Wahhabi Islam using atheistic socialists to help get a toehold in New Zealand? Or are the socialists simply taking gullible Muslims for a ride as part of their own schemes? The evidence strongly suggests the latter.

The Alliance of Civilisations document, for example, is 90% socialist ideology, and continues the aim originally spelt out by Karl Marx of abolishing national borders as part of a unified world, and encouraging greater immigration from the third world to the first.

“The solution is not to build walls around nations,” says the report. “Migrants make important contributions...Indeed,

WHO’S BEHIND THE ‘PEACE’ MOVEMENT?

organisers. Indeed, there aren’t many people on earth – save in North Korea – who share the politics of the organisers...the International A.N.S.W.E.R ‘Coalition’ is, in reality, a front for a group of particularly kooky leftists, the World Workers’ Party.

“The movement has been hijacked by a bunch of neo-Stalinists who, oddly enough, utilise their hopped up ‘radical rhetoric’ in the service of the most conventional Democratic Party [Labour in NZ] politics imaginable. It was a revealing moment, and a truly disgusting sight,” Raimondo said.

As an example of just how morally-bankrupt the “Peace” movement really is, consider the words of IAC’s Lynne Stewart about civilian “collateral damage”: “I’m pretty inured to the notion that in a war or in an armed struggle, people die.

They’re in the wrong place...So I have a lot of trouble figuring out why that is wrong, especially when people are placed in a position of having no other way.”

Those comments, from a peace movement leader, could be used to justify civilian deaths in Iraq. Stewart, of course, meant civilian deaths in the West as a result of 9/11. As long as it is Western civilians dying, the “peace” movement applauds it.

Stewart, for the record, was last October sentenced to two years jail for aiding Islamic terrorist organisations.

So should we trust the “peace” movement springing to the defence of radical Islam?

“Most in the peace movement are genuine, sincere people,” Investigate wrote in the April 03 editorial. “But they need to realise that some of the organisers of the movement internationally are as morally corrupt as those they are protesting about.”

Like an octopus with tentacles everywhere, the socialist networks have a peculiar ability to worm themselves into the fabric of modern western society. The IAC, for example, listed on its US website in 2003 extensive evidence of its links with Peace Movement Aotearoa, which in turn is the umbrella group for organisations like the Peace Foundation, John Minto’s Global Peace & Justice Aotearoa and others. Virtually all of them lurk behind positive sounding names (who can argue with “Peace”?) that disguise the radical socialist agenda driving them, and it is particularly difficult for the public to get the full story when every other major current affairs magazine in New Zealand, as well as both main TV networks and National Radio, have been tainted by their association with the Media Peace Awards.

It will be interesting to see whether Robyn Hughes, and her “comrades” get reelected in this year’s local body elections.

“Peace” is not really want Morgan and his colleagues want. The magazine and the “peace” movement have clashed once before, as Morgan’s hate-letter makes clear.

“Wishart, who describes himself as a “social conservative”, had previously labeled people in the peace movement as “extremists” and thereby tried to discredit the global majority who are opposed to George Bush’s imperial crusade for oil and power,” complained the letter.

It was a reference to an article in Investigate four years ago which revealed nearly all of the anti-war protests around the world had been organised by a US front agency for communism. As a result of this letter, we’ve now uploaded that article to our online archives, www.thebriefingroom.com. In fact, the article the peaceniks complain about was written by American investigative reporter Sherrie Gossett, and she pointed out that even the liberal media like Salon.com in the US had begun to realise that the Anti-war protests reeked of the socialist World Workers Party, which set up the International Action Centre to coordinate worldwide street marches.

“The International Action Centre and the Revolutionary Communist Party [USA] are not just extremists in the service of a good cause,” wrote Salon’s Michelle Goldberg. “They are cheerleaders for some of the most sinister regimes and insurgencies on the planet.”

One of the leaders of the Anti-War movement in the US, Ramsey Clark, was closely affiliated to anti-Semitism and helped defend a former Nazi concentration camp guard from war crimes charges, not just because he was a lawyer but because he shared some of the Nazi’s views. The International Action Centre also defended the Hutu massacres in Rwanda, when the Hutu tribe slaughtered half a million Tutsi civilians in 1994.

The World Workers Party supported China’s massacre of the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989, describing the protesting students and workers as “counter revolutionaries”. The party also supported the brutal repression of the Tibetan people by the Chinese.

So slick has the socialist campaign to capture the peace movement been, however, that few dare to speak up against them. One who did back in 2003 was Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo.

“The people who came to these demonstrations don’t share the politics of the

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 55

North & South’s Robyn Langwell picking up top prize at the Media Peace Awards from presenter Anita McNaught.

A full list of winners is available at www.peace.net.nz/ mediapeaceawards.htm

Muslim immigrants to the US, on average, have higher levels of education and are more affluent than non-Muslim Americans.

“Political, civil society and religious leadership in the West can help set the tone within which debates regarding immigration take place by speaking forcefully and publicly in defense of the rights of immigrants.

“American and European universities and research centres... should promote publications coming from the Muslim world on a range of subjects related to Islam and the Muslim world.”

The Alliance of Civilisations report, whilst stopping short of recommending outright censorship of the news, nonetheless recommends that sympathetic media outlets be identified to promote the goals of greater immigration and integration, and be encouraged to produce good-news stories about Islam whilst downplaying the negative.

“The Alliance of Civilisations should take advantage of major media, cultural and sports events for the promotion of its objectives.”

The report, due to be adopted by the New Zealand Government later this month, is a public propaganda campaign almost without precedent outside Nazi Germany. David Benson-Pope’s Ministry of Social Development is working on it, and a briefing document released this month explains some of it: “The Waitangi Dialogue will focus on the broad themes of peace, development, security and education, and aims to develop a plan of action with proposals for practical projects in these areas. The overall emphasis of the Waitangi meeting will be on developing relations – or building bridges – between faith communities.

“High Level Symposium on the Alliance of Civilisations Report: Auckland, New Zealand, 24 May 2007 The New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark, with co-sponsorship by the government of Norway, will host a high level symposium in Auckland on 24 May 2007 to discuss the report of the Alliance of Civilisations High Level Group.

“Prime Minister Clark wishes to ensure that the report receives full consideration including in the Asia-Pacific region.

The symposium, which will be by invitation only, will bring together a small group of leaders, community representatives and experts to discuss the implications of the report for the region. Norway’s involvement will bring to the event the benefit of its considerable expertise as a leader in peace and reconciliation processes.”

56, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

As the letter-writer to Investigate put it: “Basically the Alliance of Civilisations is a UN strategy whereby the secularism of the West can accommodate Islam peacefully – the focus appears to be on reconciliation of secularism with Islam with isolation of evangelicalism. Helen Clark has recently stated that NZ is no longer a Christian country – meaning that Evangelical Christianity no longer has a place in NZ. It will be interesting to see who attends (‘by invitation only’) the coming meetings in NZ on the AoC, which Helen states she is going to personally facilitate, and who is not going to be invited – this may tell a story in itself.”

Which brings us back to the Socialists and Muslims’ Letter of Hate. Suddenly, with the revelation that die-hard tinfoil-hat wearing communists are using Muslims as “useful idiots”, the socialist-inspired Alliance of Civilisations document starts to make sense, especially with Helen Clark listed as the Asia-Pacific chair of Socialist International on their website, www.socialistinternational. org , in its report of the 2004 Socialist International World Council meeting held in Madrid that February.

“New Zealand is hosting the first symposium on the Alliance of Civilisations’ report in the Asia-Pacific region next month,” Clark said in an April 2007 speech in Valencia attended by the Spanish Prime Minister.

“It will be followed by a meeting in our country of the regional interfaith dialogue which brings together multi- faith delegations from South East Asian and South Pacific nations.

“The Asia Pacific region is at the intersection of many of the world’s great faiths. Peace and security in our region, as throughout the world, are dependent on us breaking down the artificial barriers we human beings have built between ourselves, so that we can celebrate our common humanity.

“We applaud Spain, together with Turkey, co-sponsoring the Alliance of Civilisations initiative at the United Nations. That has led to an important report on how to overcome the distressing polarisation we have seen between the Western and Islamic worlds...

I believe that New Zealand’s close involvement in the affairs of the Asia Pacific make us of much greater interest to Spain at this time.”

Little wonder then, that New Zealand socialists are moving swiftly to try and prevent Investigate’s revelations from gaining wider traction or interfering with the implementation of the Alliance of Civilisations here.

Independent media, like Investigate, who dare to expose the arrival of extremist Wahhabism in New Zealand are targeted in the hope we’ll be intimidated into backing away from publishing further details.

But don’t expect other local media to report this. Socialist groups have also managed to buy the silence of most of the New Zealand news media, by offering inducements via the Media Peace Awards. The awards were set up in 1984, at the height of anti-nuclear protests worldwide, with the aim of encouraging reporting favourable to Peace Foundation causes. The Peace Foundation is another socialist front agency (see sidebar story).

For the record, Investigate magazine has never entered them, but regular entries are received each year from: Metro, North & South, The Listener, TV3, TVNZ, Radio NZ. North & South’s Jenny Chamberlain took the premier award in 2006. A year earlier it was her editor Robyn Langwell. The year before that it was North & South again, with both Metro and the Listener “highly commended”.

This is not to say that winners and finalists have not done good work, but as with any “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” arrangement it is journalistically ethically questionable whether any media should take part in a Media Peace Awards requiring them to give favourable coverage to a particular socio-political view. For example, would Investigate’s expose on Wahhabi Islam win a prize? Journalism should only be judged on its news value, not its propaganda value. The obvious answer shows how the media can be bought and paid for with a few crumbs and a pat on the head.

The Media Peace Awards encourage slanted reporting. If you see a media outlet crowing about winning a Media Peace Award, you can judge their journalistic credibility for yourself.

Indeed, the close relationship between the Peace Foundation and NZ media may explain why neither TV3 nor TVNZ picked up the rights to the internationally acclaimed Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on radical Islam infiltrating British mosques this year. The documentary features many of the same people in the Investigate article, but it is arguably possible that neither TV channel wants to mess up its chances of winning a “peace” award by screening it.

The Peace Foundation, thanks to its close links with Labour, is also responsible for Ministry of Education policy on “peace studies”: “From the outset,” records the Foundation’s website, “the Foundation concentrated on providing resources and stimulus for peace education in educational institutions, as well as INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 57

servicing community groups. It also acted as a catalyst for the formation and/or maintenance of a number of groups including Students and Teachers Educating for Peace (STEP), Media Aware and the World Court Project. It also participated in a series of conferences arranged by Russell Marshall, during his term as Minister of Education from 1987-1990, and made a major contribution to the development of the Peace Studies Guidelines for schools.”

“In collaboration with the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF), and in consultation with the Curriculum Development Unit of the former Department of Education, the Foundation published a resource book for teachers at the primary/ intermediate level entitled Learning Peaceful Relationships. This has become almost a standard resource and some 12,000 copies have been sold both in New Zealand and overseas.

“In 1989 the Foundation produced a pamphlet to provide all Boards of Trustee members with specific information about the implementation of peace education, when the School Charters were being drawn up. In 2000 the Foundation published Thanks not Spanks, a book designed to give parents and caregivers ideas on how to raise children with out resorting to violence.”

Peace Foundation director Marion Hancock is one of those who signed the letter against Investigate.

But perhaps the final word as to the credibility of Grant Morgan’s list should go to some of the signatories themselves.

When we first received the letter via email, we doubted that Morgan had either properly obtained all the signatures or properly set out Investigate’s case when seeking comment.

Morgan refused to provide a copy of the email he had sent to prospective signatories, so we decided to ring a few signatories at random. Rosemary Arnoux, a lecturer in French at Auckland University, admitted in a hilarious phone exchange (www. investigatemagazine.com/rosemary.mp3) that she had not even read the Investigate article she was “complaining” about, until the day after we’d queried Morgan’s bona fides.

INVESTIGATE: I’m just double checking that you have in fact seen it?

ARNOUX: What, your article? I scanned it rapidly on my computer this morning.

INVESTIGATE: You scanned it rapidly – ARNOUX: [interrupting] I read it fast, very fast!

INVESTIGATE: You read it – ARNOUX: [interrupting] Oh look! [click, hangs up] Another was Mua Strickson-Pua, who told Investigate he actually quite liked the article, but needed to be staunch.

“I had a quick browse through. Ian, I felt it wasn’t too bad, I felt it was middle of the road, but I thought I would get in behind in terms of the people who had their concerns. I said I was happy to be a co-signatory, but at the same time I thought your article wasn’t too bad!”

A similar sentiment was echoed by Waitakere mayor Bob Harvey, who said he had to take a public stand.

“If I was you I’d probably do it the same, but I’m not doing that I’m being the mayor of a city and I actually care about some harmony before bloody car bombs start going off in Henderson.”

Quite. But if local Muslims keep mixing with al Qa’ida terror fundraisers and local communists spoiling to “bring on the revolution”, Harvey may not get his wish.

58, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

The List of Signatories

(italic type denotes what they left out of their descriptions) GRANT MORGAN, organiser of RAM - Residents Action Movement | Ex Communist party, Socialist Worker former leader ROBYN HUGHES, RAM councillor on Auckland Regional Council (Manukau City electorate) | Partner of Grant Morgan Dr. JOHN HINCHCLIFF, Auckland City councillor and former vice-chancellor & president of AUT | Former member of Socialist Unity Party front, NZ Council for World Peace SUE BRADFORD, Green MP (Auckland) | Former member of the Workers Communist League, currently runs a Marxist based training school for activists at Wellsford MATT McCARTEN, national secretary of Unite Workers Union (Auckland) | Self proclaimed Marxist-Leninist ROGER FOWLER, QSM, manager of Mangere East Community Learning Centre (Auckland) | Ex Communist Party, probable Socialist Worker member JOHN MINTO, spokesperson for Global Peace & Justice | Auckland Marxist, close associate of Socialist Worker, Workers Charter Movement leader CAMPBELL DUIGNAN, southern regional secretary of Service & Food Workers Union/Nga Ringa Toa (Dunedin) | Former Workers Communist League supporter SHAUN DAVISON, regional chair of Post Primary Teachers Association (Whangarei) | Workers Charter Movement supporter JILL OVENS, northern regional secretary of Service & Food Workers Union/Nga Ringa Toa (Auckland) | NZ/Cuba Friendship Society activist, former Alliance Party co-leader JOE CAROLAN, secretary of Solidarity Union (Auckland) | Socialist Worker MAURICE WARD, professor at Faculty of Human & Environmental Studies, Kanto Gakuin University (Yokohama, Japan) | Ex Communist Party, probable Socialist Worker sympathiser SYD KEEPA, convenor of Council of Trade Unions Runanga Te Roopu Kaimahi Maori and apiha Maori for National Distribution Union (Auckland) | Self described Socialist Party of Aotearoa sympathiser OLIVER WOODS, organiser of The Decembrists, a tertiary student social justice coalition (Auckland) | Workers Charter Movement endorser JULIA ESPINOZA, organiser for ClimAction, Auckland’s climate change coalition | Socialist Worker front organisation MIKE WILLIAMS, trade unionist (Wellington) | Formerly close to Socialist Unity Party BERNIE HORNFECK, president of Rotorua People’s Advocacy Centre | Ex Communist Party, Socialist Worker member Reverend DON BORRIE, (Porirua) Leader NZ/North Korea Society LEN PARKER, co-chair of RAM - Residents Action Movement (Auckland) | Ex Communist Party, Socialist Worker member LUKE COXON, organiser for National Distribution Union (Auckland) | Maoist, ex Radical Society KYLE WEBSTER, West Coast representative on board of directors of NZ Nurses Organisation (Greymouth) | Socialist Worker member Reverend STUART VOGEL, Presbyterian minister and Council of Christians & Muslims (Auckland) | Official NZ/North Korea Society VAUGHAN GUNSON, artist and Socialist (Whangarei) | Socialist Worker member DAPHNE LAWLESS, editor of UNITY journal (Auckland) | Socialist Worker member TAHAE TAIT, Te Arawa iwi & spokesperson for Tait whanau in Rotorua | Ex Communist Party, probable Socialist Worker member PAT O’DEA, executive member of RAM ¬ Residents Action Movement (Auckland) | Ex Communist Party, Socialist Worker DEAN PARKER, NZ Writers Guild (Auckland) | Former British International Socialists, former NZ Socialist Unity Party, close to Socialist Worker, Irish republican supporter MIKE TREEN, national director of Unite Workers Union (Auckland) | Former Socialist Action League, Communist League, Alliance Party MALCOLM FRANCE, organiser for ClimAction, Auckland’s climate change coalition | Socialist Worker front PAUL MAUNDER, NZ Writers Guild (Blackball) | Formerly close to the Workers Communist League, Cuba supporter TOM BUCKLEY, organiser for Unite Workers Union (Auckland) | Workers Charter endorser QUENTIN FINDLAY, education co-ordinator of Lincoln University Students Association (Canterbury) | Socialist, Alliance Party activist DON POLLY, retired journalist (Paekakariki) | Formerly close to the Workers Communist League GRAEME YOUNG, ex-organiser of National Distribution Union (Christchurch) | Ex Communist Party, probable Socialist Worker CHRIS SULLIVAN, Catholic (Auckland) | Former writer for Socialist Action League newspaper HEATHER LYALL, social worker (Auckland) | Socialist Worker DON ARCHER, delegate for Engineering, Printing & Manufacturing Union (Christchurch) | Ex Communist party, Socialist Worker member GRANT BROOKES, delegate for NZ Nurses Organisation (Wellington) | Socialist Worker member WARREN BREWER, secretary of Socialist Party of Aotearoa (Auckland)

JIM HOLDOM, social justice advocate (Hamilton) | Has visited Palestine, Cuba and Nicaragua, on “left” of Labour Party, close to Socialist Party of Aotearoa SU’A WILLIAM SIO, Manukau City councillor – Otara Ward Labour Party, former union organiser Dr. DAVID WILLIAMS, professor of law (Ranui) | Longtime left wing activist DAVID TUTTY, Auckland Catholic Justice & Peace Office | Member of pro-left Philippines Solidarity Network Aotearoa TIM HOWARD, community worker (Whangarei) | Workers Charter endorser. Supports Philippines leftist activists. Trustee of Sue Bradford’s marxist training school VICTOR BILLOT, national president of Alliance Party (Dunedin) JENNIFER CARMICHAEL, union organiser (Auckland) JOCELYN BROOKS, Alliance Party (Wellington) Reverend ANTHONY DANCER, social justice commissioner for the Anglican Church (Wellington) | Organised the Anti-smacking church service attended by Helen Clark and Sue Bradford Bishop RICHARD RANDERSON, dean of Holy Trinity Cathedral, Parnell (Auckland) | Leftist, peace activist Reverend MUA STRICKSON-PUA, chaplain, community worker & Pasifika development tutor (Auckland) | Green Party candidate 2005 Sister CLARE O’CONNOR, Cenacle sister (Wellington) Reverend GILLIAN WATKIN, Methodist presbyter at Mt Eden (Auckland) Reverend DENISE KELSALL, St Matthew-in-the-City (Auckland) ANNE MOODY, Anglican priest, member of Third Order Society of St Francis (Auckland) MERYL ZOHRAB, Anglican priest and plunket nurse (Auckland) Dr. LYNNE WALL, lecturer, Trinity Methodist Theological College (Auckland) Dr. TERRY WALL, Methodist Minister (Auckland) BOB HARVEY, mayor of Waitakere City CHRISTINE ROSE, Rodney District representative on Auckland Regional Council HEATHER MACKAY, deputy chair of Pakuranga Community Board PENNY HULSE, councillor on Waitakere City | Council Formerly endorsed by the Alliance Party BARRY WILSON, president of Auckland Council for Civil Liberties PAUL G. BUCHANAN, international security analyst (Auckland) Dr. JAMES LIU, deputy director of Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research (Wellington) DAVID WONG, NZ Order of Merit, founding president of North Shore/Rodney Ethnic Council (Auckland) AMALA WRIGHTSON, spiritual director of Auckland Zen Centre and member of Auckland Interfaith Council CAMERON BROADHURST, Zen Society of Auckland BILL COOKE, vice-president of NZ Association of Rationalists & Humanists and senior lecturer at School of Visual Arts, Manukau Institute of Technology VERPAL SINGH, chair of The Sikh Centre (Auckland) MARIA HAYWARD, manager of Centre for Refugee Information (Auckland) JAVED KHAN, president of Federated Islamic Associations of New Zealand (Auckland) GUL ZAMAN, president of Auckland Indo-Fijian Association MUSTAFA FAROUK, vice-president of Federated Islamic Associations of New Zealand (Hamilton) HAIDER LONE, executive member of NZ Muslim Association (Auckland) OMAR FAHMY, president of New Zealand Sri Lanka Foundation (Auckland) NASREEN HANNIF, national representative of Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand (Auckland) ISRAR SHEIKH, general secretary of New Zealand Muslim Youth & Sports Association (Auckland) MOHAMED MOSES, secretary of Mt Roskill Islamic Trust (Auckland) ABDUL ELAH ARWANI, chair of South Pacific Mosque (Auckland) ANILA KETAN, president of Auckland Muslim Girls Association FIONA LOVATT-DAVIS, co-host of Kia Ora Show, Radio Watea (Auckland) | Islamic spokeswoman ISMAIL WAJA, editor of Al Mujaddid Media (Auckland) NUREDIN HASSAN, team manager of Muslim Students Association at AUT JIBRIL MUSSA, president of NZ Nejashi Trust (Auckland) MOHAMMAD THOMPSON, chair of Voice of Islam TV (Auckland) MOHAMED HASSAN, senior writer of e-newsletter NZDawa (Auckland) MAAN ALZAHER, organiser of Working Together Group (Auckland) AHMAD ESAU, teacher and founder of Aotearoa Islamic Impressions, an Islamic art group (Auckland) OMAR HAMED, organiser of Students for Justice in Palestine (Auckland) | Founder Radical Youth JANFRIE WAKIM, Palestine Human Rights Campaign (Auckland) TAYYABA KHAN, peace activist and former president of Auckland Muslim Girls Association, winner of the Sonja Davies Peace Award in 2005 MOHAMED & FARHANA NALAR, Working Together Group (Auckland) ANJUM RAHMAN, Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand (Hamilton) | Labour Party candidate ILIYAS DAUD, pharmacist and sports administrator at Ponsonby Soccer Club (Auckland) MADENEYAH GAMILDIEN, commodity trader (Auckland) OMAR KHAMOUN, Wellington Palestine Group HOOSEIN ISMAIL, New Zealand Muslim Support Trust (Auckland) ATAUR RAHMAN, representative for the Bangladeshi community in New Zealand (Auckland) RAFIQ SAHIB, Secretary of East Auckland Islamic Trust

SAHAR GHUMKHOR, organiser of Students for Justice in Palestine (Auckland) ADLY RASLAN, trustee of AlHoda Islamic Trust (North Shore City) WASEEM ALZAHER, BSc major in Biomedical Science (Auckland) ROBERT WHITE, director of Centre for Peace Studies at University of Auckland MARION HANCOCK, director of The Peace Foundation (Auckland) | Member of peace delegation to China in 1987 EVA NAYLOR, peace & environmental activist (Wellington) VALERIE MORSE, Peace Action Wellington | Burned the NZ Flag at Anzac ceremony RICHARD KELLER, peace activist (Wellington) | Longtime left activist MARGO BAARS, co-ordinator of Human Rights Foundation Aotearoa (Auckland) PAUL BRUCE, lead meteorologist at MetService NZ & co-ordinator of Latin American Solidarity Committee Aotearoa (Wellington) | Longtime left activist, Green Party candidate GERARD BURNS, Catholic priest at St Anne’s parish, Newtown (Wellington) | Wellington Palestine Group, an extreme left anti Israel organisation MAIRE LEADBEATER, spokesperson for Indonesia Human Rights Committee (Auckland) RAYMOND BRADLEY, emeritus professor of philosophy (Warkworth) | Atheist MERE KEPA, transcultural educationalist (Auckland) JIM MILLER, professor of Applied Language Studies & Linguistics at University of Auckland Dr. LISA GUENTHER. senior lecturer in philosophy, University of Auckland CLIVE ASPIN, PhD, senior research fellow at University of Auckland ROSEMARY ARNOUX, senior lecturer in French at University of Auckland FRANCO MANAI, senior lecturer in Italian at University of Auckland Dr. HILARY CHUNG, lecturer at University of Auckland Dr. MALCOLM BROWN, lecturer in sociology at University of Auckland TRACEY McINTOSH, senior lecturer in sociology at University of Auckland FELICITY PERRY, lecturer at Victoria University (Wellington) ANDREW CAMPBELL, campaigns director of Finsec, the finance workers union (Wellington) | Formerly Alliance Party and Activism in Aotearoa SHAWN TAN, organiser for Finsec, the finance sector workers union (Auckland) | Green Party, anti-capitalist CATHERINE BINDON, ex-organiser for National Distribution Union (Wellington) DION MARTIN, organiser for National Distribution Union (Palmerston North) | Alliance party, supports Philippines left activists SIMON OOSTERMAN, publicity officer for National Distribution Union (Auckland) | Anarchist BILL ROSENBERG, researcher for Campaign Against Foreign Control in Aotearoa (Christchurch) | Longtime left activist JUDITH McMORLAND, secretary of Action for Children & Youth in Aotearoa (Auckland) | ACYA advocates for children and young people, in particular on the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Children.

LEIGH COOKSON, director of Arena and co-convenor of GATT Watchdog (Christchurch) MEREDYDD BARRAR, spokesperson for Citizens Against Privatisation (Waitakere City) Reverend BRUCE KEELEY, co-president of Council of Christians & Muslims (Auckland) JOAN BROCK, secretary of Council of Christians & Muslims (Auckland) JIM HUNT, Council of Christians & Muslims (Auckland) VALERIE JABIR, NZ Council of Christians & Muslims (Auckland) MUHAMMAD UMAR CHAND, Muslim, Pakistani Kiwi, Council of Christians & Muslims, Auckland Interfaith Council HANNAH SPIERER, environmental affairs officer for Auckland University Students Association | Green Party BAKER POSTELNIK, environmental activist (Kaiwaka) JO McVEAGH, environmental activist (Auckland) | Workers Charter endorser EMILY BAILEY, environmental & community worker (Wellington) DONNA GARDINER, Maori mother and grandmother (Auckland) GIAMPIETRO FREN, representative of Italian community in Hamilton NIK JANIUREK, technical manager of Maidment Theatre (Auckland) LYN DOHERTY, Maori mother and grandmother (Auckland) NIBRAS KARDAMAN, marketing co-ordinator (Auckland) GLYNNIS PARAHA, daughter, grand-daughter, sister, niece, aunt, grand-aunt & friend (Auckland) SALLY McARA, PhD candidate and author (Auckland) GARRICK MARTIN, mental health nurse (Wellington) AFIFA CHIDA, Bachelor of Design student (Auckland) JOHN POLKINGHORNE, undergraduate student in economics & chemistry (Auckland) EDWIN DE RONDE, researcher (Auckland) MARZAN AMERA, town planner (North Shore City) BRANWEN LORIGAN, art educator, Artists Alliance (Auckland) GAILLE BOYD, producer for Maori Media and Kiwi Music (Auckland) | Islamic convert NUR JAHANGIR, water supply & operation engineer (North Shore City) ANDY KINGSTON, lover & potter (Kaeo) (Italic type, courtesy Trevor Loudon*, denotes what they left out of their descriptions. Additional research by Ian Wishart) *http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2007/04/grant-morgan-is-truthophobe.html

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 59

WORLDBRIEF

Radical

ISLAM Squashing

Moderates Documentarians battle America’s PBS TV to get Islam film on the air, reports Karoun Demirjian

W

ASHINGTON – The film features grainy footage and dramatic music, presenting itself as a stark look at the way fundamentalist Muslims in America and Europe crush dissent by their more moderate co-religionists.

