Investigate, March 2005

INVESTIGATE

March 2005:

David Tua

Air crash

Boy-racers

Geoff Mackley

Issue 51

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New Zealand’s best cur rent affairs magazine

INVESTIGATE BREAKING NEWS

MARCH 2005

A TUA BY THE TAIL David Tua was New Zealand’s best heavyweight boxing hope in a century. Coached and managed by former Olympic medallist Kevin Barry and businessman Martin Pugh. But as MARIA SLADE observes, it all came crashing down. Is Tua really an ingenue who had no idea what his managers were up to? Or were Barry and Pugh a public relations road accident waiting to happen?

ZULU KILO DOWN They say fatigue may account for as many road fatalities as alcohol. Busy lives, stresses and strains, a moment’s inattention. But in this exclusive investigation NEILL HUNTER discovers fatigue may also be a factor in a growing number of aircrashes, including the last flight of ZK-LTF

THE GLADIATORS ‘Boy-racers’ is the epithet we spit out on talk radio and in letters to the editor in this country. ‘P-platers’ is the equivalent term across the Tasman. PAUL HAM goes beyond the temptation of kneejerk solutions and argues that young male aggression is the guaranteed result of an over-feminised society

CRAZY HORSE How did TV3 cameraman Geoff Mackley earn his ‘Rambo’ nickname, and why did it lead to international fame and a six figure fortune? CLARE SWINNEY meets a man who’ll do anything to get the shot

FRONTLINE Images of freedom from Iraq, as citizens defy those who said democracy could never be done in the Middle East

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION

INVESTIGATE vol

5 issue 51 ISSN 1175-1290

Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart Customer Services Debbie Marcroft NZ Edition Advertising Grant Haworth, Jacques Windell Contributing Writers: Neill Hunter, Peter Hensley, Clare Swinney, Chris Carter, Laura Wilson, Ann Coulter, Tim Kerr, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, and the worldwide resources of Knight Ridder Tribune, UPI and Newscom Tel: +64 9 373 3676 Tel: +64 9 373 3667 Investigate Magazine PO Box 302-188 North Harbour Auckland 1310 NEW ZEALAND

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Focal Point Vox-Populi Simply Devine Laura’s World Eyes Right Break Point Doublespeak Line 1 Tough Questions Short Circuit

Editorial Can you hear the people sing?

Why Tom Wolfe is howling The right to protect one’s culture The myth behind Kyoto Ann Coulter on leftwing academics Ian Wishart on politics Chris Carter on bad Gumm’int Debate over the Old Testament Items for the office wall

Australian Edition Editor James Morrow Customer Services Debbie Marcroft, Sandra Flannery Advertising Jamie Benjamin Kaye Tel: + 61 2 9389 7608 Tel: + 61 2 9369 1091 Tel/Fax: 1-800 123 983 Investigate Magazine PO Box 602 Bondi Junction Sydney NSW 1355 AUSTRALIA

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Peter Hensley on investment Bright, shiny things Claire Morrow on the kindest cut Pat Sheil on the discoveries of 1905 The return to Cambodia Michael Morrissey’s autumn harvest Shelly Horton & Tim Kerr’s reviews

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ORIAL AND OPINION Editorial Can you hear the people sing?

Why Tom Wolfe is howling The right to protect one’s culture The myth behind Kyoto Ann Coulter on leftwing academics Ian Wishart on politics Chris Carter on bad Gumm’int Debate over the Old Testament Items for the office wall

TYLE Peter Hensley on investment Bright, shiny things Claire Morrow on the kindest cut Pat Sheil on the discoveries of 1905 The return to Cambodia Michael Morrissey’s autumn harvest Shelly Horton & Tim Kerr’s reviews

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL The tide is going out on Labour

Y

ou can tell it’s election year. You can smell the scent of political blood on the air. You can feel the chill winds of false promises looming on the immediate horizon. For Helen Clark, this is make or break. Will she be the first Labour Prime Minister ever to go three straight terms and bring in what critics are already labeling Labour’s “Third Reich”? Or will 2005 be the year of a political tidal shift?

It’s an interesting scenario. As I write this in early March the latest political poll puts Labour 11 points ahead of National, with NZ First and the Greens neck and neck on 7 points each and Act and United Future dead in the water.

The disappearance of United Future would be a shame if only because the party has some good MPs, but leader Peter Dunne’s stewardBut ultimately, voters this year ship has, in the minds know that a National/NZ of some, gutted the of its credibility.

First coalition is just as capable party Like Jim Anderton, of delivering sound economic Dunne could find himmanagement, and even tax cuts self after the election safe in the seat of OhariuBelmont, but holding his caucus meetings in a phone booth with room left over for a genuine caller.

Winston Peters on the other hand can only go up this year, barring divine intervention, and one would have to argue that Peters has been the beneficiary of divine intervention many times in the past so there’s no reason to assume the political survival miracles will suddenly start swinging against him. And given the miraculous drawing of NZ First’s treaty references repeal Bill from the ballot last month, NZ First would have to do something really dumb not to capitalize on the publicity from this.

Which leaves us with Helen Clark and the Labour team. As Investigate warned readers three years ago, this 6, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

is a political party that is taking public brainwashing and social engineering to new heights. Learned left-wing academics will write theses about this bunch of social misfits for years to come, such will be the damage wrought

by Labour.

“No new taxes,” Labour had promised when they first got in. Now the State is sucking more tax money out of the economy than Muldoon could have envisaged in his wildest dreams. Except these days they’re not called “taxes”, they’re called “levies” or “fees”.

Finance Minister Michael Cullen was being coy on the radio a week or so back when he insisted that all this concentration on the $6 billion surplus was unwarranted because the much-vaunted surplus is “largely illusory”.

Can’t wait to see such honesty in Labour’s election campaign advertising this year: “Vote Labour, we’ll make your money disappear”; or “Vote Labour and enjoy three more years of sound economic management and an imaginary $6 billion surplus”.

To be fair to Cullen he’s probably right. The surplus is illusory because of the smoke and mirrors with student loan debt (counted as an asset in the Government books even though students are not repaying their loans and the debt is rising) and other financial conjuring tricks.

But ultimately, voters this year know that a National/ NZ First coalition is just as capable of delivering sound economic management, and even tax cuts.

Elections in the US and Australia have seen socially conservative administrations returned to power with record majorities, against the predictions of left-wing media pundits.

It could happen here too.

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 7

CONTRIBUTORS

CANNON FODDER Mentioned in Dispatches

Journalist and author Paul Ham (who got his own driver’s license in 1977, when P-plates lasted just a year) examines the phenomenon of reckless young male drivers and what to do about them in “The Gladiators”. Ham found that the root of the problem of young male drivers is not insufficient regulation - far from it - but a culture which has stopped trying to channel young mens’ natural risk-taking behaviour and turn it into something constructive.

What would happen, he asks, if we crack down so hard on a generation of young men that we break the masculine spirit our society actually needs to survive? The same young men hooning around in hot cars are the ones who would also defend their country. Is the emasculation of the West the real cause of the rise in anti-social behaviour in young males?

Ham is the Sydney correspondent for the Sunday Times of London and the author most recently of Kokoda, published by HarperCollins. He is currently at work on a book about Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. “The Gladiators” is the first of his features to appear in the New Zealand edition of Investigate.

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Maria Slade is one of New Zealand’s leading courtroom correspondents. In our March issue she provides a potential juror’s perspective on the intriguing spat between former World Heavyweight Title contender David Tua and his sacked management team, Olympian Kevin Barry and business advisor Martin Pugh. At the core of the case, what happened to Tua’s millions?

Slade, who covered the three year long Winebox Inquiry in the mid 90s for National Radio, and the heartrending trial of Jules Mikus, the paedophile who murdered six year old Teresa Cormack (see Slade’s report in Investigate, Nov 02), admits the Tua case was one of the toughest in terms of the personalities of the protagonists. “I’ve never struggled so hard to retain my objectivity,” she candidly writes. “One look at the way Kevin Barry and his cohort Martin Pugh had dressed to come to court and I realised I didn’t know what I was dealing with. Bleached and greased hair, gold medallions, winkle-picker brogues with white socks and shirts more suitable for a night out clubbing...”

Ouch! Slade is a senior journalist for the Newstalk ZB network, and has previously written for a variety of publications, including The National Business Review and The Independent.

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 9

VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES POISON APPLE OR PLACEBO?

TOUGH CHOICES

I am really surprised that one’s immunity following vaccination cannot be determined. My daughter has recently produced three beautiful children. They were born in 2001, 2002, and 2004. She has received all her rubella shots as a preschooler and in form one at school yet after each baby she was told she had no immunity for rubella and given another shot!

Never was it questioned why she had no immunity.

I am outraged that she has been subjected to this and why it was assumed another shot would fix it.

Any expectant mums out there ought to assume they have no immunity to rubella and if known contact does occur see their doctor immediately for some gamma globulin.

Also if as a parent you should decide not to consent to immunisation it may just pay to check that your school has systems in place to acknowledge your refusal. I have had one child take a trip via ambulance to hospital in anaphylactic shock after the MMR vaccine and have viewed it cautiously ever since.

To that extent we refused for a second daughter to have the MMR as an eleven year old but the school went ahead anyway and gave it to her against our express refusal on the consent form.

And what became of our child who received the anaphylactic shock? When the mumps did do their rounds he suffered from secondary complications battling both meningitis and pancreatitis and was incredibly ill. So he too, was conferred no immunity from the MMR vaccine! Beware, be aware, and do not be lulled into a false sense of security if your child has been vaccinated.

I notice in our newspapers even those who refuse the new meningitis vaccine will be recorded. Compliance is a big bang these days. What pressure will come on those who will refuse? And surely we have a right to know the contents of the vaccine and to know if the desired immunity has been achieved.

Rosemary Drinnan,Waipu

Thank you for your magazine. It makes me think and sometimes cry. I am very interested in what is really going on out there and am about to be faced with the decision about the Meningitis vaccination.

Do I give consent and give into the pressure that is out there or do I continue to find out as much as I can and weigh up the pros and cons?

It is a tough decision because both sides have valid information. Right now maybe ignorance would be bliss.

Thank you again for giving us all a chance to become informed and make responsible and educated decisions.