But the very production of “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center” has highlighted sharply different views about the state of Islam in the United States and showcased how intensely sensitive that subject remains. PBS, which commissioned the project, is delaying airing the film after protests that it is anti-Muslim. Now its creators are launching a public campaign against PBS to get it shown.

The hourlong documentary is one of 22 episodes funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for PBS’ “America at a Crossroads” series, which examines post-Sept. 11 subjects such as terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the experience of American troops overseas and global perspectives on U.S. foreign policy.

“Islam vs. Islamists” follows the efforts of socially liberal Muslims in America and Europe to reclaim their religion from

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political extremism by speaking out against ultra-conservative imams in a sort of modern-day Muslim reformation.

But the film never made it into the initial lineup of 11 shows that aired recently. A film about widespread discrimination against Muslims, “The Muslim Americans,” did air as part of the series.

The producers and subjects of the “Islam vs. Islamists” film, who began to show it in private screenings last month, say that PBS began to demand what the producers saw as unrealistic editorial changes after the series’ advisers, acting on criticism from such Muslim groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Nation of Islam, claimed the documentary unfairly portrayed Muslim religious leaders. They say their experience with PBS proves the point of their film: that moderate Muslims have no platform from which to criticize extremists in their own religion.

“I can’t see what they object to, except that they don’t want to see the true plight against modern-day Muslims,” says Hedieh Mirahmadi, a representative of a moderate imam who spoke at a screening in Washington that was organized by the film’s producers. “Not being able to see the political reality means

Islamic Centre of America building. Moderates claim radicals in US mosques are silencing them and silencing the media

that it may come to root in a very dangerous way.”

Mirahmadi argues, for example, that the Saudi-based Wahhabist movement, a fundamentalist form of Islam, has spread across the U.S. Mary Stewart, a spokeswoman for WETA, the PBS station in Washington, and executive producer for the Crossroads series, said in a phone interview that even though the film hadn’t made the cut for the first 11 parts that were broadcast, it would be aired as soon as PBS feels that it has been satisfactorily edited.

“It is a film with a lot of promise,” she said. “But every film that comes through PBS goes through editorial standards.

They have received notes on what editorial changes would need to be made to bring it up to standards for PBS.” Producers and hosts of the Crossroads series have publicly accused the production team for “Islam vs. Islamists” of showing an editorial slant by being overly alarmist and demonizing imams.

But defenders of the documentary say it merely portrays, in realistic terms, the divisions within the Islamic community in the West.

The Muslims portrayed in the movie - including Naser Khader, the Danish parliamentarian who spoke out against Imam Ahmed Abu Laban and others leading the riots over last year’s cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad - say that PBS does not want to consider Western Muslims as a variegated group.

“In my opinion, we don’t have a crisis of civilizations, we have just one clash,” Khader says. “It is in Muslim society, between Islamists and those who say `yes’ to democracy and modernity.”

Speaking for the film’s production team, Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington national security think tank, insists that the film is finished and says PBS’ refusal to budge on editorial demands meant that the film’s relationship with the network was finished too.

“They’re insisting on structural changes that would essentially eviscerate the message of the film,” he says.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting provided $675,000 for the production of “Islam vs. Islamists,” nearly all federal funds.

Some members of Congress saw the film at a showing late April. A Corporation for Public Broadcasting spokesman said it is committed to finding a way to publicly show the film.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 61

Camille Paglia, defender of the

West

Rod Dreher discovers feminist icon Camille Paglia channeling Eve’s Bite

I

f you ask me, it’s a pity the cigar-smoking Bohemian Tory and the self-described “feminist bisexual maniac” never met. I think the late Russell Kirk and Camille Paglia would have hit it off at least as well as Pope Benedict XVI and the irrepressible Italian atheist Oriana Fallaci did in the months before she died. Here’s why: Dr. Kirk, the traditionalist man of letters widely considered the godfather of modern American conservatism, believed that the great task of contemporary conservatives was not any of the goals likely to appear on Republican campaign literature. He knew that culture was more important than politics and considered poets to be, in Shelley’s phrase, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Because of this, Dr. Kirk taught that reviving the “moral imagination” – meaning re-engagement with the art and literature of the West’s cultural patrimony – in the face of the disaster of modernity, was vital to saving our civilization.

Dr. Paglia, a professor at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts who made her name in 1990 with the publication of Sexual Personae, is no conservative – in fact, she’s an atheist libertarian Democrat who extols the virtues of pagan sexuality. But she’s downright Kirkian in her contempt for the egalitarian instinct and in her roaring disgust at modernity’s disinterest in, or even contempt for, Western tradition.

And she holds her own tribe – American humanities professors – chiefly responsible.

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“I remain concerned about the compulsive denigration of the West and the reductiveness so many leading academics in the humanities have toward their own tradition,” she tells me.

“They reduce it all to the lowest common denominator of racism, imperialism, sexism and homophobia. That’s an extremely smallminded way of looking at culture and a betrayal of the career mission of these educators, whose job is to educate students in our culture.”

Dr. Paglia, one of three judges for this year’s Hiett Prize, has been saying that for a while now, which is one reason that conservatives love her. If modernity is, as one traditionalist conservative writer put it, a “perversion of the responsibility of stewardship,” then Dr. Paglia, by championing Western culture against the sophisticated barbarians inside the academy, counts as a convicted anti-modernist.

But that wouldn’t be quite right; she’s a passionate partisan of modernist giants like Picasso, as well as low-culture rock `n’ roll Dionysiacs. What galls Dr. Paglia is that the politics of leveling – affirming or denying greatness according to therapeutic political standards – is compromising scholarship.

This is not just an academic dispute. If students don’t learn the Western canon, they will remain rootless, ignorant and alienated. They will fail to grasp what makes the West unique – and why it should be cherished, conserved and defended. Sexual Personae was a tour de force of cultural criticism, arguing that the genius of the West came from the irreconcilable conflict between classical paganism and Judeo-Christian religion.

“If students don’t learn the Western canon, they will remain rootless, ignorant and alienated. They will fail to grasp what makes the West unique – and why it should be cherished, conserved and defended” The decline of religion in Europe frightens this stalwart atheist. “The Europeans have become very passive, all of them,” she says. “There’s a fatigued worldliness typical of Europe right now, and that’s why nothing very interesting artistically is coming out of there.”

Can you have a vibrant culture without cult? Traditionalist conservatives say no. Dr. Paglia is inclined to agree – and says that our lazy secularism and superficial religiosity puts America at risk of succumbing to acedia, the Greek term for spiritual slothfulness. She is shocked to discover how few of her college students grasp basic biblical concepts, characters and motifs that were commonly understood one or two generations ago.

This stunning loss of cultural memory renders most Western art, poetry and literature opaque.

“The only people I’m getting at my school who recognize the Bible are African-Americans,” she says. “And the lower the social class of the white person, the more likely they recognize the Bible. Most of these white kids, if they go to church at all, they get feel-good social activism.”

What are they left with? “Video games, the Web, cellphones, iPods – that’s what’s left,” Dr. Paglia laments. “And that’s what’s going to make us vulnerable to people coming from any side, including the Muslim side, where there’s fervor. Fervor will conquer apathy. I don’t see how the generation trained by the Ivy League is going to have the knowledge or the resolution to defend the West.”

Our cultural crisis is precisely that serious, says Dr. Paglia, who believes – as does Pope Benedict, one of the most cultured men on the planet – that we could well be reliving the last days of the Roman Empire.

“If the elite class sees nothing in the West to defend, we’re reproducing this situation of the late Roman Empire, which was very cosmopolitan and very tolerant, but which was undone by forces from within,” she says.

What are those who want to conserve the traditional Western humanities as a refuge from cultural barbarism supposed to do? Says Dr. Paglia, emphatically: “It’s up to people to educate themselves.”

In this light, it’s not a stretch to think of the Dallas Institute for the Humanities as a sort of secular monastery. Like the European monks of old, the scholars and teachers at the Dallas Institute are keeping the light of Western humanist tradition burning in a new Dark Age. We need more institutions like this in days to come. Friends of what the poet T.S. Eliot (and later, his friend Dr. Kirk) called “the Permanent Things” are going to need intellectual sanctuary.

“That’s what’s going to make us vulnerable to people coming from any side, including the Muslim side, where there’s fervor. Fervor will conquer apathy. I don’t see how the generation trained by the Ivy League is going to have the knowledge or the resolution to defend the West...We could well be reliving the last days of the Roman Empire” Camille Paglia

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 63

thinkLIFE money

A day in the life...

Financial writer Peter Hensley reflects on 77 columns

T

here are days that seem to run into each other. A flight to yet another city following up either existing or new clients; many times it is just catching up with product suppliers, ensuring that their business model is still on track and there are no nasty surprises lurking in the shadows.

The emails stream in both from Sunday Star Times readers inquiring about their UK pension entitlements, or whether they should use a recent legacy from Aunt Dora to pay off their mortgage or buy a rental property, and regular clients inquiring if the investment associated with the latest bond issue suits their portfolio. The phone goes and it is likely to be the local court house saying that the judge is busy and could I come up and deal with a bail application because the police are opposing the application. A day has to be set aside to review the six monthly reports that are due out. The newspaper column has to be written, a community

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service group would like you to be the guest speaker at their financial health forum and this column has to drafted. Add to that the steady stream of clients who appear at the door with either an appointment or on the off chance that they could ask me a quick question.

That is a typical week. First flight out of New Plymouth on Monday morning – finding enough time to attend a KiwiSaver seminar and catch up with a few clients.

Then fly back to the office in the afternoon.

The office ladies have already handled numerous requests involving product transactions and requests for investment statements. They are careful not to offer advice and frequently take messages for me to follow up on my return. Their customer service skills are excellent and always rate high when we conduct regular surveys amongst our client base using independent consultants.

They have instructions not to make client appointments on a Wednesday, as normally I am on a course. Golf was cancelled this week as the South Taranaki District Council held a financial health forum for their mature residents and scheduled it on Wednesday. Despite the time conflicting with other events, attendance was excellent and the room overflowing. The presentation covered topical issues like how not to get scammed and how home equity loans operated.

After such talks, it is common to stand answering individual questions for almost as long as the presentation. This was no exception. After the final one-on-one questions finished I bade farewell to the organizers and went to visit with a local resident who could not attend the seminar because of health issues.

The first half of Thursday was set aside to complete the six monthly reviews of the portfolios that we administer. Pretty normal task as activities go, with the most noticeable feature being this month the consistent remark that no changes were recommended. The process was interrupted by the court house requesting assistance to deal with a bail matter. Because my offices are situated only two minutes walk from the court house I am often called upon to deal with arrest matters. When the nature of the offending is escalated beyond the powers of both the police and court registrar’s jurisdiction and the judge is either out of town or unavailable a local Justice of the Peace is called in to deal with the matter. Each court house around New Zealand has a court panel of approximately ten JP’s who are trained to deal with most court procedures and our jurisdiction is quite wide. I have been undertaking this non-paid community service for over fifteen years. Depending upon the judge’s workload I could be called up several times in a week. Obviously I am not the only local JP performing such services and many times, depending upon the circumstances we sit in pairs. For example tomorrow two JP’s are required to sit in JP traffic court where we deal with lower order offending where fines and disqualification matters are deal with.

We each take a turn sitting in Saturday court dealing with Friday night offending, so that those people unfortunate enough to be arrested on a Friday night are not expected to linger in the cells over the weekend. It is both an honor and a

privilege to serve the community in such a manner. It also provides an insight to a side of the community that many would not be exposed to.

In addition to serving an ever increasing client base I am also the current chairman of the Society of Independent Financial Advisers (SIFA). This has been a two year appointment and comes after serving on the committee for several years. It is indeed fortunate that we have some of the country’s best advisers as members and some of those assist on the executive council. Because the association is made up of like minded people running similar practices we all share the association duties so that being an office bearer is not an onerous task.

At a recent conference where I was one of the platform speakers, while I was waiting to conduct an afternoon workshop session I was able to sit in on one of the other concurrent workshops. The presenter was talking about marketing and asked attendees who sent out newsletters.

Many did not and of those that did, the highest frequency was quarterly. He was clearly surprised when I indicated that we publish one every fortnight. He would not believe that I have a very good colleague who writes an excellent email letter twice a week. Writing the Sunday Star Times column can take up to four hours and a column such as this equally as long. Being able to communicate with clients on a regular basis is a treat and not a chore as many would think. It allows us to tell them both the good and bad things that happen to their portfolios. My long suffering readers have seen my writing style develop over time and I am pleased be able to say that I have been contributing to Investigate magazine from the very first issue in February 2000. The feedback we receive is excellent. The vast majority of it is very good and on the rare occasion that the reader has disagreed with my approach, they have always recognized the research that has gone into the article.

Many times in my articles, I use a parable style citing a fictitious couple called Jim & Moira and building a story around a financial aspect of their lives. More than several clients have accused me of using them as role models for my articles. In some circumstances they have been correct, however in others they have been very wide of the mark. The character names and in many cases the themes I use, all come from my own family, with Jim and Moira being my dad and mum’s names.

I am blessed to have one of the best jobs in the world. A good friend of mine often says that to be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved. I have learnt from experience that he is right. I do not accept that responsibility lightly. I am pleased to say that I believe that our clients have the best mix of investments that are available in the market place. The fees structure we utilize is one of the lowest in the country and I am constantly encouraged to lift them. We have no plans to.

In fact, I plan to continue to do exactly what I do now. As long as I am able to fit in golf on Wednesday and Saturdays, the investment market research, writing and advising will continue for many years to come.

I have a neighbour who keeps reminding me that the best part of doing nothing is the resting up afterwards. I am yet to fully experience what he means, I don’t have a lot of time to do nothing.

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thinkLIFE education

Which education for Barbie Dolls?

Amy Brooke gives the education politburo an “F” for flunkyism

I

recall some years back a son coming home from school, disturbed about a decision a teacher had directed the class towards making, one he thought wrong.

His judgment was good and I supported him with the reminder that while it was important to listen and fairly evaluate facts, in the end one has to stand up if necessary against the crowd, even if one stands on one’s own. “At least, you’ll always have been taught that at school,” I added. He looked at me in astonishment.

“We’re not taught that at all,” he said.

“We’re taught the opposite.” It had been explained to the class – and consistently

66, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

underlined all his schooling – that the individual was expected to conform his or her views to that of the majority, that conflict resolution and group decisionmaking was the important thing.

It serves us right for trusting institutions.

If there’s one useful realization that the anti-smacking debate should bring home to us, it is that institutions get captured by those who run them. If they are paid by the government, almost inevitably they will reflect government thinking in the same way that we saw in the former USSR, with regard to the promotion of only state-funded writers sympathetic

to Communist ideology. In this respect, we aren’t so different here, the way our left-wing literary in-group operates. Its inevitable crowning glory, the Prime Minister’s Award, is apparently not even paid for by Prime Minister Clark – a mistress of centre-staging.

The roll-call of institutions and organizations supporting Sue Bradford’s power-grabbing, far from impressing us, reminds us how easily organizations get captured. Reasons can range from the dominance of powerful individuals using an organization for their own purposes, to the lowest common denominator

syndrome of committee thinking and acquiescence. What we do know is that heads of state-funded organizations tend to be political appointees, predominantly left-wing or liberal, philosophically, and to make decisions antipathetic to the views of the conservative majority.

Take, for example, our censorship board – or the Broadcasting Standards Authority – which shows little respect for the majority’s desire for acceptable standards; or the Law Commission considering allowing single gay men to adopt children, presumably including young boys. And dear old Plunket. How can Plunket be wrong? Yet this is the organization which formerly advocated placing babies on their stomachs to sleep – to avoid their lying on their backs and choking on vomited milk – possibly a reason why some little ones suffocated, wedged up into bassinet corners. Plunket has now inexplicably reverted to advising that infants should be lain on their backs, where they can inhale vomit. Yet the safest possible, centuries-used position is to place a baby on alternate sides after feeding, wrapping it in the well-known way which prevents it rolling either onto its back – or forward onto its front. I lost my own reverence for Plunket early on, when instructed to feed a healthy, breastfed baby both cereal and orange juice at approximately 6 weeks – although orange juice curdles milk in the stomach. I resisted, pointing out his healthy weight gain, and that as Nature hadn’t supplied me with either of these two products, she obviously had other preferences.

The moral in these references is that nothing should replace the thoughtful judgment of the individual. Not only is this not taught to our children in schools, it is also expected that we will fall into line because various establishments say we should. And behind all those masterminding our thinking and brainwashing us on sociopolitical issues have been our establishment educationists, drawn in many cases to the profession because of the desire to dominate our thinking; to attack, in particular, the foundations of our Western culture; to mount an attack on the importance of knowledge itself; and to bring about a society where the capacity to think independently is reduced as far as possible.

Lenin’s “useful fools” are always with us. Many of those programmed to think along institutional lines, headmasters

and teachers included, are well-meaning servants of masters whose existence they have not really comprehended. Whatever the education establishment promotes, they will defend. This includes Ministers of Education whose own status as welleducated individuals is debatable, from the present incumbent Steve Maharey’s crude “F*** off”; to bovver boy’s Trevor Mallard’s Heineken bottle infamy; to Lockwood Smith’s soft capitulation to those intent on removing grammar and syntax from the revised English curriculum. We are naïve if we think this was in spite of George Orwell’s warning that language is the tool by which ideologues control society. Our Marxist politburo well know that restricted competence in language use leads individuals to poorer thinking. Hence, the any-old-how-as-longas-you-communicate mantra (including minimalist text messaging) has become the yardstick for English, the subject which, with its complexities, underlies all other competencies in our schools.

What alternative is there to incredulity, when a recently departed headmaster of Nelson College, in apparent spleen, described the Cambridge international examination as only fit for Barbie dolls? Its present headmaster is on record as saying he’ll have no debate about the NCEA in his staffroom, and that the “Cambridge international alternative system offered at some schools is ‘laughable’, designed for ‘colonial’ governments.” Shades of Steve Maharey’s gauche “Botswana” sneer.

The repetitive pattern of accusations levelled against what is obviously a far more advantageous system for our grossly under-extended, clever and bored students is suggestive of the cloned thinking which institutions specialise in.

And bored they are, with truancy rates streaking high. I’ve asked many bright youngsters what their predominant memory was of their class time at our state schools. Boring largely sums it up – except when there were actual interesting facts to learn. But our education bureaucracy has publicly discarded facts in favour of “skills”.

Knowledge is officially out, incredible as is the stupidity of this direction to anyone who actually values education. Wisdom, understanding, and right paths forward can only be built on foundations of genuine knowledge – not feel-good practices and tedious desk-hours.

Boring, boring, boring. This was the

“

Our education bureaucracy has publicly discarded facts in favour of “skills”. Knowledge is officially out, incredible as is the stupidity of this direction to anyone who actually values education

”

complaint of first year Canterbury University students surveyed a little while back, rejecting social engineering and superficial infotainment constantly thrust their way to make things feel “relevant” to them. The thirst they had was for lasting knowledge, genuinely learning of things past and beyond their immediate times and environment. What they would have liked were facts, not to be underestimated and condescended to with banalities.

This is exactly what the ministry has no intention of giving pupils, with the new draft national curriculum’s typical plan of giving often incompetent or barely mediocre teachers more freedom “to tailor the curriculum to the type of community they live in.”

The NCEA is a dog of a system born of a mismatch between ideologically programmed neo-Marxists, who over recent decades gained themselves strategic positions throughout the education establishment – and cerebrally-challenged do-gooders who think no child should have to fail anything. It is perfectly possible to provide excellent, respected alternatives for non-academic students in areas of practical skills the country badly needs, and this was done far better in the past. Back to best practices, however, won’t be achieved until the monopoly of this abysmally-performing education institution is broken. www.amybrooke.co.nz www.summersounds.co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/users/brookeonline/

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 67

thinkLIFE science

Global storming

A hurricane scientist dismisses storms’ connection to global warming, reports Martin Merzer

M

IAMI – The invitation went to 50 top hurricane scientists: Please attend a seminar to discuss erroneous connections between global warming and hurricanes. And please don’t attack the presenter.

“No rotten tomatoes,” read the invitation, sent to South Florida colleagues in February by prominent hurricane scientist Chris Landsea. This month, Landsea has published a study that he believes seals his case and should end one of the hottest debates in all of science: There is no connection, he says, between global warming and increased hurricane activity.

Other researchers who reported such a

68, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

link made a fundamental mistake, he concluded in the study. They underestimated the number of storms before the age of satellite monitoring – and before global warming became a concern.

An average of three storms each year were not counted during the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, he says, because they didn’t hit land, weren’t reported by ships, and they formed, flared and disappeared without anyone noticing.

“When you add those storms back into the record, we don’t see any new trend,” says Landsea, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center whose peer-reviewed study appeared in the journal EOS, pub-

lished by the American Geophysical Union. “There’s no link to global warming that you can see at all.”

At least not yet.

Some researchers believe global warming eventually will strengthen hurricanes by producing warmer ocean water, though a report issued last month said that a warming atmosphere also could strengthen crosswinds that inhibit storm development.

In any event, the debate over global warming’s past influence on hurricane development has cleaved leading scientists into two camps.

One is led by Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who says that hurricane activity has increased during the last 100 years or so and the increase is linked to global warming caused in part by human activities.

The other camp is led by Landsea and some colleagues at the hurricane center and the federal government’s Hurricane Research Division on Virginia Key, Fla. They say global warming is real but that there has been no significant increase in hurricane activity since the late 1800s.

After last February’s seminar at the hurricane center, Hugh Willoughby, a professor at Florida International University and a former director of the Virginia Key research center, called the scientific climate “hateful.”

After reviewing Landsea’s paper, Willoughby says he is maintaining neutrality but is “sort of persuaded” by the report and similar studies he has reviewed for publication in coming months.

Emanuel declined to comment, referring questions to Tom Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who has worked with both warring camps.

Knutson says Landsea “makes a very good case,” but “I consider the science still unsettled.”

This issue is settled, however, for Landsea.

As part of Landsea’s supporting evidence, he points to charts showing all tropical storms or hurricanes in 1933 and 2005, the two busiest seasons on record.

In 1933, all storms appear fairly close to land, and none were reported in the central or eastern Atlantic; but in 2005, those remote areas were filled with crisscrossing hurricane tracks.

“It seems obvious that there’s a big gap in how we monitored things in the presatellite era,” Landsea says. “Sometimes, you just have to state the obvious.”

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Investments with a track record that withstands the scrutiny of prudent investors are why investing with Bridgecorp makes such good financial sense today – just as it has done for over a decade.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, JuneWORK277 2007, 69

thinkLIFE technology

It’s a new Vista

Ian Wishart turns the key on Vista Ultimate, and is surprised at PDF Converter Professional 4’s breadth

I

remember it as if it were yesterday. An ageing Olivetti 286 computer with 2mb of RAM and a 20MB hard drive, and the rugged MS DOS operating system. It was 1990, and back then the number of kiwis with online access could be counted on two hands. As an avowed techno-geek, I was one of them. There were no homegrown internet providers – AOL was still small bananas in the US – and Australia and NZ largely relied on a US business database provider, Compuserve. Dial-up modem speeds averaged 1.2K (compared with today’s dial-up standard of 56K and broadband standard of 2mb), and the worldwideweb as we know it did not exist.

When Windows 3.1 hit the market, I was there. When Windows 95 arrived a few years later, I was one of the first to buy a copy. But even then, while covering the Winebox Inquiry, many of my client newspapers looked at me blankly when I asked them for an email address to send stories over the internet. “Inter-what?”

How times have changed.

In all of the previous incarnations of the main Windows operating system, upgrading has been a cinch. I’ve never needed to reverse an upgrade and I’ve never taken precautions.

But with Windows Vista, it’s different.

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When Microsoft sent through Vista Ultimate for review, one part of me wanted to load it on the spot. My Windows XP Pro installation has taken a pounding and, frankly, is looking sad.

On the other hand, Windows Vista is like having a tiger by the tail. It’s a complete overhaul of the Windows system rather than an evolution. For those purchasing a brand new computer system tomorrow there’s really no question – go Vista. But for those upgrading from XP or earlier versions there’s an awful lot of fine print on the box. One major computer retailer tried to convince me that my 12 month old ASUS notebook on a Centrino chip was incapable of running Vista at all, let alone the top of the line Ultimate version. He swore black and blue I’d have to buy a new notebook.

Unconvinced, I turned to the packaging and ventured into that aforementioned fineprint. If you are considering upgrading to Vista, first go to www.windowsvista.com/upgradeadvisor That site will run a test on your system and recommend which version of Vista, if any, can be handled by your hardware.

Thankfully, the ASUS M6 passed the test.

But the next issue is a more practical one.

Software compatibility. If you’re a business user, you’ll need to factor in whether your existing business software can run on Vista or whether you’ll need to purchase upgrades. Naturally Microsoft have the new Office 2007 suite ready so standard applications are OK. But don’t assume everything else will be. Adobe have published Vista upgrade information on their website which reveals some existing software works great, while some programmes run like a dog.

Check first to see if you are covered.

One thing Vista does offer is the capacity to dual boot – ie, you can load Vista AND keep your existing XP setup, if you want to carefully manage the transition. That’s the option I took, clearing space on D:\ . On start-up, you’ll get the option of booting either Vista or XP, providing the best of both worlds as long as you have the disk space.

I’ve been running Vista for around four weeks now. It’s great. Very stable, intuitive to use. I have not yet fully explored its myriad features, which include robust networking functionality and remote desktop, advanced backup in the event of hardware failure, or the enhanced Windows Media Centre applications. As I tentatively unleash the power of Vista in the coming weeks, I’ll brief you on what I find.

SCANSOFT PDF CONVERTER PROFESSIONAL 4 The people at Nuance software are nothing if not clever. I’ve already raved in these pages previously about their Dragon Naturally Speaking software finally coming of age. I hadn’t expected to be excited by a PDF programme but find PDF Converter Pro 4 is a much craftier bundle than I’d given it credit.

Why do you need another PDF programme when you can download Adobe Acrobat Reader free from the internet?

Yeah, well, if your involvement with PDFs is solely to read the occasional link on the internet, then you probably wouldn’t be enthused. But if you recognise that PDF documentation is fast becoming critical online and in the office and home, then you do need a programme like this.

PDF Converter Pro 4 is loaded with usefulness, like the ability to convert PDF documents automatically into Microsoft Office documents that you can edit in Word, Excel and so on. No longer are you trapped by someone else’s PDF – it’s like breaking into

a bank vault and having a rummage.

If you’ve clicked through many corporate and government sites you’ll find many official forms in PDF format. Up until now you’ve had to print them off, fill them in by hand, and fax them. No longer. PDF Converter has a function allowing you to break into a PDF form and fill it in onscreen via the keyboard. The paperless office finally comes one step closer!

You can also create PDFs instantly from within virtually any application, again saving time and hassle, whilst maintaining the ability to lock your own content, password protect it and all the other PDF creation tools you’d expect. For extra functionality, Scansoft allows users to pull in unrelated files – jpegs, PDFs, powerpoint files, word documents – and merge them into one single PDF. It’s an easy way to desktop publish in PDF. For those on the move, the Nuance RealSpeak function converts PDF documents into MP3 audio files. Granted, it is not quite to the standard of a bedtime story, but it means you can listen to any PDF doc-

ument in the world if you wish – particularly useful for those with vision problems.

One final piece of good news: PDF Converter Professional 4 is compatible with Vista, XP and Windows 2000.

When loading Vista, I made the Scansoft product the default PDF handler. It’s a decision I haven’t regretted.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 71

feelLIFE

sport

ICON

A bridge to far

Anzac Day 2007 will not be fondly remembered

by New Zealand cricket fans, writes Chris Forster

T

heir hopes of World Cup glory were savaged by Sri Lanka at a sparsely populated Sabina Oval in Jamaica.