Christine Pearson, Rotorua

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WOMEN NOT FACTORY FODDER I am a married woman intending to have a family. I am also a University graduate and work in the area of assisting children and their families. The Prime Minister’s state of the Nation speech called ‘women’ (read ‘mothers’) into the workforce. It makes me absolutely furious to think that she would encourage women like me (who choose to start a family with a loving committed husband) to have my children and then fob them off to a child care facility so I can go back to work and earn my keep for this country and to help keep my family afloat.

I am not planning to be a baby machine – gleaning what I can from the State. I wish to be responsible in child rearing. I want to raise my children so that some day they may be contributing members of society, dare I say it, even leaders. To do this with some success I need to be at home with my children, teaching them in the way they should go, spending time with them and speaking truth and wisdom into their lives (my husband’s and my values, not the State’s).

I am fed up with the Labour Government’s constant anti-family attack on mothers who want to be with their children. Those early years come and go in an instant and I do not intend to miss them. An idea for the present Government to consider; how about focusing

on the 80,000 receiving the unemployment benefit, who um, do not contribute to society, and in the process, how about backing off from mothers who do? Being a parent to a child is the greatest contribution a mother or father can ever make to society. To me there is no higher calling.

Deborah Taylor, Auckland

AN ASSUMPTION OF POWER There has been a recent and disturbing trend in the media regarding “helping professionals” being of little or no help to young people in crisis. You know the stories; the Doctor who risked the life of a 15 year old girl through an inappropriate application of the Privacy Act; the Counsellor who decided to keep a girl’s sexual assault secret from the parents claiming “client confidentiality”; and the school that attempted to minimise a bullying incident by implying that the victim was somehow to blame once the bullying came to light. Another case that I was recently made aware of as a Youth Interventionist involved a School Guidance counsellor anonymously sending a teenager off to the doctor for anti-depressant medication without informing the parents; the young person was at risk of self-harm, and still the parents were not told of their child’s situation. The “Cult of Confidentiality” is thus dangerously alive and well in our schools, our hospitals, and our social services, and it is the School environment that I wish to focus on.

In the Counselling profession, client confidentiality is not absolute.

I recently had cause to review the Codes of Ethics for the six main Professional Associations that cover members of the Counselling and Helping Professions in New Zealand, and included in my review the Privacy Act 1993, and the Children, Young Person and their Families Act 1989 as they applied to client confidentiality. Every single one of the aforementioned documents accept breach of client confidentiality without client consent in four situations: if a client is at risk of harming themselves, harming others, discloses an illegal intent or future

action of illegal intent, or if the presence of any external threat to the health or safety of the client exists. Importantly, each of these examples of accepted breach is particularly applicable to clients under the age of 17.

Part of a professional counselling intervention with a client is the practice of “Informed Consent”, and sadly, it would appear that a number of Counsellors (particularly in schools), are woefully inadequate in this critical area of client engagement. Informed Consent is a process by which the counsellor advises the client of the counselling structure, process, and boundaries, at the beginning of the first intervention session. One of the boundaries that must always be explained to clients is the limits of confidentiality within which the counsellor operates, and this explanation must occur prior to any client disclosure.

Failure to adequately conduct a proper Informed Consent process endangers not only the client, but the Counselling professional, who often takes on a level of responsibility for their client’s welfare that they have no right to claim in the absence of parental involvement and awareness, thereby further isolating the client from what are often available support structures in the home. No school staff member, counsellor or otherwise, can legitimately assume the powers and responsibilities of a parent, when incidents arise which affect the welfare of the student, and the rights of parents and caregivers to be involved in any decisions related to their children are upheld in a number of New Zealand Statutes. Students “rights” must always be balanced alongside parents “rights”, and neither must student “rights” infringe on the “rights” of parents and caregivers to decide what is best for their children. The sanctity of a parent/child relationship still holds an enduring social significance, and families play critical roles in monitoring and supervising young people’s behaviour and wellbeing, into and throughout their teenage years.

Recent research from the United States National Institute of Mental Health highlights why such relationships with parents and caregivers

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 11

play such a pivotal role for teenagers. A longitudinal (15 year) study that utilised Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Scans of brain development of the same participants from ages 5 to 20 revealed that “higher order” brain centres, such as the pre-frontal cortex (responsible for integrating sensory information and reasoning), don’t fully develop until young adulthood. To assume therefore that a teenager in crisis is capable of making a rational decision about what is best for them in the absence of parental or caregiver guidance is a classic example of present day ideology attempting to trump historical common sense.

But what if the parent or caregiver is the perpetuator of the crisis, particularly if such a crisis is birthed in abuse or neglect? Counsellors have solid guidelines in this situation as well: to immediately inform the appropriate authorities (i.e. the Police and CYFS) for the purposes of the said authority conducting an investigation.

The lesson of recent media articles pertaining to members of the helping profession overstepping their role boundaries is thus a simple one: “When working with young people, be very cautious of claiming a responsibility for a young person’s welfare or situation that is not yours to claim”. A young person’s life may well depend on the application of such discernment.

For the record, I am a Double Degree qualified Counsellor who specialises in Youth Intervention. I’m also a member of two Professional Associations (MNZCCA, DAPAANZ), both of which subscribe to a ratified Code of Ethics.

Stephen Taylor, Auckland

A BLOW FOR PROLIXITY I write in response to David Lane’s letter (dated February 2005 AD, Julian calendar time, paragraph 5, line 57, read at 10.43 though my watch may be a little tardy) where he described the decision (made by Board Secretary Mr Owen Davie by an email 1/12/04, 2.11pm, read by David Lane presumably some time later though he didn’t provide this information) regarding the General R18 rating given to Irreversible; the film depicting anal rape violence and pertaining to the review (no 8, dated 1 December 2004, time not specified but probably afternoon some time, probably typed on 80gsm letterhead with a self-adhesive stamp on the envelope, possibly arriving through the mailbox at 11.32am Monday 6th December, second class post, gorgeous postman though, but untidy at times) and had no idea (time of writing this letter on Canon A4 photocopy white paper, GSM 80, 4.52pm Sunday

THE TWINPACK SYSTEM is designed to ensure you don’t run out of gas. When one cylinder empties, it automatically changes across to the reserve cylinder. An easily readable indicator on the regulator changes colour from green to red indicat-

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20th February, blue skies outside but slightly blustery, possible shower or two later, but will probably be tomorrow when I actually post it in a NZ Post Prepaid Envelope, purchased at the Newmarket Branch of NZ Post, Est. 1887, at 9.27am Wed 26 Jan, journey made by Stagecoach Bus, alighting cnr Broadway and Gillies; would have written this response earlier but was prevented by having to scratch a nasty urticaria caused by insect bites of unknown origin) what on earth he was banging on about!.

Secretary Cathy van Miert Society for the Discouragement of Inarticulate, Unclear, Unnecessarily Minutae-Overloaded Letters None Tree Hill, Auckland

BORER IN THE WOODPILE A centre right government would have its work cut out for it & would need far more than one term in which to carry out the most vital task of all for saving this country: cleaning up a liberal-coated public sector.

Liberal rot in this country can best be summed up in the word ‘borer’ – those tiny beetles who burrow into good wood and destroy it from the inside out.

Any centre-right government would have to start with the judiciary & the education sector the once-strong pillars which have been reduced to sawdust by the infiltration as it were of the sandal-wearing storm troopers. Everywhere one looks in such fields as nursing & teaching, cultural sensitivity awareness and all sorts of other tripe have been stuffed down this country’s throat.

The greatest threat to New Zealand children today is not the candyoffering stranger outside the school but the one in the class controlling the marker pen. As a new generation is automated into “correct thought” there will undoubtedly be a point of no return when today’s children become tomorrow’s adults, all of them marching and humming to the same tune of ‘Helen uber alles’.

As for the judges of this country, in my opinion D-day will be reached when the treaty activist Durie reaches the Supreme Court, the flood gates will be opened and this country will have Te Treaty as its constitutional centre piece.

The treaty gravy train must be derailed and its snake oil peddling judges run out of Dodge.

Matthew Ensor, Christchurch

ing that you now have one empty cylinder.

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So if you’re thinking gas, the BOC gas experts will take the hassle out of getting you connected to TWINPACK. Simply call on 0800 800 753, or email customer_services@boc.com

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 13

ROAD ENGINEERS MY %$#@!

Chris Carter’s article on badly-engineered killer highways sums up the way most New Zealanders feel about the people who built them. New Zealand is full of difficult roads that meander and zig-zag all over the place. We all know the shortest distance between two points is a straight line or what should be a straight road but on perfectly flat land there is often a series of dangerous corners for no reason whatsoever.

You only have to drive on the roads in Franklin County to find some prize examples of stupid road-making. Totally unnecessary corners and doglegs make what should have been an easy straight drive over flat or undulating land, into an irritation for experienced drivers and a real survival test for novices.

I know two people who rolled their cars on very tight 90 degree corners with no camber – real death traps in the wet. One had to kick the back windscreen out of his upside-down car to escape.

Were these roads made by incompetent nitwits with little foresight?

Yes, but we could also add “greedy” and “corrupt” to the resume of some of them.

The roading contractors who built these horror highways back in the early-to-mid 20th century got paid by the mile. The longer the road, the more money they got, so they made them as long as possible by padding out the job with extra bends and turns. And they got away with it by buying off the government inspectors.

They had the power to go through any land necessary and keep the contractors going straight but frequently approved some of the worst roads ever made. They are a national disgrace.

My grandfather was a civil engineer who worked for the Ministry of Works for many years and was also a founding member of the Standards Institute. He specialized in bridges and rose up the ranks to become a senior inspector of works. He knew some of the contractors would do anything to make more money – bribery included.

He saw it going on many times and was disgusted by it. Top people inside the Ministry couldn’t be bothered doing anything about it either, even though road construction was costing them much more than necessary.

But it is the driving public who have paid a far higher price. Longer roads mean more petrol used, more tyre wear and more time wasted.

This has cost the country countless millions over the decades. But worse is the number of unnecessary accidents and deaths on these dangerous, crooked roads. Granddad knew this would happen and said the guilty parties deserved to be shot. If he hadn’t believed in the Judgement Day he probably would have done it himself!

We will continue to put up with the current situation forever because the cost of road straightening these days is prohibitive. Low usage back roads will be left as bent as bananas because the cost versus benefit ratio is too high for the bean counters in Wellington. It is easier and cheaper to blame poor driving and put up a few extra signs than fix the

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real problem. It is also more cost effective for them to pay out tens of millions in ACC and hospital costs than hundreds of millions fixing roads. Many people will find it hard to believe this has been going on in Godzone because we are told by the experts there is little or no corruption in NZ. The stench of corruption surrounds government contractors the world over. New Zealand is different only by degree and we are a lot better at hiding it.