Four years of planning undone by a mix of nerves, under-performance and ruthless opposition. The Black Caps suffered a tear-inducing 81 run exit at the critical stage of the game’s loftiest competition, falling one game short of the final for the fifth time in their history.

But their failings paled into insignificance next to an arcane and seemingly cursed tournament in need of a serious overhaul.

On the surface qualifying for a World

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cup semi-final is no disgrace. After all, the New Zealanders had nestled almost effortlessly amongst the elite contenders at the event, swatting aside England, the West Indies and South Africa to make the top four.

The potent forces of India and Pakistan had fallen at the group stage, suffering humiliating defeats to Bangladesh and the Irish part-timers.

A fully fit and focused Shane Bond was among the most lethal bowlers at the tournament – at the peak of his powers.

Craig McMillan, Peter Fulton, skipper

Stephen Fleming and Scott Styris were all hitting top form with the bat. Coach John Bracewell seemed to be orchestrating a title showdown with the incomparable Australians. But appearances can be deceiving.

A comprehensive 5 wicket pasting by familiar foes Sri Lanka, in the third to last game of their Super 8s campaign started the shakes and the disbelief.

They rebounded by sinking the South Africans with a solid batting effort after part-time bowler Craig McMillan managed to trap three unsuspecting batsmen.

“

The Fleming retirement bombshell as one day skipper after their semi-final demise was almost preordained in its delivery.

He recognised the unforgiving cycles of top level cricket and fell on his sword rather than endure another four years of endless scrutiny and planning for the next limited overs tournament

”

Then it all went a little pear shaped.

Bond was struck down with food poisoning on the morning of their last shakedown for the semis, against the rampant Aussies. A dodgy fish curry was the apparent culprit. Fill-in pace bowlers Mark Gillespie and Michael Mason were taken to the cleaners while Matthew Hayden and his mates amassed 348 for six. The Black Caps chase soon wilted and Stephen Fleming, who was among the many failures that day, tried to write off an embarrassing flogging as a case of “chasing a big total with nothing to lose”.

Those words would come back to haunt him in the match that mattered.

Bond was clearly still feeling the pressure, and the affects of that rebounding curry. He sprayed the ball in all directions that fateful morning. James Franklin came to the rescue with two top order scalps but in the end Sri Lanka’s pintsized captain Mahela Jayawardene crafted a brilliant century against some abysmal “death bowling”.

Fleming and fading tyro Ross Taylor went early as Lasith Malinga “the slinger” struck lethal form. Makeshift opener Peter Fulton and the in-form Scott Styris

threatened to give the 290 run target a crack, before a scarcely believable middle order collapse – five wickets tumbling for just 11 runs.

Game over, tournament finished, dreams shattered.

Lou Vincent cast a forlorn figure back in the salubrious SKY Sport studios in Mt Wellington that morning, as a comments man on pay TV’s live coverage.

You couldn’t help but focus on the cast shrouding the opener’s wrist which was cruelly shattered early in the tournament by a Bond bouncer in the nets, early in the tournament. Vincent’s usually an amiable ball of energy and quirks. Clearly the seven hour ordeal of watching his team-mates fall over when he could’ve been helping them out, must have been almost unbearable.

World Cups only come around every four years. The All Blacks’ long wait for rugby redemption is testament to that eternal statistic.

Bond is almost certain to have bowled his last delivery on the big stage. Vincent, Fleming, Styris, Daniel Vettori and Jacob Oram will all be in their early to late 30s if they stick around for the next tournament on the sub-continent in 2011.

In-between there’s the usual fodder of England tours, trying to dent the Australians’ confidence and a chance for revenge against those pesky Sri Lankans.

New Zealand needs to dig up a few pace bowlers, a couple of middle order batsmen and a champion all-rounder to rebound from their West Indian setback and seriously mount a challenge in four years.

The Fleming retirement bombshell as one day skipper after their semi-final demise was almost pre-ordained in its delivery. He recognised the unforgiving cycles of top level cricket and fell on his sword rather than endure another four years of endless scrutiny and planning for the next limited overs tournament. It was almost a selfish act to quit as captain in their last game of the season, yet still make himself available as a batsman and test match captain next summer.

It also marked the end of an era – after 218 games as an astute leader – a widely admired master at tactical cat and mouse with limited resources.

HEROS

World Champions – Australia Untouchable, never even threatened, Ricky Ponting’s cavalier collection of

extraordinary talent set high standards and bettered them, while everyone else floundered in the West Indian dirt. Hit top gear with thumpings of the Black Caps and South Africa, before Adam Gilchrist’s pyrotechnics stumped Sri Lanka in that bizarre final at Kensington Oval.

Retiring legend – Glenn McGrath What a swansong for the best fast bowler of his generation. Rewrote the record books (again), tied batsmen up in knots and was named player of the tournament at the tender age of 37. Retirement will be very satisfying indeed for the lofty Aussie they affectionately call “Pigeon”.

Slingshot Cowboy – Lasith Malinga His horizontally propelled thunderbolts snared a world record four wickets off consecutive deliveries against South Africa, providing a rare highlight in the flaccid event. The frizzle haired Sri Lankan then bamboozled New Zealand’s top order in the semi-final. Possesses an action bordering on the illegal but his X-factor is just what the game needs.

New Zealand saviour – Scott Styris 31 year old Styis hit a consistent high note and guided his country out of a few potholes before their implosion at the business end of the tournament. Officially one of the best batsmen in the world, after scoring 499 runs.

VILLAINS

Muddling money-grabbers – the International Cricket Council The sport’s ruling body is guilty as charged of extending the competition beyond endurance levels, with a fatally flawed format. Seven weeks is a long time to drag out a tournament, in a sport which only boasts eight seriously competitive teams.

Their profits are driven on the extraordinary amount of time people spend perched in front of a TV. But the one match a day format during the endless Super 8s rendered even the most fervent fan, brain dead. Their exorbitant ticket prices left a swathe of impressive stadiums half empty during the height of the tourist season.

The I.C.C have dealt with corruption and many scandals over the years, but may be this is their biggest crisis. The Dubaibased decision makers have to rescue the game’s showpiece and have a set timeline of four years to do it.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 73

feelLIFE

health

A silver bullet

Health writer Claire Morrow dissects treatment for psychopaths

M

uch has been written about the shooting spree at Virginia Tech in April. The post-mortem of the whole affair, with the 20-20 vision of hindsight. About all the failures. He shouldn’t have had a gun...if guns had been permitted on campus, someone would have shot him...the university should have done something about him earlier. All good points, of course. But my interest is in the failure of the individual. Was shooter Seung-Hui Cho ill, or was he evil? Whatever conclusion we reach in his case, the problem of evil remains to be discussed.

In cases like these, all of the pundits line up pretty quickly to get their views in, and if I put my two cents in it is in the context of a broader point. Not only am I not a forensic psychiatrist (and nor is the average talk show caller) but the patient is dead. And even if he weren’t, the fields of psychology and psychiatry are not so confused as to think they know everything, although no small number of individuals in those fields might try to give that impression.

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The shooter in this case meets the FBI profile for school shooters in the important regard of being a young male, the one uniting feature of that criminal group.

But from there, the traits of mass killers, even when restricted to school-shooters, are more disparate than we might like to think. Although there are features in common, a likelihood of; loneliness, depression, loss, violent imaginings, and so forth, the underlying pathology that causes these signs is different again.

Cho was treated for depression, he was assessed as being suicidal, he was a loner.

He wrote confused pieces for his writing classes that were not only violent and crude but so odd as to be scary. He stalked a few women. Students and professors were afraid of him. Not because he threatened people, but because they could see that something was very wrong. His rambling manifesto – posted to NBC the day of the shooting – shows him to be largely unemotional, paranoid, and confused in his thinking. He looks like he hasn’t slept.

He is focused on his own suffering, but doesn’t indicate that he wants to hurt others – he seems to only want attention, to show the world how hurt he is, how he has been damaged. He seems narcissistic but he doesn’t seem cruel. Years will pass before a formal diagnosis – if any – is made for him. For my money it will be that he had a psychotic disorder, either related to his depression, or together with it.

I doubt you could call him evil, it seems he was ‘insane’. Certainly he suffered, but that is no excuse. If fate had lined things up perfectly, he may have been helped.

But he wasn’t. He was a grossly disordered young man, confused and paranoid and irrational, but it was still an act of evil.

So there are evil deeds. How else to describe it? One cannot leave 32 dead and fall back on the mealy-mouthed nonjudgments of “sad”, “tragic”, “unfortunate”. Avoidable. Puzzling. The word that contains all of the former, and more, is “evil”. The man was merely sick, but he did an evil thing? Sounds like the pained rhetoric of a do-gooder. And of course, I could be wrong, but as the facts stand, that is my best guess in this case. I would go so far as to say that not all those who do evil deeds are themselves evil. But no further, for surely it is possible to be evil.

Theologians are not normally confused by what they mean when they describe evil, forensic professionals describing the same thing are muddled, but only up to a point The Columbine High School shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, are thought by the forensic investigators of that case to have been of two completely different makeups. Klebold was a troubled young man; he was depressed and angry, he hated himself. Had he not met Harris, he might as easily have been picked up for smoking pot and benefited from counseling. Perhaps there was a degree of paranoia related to his depression, he was certainly troubled, but he was not indelibly marked psychologically to be a killer.

The other boy, Harris, presented better.

He was charming when he wanted to be, but he was cold and calculating. He might have hated the world, but he loved himself. He wasn’t delusional, nor his mood disordered. There was no mental illness at all that may have tipped a balance. Like Charles Manson, he brought out the evil in a “troubled” recruit. He enjoyed the murders, he was cruel. But sane. He was

psychopath. Which is mental health – and lay – speak for evil.

“Psychopathic personality” is not listed in the DSMIV, the diagnostic handbook of mental disorders, although “antisocial personality disorder” is. But a number of forensic experts have stuck to the former label in their research because they feel it best describes the person, rather than merely their behavior.

Several diagnostic checklists have been constructed to define the psychopath. Essentially, though, they lack empathy, they have no conscience. They can pass for normal because they don’t feel bad about lying. They do what they want to, with no regard for anyone else.

Not all psychopaths are cruel – some are con-men or frauds, or not criminal at all. But they lack the traits that make people...human. Psychopaths might be cognitively different, they often have difficult or horrific childhoods, they certainly never learn empathy, and as their developing peers develop normally, the gap widens and so forth. Perhaps it is a developing brain damaged by its environment or a brain wrong to begin with that might be damaged irreparably by circumstance.

Perhaps it is not – and this is the current neuropsychiatry view – really understood, and my addendum; perhaps it is simply not explicable by science.

If, as I postulated, Cho was mentally ill, he might have been helped. If he had a definable mental illness, and a raised (but not to the point of diagnosis) psychopathic traits inventory, he would be predicted more likely to commit an act both violent and delusional but may well have still been kept safe from others by treating the illness, whatever that might take. But were he truly a psychopath (and I say not, because psychopaths are not confused, and often charming, they are rational, but without morality) then no, there would be no hope. Therapy or medicines and so forth are not flawless, but they have a chance, at least, in the mentally ill.

In the case of the psychopath, it takes a twisted approach to criminal law to say that there is a mental illness involved. Why did this person do these terrible things? Because he’s ill. How do you know he’s ill? Because he did these terrible things. If evil is an illness, it makes a mockery of medicine and psychology.

It doesn’t bother the patient, and there is no cure. No medication or electro-shock or therapy can help the psychopath – there is research to show that empathy training actually makes the psychopath more likely to re-offend. Since they are not human and have no empathy, but their victims do, a state pursuing such “rehab” is essentially training predators to be better at the evil that they do.

The mentally ill, the brain damaged, the citizen in thrall to a charismatic leader, the temporarily irrational, the drug-affected, the besotted, the misguided. It would be a brave reader who would declare themselves incapable of evil. The true psychopath is not worthy of the status of humanity, not being a member of it. For everyone else: eternal vigilance.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 75

feelLIFE

alt.health

Sunbeds banned

Many American teenagers are no longer allowed to tan their own hides, reports Jennifer Nedeau

N

o smoking. No drinking. No talking on cell phones while driving. Now, the latest no-no in some American state laws aimed at underage teens is indoor tanning.

Spurred by worries about skin cancer, Utah and Virginia this year joined 25 other states in placing limits on teens seeking a bronze glow from the ultraviolet lights of a tanning bed. North Dakota’s Legislature is putting the final touches on a measure to also clamp restrictions on tanning salon patrons under age 18.

Most of the laws require underage teens to get parental permission to lie under the tanning-bed heat lamps that emit intense UV light. A handful of states completely ban access to artificial UV light in salons for those younger than 13, 14 or 16.

Others require teens to bring along a parent or a doctor’s prescription.

Critics say the tan bans are an example of government overreaching, while advocates compare the use of tanning beds to cigarette smoking and the drinking of alcohol – unhealthy practices states already put off limits to minors.

“We have labeling on cigarettes and alcohol and nothing on tanning beds that says `known carcinogen,’” says Dr. Arielle N.B. Kauvar, a dermatologist and chair of the American Academy of Dermatology Council on Communications.

But the restrictions have incensed the $5 billion indoor tanning industry and led to charges of government “nannyism.”

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“I think it is a personal right to tan, just like it is to talk on a cell phone. When are we going to stop over-regulating the lives of our youth?” argues North Dakota state Sen. Nick Hacker, a Republican, who voted against imposing tanning restrictions.

The North Dakota bill, which passed the House and was approved with amendments by the Senate, would bar customers under age 14 from indoor tanning without a physician’s prescription and the presence of a parent and would allow those ages 15 to 17 to tan only with signed parental consent.

State Sen. Ralph Kilzer, a Republican and physician who is one of the sponsors of North Dakota’s bill, says teens are most affected by exposure to UV light. “The younger you are when you have your tanning, the more likely it is to affect you down the road.”