Now we are going to be hit with a five cent a litre petrol tax to cover road “improvements”. This is legalized highway robbery.

And to make matters worse, much of the proceeds will pay yet more roading contractors to “fix” the problems deliberately caused by their crafty predecessors.

Ross Julian, Drury

THE CHICKEN OR EGG DEBATE Nick Sault in his ‘crack at Ian Wishart over…evolution’ (Jan 05) says he finds ‘it astonishing that a man of [Ian’s] intelligence, could live in denial of the processes of evolution.’

Can I ask him a simple question? What are these ‘processes of evolution’ to which he refers? I would like him to identify them for us.

To be more specific; physical life runs on coded information - the genetic code with its genetic information.

Evolution’s central claim is that once upon a time there was no genetic code or information. Then bingo, over a thousand million years, both the code and all the diverse information that determines the form and functioning of each particular life form on earth, came to be. This critical central claim of evolution says that both the code and all this information arose spontaneously - without a single thought being given to it - solely as a result of the properties and interaction of matter/energy.

This claim requires that the spontaneous generation of coded information occurs readily and repeatedly, given the vast amount of highly specific genetic information in existence today.

Could Nick please identify for us the process by which codes and coded information arise spontaneously (independent of thought/ mind), and document one verifiable of case of this occurring.

Given the confident tone of the rest of his comments this should not be difficult.

Renton Maclachlan, Porirua

GIVE DARWIN SOME CREDIT Darwinism is an insightful concept that has the ability to explain a great deal of biological reality. But it is a theory that is less than complete and is likely to remain so while it holds to a presupposition that there has to be a fully natural explanation for the idea of common descent.

Actually I consider common descent most likely. A Creator does not

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 15

have to begin again from ground zero with his new creations and I believe there is Bible evidence that he didn’t. (Think of the story of the creation of Eve). Just as there a great deal of intellectual inertia in accepting that Darwinism has it limits, Creationists show the same inertia in conceding that Darwin, the man, did make a contribution to our understanding of the natural world. It is also clear that Darwin was not as dogmatic in his views as are some of his more enthusiastic followers. He was cautious with his explanations and humble in that he acknowledged there were many possible pitfalls and shortfalls to his theory. We should all note that Darwin was partly correct! But nothing has since turned up in science that necessitates Creationists making the mental “jump” necessary to believe that small changes accumulate to large changes. One reason for this is to do with a fundamental truth regarding composite systems.

In a composite system, there is a direct correlation relationship between the size of any change and the number of requirements that that change must satisfy. Small changes are possible because they don’t affect several different other parts of a given system. Large changes become a scientific “black box” because they require the coordinated change of several other components of a given system in unison. All changes are not created equal and one cannot build a case for macro or complex evolution just because small changes are observed.

Evolutionists have experimental evidence for minor changes and extrapolation, and much of that points to the idea of common descent. Creationists have theoretical and mathematical rationale to support their position that large (unaided) changes are unlikely or impossible. A little open-mindedness on both sides might be very helpful to this ongoing discussion.

Dale Tooley, Upper Hutt

REASONS TO DOUBT I am not impressed with your answer to my letter (Feb 2005, p14).

Please note that the reason for that letter was your essay in the December issue “Should I believe the Old Testament” in which you emphasize a number of times that the Old Testament is without errors. I quote: “No, science has not proven the Old Testament is wrong. Not even one little paragraph.” And later on “And indeed, it is without error. After two thousand years of criticism, not one error has so far been proven to exist anywhere in the Bible.”

Does this mean that every sentence is true and correct? (Assuming ‘correct’ to mean the opposite of ‘wrong’ and ‘error’). What about the example I quoted, the description of a worldwide flood 4000 years ago, where 40 days of rain was enough to raise the level of the oceans by a few kilometers. Other readers commented on the difficulty of collecting hundreds of thousands of animal species from all over the world. The Bible is quite detailed on the description of the Great Flood. As a Christian I do believe in the Bible, but do not see it as a textbook of history, nor of science.

WIN A DVD In association with Warner Home Video, we’re giving away a DVD movie every issue to one letterwriter, chosen at random. So if you’ve got something to sound off about, say it to us and you could be our next winner. Correspondents should include email and phone contact details.

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Let’s go on to your comment on my statement “… our knowing that all living things are related to each other is as much a fact, as the fact that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning”. You turn it around and state that I conclude that the “fact of evolution is as real as the sun rising tomorrow morning in the East”. This is not what I said. Firstly, I did briefly explain that everything in science is theory, open to questioning. Nothing is fact, strictly speaking. Secondly, I never put the word ‘fact’ in front of ‘evolution’, and thirdly I used the word ‘fact’ here as we use it in every-day language, not in a scientific-philosophical sense.

I find it amusing to survey the whole spectrum of creationists, ranging from the young-earth creationists (everything started in 4004 B.C.), to the progressive creationist, who allows for more time, down to the latest offspring of Intelligent Design. There must be wars raging within their camps. Only when it comes to fighting evolution do they stand united. But do they? Michael Behe, one of the pillars of Intelligent Design, states that he has no problem with the idea of common descent, that all organisms share a common ancestor. In other words, that we are related to the apes! So, where is the problem?

You don’t like me calling Intelligent Design pseudo-science, or rather, anti-science. Intelligent Design assumes that what is mysterious today will always be so and that we need to invoke a supernatural explanation. And you want to put this ‘theory’ alongside other great scientific achievements, like the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics?!

This does neither religion nor science any good.

Ian, you refer jokingly to my native Vienna. Let me tell you that in all the 30 years I lived in central Europe I have never come across anybody who had a problem with the theory of evolution. I am sure there will be some, but most certainly not 40% of the population like in the US (I wouldn’t be surprised if that figure rises even further under four more years of Bush). Another statistic shows that 40% of Americans cannot tell how long it takes for the earth to get around the sun.

A coincidence?

Hans Weichselbaum, Doktorandum Chemistry University of Vienna

WISHART RESPONDS: Hans, your letter deserves a longer reply than I have space for here, so it forms this month’s Tough Questions column, (see the page 30). Read it there.

THEY THINK WE’RE STUPID The purpose of Steve Maharey’s tinkering with benefits is one of obfuscation. By removing names such as the ‘Domestic Purposes Benefit’ it becomes more difficult for critics to analyse and comment on the welfare system’s flaws and deficiencies.

I see this as another ploy that is consistent with the brain-binding tactics of political correctness.

Hugh Webb, Hamilton

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Address: INVESTIGATE, PO Box 302188, North Harbour, Auckland, or editorial@investigatemagazine.com (please include your address)

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 17

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE Wolfe howls at loose moon units of the Left

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fter thoroughly enjoying Tom Wolfe’s latest novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, it came as some surprise to read review after review that panned the book. Wolfe has had negative critiques of his earlier work, the smash hit Bonfire Of The Vanities and the more recent A Man In Full; during a celebrated literary bitchfight with a jealous Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving, Wolfe wrote an essay titled “My Three Stooges”.

But there was nothing like this near-universal condemnation by the literary establishment, so spiteful and so personal.

Wolfe “has become an old fart, and the worst kind of old fart, too: a right-wing scold, a moralising antique”, wrote Henry Kisor of the It explores social status and the Chicago Sun-Times. “has grown into primal human need to belong to a anWolfe unremitting scold, exgroup. How ironic, then, that the coriating perceived debook was the trigger for Wolfe to pravity”, wrote The Washington Post’s Michael become a pariah within his own Dirda. The book is, “a group, the New York liberal elite (slightly disguised) hellfire tirade, a vision of students who belong in the hands of an angry God”.

Wolfe is “irredeemably, programmatically superficial” wrote Theo Tait in the once-great magazine The Spectator.

Many reviewers sneered about Wolfe’s age, 73, as if it somehow disqualified him from writing about young people.

“What can be expected when a novelist in his 70s takes on the subject of undergraduate life? Mainly voyeurism,” wrote Princeton professor Elaine Showalter in the Chronicle Of Higher Education. Wolfe was “titillated by the sexual revolution that has arrived on campus since his own student days”. There must be a rea18, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

son for such spite which goes beyond the pages of Wolfe’s new book. And, of course, it is politics. The day before the US presidential election last November, Wolfe was quoted in The Guardian as saying he might vote for George Bush. Social death!

What’s more, he poked fun at the Bush-hating New York liberal dinner party set, to which he belonged.

“Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing ...what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And ... Tina’s reaction is: ‘How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?’ I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled.”

Wolfe’s book is about a high-minded 18-year-old virgin, Charlotte Simmons, from a conservative hillbilly family, the first to go away to a prestigious college. But instead of an intellectual Shangri-la she found a shallow, status-obsessed world of rampant sex, crudity and drunkenness, where her virginity was a joke and being “cool” was everything.

It explores social status and the primal human need to belong to a group. How ironic, then, that the book was the trigger for Wolfe to become a pariah within his own group, the New York liberal elite.

“I cannot stand the lockstep among everyone in my particular world,” he told The Guardian. “They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them.”

Wolfe also accepted an invitation from Laura Bush to the White House last year to speak at a literary function.

But the final affront to his peers was when The New York Times discovered President Bush loved I Am Charlotte Simmons.

“It is unclear exactly what Mr Bush liked so much about the book,” wrote the newspaper’s Elizabeth Bumiller. Shock horror, the President was even, “enthusiastically recommending it to friends”.

“Does Mr Bush like the book because it is a journey back to his keg nights at Deke (his jock fraternity at Yale), or because it offers a glimpse into the world of his daughters’ generation?” Miaow.

Then, to make matters worse, another British paper, The Sunday Times, revealed Wolfe’s daughter, Alexandra, 24, had confessed that

KRT she, too, was intending to vote for Bush. “If I say it out loud, it’s death,” she whispered to writer Sarah Baxter at a Manhattan black tie arts party. “In a place like this, people look at you like you are a freak.

I believe in abortion and I totally believe Kerry is right on some social issues, but I just don’t trust him on terrorism.”

Maybe this determination to escape intellectual lockstep and think for oneself is hereditary. Or, scary thought, for Wolfe’s detractors, maybe it is contagious.