Virginia’s new law, which takes effect in July, will require teens under 15 to get parental consent before going into the salon. Utah’s new law requires parental consent for anyone under age 18.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Vermont are considering similar legislation.

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared that ultraviolet radiation from the sun and artificial sources, such as tanning beds and sun lamps, is carcinogenic.

While there are safer options, such as spray-on tans often called “mystic tans,” most tanning salons only provide beds with heat lamps.

Kauvar, the dermatologist, says that bulbs from tanning salons emit 15 times the rays of natural sunlight, elevating the possibility for frequent users of developing both melanoma and non-melanoma cancer.

There are an estimated million new cases of skin cancer each year. “It is extremely risky behavior, and research indicates it is habitforming,” Kauvar argues.

The Indoor Tanning Association, which boasts of 25,000 professional indoor tanning facilities in the United States and 30 million customers, insists that moderate exposure to the sun can be a benefit.

An article posted on the Indoor Tanning Association Web site states that sun exposure can help fight off depression by boosting levels of serotonin, reduce heart disease by raising levels of Vitamin D, prevent diabetes, prevent cavities, boost fertility, ease irritable bowl disorder, combat menstrual problems, ease skin conditions such as psoriasis, acne and eczema and can even help with weight loss.

“After 30 years of giving bad advice about the sun itself, they moved the argument to tanning beds. They were wrong about the sun, and they are wrong about tanning beds,” says John Overstreet, executive vice president of the tanning association.

According to an Academy of Dermatology press release, more than 1 million people use tanning salons on an average day. Of these, 70 percent are Caucasian females ages 16 to 49. More than 25 percent of teenage girls have used tanning salons three or more times in their lives. The academy has identified the risks of indoor tanning as premature aging – such as age spots and wrinkles – and skin cancer.

Kauvar notes that the tanning industry has effective ways to get young people into tanning salons. She mentions that at major universities, students can use their university cash cards to pay for tanning sessions.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, states with existing laws restricting teen tanning are: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 77

tasteLIFE

TRAVEL

A holiday home in Paris

Meeting Parisians enriches a visit to the City of Light, discovers Carol Pucci

P

ARIS – A half-dozen boiled potatoes rest atop an electric grill on Jacqueline’s dining-room table. Next to our plates are three miniature skillets and little wooden paddles; a plastic tray with square dividers stacked with slices of three kinds of cheese; metal bowls filled with diced red and green peppers, mushrooms and herbs; a plate of smoked meats; and a jar of pickles.

This is raclette, a dish made by melting the cheese and vegetables under the broiler, scraping it onto the potatoes with the paddles and adding a garnish of meat and pickles.

“As soon as you get one in, start making

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another one,” Jacqueline instructs me, poking the potatoes with a fork. I fill my skillet, stick it in the broiler, watch the cheese bubble, take it out and make another.

The dinner is a cook-at-the-table winter meal as casual and traditional in France as a summer barbeque in Auckland. But I wouldn’t trade this experience for a meal in a three-star restaurant.

Jacqueline gets out photo albums and shows me pictures of the artists and musicians she and her husband, Jose, an Argentinean architect, constantly invited in for meals, music and parties when he was alive.

After Jose died, she decided to continue

the tradition of filling her home with visitors, this time through a bed-and-breakfast program run by an agency called Alcove & Agapes, started by Parisian entrepreneur Francoise Foret.

We eat, drink wine, laugh and watch a video on her flat-screen TV. “Between us, our two countries, we’ve had our problems,” Jacqueline says, leaning toward me and smiling. “It’s such a silly thing.”

It’s late and I’m feeling a little tipsy, but no worries. My bedroom is right across the hall.

Beyond the monuments and museums,

travel for me is all about meeting people and soaking up the local culture.

Easy enough in a small town, but Paris?

In a city with a reputation for being cool and aloof toward outsiders, can the average English-speaking tourist meet people other than waiters and shopkeepers and make some real French connections?

That’s a challenge I posed for myself on a recent visit. France, is, after all, the world’s top tourist destination, attracting 78 million visitors in 2006. And despite the whole “freedom fries” episode over French opposition to the war in Iraq, there will always be Americans in Paris.

“There’s a lot of cliches,” says Laurence Monclard, who’s built a business called Meeting the French with the aim of breaking down the stereotypes. There’s the perception “that we can be rude. That we’re not talkative. That we’re self-oriented.”

Like Alcove & Agapes, Monclard, 35, arranges B&B stays in Parisian homes. She also sets up dinners between locals and foreign visitors; works with the Paris tourist board on a program called “Meeting the Parisians at Work,” and arranges visits with local artists in their studios.

“You see the facades of the buildings and the old houses, and you see lots of people on the street,” she says, “but at the end of the day, you just can’t knock on the door and say `Can I come in?’”

With a little help, it turns out that you can.

It’s possible to stay in any one of more than 100 private residences around Paris, from elegant apartments with views of the Eiffel Tower to artists’ hideaways tucked into private gardens.

The location of Jacqueline’s Latin Quarter apartment in a 17th-century building, around the corner from the Pantheon, near dozens of cafes and restaurants, couldn’t have been better, but it was Jacqueline’s warm welcome that made the four nights I spent in her spare room special.

She’s 67 and moved to the neighborhood 43 years ago when 60 people shared two bathrooms in her building. Now, with the Luxembourg Gardens and direct train to the airport just a five-minute walk down the hill, it’s prime real estate.

My room (third floor, no elevator) was furnished with two twin beds, a desk, a wardrobe, lots of light and had a private entrance and bathroom with modern fixtures. Covering the walls were black-andwhite photos of the couple’s musician and artist friends, including one of singer Paul

Simon sitting at the same table where we shared the raclette.

The price was US$124 a night, more than I would have paid off-season for a two-star hotel (the rate for a single was only a few dollars less than for two), but this was more than just a place to sleep.

Jacqueline (Alcove & Agapes, asks that the full names of B&B hosts not be used for privacy reasons) steered me to the Sunday market on the Rue Mouffetard where she and Jose used to go to dance and sing to the street music, and we shared stories in front of the TV over glasses of her homemade raspberry liqueur.

“It’s important for people who are away from home to feel they have a home,” she said.

At the end of the day, when the shops and museums had closed, it was too rainy to go out walking and I had done all the cafe-sitting I could, that’s just how I felt.

Monclard’s “Meeting the French” program is how I happened to spend an hour and a half one afternoon talking with Sophie du Buisson, 36, a sculptress who works in bronze, stone, clay and papiermâche in her studio and home in the hilltop artists’ quarter of Montmartre.

I picked Buisson from a list of Englishspeaking artists who welcome visitors into their studios, and sent a credit-card

payment of $6.50 over the Internet to “Meeting the French” to set up the appointment. Then I followed instructions to take the subway to Montmartre, find the address, punch in a door code and “ring at the brown door at the end of the corridor on the first floor.”

Buisson welcomed me into her workshop, a brightly lit, ground-floor space with skylights, right off the kitchen. Many of her pieces were on display in her living room.

One stood out: a life-size papier-mâche figure of a tall woman in a red dress.

Over espresso and almonds, we talked about her work, Paris, her husband’s restaurant, her 7-month-old son, my work and our families.

She specializes in figurative art – sculptures of women, men and children. Lately, it’s become more abstract as she strives to work social messages into her pieces. She’s involved with a charity that focuses on people with rare and crippling diseases, and is working on a bronze fountain she hopes to sell to raise money.

Everything she makes starts with a found object, like a pole lamp, a scooter or the piece of wire she bent into the form of a Christmas tree.

“I just look in the street at what I can find for free.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 79

Another afternoon, through a “Meet the Parisians at Work” program Monclard coordinates for the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau, five of us went backstage with Katia Lauranti and Nathalie Hacker, fashion designers who own a Left Bank clothing and jewelry boutique called Ka’Na. What I liked about this visit is the way it drew me into a part of Paris filled with offbeat art galleries, pastry shops, cafes and churches I might otherwise have missed.

Lauranti and Hacker share a shop and studio space on a side street in a shopping district between busy Rue de Rennes and chic Rue Cherche Midi.

To get there, I walked by St. Sulpice church of Da Vinci Code fame and popped into a gallery called Espace EDF-Electra, where I browsed through an installation of 1,000 live plants that transformed the room into an indoor rain forest.

Lauranti, 56, is a clothing designer with a love of bright colors. She specializes in fluid, geometric creations such as her trademark expandable pants that can be worn four ways. Hacker, 44, gave up a career designing perfume packages to craft bold necklaces from materials such as pig’s teeth from Africa and seeds from Madagascar.

Their clothing and jewelry sells for hundreds of dollars, but neither woman fit the stereotype image of French fashion designers working in huge workshops with lots of assistants.

Hacker wore pin-striped suit pants and a black vest and showed up carrying a motorcycle helmet under one arm. She works in a space in back of the shop with shelves stacked floor-to-ceiling with plastic bins holding her beads and stones.

Lauranti sews everything on a machine in a basement cubbyhole filled with bolts of colored cloth and spools of thread. She took up sewing 10 years ago after losing a secretarial job, and now counsels others thinking of midlife career changes.

Paris is a collection of neighborhoods, and on certain streets, life goes on as if this were a country village instead of a big city.

One of the best ways to get a feel for Parisian life is to get out on a Sunday into one of these neighborhoods and mingle with the locals as they shop, eat, push their kids in strollers and sing along with the street musicians.

Rue Cler, a pedestrian street near the Eiffel Tower lined with food shops and a lively outdoor market, used to be one

80, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

of these streets. Guidebook author Rick Steves discovered it a few years back, and it’s been so overtaken with tourists that it’s been nicknamed “Rue Rick Steves.”

So where’s the new Rue Cler?

If you’re on the Right Bank near Montmartre, walk or take the subway to the bottom half of Rue des Martyrs, starting at the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, northeast of Galeries Lafayette and below the domed Basilica of Sacre-Coeur.

Like many similar streets in neighborhoods that lure few tourists, this part of the

Rue des Martyrs is closed to cars Sundays between 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

The smell of ripened cheeses mixed with the scent of oranges and roasting chestnuts on the day I walked here. A woman cradling a dog and three baguettes in her arms stopped to sing along with a trio called the Nag `Airs. The song was a Corsican folk song called “Tchi Tchi,” and everyone seemed to know it.

I love neighborhoods like this. After you’ve done the monuments and museums, it’s what Paris is all about.

BOOKINGS: New Zealand’s Distinctive Holiday Homes have accommodation available in Paris,

call 0800 700 344 for price and availability information.

MEETING THE FRENCH PROGRAMS: Work-place tours (US$6.50 per person), coordinated through the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau, include visits to a chocolate maker, a baker and a coffee roaster. Visits with artists in their studios (US$6.50) and dinners with families (prices vary) in their homes, can also be arranged. See www.meetingthefrench.com or call 00-33-6-73-65-62-19.

TOURIST INFORMATION: Contact www.paris.org.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 81

tasteLIFE

FOOD

Message in a bottle

Eli Jameson learns that words are almost as important as a corkscrew and a glass

A

nyone of a certain age – such as, say, mine – who entertained literary pretensions as a youth will have gone through a phase when they wanted to be Jay McInerney. For those not familiar with his oeuvre, during that certain charmed, cocaine-fuelled era known as the 1980s when greed was good (still is in my book) and something called nouvelle cuisine was all the rage, McInerney was the leader of a literary school known as the Brat Pack.

McInerney’s big hit of the era was a novel called Bright Lights, Big City which chronicled – in the second person, no less – the descent of a young fact checker at New York magazine whose life slowly spirals out of control.

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Alas, I was too young to join the Brat Pack or to even get half the references in the book when it came out. I wasn’t even of legal age at the time to drink. Though at the time I swore that I had a book like Bright Lights in me, the times changed, circumstances changed, even citizenships changed.

But now, having been legal to drink for more years than I care (or can) remember McInerney has gazumped me again, writing the book about wine that I would have loved to do. That book is A Hedonist in the Cellar, and the name says it all. Travelling around the world for the seriously-upmarket American glossy magazine House & Garden, McInerney finds himself in cellars and restaurants from the Napa Valley to Bordeaux to

Chile to Australia. One day he will be pulling corks from white Burgundies in New York’s famed Le Bernardin. The next he will be figuring out what Italian white goes best with Prosciutto San Daniele – in San Daniele. And every step of the way he eschews the wine-wonk writing that is redolent of old cigar boxes and wet Labradors.

Instead he describes one Chilean wine as “one of those chic, svelte and devastatingly attractive women you see on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore.” One much-derided grape variety is “associated with dim memories of embarrassing dates – like certain hairstyles from the era of Foreigner and Leo Sayer”. And he tells you how to fake it – by, for example, cultivating

a knowledge of Alsatian Rieslings, which are particularly delightful with fish. You get the idea – he’s having fun, and you want to go along for the ride.

The fact remains, however, that as silly as some of the poncier forms of wine writing are, opening up the verbal throttle and having a bit of a play describing what is in one’s glass is a great way to keep palate and mind nimble. For years Mrs Jameson and I have played a game called “Leaping Gazelle”, named after our slightly offkilter memories of the famous scene in the first act of Brideshead Revisted when Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder attack the great house’s cellars: Wilcox welcomed our interest; we had bottles brought up from every bin, and it was during those tranquil evenings with Sebastian that I first made a serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of that rich harvest which was to be my stay in many barren years. We would sit, he and I, in the Painted Parlour with three bottles open on the table and three glasses before each of us; Sebastian had found a book on wine-tasting, and we followed its instructions in detail…Then we talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another wine; then back to the first, then on to another, until all three were in circulation and the order of glasses got confused, and we fell out over which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and more exotic. “... It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle.”

“Like a leprechaun.”

“Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.”

“Like a flute by still water.” “... And this is a wise old wine.”

“A prophet in a cave.” “... And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.”

“Like a swan.”

“Like the last unicorn.”

All of this got me thinking about the relationship between words and wine.

Wine drinkers have, as the above quote from Waugh shows, loved to show off their skill in conjuring the right adjectives.