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 19

LAURA’S WORLD

LAURA WILSON Identifying and eradicating unwanted pests

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ew Zealand Customs officers are among the world’s most rigorously protective. We love to keep things out of our remote little country. I quite frequently fly around the world carting some odd items that barely raise an eyebrow until I land here, whereupon I am funnelled toward MAF and Customs scrutineers who treat me as if I am very odd indeed.

“Why would I want to bring such things into the country? Does the country need such things? They have never heard of items like these, so surely I am hiding some ulterior motive?” I have an interest in different healing techniques and pick up the odd foreign implement and herbal remedy.

If it is New Zealand’s choice to At first the insinuation that this made me a susbecome multi-cultural then I sup- picious oddity upset me. port that. This also is our right. But How dare they make judgements? I let us not think it is our obligation. such found it very smallUnwise immigration schemes are minded indeed.

Often my goods are crippling countries and diminishing taken for further testing cultures that seem to have no right and I receive them weeks to protect themselves or even months later, purged of every possible evil. This simply does not happen elsewhere, unless you have a firearm. But ask most New Zealanders about Customs and they will back up this mentality of exclusion. We want the right to shape our country the way we want, not have it shaped by outside influences flooding in at the will of foreigners whose alliance lies not with the heart of this nation.

We are quite clear when it comes to excluding undesirable substances, but not so undesirable attitudes. This becomes an issue of human rights, as if we do not have the right as a country to judge an attitude or a behaviour 20, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

undesirable and keep it out. We will protect our flora and fauna from contamination with the greatest of measures, but not our culture.

A few countries have the shoe on the other foot. Bhutan, for example, allows only tourism, no immigration.

Tourists pay US$250 a day to visit, allowed only two weeks in a guided tour of designated areas. While Bhutan is an extreme example, it is by no means unique.

Many countries have almost no immigration allowance – it is simply something they do not want. Nepal, for example has a few foreign residents, but all are there on shonky student visas that require constant renewal. Try to even find an Immigration Department, and then try to ask for a residency application form, and you will be laughed back to your country.

I estimate that in approximately two-thirds of the world’s countries, immigration is nigh impossible. The countries that do allow it are predominantly Western.

In Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand the attitude to giving foreigners entitlement to dwell and even become nationals, is entirely different. Even countries that are over-full to bursting still take in thousands of immigrants. Why the differences?

Obviously, more people want to get out of a poor country and into a comparatively rich one, than the reverse. But there is another reason, one which Western nations scorned long ago. Protectivism. Even the poorest of countries like Nepal and Bhutan are passionate about their identity and protect it at great cost. They want tourism and they want money, but they do not want outside customs taking root and potentially taking over their sovereign ways.

Try similarly to immigrate to a Muslim nation. Even marrying a national does not afford you residency or citizenship. They are absolutely protective, and unashamedly proud of it. But observe the outcry if any Western country attempts in even the meekest way to protect itself by suggesting for example that it is overcrowded and needs a break from the tide of immigrants. This

country will be in the headlines, whichever politician dared to voice this opinion labelled a racist, conservative bigot, or as in the case of Pym Fortuyn, Dutch Opposition Leader, simply shot to death.

I have never been a part of any organisation, be it religious, political or philosophical. I have no criminal history, no world-changing goals, and no particular axe to grind yet immigration to a non-Western country would be no easy task as most simply do not want me. They most certainly feel no kind of moral obligation to take me in simply because I ask nicely! Even if I had fled New Zealand, pursued by the IRD or the Mongrel Mob I would find they have no such thing as ‘claiming refugee status’ because I fear for my livelihood or life.

The very fact that New Zealand is taking its time to consider whether to grant residency to a foreign man with a strongly political-religiousactivist past who entered the country illegally under false pretences, is causing moral outrage. Not moral outrage that New Zealand is being taken advantage of, but outrage that it dares to harbour doubts about this man and even greater outrage that it dares to suggest it has the right as a nation to protect itself from individuals, ideas or situations that could harm the way of life here.

What on earth is all this about? How dare Amnesty International lambast the government in full page Herald ads for crimes against humanity? Have we not a right to even consider protecting ourselves?

If New Zealanders don’t want Nukes, they are kept out. We don’t like snakes, even if they are at risk of becoming extinct in their own land we would not consider harbouring them. Customs have every right to treat me, a New Zealander with suspicion, to detain me, test me, question me for as long as they like because their business is protecting the country. Why is it not equally important to protect this country’s culture, as its nature?

When Bhutan wants to protect itself from unwanted influence it is seen as a charming, endearing quality and a bold move by a proud people who have something worth protecting. Bhutanese do not lack

compassion, but had some of New Zealand’s high-profile refugee claimants gone to them for refuge, they would have politely declined.

The world media would not have berated the Bhutanese government for this. In fact no one would have seen it as other than their personal right to choose. Why on the one hand would people uphold Bhutan’s right to self-determination through protection and exclusion, and not New Zealand’s? Why are we bigots for excluding an Algerian whilst Bhutanese are heroes for excluding an American? Clearly our attitude towards protection and preservation is two-faced, confused and heavily coloured by the unconscious prejudice that Westerners owe something to the rest of the world.

I have spent much of my life travelling, often involved in voluntary schemes to alleviate suffering, to bring health and education to people whose governments either can’t or don’t care to provide for. I do not lack compassion but one thing I have learned about the world is that poverty, disease, and most forms of suffering I have witnessed stem from attitude, culture, belief and behaviour, not by an accident of nature, and not by Western greed.

New Zealand is a safe, healthy and caring place to live because of a culture we have carefully cultivated, argued over and altered over generations. Now we take this culture for granted, as if it is not a creation, a possession of ours. Rather, we see only a land that we possess by dubious rights, that we have little right to restrict others from.

In Bhutan culture is seen as their greatest asset, coming before land, before wealth. Part of treasuring this is in saying the word no.

If it is New Zealand’s choice to become multi-cultural then I support that. This also is our right. But let us not think it is our obligation.

Unwise immigration schemes are crippling countries and diminishing cultures that seem to have no right to protect themselves. We must be able to do both; celebrate and protect our way of life as well as invite other cultures and expand our boundaries. To do this we inevitably have to say no along the way, in between the yes’s.

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 21

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER A burning question

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millennium dawns, and a power and environmental crisis beckons.

Or does it? The globe is warming, oil is running out, and it’s all our fault, apparently. Mankind’s fondness for fossil fuels spells doom for us all, or so we are told. The earth will warm, the seas will rise, crops will fail, coastal lowlands will be inundated, polar bears will die out, and yada yada yada. This is partly true. The climate is changing. Temperatures worldwide are increasing. It is happening; it just isn’t happening for the reasons that that Greenies tell us it is.

I was raised as an environmentalist. I love the earth.

Like most farmers, and most hunters, I’m a true Green, and proud of it. But unlike the ultra-far-red-leftists of the party which bears the same name, Greenies like me prefer to base our The burning of fossil fuels by opinions on fact, rather on dogma, ideolWestern nations is not causing the than ogy, and bad science. rise in global temperatures, and We are in good company.

British botatheir cessation in so doing will not nist, Professor David halt it, nor will it save those nations Bellamy, has pubwhich are at risk lished a paper outlining how it is that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are increasing because of global warming, and not, as the flat-earth zealots of the Kyoto Cult claim, the other way round. His findings are based on thirteen thousand years’ worth of archaeological data since the last ice age.

Bellamy refers to the Milankovitch cycles, which measure changes in the earth’s climate brought about by variations in the tilt of our planet’s axis and her orbit around the sun. These changes occur gradually over long periods – up to 100,000 years – and their effects, along with those of the known 300-year and 22-year weather cycles generated by sunspot activity, have been inscribed not 22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

only in the fossil record, but also in human history.

1000 years ago, the Vikings grazed cattle on the lush green pastures of what are now the frozen icy wastes of Greenland, and Britain had a wine industry. 750 years later, the climate had cooled to such a degree that people could ice-skate on the River Thames in London.

Bellamy also quotes from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, whose petition against the Kyoto Protocol has been signed by some 18,000 scientists worldwide. Its central claim is simple; “Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide are in error, and do not conform to experimental knowledge.”

Kyoto proponents would do well to acquaint themselves with a little of that experimental knowledge. We are told that melting ice caps will cause sea levels to rise.

This is patently untrue, and easily demonstrated. Fill a glass to about three-quarters with water. Drop in a few ice cubes. Mark the water level with a felt-tipped pen.

In an hour or so, when the ice has melted, come back and check the level. You will discover that it hasn’t changed.The science behind this is very, very, third-form simple. Ice is less dense than water, which is why it floats. Because it floats, it displaces water, pushing the water level up. As the ice melts, the displacing ice is replaced by water, of increasing density, at lower volume, meaning that the overall level remains the same. Melting ice caps will have no effect at all on sea levels.

For the record, the Northern ice cap has no land mass under it. It is all floating sea ice. Most of the icebergs released by the Antarctic, are also sea ice, from such reservoirs as the Ross Ice Shelf. Such land-based ice as is released, by retreating glaciers and continental ice masses, is utterly insignificant relative to the volume of the oceans. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to sit down with a map of the world and a pocket calculator to work that one out.

Sea levels will, however, rise with increasing global temperatures. This is because a warming of the oceans

“Nobody wants pollution. There are very good reasons for mankind to pursue an alternative to oil as a source for transport fuels. But just for the record, oil is never going to run out. Contrary to popular myth, it isn’t fermented dinosaur juice. Oil is one of the products which the earth produces all the time, albeit slowly” causes their waters to expand. Low-lying countries are at risk, unfortunately, and this is a great tragedy of our time; but a greater tragedy still, is the unfettered willingness with which so many otherwise ostensibly intelligent people leap blindly onto a popular bandwagon founded on theory and science which is, plainly and simply, wrong. The burning of fossil fuels by Western nations is not causing the rise in global temperatures, and their cessation in so doing will not halt it, nor will it save those nations which are at risk.

We are also led to believe that methane emissions from New Zealand’s three-odd million cows are irrevocably harming the atmosphere, and that we must purchase “carbon credits” from some other country in order to overcome this.

The authors of this particular chapter of the Kyoto fantasy have obviously not thought far enough outside the box to give consideration to the effects which must, by their logic, have been caused by the up-to-75 million bison which roamed North America until the 1830s, or the huge African wildlife herds that existed up until modern human predation. One would presume, in keeping with their argument, that the globe should now be in credit from that period.

The fantasists also appear to ignore the fact that the atmospheres of the northern and southern hemispheres mix only at the equator, and even then, by only a minute percentage every year. Even if the “carbon credit” theory were anything other than simplistic misinformation, several centuries would have to pass before the effects of carbon emissions “saved” in one hemisphere, had any measurable effect on those “spent” in the other.

And as an aside, forests are not the “carbon sinks” which the Protocolers claim them to be; living plants emit almost as much CO2 as they take in. The only effective way to turn a forest into a carbon sink, is to cut it down for timber, or mill it into paper.

As I write this, on the evening of Wednesday 16th February 2005, the Government of New Zealand is committing the latest in its long litany of ill-informed, incompetent, or deliberate and ideologicallydriven blunders. It is ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.

Even as it does, professional activists, from the internationallyfranchised business Greenpeace, are occupying the site of this New Zealand Government’s single most intelligent and sensible action – the commissioning of the mothballed Marsden-B power station, as a coal-fired electricity generating plant.

They are doing so because they, and the Greens, and any number of other highly-opinionated yet poorly informed protesters, are opposed to the use of coal as a fuel for electricity generation. It is their claim that the burning of coal, or any other fossil fuel for that matter, in spite of a wealth of informed scientific opinion to the contrary, is a contributing factor to the current cycle of natural climate change. I do beg to differ. Mankind, for all his faults, is just not that significant. We are not affecting our planet’s climate. It is changing all by itself, without our help, as it has done since time immemorial, not just in the couple of hundred years since modern record-keeping began.

A single volcanic eruption on the scale of Taupo, or Krakatoa, or Mount St Helens, or Pinatubo, releases more particulate and oxidative matter into the atmosphere, than has been created by the whole of mankind since the discovery of fire, modern wars included. Sorry, Kyotoers, but once again, this is verifiable fact.

Ice ages come and go. After them, indeed between them, the climate warms again. Greenhouse fanatics choose to ignore this natural phenomenon, because they have no pseudo-scientific way of explaining it.

Though generally short on alternative solutions, in this case, as an alternative to coal, the protestors make some timid noises in favour of natural gas. This is a curious position. The exhaust products from the burning of natural gas (primarily a mix of propane and butane, with some methane, a little ethane, a smattering of pentane, and a dash of carbon monoxide), are mostly water vapour (the single most effective greenhouse gas, which also sustains life on our planet, and staves off ice-ages), and carbon dioxide.

Strangely enough, the exhaust products from a modern coalfired thermal power station are also, primarily, water vapour and carbon dioxide.

The reality of black gold today, is a long way from the grim memory of its industrial past. Fly ash is caught by filters. Sulphur dioxide is neutralised with lime, and the resultant calcium sulphate is extracted to be used as a fertiliser. After these processes, there is very little left.

Their other preferred alternatives appear to be the continued destruction and flooding of South Island rivers and wilderlands, and the proliferation of ugly, noise-polluting wind farms – which Europe, incidentally, having had much experience of, is now in the process of dismantling.

Nobody wants pollution. There are very good reasons for mankind to pursue an alternative to oil as a source for transport fuels. But just for the record, oil is never going to run out. Contrary to popular myth, it isn’t fermented dinosaur juice. Oil is one of the products which the earth produces all the time, albeit slowly. When we tap into an oil strike, some of the oil comes out under its own pressure, and the next fraction is displaced with water, either sea water or fresh water, depending on whether the find is on land or offshore.

But oil isn’t so much pumped, as collected. Oil companies prefer not to spend unnecessary money on extracting this free and plentiful product; when the easy stuff runs out, the well is capped, declared “dry”, and the company moves on to the next find. At that stage, the reservoir usually still contains around 80% of its original oil.

Oil is handy and versatile stuff, providing us with plastics, artificial fibres, and a host of other products, from cosmetics, to agrichemicals, to road-building materials.

That said, it isn’t the cleanest thing we can put into our fuel tanks; but neither is it, nor coal, the cause of global warming.

Worldwide, a commercially-driven and media supported campaign of mass hysteria over climate change is using fraudulent science and bogus evidence to convince foolish Greenies and ignorant politicians to spend vast amounts of money on solving a problem which doesn’t exist. It is reminiscent of those other great bogeyman stories, about Y2K, SARS, Nuclear War, werewolves, vampires, and Asian Bird Flu. I end as I began, by quoting Professor Bellamy: “The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth. It is time the world’s leaders, their scientific advisers and many environmental pressure groups woke up to the fact.”

(With acknowledgement to David Bellamy, and special thanks to Allen Cookson for some additional information.)

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 23

BREAK POINT

ANN COULTER

The problem of fruitbat university lecturers…

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niversity of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has written that “unquestionably, America has earned” the attack of 9/11. He calls the attack itself a result of “gallant sacrifices of the combat teams.” That the “combat teams” killed only 3,000 Americans, he says, shows they were not “unreasonable or vindictive.” He says that in order to even the score with America, Muslim terrorists “would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.”

To grasp the current state of higher education in America, consider that if Churchill is at any risk at all of being fired, it is only because he smokes.

Churchill poses as a radical living on the edge, supremely confident that he is protected by tenure from being fired. College proJust because we don’t have fessors are the only peobright lines for determining ple in America who assume they can’t be what speech can constitute a fired for what they say.

Tenure was supposed firing offense, doesn’t mean to create an atmosphthere are no lines at all ere of open debate and inquiry, but instead has created havens for talentless cowards who want to be insulated from life. Rather than fostering a climate of open inquiry, college campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banned words and prohibited scientific inquiry.

Even liberals don’t try to defend Churchill on grounds that he is Galileo pursuing an abstract search for the truth. They simply invoke “free speech,” like a deus ex machina to end all discussion. Like the words “diverse” and “tolerance,” “free speech” means nothing but: “Shut up, we win.” It’s free speech (for liberals), diversity (of liberals) and tolerance (toward liberals).

24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

Ironically, it is precisely because Churchill is paid by the taxpayers that “free speech” is implicated at all. The Constitution has nothing to say about the private sector firing employees for their speech. That’s why you don’t see Bill Maher on ABC anymore. Other wellknown people who have been punished by their employers for their “free speech” include Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Jimmy the Greek and Andy Rooney.

In fact, the Constitution says nothing about state governments firing employees for their speech: The First Amendment clearly says, “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.” Firing Ward Churchill is a pseudo-problem caused by modern constitutional law, which willy-nilly applies the Bill of Rights to the states – including the one amendment that clearly refers only to “Congress.” (Liberals love to go around blustering “‘no law’ means ‘no law’!” But apparently “Congress” doesn’t mean “Congress.”)

Even accepting the modern notion that the First Amendment applies to state governments, the Supreme Court has distinguished between the government as sovereign and the government as employer. The government is extremely limited in its ability to regulate the speech of private citizens, but not so limited in regulating the speech of its own employees.

So the First Amendment and “free speech” are really red herrings when it comes to whether Ward Churchill can be fired. Even state universities will not run afoul of the Constitution for firing a professor who is incapable of doing his job because he is a lunatic, an incompetent or an idiot – and those determinations would obviously turn on the professor’s “speech.”

If a math professor’s “speech” consisted of insisting that 2 plus 2 equals 5, or an astrophysicist’s “speech” was to claim that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, or a history professor’s “speech” consisted of rants about the racial inferiority of the n....s, each one of them could be fired by a state university without running afoul of

AP/FOTOPRESS the constitution. Just because we don’t have bright lines for determining what speech can constitute a firing offense, doesn’t mean there are no lines at all. If Churchill hasn’t crossed them, we are admitting that almost nothing will debase and disgrace the office of professor (except, you know, suggesting that there might be innate differences in the mathematical abilities of men and women).

In addition to calling Americans murdered on 9/11 “little Eichmanns,” Churchill has said: 1. The U.S. Army gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians specifically intending to spread the disease.

Not only are the diseased-blanket stories cited by Churchill denied by his alleged sources, but the very idea is contradicted by the facts of scientific discovery. The settlers didn’t understand the mechanism of how disease was transmitted. Until Louis Pasteur’s experiments in the second half of the 19th century, the idea that disease could be caused by living organisms was as scientifically accepted as crystal reading is today. Even after Pasteur, many scientists continued to believe disease was spontaneously generated from within. Churchill is imbuing the settlers with knowledge that in most cases wouldn’t be accepted for another hundred years.

2. Indian reservations are the equivalent of Nazi concentration camps.

I forgot Auschwitz had a casino.

If Ward Churchill can be a college professor, what’s David Duke waiting for?

The whole idea behind free speech is that in a marketplace of ideas, the truth will prevail. But liberals believe there is no such thing as truth and no idea can ever be false (unless it makes feminists cry, such as the idea that there are innate differences between men and women). Liberals are so enamored with the process of free speech that they have forgotten about the goal.

Faced with a professor who is a screaming lunatic, they retreat to, “Yes, but academic freedom, tenure, free speech, blah, blah,” and their little liberal minds go into autopilot with all the slogans.

Why is it, again, that we are so committed to never, ever firing professors for their speech? Because we can’t trust state officials to draw any lines at all here? Because ... because ... because they might start with crackpots like Ward Churchill — but soon liberals would be endangered? Liberals don’t think there is any conceivable line between them and Churchill? Ipse dixit.

Universal Press Syndicate March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 25

DOUBLE SPEAK

IAN WISHART Killing us softly with their song

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ellphones kill 17 in road crashes”, screamed the newspaper headline, or something like it. I almost choked on the latte (come on, I live in Auckland). Seventeen people a year being killed because drivers are using cellphones, I thought to myself. Almost enough to warrant reconsidering my “yeah, right” attitude to the problem. And then I read on. It was actually 17 deaths over seven years.

And on the strength of that, the Nanny-State brigade are calling for a blanket ban on the use of cellphones in vehicles, including a ban on the use of hands-free kits.

“It’s not the cellphone that’s the worst probBecause let’s face it: if the logic lem,” they wail to sympabehind banning cellphones is to thetic, liberal, control-freak ensure drivers don’t get dis- journalistic lap-puppies, tracted by conversations, then “it’s the conversation.

People can’t drive and talk we may as well ban passenger at the same time. It’s not seats in vehicles safe!” No. Apparently not.