Lately, however, this trend has gone more guerrilla, eschewing the more formal and structured styles of the delightful Jancis Robinson or the awful Robert Parker,

who has turned so much of wine buying into a numbers game.

A few years ago a pair of wine writers, Greg Duncan Powell and Ben Canaider teamed up to offer an annual wine guide called Drink, Drank, Drunk, which went so far as to follow a fictional couple through their wine buying and tasting adventures. For whatever reason Greg and Ben’s partnership seems to have broken up before Rohan and Mandy, the inner-city pair who find themselves needing bottles for all life’s big occasions, including days that end in “Y”.

Of course none of this is fun if one can’t take the piss while tasting it. Perhaps the best take on this phenomenon was captured recently by the web comic strip Achewood – which despite being populated by a bunch of anthropomorphic stuffed animals is not for kids but rather gleefully adult. In one strip the lead character joins an erotic wine tasting club, and comes out with pronouncements such as: “Most interesting. Plump, soft white flesh of vanilla and melon yields as a firm hand of chocolate and clove gently pulls the tropical decolletage from her shoulders... it’s a forbidden combination, culminating

in an explosion of heat and musk”.

Putting down the produce for a minute, describing what one tastes when one drinks should not be left to the experts and the wannabes. It should be a sport for all of us. Inspired by McInerney’s writing I found myself recently coaching my father, long distance and via e-mail, through hosting a dinner party in honour of his wife’s birthday. Before I knew it I was recommending – you got it – Alsatian Riesling to go with the saumon en croute I talked him into making, writing that “A sip of a moderately-priced number from a house like Hugel after a bite of fish has the effect of making the taste buds wake up, snap to attention and get back to work. But these are wines that are up on all the latest management techniques and do need not act like intimidating drill sergeants to get the job done. They run a company where no one has an office wall, there’s a pingpong table in the break room, and the receptionist parks next to the CEO. In other words they make taste buds want to do a good job for its own sake – and perhaps the promise of vested stock options when it comes time to float the company.”

I know. Don’t quit my day job.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 83

seeLIFE PAGES

“

The interesting thing about this anthology of explanations for the origins of town or location names is how often the obvious notion proves not to be the historically accurate one

”

Cruelty to livestock

Michael Morrissey’s coverage had to be restricted this month due to our major stories WHYKICKAMOOCOW

By Nicola McCloy Random House, $19.99

T

he title is the English phonetic version of an imaginary Maori languagenamed town called Waikikamukau.

I guess the intended pun is more humorous for English readers than Maori ones.

The interesting thing about this anthology of explanations for the origins of town or location names is how often the obvious notion proves not to be the historically accurate one. Bombay, for instance, just south of Auckland, is not named after the ancient city but the ship Bombay which brought settlers to the area in the 1860s. Interestingly enough the great Indian city has recently returned to its original Hindu name of Mumbai but Bombay, New Zealand, is sticking to its nomenclature. Dagg town is not named after sheep poo or comedian Fred Dagg but Captain Dagg, a whaler who made a massive haul of seal skins from there in the early 1800s. Other towns that have possible naughty nuances to their names such

84, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

as Waipu and Pigroot are also noted. Bulls does not come from the district sustaining a plenitude of male bovines, but from James Bull, a woodworker and carver, who funded a store which wound up providing everything from a beer to a bed for the night. The energetic Bull also established a carrying and sawmilling company. Soon locals said they could go to Bull’s for anything and everything.

Hence the town became Bulls – apostrophe omitted. Hinds in Canterbury has nothing to with the proliferation of deer farms but is named after Captain Hinds, an ardent Anglican and supporter of Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

Thankfully humour can sometimes have a place in history. Take Nightcaps, a town so humble that at one stage it was possible to buy a house there for one dollar (plus installation expenses). One can’t imagine a committee of civic-minded burghers coming up with such a moniker and such proves the case. A Captain Howell, a retired whaler who had 19 children (two by the first wife, 17 by the second) was gazing at the tops of the Takitimu mountains

one typically misty night, and reportedly said, “They have their nightcaps on”. The rest, as they say, is history.

Since McCloy’s aim in part is to look for humour, quirkiness and oddity, she finds more of these in European names and the book as a whole has a European flavour.

However, some. Maori names fit the brief.

Taumata is the abbreviation for the longest place name in the world. Kumara in the South Island is not named after the delicious sweet potato and the town was originally called Kohimara. Ngatimoti, in the Motueka district, is misnomer – there is no tribe called Moti. The explanation is that Timoti is Maori translation of Timothy who carved into a tree “Na Timoti” – “belonging to Timoti”.

However, much of the time things are what they might seem – Auckland is named after the Earl of Auckland, Wellington after the Duke of Wellington, and Christchurch after Christ Church at Oxford. The humorous, the quirky and the odd, it seems, tend to gravitate toward the smaller towns. The larger metropoles take themselves more seriously.

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www.mistralsoftware.co.nz INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 85

seeLIFE MUSIC

Music to his ears

Chris Philpott is a happier reviewer this month OPSHOP Second Hand Planet

ARCTIC MONKEYS Favourite Worst Nightmare

ELTON JOHN Rocket Man: The Definitive Hits

W

I

T

aving the Kiwi flag this month, local heroes Opshop finally return with the follow-up to the unexpected success of their 2003 debut.

Despite the fact that the writing and recording sessions for Second Hand Planet were incredibly disjointed, taking place intermittently over the last 3 years, the real driving force of the group is singer/ songwriter Jason Kerrison.

His talent alone makes Opshop worth taking a look at.

The most distinctive difference between Second Hand Planet and debut effort You Are Here is perhaps this albums greatest strength – each song is epic in nature, each track seemingly written for large arenas and larger audiences, compared to the more intimate feel of their previous offering.

Part of the reason for this change is likely the production expertise of Greg Haver – his previous work with larger-thanlife acts like the Manic Street Preachers combines perfectly with Kerrison’s innate skill for finding melodies that enthral the listener, most evident on tracks like album opener “Big Energy Little Spaces” and the groups recent chart hit “Maybe”.

While it may not be the album of the year, this is a great offering from a Kiwi band with a wealth of talent and definitely one worth checking out.

86, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

t was little over a year ago that the hype for the Arctic Monkeys began, with their overnight success of their debut, Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not, taking the world by storm.

Of course, with great success comes great expectation, and the questions ahead of the release of follow-up Favourite Worst Nightmare focused on whether they could replicate that effort.

To get straight to the point, the Monkeys have actually surpassed any expectations I could have had for this album.

One noticeable difference comes in the rhythm section – having replaced bass player Andy Nicholson during 2006, the group has actually tightened in that area, giving the album a fast paced pumping, almost desperate sounding, feel about each song.

However some of the better aspects of the first record remain, with singer Alex Turner retaining his thick northern English accent and talent for finding quirky melody lines, and quirkier lyrics to fill them, to go along with the group’s signature catchy, dance guitar hooks.

Favourite Worst Nightmare is undoubtedly one of the most entertaining rock records of the year, if not longer, and is definitely a must-have in the watered down rock music climate we live in.

he real question when releasing a “definitive hits” collection of an artist whose recording career spans some 40+ albums and compilations is a simple one: just what songs to include.

Such is the case with Elton John, and of course there is no right answer since each fan will have in mind the 20-25 songs that should be included. It’s likely many, many fans will be disappointed that their favourite song isn’t included on Rocket Man. That said, Rocket Man contains about as many hits as you could hope for, including classics like “Daniel”, “Tiny Dancer”, a live recording of “Bennie and the Jets” and even more recent tracks like “I Want Love” and “Tinderbox”.

My favourite thing about Rocket Man is that some 13 of the 18 tracks here are from the 1970s, perhaps Elton Johns golden years in terms of song-writing.

Accordingly, some of the more unexpected tracks are included here, including my own personal favourite “Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting)” and “Philadelphia Freedom”.

For younger listeners more familiar with his recent work, Rocket Man is perhaps the perfect album to show why Elton John is undoubtedly one of the most important songwriters of the 20th century.

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seeLIFE MOVIES

It took a while

The latest movie releases here played in the US last year. It could be a sign...

Man of the Year Rated: M Starring: Robin Williams, Laura Linney, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum Directed by: Barry Levinson 116 minutes

O

scar Wilde pointed out to us The Importance of Being Earnest. But he never warned of the deadliness of being too “earnest.”

And that’s a warning Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Wag the Dog) and Robin Williams needed to hear before marching off to make Man of the Year. It’s a nearly tone-deaf satire of American politics and the culture of celebrity, a comedy without enough laughs, a satire without enough bite.

But it does have a killer premise. It suggests that a Jon Stewart-type might be able to become president of this distracted, shallow land of the TV and home of the naive.

You’ve seen that face Robin Williams wears sometimes, the pained, sad-serious “Oscar nomination” face he wears when he’s playing a part that demands few laughs, or talking on a chat show about his personal demons. He wears that pretty

88, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

much all the way through Man of the Year, even as he is riffing, rapping and rattling off shots at the Republicans, the Democrats and the state of our democracy. Williams is Tom Dobbs, a comic who hosts a popular political comedy TV show with a glib answer to every political question of the day.

“If it was unpatriotic to question the government, we’d still be English!”

He’s Jon Stewart without the edge or smarts – Jay Leno, in other words.

Dobbs is convinced, by an Internet “draft Tom” movement, to run for president. He gets on the ballot in a handful of key states. He won’t do TV ads. And for a time, he won’t even do comedy at his campaign appearances. He talks about the issues, the failure of the money-driven two major political parties.

And he shoots down the put-downs and distractions of his opposition, mocking flag burning amendments, gay marriage bans and the like.

“I’m not just a tree hugger. I’m an air breather.”

But thanks to a free-form improvisation at a debate, and the ditzy “this is all a game” attitude of the TV talking heads (Chris

Matthews shows up, again and again, no surprise), darned if Tom doesn’t have a shot. Well, thanks as well to something an employee at the company that has the monopoly on touch-screen voting in America figures out. Eleanor (Laura Linney) pays a high price for a glitch she spots in the software, thanks to the weasel corporate attorney (Jeff Goldblum) who calls most of the shots there.

We learn this in a long flashback, an interview after the election with Dobbs’ personal manager-turned-campaign manager, played by Christopher Walken.

That decision robs the story of its immediacy. Man of the Year never has the heat of a Bulworth, the bitter, funny truths of Network or the optimism of Dave.

Levinson, who managed to offend and amuse with his Clinton-era Wag the Dog, seems too well-intentioned, too inclined to lecture, to let Man of the Year ever turn entertaining. It’s not smart enough to be satire, not silly enough to become a spoof.

Levinson and Williams can rattle off talking points on what’s wrong with the process and the electorate, but too many scenes fail to amuse. Some go on painfully long, with characters repeating each other in

awkward conversations that go on forever.

Williams is still doing his manic stand-up bit, without the manic shtick. Linney does yet another Miss Lonelyhearts. Comedy Central mainstay Lewis Black is muzzled.

Walken is less Walken-like than usual.

For every point the movie scores about a system that rewards those who spend $200 million to get elected, and the people they’re beholden to, it loses two for boring us as it does. That doesn’t add up to a Person of the Week, much less a “Man of the Year.”

Reviewed by Roger Moore

Scoop Rated: PG Starring: Scarlett Johansson,Hugh Jackman, Woody Allen, Romola Garai, Jim Dunk Directed by: Woody Allen 96 minutes

S

coop borrows ideas from so many of Allen’s movies, it’s a sort of miniretrospective. There’s the Runyonesque vaudevillian from Broadway Danny Rose, the stage magic act that actually summons

the occult from New York Stories, and the amateur sleuths from Manhattan Murder Mystery, to name a few.

Once more Allen is working in the upper-crust London of Match Point, with Scarlett Johansson again falling for a wealthy man who may want to eliminate her. Johansson’s character, Sondra Pransky, is a beginning college newspaper reporter vacationing in England. Her investigative technique involves sleeping with her subjects, and Sondra wonders if she should have followed her sister into the field of dental hygiene.

But when she’s “dematerialized” by the cornball conjurer The Great Splendini, a k a Sid Waterman (Allen), she connects with the ghost of recently deceased star reporter Joe Strombel (Ian McShane).

Passing along a tip he got on the other side, Joe informs Sondra that aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is the notorious Tarot Card Killer.

Sondra recruits Sid, a fellow Brooklynite, to pose as her oil tycoon father as she insinuates herself into Peter’s social circle. Soon she’s near enough to perform comprehensive body searches, and starts falling for the handsome suspect. Jackman

plays the role with slightly ambiguous charm, his manner suggesting mysterious, not necessarily benign, depths. Sondra’s romantic uncertainty jeopardizes her investigation, and possibly her life.

Peter’s innocence or guilt doesn’t really matter until the finale, and Allen places enough red herrings in our path to keep even confirmed mystery buffs guessing whether the film will end with a wedding ring or handcuffs. The point is the spectacle of two lowbrow New Yorkers trying to bluff their way through the cultured echelons of English society. Every manor house interior looks like a spread from Architectural Digest, and the shopworn Sid fidgets as if he expects a butler to catch him filching the silverware.

While some of the class-clash comedy is wheezy, the actors’ chemistry makes up for it. Allen and his starlet have a kidding, teasing empathy without a hint of flirtatious creepiness. By the time they part ways, he’s shown her that life is a perilous business full of illusions, and it inevitably ends with a vanishing act, but we can have some laughs along the way.

Not a bad message. Not a bad movie.

Reviewed by Colin Covert

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 89

seeLIFE DVDs

A royal flush

Carrie Rickey covers-off one of 2007’s most anticipated DVD releases The Queen M ( contains low level offensive language ) 103 minutes

I

n the history of political poker, the week between the shocking death of Princess Diana and her funeral might be the only time that a jack trumped a queen. At stake was the monarchy itself.

So suggests The Queen, Stephen Frears’ piercingly funny and unexpectedly moving account of that odd couple, Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and HRH Elizabeth II (majestic Helen Mirren) and their back-channels affair.