Not with a rampaging death rate of two and a half people per year. What’s next, a lead story in the Herald telling us, shock horror, “100% increase in cellphone-related fatalities prompts call for Government to introduce emergency regulations…”?

Ah, they’re a right little bunch of comedians, these.

It’s almost enough to make me think Darwin might actually have been right. Perhaps a segment of our population, mainly in the left-wing liberal camp, really are the natural descendants of apes and that’s why we’re fast becoming a banana republic. Buried, a week later, in a much smaller story in the paper was Matthew Dearnaley’s brave attempt to provide some much needed balance. He reported that the biggest distractions for drivers in road smashes were passengers talking and/or drivers reaching for or looking for something while they drove. Add to that the thirdlargest factor in road smashes – fiddling with those pesky, 26, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

all-the-bells-and-whistles-you-can-afford car stereos with the really really really small buttons and even tinier writing on the knobs – and you’ve got a whole heap of bigger causes of road fatalities than cellphones.

You are actually more at risk, in Auckland anyway because I’ve seen it happen, of being pinged in a cellphone drive-by where - either as pedestrian or fellow passing motorist – you’re clouted around the head as a result of another enraged driver throwing their malfunctioning phone with the fiddly buttons out the window.

Cellphones are a distraction for drivers, don’t get me wrong. They can, in some cases, lead to road accidents.

But how many more accidents are caused by three year old twins Amanda and Timothy in the back screeching like proverbial banshees because one bit the other or you didn’t go the route they wanted or you just passed an icecream shop without stopping – need I go on?

Then there’s autocide – suicide by car. It’s a fair bet that a large chunk of our road fatalities each year are people who’d had enough of the screaming in the back seat, or anywhere else for that matter.

Frankly, I can’t see why the Government is even bothering with this half-baked plan to ban cellphones and headsets when Frau Clark could simply wave her dictatorial finger and get the thought police in Labour’s Cabinet to adopt the fullbaked version and simply ban road accidents. Fullstop.

We could have the police officers currently manning speed traps reassigned to ride shotgun in ambulances, where they could sternly admonish and occasionally administer a jolly good kicking to victims of roadcrashes, and slap ‘em with an instant $500 fine before they even reach the hospital.

Because let’s face it: if the logic behind banning cellphones is to ensure drivers don’t get distracted by conversations, then we may as well ban passenger seats in vehicles. Only then could you reduce the likelihood of a conversation breaking out. Governments introduce stupid laws by first creating a climate of fear and then milking those fears for all they’re worth. And the biggest tragedy is that New Zealand’s Fourth Estate is complicit in the crime.

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 27

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER A state-sponsored frontal lobotomy

H

ow do you finally discover that you have crossed the threshold as it were and become, irrevocably, a grizzly old bastard? Could some of the signs, for instance, be somehow linked to the old chestnut theories that the Coppers now seem indecently young, that Americans rejoicing in names like Snoop Dogg, Eminem and the like who wail frequently obscene or incredibly violent doggerel to a sort of ghetto-like primeval beat is now akin to the prophesied effect that Rock and Roll would have on my generation, (a notably accurate prophesy when you come to think of it.) That women and wimps have taken over our world. That It is fair to say that amongst the we now live in times where Members of Parliament there the number one objective of every good person plainly are some good people, must be, at all costs, to but sadly these folk are working avoid ever letting a word or a phrase cross your lips in an environment that more that may give offense to a commonly resembles a fellow human being, or for Victorian mad house that matter any living thing that could be thought to have an IQ higher than that of a common amoeba.

Having studied at some length our society since the beginnings of the new millennium, the term dinosaur I have now discovered is no longer a strong enough description to accurately portray the likes of such as I. Indeed so decrepit have become my mental processes and general inability to accept change, that together with my plainly unacceptable desire to hold on to such antediluvian principles regarding such matters as the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, truth versus lies etc, this should, without any doubt at all, make me an instant candidate for a state-sponsored frontal lobotomy. Worst of all, and this is a terrible admission to make I’m sure you will agree, I don’t personally 28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

give a big rat’s bottom as to either my supposed mental decay, current thought processes or – worse – frequently rabid utterances.

Since liberal socialism and all of its mind numbing, institutionalised gray-matter-destroying rubbish infiltrated our previously very well balanced and indeed pleasant little country, you may be absolutely assured that anything at all that you may say, do, or even think, will be contrary to this brave new world where euphemism, spin, and downright deception is not only the norm, but where advanced practitioners of these new age black arts are rewarded almost beyond measure.

Of course, should you retain, even after some years now of social re-engineering, some small vestige of morality, a lingering perception of what is genuinely right or wrong, even worse the temerity to voice in a public place an opinion or an idea based on these now officially discredited ageist/sexist/racist/homophobic/ etc thoughts or ideas, (and believe me such is the lexicon of the liberal abuse vocabulary that every time you say anything you will be bound to fall foul of one or perhaps all of these catch-all labels), then very quickly you will see the sense in simply joining the mainstream, saying nothing, and indeed most probably earning social promotion to the ranks of the “Metro sexual”, a term that as I understand it describes fairly accurately, anyone at all who has cast aside such unhealthy notions of being either male or female with a normally operating brain and adopting instead the thought patterns and world view probably best described as being that of an earthworm.

Having achieved, well certainly from our metro sexual politicians’ point of view in any case, this most desirous state of near social nirvana, we may then be almost completely relied upon to vote in the expected fashion, although should a last little nudge be required to maintain the sisterhood’s largely undeserved position of power and influence, then common voter bribery using the peoples’ own tax monies you can absolutely guaran

tee will retain St Helen’s place in this odd-ball political firmament.

All of this, even as a self-confessed grizzly old social dinosaur, scares the hell out of me, not so much on my own behalf, but even casting my mind back just a couple of decades, this quickly accelerating decline in just about everything that we all once held to be an integral part of our national character appears to be all just going down the toilet, right under the very noses of people who, like me have had kids, yet appear to have no conception at all as to how we, as parents, should be guarding, if necessary with our very lives, what little that now remains untouched by a series of politicians, who if there was ever any justice at all, would be behind bars for the common good.

Good God, we voters really do have a lot to answer for do we not? In fact, I really do believe that before anyone is allowed to cast a vote at any upcoming elections that it should be made law that each individual voter should have to prove that they have spent at least several hours watching and listening to the people that collectively we have recently chosen to represent us.

It is fair to say that amongst the Members of Parliament there plainly are some good people, but sadly these folk are working in an environment that more commonly resembles a Victorian mad house.

The standard of debate is at best puerile and frequently descends to a level where an onlooker might seriously believe that they had stumbled upon an episode of Animal House, where various wild-eyed actors are competing with one another to amuse the watching audience with feats of studied idiocy that – if not genetically based – at least call into severe question the current state of our mental health service.

Ever watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show? The parallels are “astounding,” from the Speaker playing the part of commentator, to the various MPs braying their own particular interpretations of everyone from Odjob to Frankenfurter. I tell you, rent and watch the movie, then sit down and watch Parliament in action, and I’ll guarantee you that apart from the sycophants in the Press Gallery, no one will ever take our current Parliament seriously, ever again.

Which point, one must observe, is in fact no laughing matter at all, because, quite plainly, it is from this appallingly dysfunctional organisation that the very laws that increasingly control our lives are formulated and then enacted, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why it is that the much better organised Government Departments have increasingly taken over the role of Ministers and the MPs by simply being forced to fill the vacuum that their supposed masters have provided by their collective ineptitude.

Our democracy now appears to have devolved to the point where Parliament simply applies itself to the task of prying enormous amounts of tax monies from the people at large, at which point unelected and largely unaccountable bureaucrats spend up large, usually in the time-honoured manner of increasing the size of their staff levels and therefore power structure, consolidating their increasing grip on the throats of the citizens that they are meant to serve and be working for.

Certainly we still have elections, indeed we all are looking forward to one at the end of this year, but have little doubt at all that when our votes have been cast, little of any worth will have changed, Justice, Health, Education, the Police and various other Departments and Ministries are now, quite clearly self-sufficient unelected entities and most certainly well beyond either censure or the control of the common herd, which I might add is self evident in the cavalier fashion in which they effectively carry on their own sweet ways regardless of which Government we choose to elect. All of which thoughts and observations I freely admit can only really come from a Grizzly old curmudgeon, the younger more liberal freethinkers amongst us continuing to largely believe that Democracy, like Freedom, is simply a word ... perhaps they are right.

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 29

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART

A Viennese waltz on whether you can believe the Bible

H

ans (“Vox Populi”, p16) takes me to task over my suggestion that the Old Testament has not been found to contain any errors.

My response is this: Why do you keep missing the basic points I’m making? The Old Testament is without error. Philosophically, to believe that it has error is to believe that we worship a God who cannot communicate accurately with humankind. I am familiar with the (mostly 19th century Austro-Hungarian) argument that the OT was myth and allegory, but their views were based on invalid philosophical presuppositions – such as Hume’s denial of miracles – that have now been shown to be flawed. So philosophiEither God can inspire his disci- cal argument that the OT is faulty doesn’t stack up. ples to write his truth in the Which leaves us with Old Testament, or he can’t the alternative – is there any objective evidence that the OT does contain errors – any errors?

None. That is the point I was making, no more, no less. After two thousand years of criticism and discovery, not one actual error has been found in the OT amongst what is still capable of verification four thousand years after the events. However, time and again historians have found that what they assumed to be erroneous references in the OT are in fact true (e.g., the discovery of the Hittite civilisation only last century).

Reason to disbelieve them could come from the natural world around us, but again (and I’m not attempting to be personal here because it applies to many) there is widespread ignorance about what the OT actually says. You, for example, suggest there’s no evidence of a worldwide flood 4000 years ago. Great. Now tell me where in the OT it says there was a worldwide flood “4000 years” ago?

This sort of strawman rubbish would be laughed out of most theological colleges but it survives in the pages of Skeptic Journals as if it is some kind of silver bullet.

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Your bottom line premise is that there is no reason to take the OT as a true and accurate record of history.

That’s your philosophical position, now provide me with some real instances where the Bible is wrong to support your premise with evidence.

You suggest all life is related. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. There is no direct scientific evidence of this, only speculation based on the circumstantial evidence. And the circumstantial evidence is effectively confined to the structure of cellular organisms and the fact that every living thing contains DNA. But I and others could equally look at the same evidence and speculate that it points to the existence of a common Intelligent Designer who used a blueprint to create life. Just as roads the world over are made of asphalt, because it works as a roading surface, so too does all life contain DNA, because that is the computer programme God designed to run life with. The mere fact that Brick “A” was found in the Victoria Park Market chimney, and Brick “B” forms part of the Sistine Chapel, does not imply that VPM and the Sistine Chapel are related. They are, but only to the extent they were designed by humans using a common design ingredient.

So here are a couple of biological posers for you: if random evolutionary change, driven by the engine of natural selection, is the reason for the wide variety of lifeforms on this planet, perhaps you can explain to me why it was only DNA-based organisms that formed life? Why do we not have a range of unconnected lifeforms if evolution was as simple and common an occurrence as you imply?

More intriguingly why is it, if evolutionists are correct, that all lifeforms would track back to one common ancestor? Why only one? Why not 500 different original species each giving rise to their own lineage?

Either God is powerful enough to raise Christ from the grave and defeat Evil, or he’s not. Either God by definition is a perfect being and the epitome of truth, or he is not.

Either God can inspire his disciples to write his truth in the Old Testament, or he can’t. And if he can’t ensure that the OT is correct, why should we believe the NT?

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 31

SHORT CIRCUITS

JUNIOR THEOLOGY • Dear God, Please put another holiday between Christmas and Easter. There is nothing good in there now.

Amanda • Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother but what I asked for was a puppy. I never asked for anything before. You can look it up.

Joyce • Dear Mr. God, I wish you would not make it so easy for people to come apart. I had to have 3 stitches and a shot.

Janet • Dear God, I read the bible. What does beget mean? Nobody will tell me.

Love, Alison • Dear God, How did you know you were God? Who told you?

Charlene • Dear God, Is it true my father won’t get in Heaven if he uses his golf words in the house?

Anita • Dear God, I bet it’s very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only 4 people in our family and I can never do it.

Nancy • Dear God, My Grandpa says you were around when he was a little boy. How far back do you go?

Love, Dennis • Dear God, Do you draw the lines around the countries? If you don’t, who does?

Nathan

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• Dear God, Please send Dennis Clark to a different summer camp this year.

Peter • Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they each had their own rooms. It works out OK with me and my brother.

Larry • Dear God, I keep waiting for spring, but it never did come yet.

What’s up? Don’t forget.

Mark • Dear God, Is Reverend Coe a friend of yours, or do you just know him through the business?

• Dear God, I do not think anybody could be a better God than you.

Well, I just want you to know that. I am not just saying that because you are already God. Charles • Dear God, It is great the way you always get the stars in the right place. Why can’t you do that with the moon?

Jeff • Dear God, I am doing the best I can. Really.

Frank • Dear God, I tried walking on water when we went to the swimming pool the other day but I just sunk. What’s your secret?

Callum And, saving the best for last . . .

• Dear God, I didn’t think orange went with purple until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday night. That was really cool.

Thomas

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DOWN FOR THE COUNT The heavyweight courtroom title fight of the world As a journalist, one’s job is to remain impartial. But MARIA SLADE admits she’s never struggled so hard to retain her objectivity as she did covering the High Court hearing into heavyweight professional boxer David Tua’s bitter and expensive dispute with his former manager Kevin Barry, and former business manager Martin Pugh 34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

KRT

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I

came to the Tua story cold. I knew little about the case, and even could see myself retiring there and growing a bit of taro.” Tua said less about the venality of the professional boxing world. But it Pugh told him to buy it through Tuaman Inc for tax purposes. “He was decided in the newsroom that this was a news, as opposed said he was trying to protect me. But I never knew how that was to a sport, story, and I was dispatched to Auckland’s High Court. supposed to work.”

“Take what boxing people say with a grain of salt and keep your The Pugh and Barry camp argue through their shares in Tuaman Inc hand on your wallet,” joked a sports journalist colleague. they own equivalent slices of Pakiri, and that the trio’s plan had always But this is New Zealand. The David Tua/Kevin Barry partnership, been to invest Tuaman Inc funds in property. albeit now soured, was kiwi sporting salt-of-the-earth. The dirty dealDavid Tua maintains there was no talk of Kevin Barry and Martin ings of the boxing ring had surely no more taken hold here than the Pugh buying the property with him. “There was never a ‘me and you’ Mafia had. or a ‘we’ll buy it’. The conversation was about the land being bought One look at the way Barry and his cohort Martin Pugh had dressed for me.” to come to court and I realised I didn’t know what I was dealing with.

As he spoke to the court I thought, can a man who earned millions Bleached and greased hair, gold medallions, winkle-picker brogues with of dollars by knocking people out really be that naïve, or is this beguilwhite socks and shirts more suitable for a night out clubbing. If they’d ing innocence a great act? wanted to portray the image of wily, slimy creatures that had crawled Trying to remain objective, I also thought that perhaps there’s a out from beneath boxing’s nasty underbelly, they were going the right certain style one becomes accustomed to living in Las Vegas, and this way about it. could explain the impression of Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh. After Contrast this with the Tua entourage. David Tua and his cousin- all they move in the sorts of circles where people keep tigers as pets. turned-manager, former rugby and league star Inga Tuigamala, turned Then Barry and Pugh opened their mouths. up each morning like five-year-olds on the first day of school. Neatly Throughout his lengthy cross-examination by David Tua’s lawyer pressed in business shirts and ties Tony Molloy QC, Martin Pugh was atop black ie-faitagas (formal skirts petulant and argumentative. He sat worn by Samoan men), they sat virtually with his back to the lawthrough every minute of the proyer and refused to look at him. At ceedings. At their sides were their times he patronisingly repeated his smartly dressed wives, and conreplies syllable by syllable as if stantly surrounding them was a Molloy was unable to understand guard of friends, family members them. Kevin Barry was defiant. and boxing comrades. Supporters Both frequently attempted to hamcame and went as the week wore mer home a point by talking on on. David Tua long ago won the and over their cross-examiner. The public’s hearts and minds in what irritated Molloy raised his voice on it perceived as his greatest fight. more than one occasion, and at one Baby-faced, he told the court point shouted at Barry: “Will you he was “just a fighter” and that answer the questions I ask and be Kevin Barry attended to every quiet the rest of the time!” To other detail of his professional which Barry cheekily replied: “I’ve boxing life. “You rely on your never seen you so angry.” Tony manager so you can just fight. I Molloy later remarked, “You have signed things exactly as they were more soliloquies in you Mr Barry put in front of me. Kevin was my than Shakespeare.” trusted manager.”

A lot of what Martin Pugh said David Tua said Kevin Barry and was nonsense.

Martin Pugh had a plan. “They Molloy questioned Pugh closely talked about a company, but I on what he knew of his responsididn’t know what that was bilities as sole director and thereall about.” fore the board of Tuaman Inc. What that was about was the Tony Forlong, the accountant Tua trio’s Exclusive Management hired in July 2003 as the relationPhotography: COREY BLACKBURN Agreement which states the comship between boxer and managers pany, Tuaman Inc, is owned 50% dissolved, had earlier given eviby David Tua, and 25% each by dence that Martin Pugh was “well Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh. Tua was under the impression Tuaman out of his depth” in running a company. He needn’t have bothered.

Inc was his company. So was company accountant Jennie Grant. “I was It was a truth Pugh revealed all by himself as Molloy’s cross-examinaled to believe that the company was David Tua’s, and only his,” she tion progressed. told the court. “For that reason alone the books I was trying to keep Pugh disputed the court-appointed accountants’ calculation that were misconceived.” between 2002 and 2004, he and Kevin Barry respectively took $1.4 The boxer described the day in April 2001 when he went with Martin million and $1.2 million out of Tuaman Inc. The QC queried him Pugh to look at the asset at the heart of the dispute – the multi- about the absence of signed and audited accounts for Tuaman Inc for million-dollar, 51 hectare beach front property at Pakiri, north of Auck- those years. Molloy asked him if he’d had alternative accounts prepared land. “I thought it was heaven, it reminded me of home in Samoa. by professionals of a comparable stature to the court-appointed ones, Right away I wanted to buy it. I wanted it for myself and my family. I to support his argument.

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Photography: COREY BLACKBURN

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 37

Pugh claimed that he had but that the court would not allow him to produce them.

Martin Pugh: “The figures I put in front of the court I provided to Price Waterhouse Coopers for their validity check which this court has ordered me not to refer to.”

Tony Molloy: “Where are the accounts? I’m not asking you about validity checks, whatever they are” Later in the exchange he asserted that no professionally prepared and audited accounts were done because “taxation is decided by the shareholders of the company. The court-appointed accountants have taken the view of undoing three years of methodology of accounting the company followed.” Molloy was moved to remark that it was a stance every New Zealand company would love to take.

When Tony Molloy asked him if he’d ever taken expert tax advice he replied yes, from myself. When then asked what qualified him to provide such advice, there followed a long discourse on how there’s a simple principle involved of paying a percentage of the company’s income in tax, and standard tax return forms are available on the internet.

Pugh claimed he adopted a “no harm, no foul” policy with the IRD. Kevin Barry’s knowledge of company law was little better.

Tony Molloy: “You poured scorn in your brief on the idea that David Tua didn’t understand about shares in the company. What I would like to know is whether you understand. The impression I get from your affidavits is that you think a 25% shareholding in a company entitles you to 25% of the company’s income and 25% of its profit. Is that what you think?”

Kevin Barry: “Yes that’s right.”

T

he proceedings came down to credibility. It was clear Tuaman Inc was owned half by David Tua and a quarter each by Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh, and that Pakiri was owned by Tuaman Inc. The nexus of the Tua case was the legal principle of express trust – that David Tua had conferred trust on Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh to buy the land on his behalf. The heart of the Barry and Pugh argument was that this had never been put in writing – indeed, it had never even been expressed in those terms.

Martin Pugh’s questionable accounting was therefore not directly relevant to the issue of who owns Pakiri, but it served to highlight the kind of person before the court.

As such, his habit of forging signatures and creatively moving Tuaman Inc funds around were central to their case.

Martin Pugh admitted to Tony Molloy that he had forged signatures on at least two occasions. Once was when he forged Tuaman company accountant Jennie Grant’s signature on a Companies Office document.

On another occasion he ‘cut and pasted’ middleweight boxer Maselino Masoe’s signature on to a fight promotion agreement.