After Di’s fatal car accident in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997, the newly-elected PM takes the temperature of his grieving nation, diagnoses that it needs a Mournerin-chief and eulogizes the deceased as the “people’s princess.” Relying on her own counsel, the Queen holds that whether or not Diana was a royal pain, divorce deprived her of royal status. Protocol dictates a private funeral.

How the modernizing PM persuades the traditionalist HRH to change the course of the ship of state – and how she deepens his appreciation for its captain – is the core of this lightning-paced entertainment that unfolds at the crossroads of gossip and history.

And therein lies its fascinating question: Do the masses want a leader to follow their lead or a leader who will lead them?

It is a challenge to make a comedy about a tragedy, yet Frears (Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity) rises to the occasion, with the help of screenwriter Peter Morgan’s witty script.

Co-writer of The Last King of Scotland, Morgan proceeds from Aldous Huxley’s astute observation that, “We participate in

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tragedy; in comedy we only look.”

And what a spectacle it is, with New Labor leadership earning political capital by upstaging the palace. And with the monarchs retreating to Balmoral in Scotland, ostensibly to seek privacy for their grandsons.

How much of the film is true? I agree with the British journalist who observed that Morgan has created his own genre, the “some of what you are about to see is true” story. Essentially he does what Shakespeare did in his plays: Imagine himself in the shoes and shadows of historic figures.

Compassionate as it is critical, satirical as it is serious, The Queen is less a docudrama than a political romantic comedy. Its concern is how the Labor leader and the wary wife of Windsor change each other.

Brilliant as Morgan’s script is, it is Helen Mirren’s diamond-hard performance that is the jewel of The Queen’s crown.

Bewigged, powdered and padded to resemble the dowager of dowdy chic, replete with George Washington coif and that patent-leather lunchbox of a handbag, Mirren seems inexpressive as a statue. Which, of course, makes the exasperated flutter of an eyelash suggest contempt, the tense scrunch of a pursed lip extreme rage.

Mirren’s is the rarest and subtlest of performances, communicating both the frosty command of the throne and the human frailty of an overprotective matriarch clutching a hot water bottle as if it could heal her grandsons’ grief.

Hers is not an impersonation, but a personification of a woman who happens to be a queen.

About Mirren’s Oscar prospects, let’s just say that protocol demands that Meryl

Streep’s queen of mean in The Devil Wears Prada curtsey to Mirren’s Queen.

Sheen’s smiling Tony Blair, all deference and dimpled resolve, is likewise excellent, if not commanding. It is the conceit of Morgan’s script that the PM is henpecked both by his anti-monarchist wife (saucy Helen McGrory) as well as the monarch herself.

Frears can’t help himself – who could? – but show QE II waddling down the palace stairs trailing a retinue of jaunty Corgis.

I kneel in complete admiration to Frears, Morgan and Mirren for a movie that finds the common ground between antimonarchists who think the royals are “freeloading, emotionally-retarded nutters” (per Cherie Blair in the film) and Republicans who believe they are the institutional memory and soul of a nation.

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touchLIFE

TOYBOX

Visual imagery Taking it with you

Stylus CX5900

The Epson Stylus CX5900 feature Epson’s revolutionary DURABrite(TM) Ultra resin coated pigment ink which increases the durability of prints, making them smudge and water resistant with vibrant colours and sharp text with up to 120 years lightfastness on selected Epson papers. DURABrite(TM) Ultra ink delivers excellent image quality and durability for both plain paper document and photo quality printing. Using four individual colour Intellidge(TM) ink cartridges, the Stylus CX5900 provide an economical and affordable printing solution that maximises ink usage. The Epson Stylus CX5900 comes with a large colour LCD viewer allowing easy operation and selection of images. With five card slots the Stylus CX5900 offers convenient PC free printing, copying and scanning. The Stylus CX5900 produce true BorderFree(TM) prints with up to 27ppm (A4 pages per minute). The Stylus CX5900’s RRP is $249. www.epson.co.nz.

PORTABLE ENTERTAINMENT

The ARCHOS 704 WiFi is the perfect companion for people on the move: its 40/80 GB* hard drive capacity allows you to store up to 50/100 movies encoded with a PC. Play them on the built-in 7” LCD color screen or playback on TV in high resolution up to 720 x 576 (DVD quality) with the DVR station. Play a large variety of video files, including MPEG43, WMV5 and protected WMV5 and read MPEG-4 AAC/ H.264 (.MP4 QuickTime files), MPEG-2, and VOB with optional software plug-ins (available on this website). The ARCHOS 704 WiFi also offers many more functionalities such as slow motion, adjustable screen size, video editing and even a video bookmarking function. Transform your ARCHOS 704 WiFi into a Digital Video Recorder with the optional DVR station. Record TV or most video sources such as satellite/cable box, VCR, DVD4 player or camcorder in MPEG-43 format.Store up to 40,000 songs on the hard drive and play most popular music files such as MP3, WAV, WMA and protected WMA files. http://www.archos.com

92, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

Belkin’s CushTop and PocketTop

Using a laptop computer on your lap can be uncomfortable due to bad wrist posture and hot laptop-bottom surfaces. The CushTop and PocketTop solve these problems, making it more convenient and comfortable to use your laptop anywhere in your home. With the new CushTop and PocketTop from Belkin, you can now use your laptop comfortably while on your couch, bed, or floor. As a cushion, the CushTop provides padded comfort between your laptop and your lap. The PocketTop acts as a case and mobile workstation, providing a built-in cooling pad and storage space for laptop accessories. www.belkin.com

CANON IXUS 75

With its cutting edge design and extra large LCD, the Digital IXUS 75 is styled to stand out. The DIGIC III processor and advanced features like Face Detection Technology ensure equally stunning results. During playback Face Detection Technology allows you to quickly and accurately correct red-eye. A 7.1 Megapixel CCD sensor captures every scene with razor-sharp detail, for photo quality prints up to poster size. An Ultra-High Refractive Index Aspherical (UA) 3x optical zoom lens delivers crystal-clear performance in an exceptionally compact form. Compose and review your shots in rich, vivid detail: the huge PureColor LCD offers superior colour reproduction and sharp resolution (230,000 pixels). Shoot clear, bright images in dim conditions with ISO 1600 – ideal for parties and restaurants or where flash photography is not allowed. Use Auto ISO Shift to avoid image blur with the touch of a button whenever camera shake is predicted. www.canon.com

N800 Internet Tablet

The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for accessing the Web on the go and comes with an outstanding browser. It also features a built-in Webcam, a sleeker design, a gorgeous screen, and improved performance.

Other goodies include VoIP support, instant messaging, an RSS news reader, a media player, and dual expansion slots. The bottom line: Though it won’t appeal to the masses quite yet, the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is a nice, portable device for on-thego Web browsing, and it has some worthy upgrades. [Reviewed by reviews.cnet.com]Visit www.nokia.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007, 93

realLIFE

LAST WORD

Photography: naveen saxena

An Indian summer

Thomas Swick gets up close and personal on the subcontinent

V

ARANASI, India – I thought that after Mumbai and Delhi, Varanasi would be something of a stroll – or, in more realistic, Indian terms, less of a slog – but the ride in from the airport was the worst yet.

We weaved for miles down a cluttered country road and then probed through a congestion that surpassed anything I’d seen. Painfully, we inched our way forward. In the middle of one hopeless intersection, a traffic policeman’s platform sat empty, as if making some kind of existential statement. A short while later a road crew forced everyone into one lane, squeezing us so tight we resembled a pileup. (Why do those colorful ads – “Incredible India” – never show scenes like this?)

It was here that my annoyance with Indian cabbies turned to admiration. At one point we pushed our way in a wedge of cars, trucks, vans, pickups, buses, motor-

94, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, June 2007

bikes, bicycles, bullock carts – many holding protruding cargos – and tried to make a turn in front of an oncoming wave of the same ingredients. The fact that this was the first traffic jam I’d ever been in that spanned several centuries didn’t sufficiently distract me from the crisis. The sweat dampening my shirt was not only from the heat. I knew by now the one road rule of India – the biggest vehicle has the right of way – and prayed for a flurry of fearful two-wheelers.

Eventually, a slice of river appeared and the taxi came to a stop. I paid my driver a sum that could never adequately compensate him for the service just rendered (and the hours of practice that had preceded it) and carried my suitcase up the steep steps of the Ganges View.

A hovel would have looked good after that ride; the Ganges View was practically baronial. It seemed less like a hotel than an old family mansion (which, I learned later, it was). My second-floor room opened onto a large tiled patio that overlooked the river. Inside, a ceiling fan whirred, brass figurines sat atop antique dressers, and a colored light filtered in through stained glass windows.

I sprawled on the bed motionless, spent, convalescent. It occurred to me that one thing you could say about India was that it obediently lived up to its popular image. I

finally stirred and went down to dinner. It was early and I took a seat at a table for six because – yes – I wanted more people. They arrived shortly: Ameeta, Hugh and Melba, all residents of Venice, Calif. Ameeta and Melba were co-authoring a coffee-table book about India; Melba and Hugh were coauthoring a marriage. The palms of Ameeta’s hands crawled with henna tattoos.

We discussed the ride in from the airport. “At one point,” Hugh said, “I thought: If you took all the Indian drivers and somehow replaced them with American drivers, they’d be at each other’s throats right now.”

They mentioned that early in the morning they were going down the Ganges with an Indian guide. If there was room in the boat, I was welcome to join them.

My alarm went off at a little before five.

I threw on my clothes, stepped out of the hotel and headed up the lane. The world was dark. The beggars from yesterday still occupied their places, though now unconscious and horizontal.

The Venetians’ hotel was very close.

Scores of insects clung to the front door.

In the lobby, a young Indian woman stood in jacket and jeans. Melba appeared shortly and greeted her warmly. This was their guide; her name was Nandita; she invited me along.

Hugh and Ameeta appeared, and we all walked down to the river. Narrow, open boats waited along the banks. We boarded one, with crude wooden benches along both sides, and the boatman slowly pushed us into the current. Bubbles broke through the water’s surface.

“Why’s the river bubbling?” I asked.

“It’s crying for help,” Ameeta said.

“When I was a child,” Nandita said, “in the summer we’d get up early in the morning and swim in the river – on the other side.” She couldn’t have been older than 28. And she wasn’t a guide by profession, but a filmmaker, specializing in documentaries, as well as a photographer.

We drifted down the river. “In Banaras,” Nandita said, “the river flows the other way round – south to north. So we say that in Banaras, everything is acceptable.”

How different the sentiment from that conveyed by a similar expression (which Americans would use): “Anything goes.”

The first connoting tolerant attitudes; the second suggesting excessive behaviors.

Interesting, too, that she called the city by its pre-1956 name.

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“Different states from all over India built their ghats along the river,” Nandita explained. “Bengal, Rajasthan, Maharashtra. So Banaras is quite cosmopolitan in that sense.”

Hindus believe that if you die within the city limits you go directly to heaven.

(Taking the idea of “geography as destiny” to a whole new level.) So some Indians come to Varanasi to spend their last days in a kind of subcontinental variation on a retirement home. There are stories of people who survive for months and then die on an ill-timed trip outside the city.

We came upon a large brick building. “That’s the electric crematorium,” Nandita said. She noted that it wasn’t very popular: there were frequent power outages, and people didn’t care to burn bodies with electricity.

Then we saw our first bathers. A man stood waist deep in the river, holding his arms out in front of him, hands cupped, eyes closed. Another man was catch-

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ing water in a silver pitcher and pouring it, ritualistically, over his head. A few people squatted beneath the surface, then quickly popped back up. On the steps, a thin man in brown underpants vigorously scrubbed his legs with soap.

Nandita explained that some come to wash, others to pray.

Purification of the body. Purification of the soul. This was the everyday, sacred Ganges. I didn’t so much as put my hand in its water.

“Banaras,” Nandita said, “sits on the trident of Shiva. It is supposed to be not on Earth or in Heaven.”

A man steered his boat up to ours and hopefully held up brass bowls, beaded necklaces, wooden figures. “You have shopping now on the river,” Nandita said smiling. Melba bought some jewelry.

Farther along, we joined boats that seemed to be carrying paparazzi. It was a classic ugly tourist scene – rich foreigners aiming their cameras at the strange locals – except that the latter didn’t seem to mind. Some of them appeared to be in a state that transcended resentment, divides, awareness.

In the afternoon I took a stroll. A busy passageway paralleled the river and I followed it north, occasionally turning down even tighter alleys to get a broad view of the Ganges. Standing at one overlook I was nearly knocked down the steps by a cow as she made her way out of a temple. On the way back I saw, through an open window, a roomful of shaved heads and brilliant orange robes. Heading toward another vantage point, I passed a doorway just as a woman emerged and tossed her garbage onto the ground opposite her house.

Despite the filth, I felt refreshed. In

“

It was a classic ugly tourist scene – rich foreigners aiming their cameras at the strange locals – except that the latter didn’t seem to mind. Some of them appeared to be in a state that transcended resentment, divides, awareness

”

Mumbai and Delhi there had always been vestiges of England – Churchgate Station, Maidens Hotel – but Varanasi was precolonial, immemorial India. None of the Indians I’d met in the metropolises – cultured, educated people – showed any enthusiasm when I mentioned Varanasi (a few of them had never visited the city).

It was a bit like telling a Frenchman you were going to Lourdes. In his three books on India, V.S. Naipaul ignores the place.

Varanasi is about as far from the image of global, high-speed India as you can get, which of course is part of its appeal. But I was also happy to be leaving in the morning, before any of the strangeness could become mundane.

I regained my route through dust, smoke, clouds of flies. Two restaurants faced each other across the cramped passageway. One had an awning, and on the awning a slogan: “Yes, we are less dirty.”

The negative turned into a positive was nice, but the “Yes” – that winking confirmation of a presumed perception – seemed the work of an advertising genius.

The passageway opened up into a street market, in the truest sense, as produce was displayed on cloths covering the pavement.

It had the cutest eggplants and greenest peas I’d ever seen. I turned around and mazed my way back to the hotel, at one point coming upon a cow standing kneedeep in garbage, a blue plastic bag hanging out of her mouth.

“Incredible India.”