The admissions came with no apparent shame. “I received no benefit,” Pugh said. “In closing,” he said grandly, and tried to raise the saga of Prime Minister Helen Clark signing an art work she had not created.

Presiding judge Justice Williams cut him off.

Another incident raised by Tony Molloy went to the heart of Martin Pugh’s credibility. In December 2001 around $925,000 was transferred from Tuaman Inc to a company in Vanuatu called Sports Tech set up

by Richard Gregory, a friend of Pugh’s. Some of that money was used to set up debit cards for Pugh, his partner Sally Cross, Kevin Barry and his wife, and others.

The sum remaining was around $809,000. The next month $809,000 was transferred back to Auckland to the Baron and Lunar Trust, a family trust associated with Sally Cross. Sally Cross then paid off business debts amounting to $809,000. Martin Pugh conceded the matching amounts looked strange, but said there was nothing “sinister” 38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

NEWSCOM

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 39

ZUMA

40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

about it. He claimed he had 200 pages of documents to explain the deal, which he would present at a future trial. “Once you see the documents it will make sense to the court. I do not wish to play my hand in regard to that.”

Martin Pugh variously described the steps in the transaction as a loan, a bond, and then a guarantee. Molloy put it to him that this story was a coverup for the misappropriation of funds from Tuaman. He denied it.

D

avid Tua told the court he had “a funny feeling” about Martin Pugh. He said it was Kevin Barry’s idea to involve him. “He (Kevin) said he was a smart businessman, and could be the ideal guy to manage the finances and make investments for me. I trusted Kevin. He really wanted Marty on board, so I gave in.”

In his closing address, Tony Molloy said: “Having seen and heard Pugh and his admissions of forgery and lying, and his disdain for the laws of the land that ordinary conscientious citizens regard as an obligation to observe, let alone company directors, it is not at all surprising that Mr Tua didn’t like Mr Pugh.”

Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh fought back hard on the credibility battlefield. They claim it was the Tua camp which was planning to shaft them. The Tuas came to the management duo in January 2001 wanting changes to the EMA, such as the inclusion of a clause allowing David Tua to get a lawyer’s approval before any contract relating to his affairs was concluded. “Unbeknown to Kevin Barry and I, David Tua with his parents and their lawyer were plotting since September 2000 (the Lennox Lewis fight was in November 2000) to terminate the EMA and deprive Tuaman Inc and Kevin and I of our shares and substantial earnings,” Pugh said in his brief of evidence. “No wonder David Tua performed so poorly in losing his World Title Fight against Lennox Lewis,” Barry said. “He must have been feeling guilty as hell.”

They also claimed there were no missing Tua millions, that David Tua had spent it all, and in fact he owes Tuaman Inc. “David told us that he did not want his family, or the family solicitor or his Church, knowing how much money he had as they would have spent it all and that’s a fact (in the end the family and David spent it all anyway),” Kevin Barry states in his brief.

Martin Pugh claims David Tua’s now wife, Robina Sitene, gave the government an old address so she could continue to collect welfare while living with and being well supported by the boxer. “David would get request from Bina or his family all the time, and I mean all the time, to pay bills,” he said.

Jennie Grant sees matters another way. She told the court Kevin Barry and Martin Pugh simply helped themselves to Tuaman funds. In contrast she said David Tua had to come to her for every small amount of money he needed. “How degrading, that man who had earned millions, doesn’t even have his own money.”

Martin Pugh and Kevin Barry allege that matters deteriorated to the point of a High Court hearing because of “women’s scorn”.

“The only conclusion that I can see is that it now seems to be about Jennie Grant, Robina Sitene and their need to “beat him” (Martin) at something, I don’t know what, and trying to justify their belief that David still had millions that he hadn’t spent,” Kevin Barry said.

“I was adamant that this huha had arisen because of Jennie’s sacking and Bina’s finding out that she couldn’t get her hands on David’s money (because he and his family had spent it).”

And so the personal insults flew. The Tuas no doubt had plenty they would have liked to fling back, but they didn’t. Not once.

The court will no doubt decide on sound legal principles who the rightful owner of Pakiri is. Having sat through the week-long hearing, I have a firm view of who morally should win this most colourful of bouts.

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March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 43

They make the news but fade away. Topdressing aircraft that crash in remote countryside. But behind every crash is a story, and behind the crash of ZK-LTF is a story that could shed light on many other similar tragedies. NEILL HUNTER has this exclusive investigation

T

he topdresser dipped silently into the gully ahead and the group of teenage surfies craned their heads searching for it, some balancing on fence posts along the ridge.

Suddenly the plane burst into view and roared over our heads like a great flying beast, its proximity not just palpable, but so real it felt like we were almost wearing the machine. The scene was a remote Northland beach an hour’s walk from the road because the Volkswagens couldn’t handle the mud; the agricultural aviator had no such restrictions as he performed aerial tricks, some especially for us, displaying mesmerising skills.

That was back in the 1960s, but those first visions of a topdresser in action remain indelibly etched in my memory. And the culture surrounding the industry hasn’t changed much either over the four decades hence. The sky jockeys at the reins of these aerial workhorses pepper their speech with jargon like “strap on the aeroplane and take it for a ride”, “turn the plane inside-out”, “inverted”, “critical speed”, “stall”, “situational awareness”.

T h e y ’r e held in such esteem that some call them “Super Pilots”. But it’s a moniker that’s swiftly passing its use-by date, because everywhere you look, from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to the New Zealand Agricultural Aviation Association (NZAAA) and elsewhere, there is one controversial word buzzing the airfields: “fatigue”.

And that’s what this story is about, the tale of a pilot, his loader driver, 44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

two grieving families and the plane with no name. The crash of ZK-LTF. Although it happened back in 2003, the rumours surrounding the last flight of ZK-LTF continue to swirl at Toko, the tiny farming community on the highway

to what some call “the lost world”, that magnificent New Zealand hinterland between Taranaki’s Stratford and Waikato’s Taumaranui. On a soft summer evening, the appearance of a national magazine asking questions in their midst at the small village pub renews debate and rekindles memories.

ZK-LTF, you see, was a mongrel. Not in quality, in make. Once it was a fixed wing topdresser, resembling a Fletcher. But officially it was an FU24-950 born into civil aviation existence in 1973, lived 5332 flight hours and died peacefully when it was put into storage in 1990. This was ZK-LTF in Fletcher guise.

But the plane was, amazingly, resurrected in 1999, extensively rebuilt,

and re-registered in March 2000 as a “Falcon”.

Farmers knew ZK-LTF. Says one: “it was a Fletcher plane, Cresco wings and Falcon motor – 650 HP.” To experts, it was a Cresco main plane, Lycoming LTP-101-700A-1A turboprop with characteristics of a Cresco with an FU24 hopper capable of disgorging 979kg of fertiliser. Some readers will want to know these things, others will simply need to know it was a topdresser, fixed wing.

When ZK-LTF crashed in Taranaki killing pilot Joe Lourie and his loader driver passenger Richard McRae there were those in the farming community who thought it was the old plane, the one which had two near misses, “flame-outs” they said, which nearly killed Joe Lourie’s brother, they said. A jinxed aircraft, perhaps.

Then another farmer, who had remained silent at the pub back in 2003, spoke up telling his friends it was the “new” plane. The Falcon. He knew this because he and his son found the wreckage that night, and the bodies, nearly two years ago: At about 6.15pm, on 4 April 2003, Barry Baldock sat on a motorbike near his woolshed about to put the sheep away

for the night on an evening fine and clear, when he heard the sound of the plane he knew so well. “I knew what plane it was. I thought, ‘that’s Joe’”.

The engine of the Falcon was distinctive and smooth: “it was humming,” he says of the Wanganui Aero Works’ Stratford operation topdresser piloted by his son’s good friend Joe Lourie. It was a sound he had heard earlier that day as well as on preceding weeks. He looked up as it roared into view, climbed steeply above the high green ridge, banked away from the tanned farmer, reverse-turned – in pilot jargon – and disappeared. The tall lean man in his sixties sat on his bike and watched briefly then thought to himself, “c’mon Joe, time to knock off.”

For a brief moment he watched the plane as it emerged again, lunging back up the wide open valley from whence it had come, towards the razorback ridges of high, green, steep jagged hills in the distance, into a narrow pass.

The shattered horizon is cut by peaks and pinnacles, like broken glass, except near the Strathmore saddle where the serrated green line breaks form, becoming one long, high, straight, towering wall of land, and the valley begins to close.

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arry Baldock reckons he was the last to see ZK-LTF and says he might have heard the crash were it not for the sound of his bike starting as the plane disappeared.

There were sheep to tend in these twilight moments, and no time to stand around daydreaming.

“I thought, ‘that’s Joe.’ Started the motorbike up. Probably the time of the crash was as the motorbike was turning over.”

Engine noises drowning the sound of a distant impact; no explosion, no fire.

At around 10.45 pm, when the All Blacks were playing on TV that night, the telephone rang in the modest Baldock farm house and the lifetime farmer told the caller, Allan Beck, local helicopter pilot and veteran search and rescue operator, that he knew the location of the plane they were searching for.

“If it’s gone down I know exactly where it is. I thought if it was the last flight before he went home…but he’d obviously gone through, turned around and made another approach. I started the motor bike up as I saw him disappear back down over the hill and rode off to put sheep away. Otherwise I would have heard it.”

Later, Search and Rescue headquarters in Wellington were so impressed they asked Beck: “how did you find it so fast”.

It was simple. He asked the farmers.

Although the plane wasn’t operating on Baldock’s farm – that had been scheduled for the following week – Allan Beck had a gut

feeling he should call Barry Baldock. With his son and a son in-law, Baldock drove up to the Strathmore Saddle, five kms north east of Douglas in the Forgotten World, and he told the others to be alert for the smell of fumes.

Then it came, wafting through their car like an invisible cloud, even before they stopped at the place where Baldock reckoned would be the nearest point in the road to the crash scene: the stench of aviation fuel permeating the still night air.

In the end it was not only the fuel smell, but a flight of others on the wing, which alerted the pilot’s friend to the wreckage of ZK-LTF. Says Barry Baldock: “A couple of ducks flew out of a little swamp and frightened him (his son). He had a torch on his head, spun around and his torch shone on a white thing on the side of the hill. He said ‘here it is up here Dad’,” and the search was over. All seemed very peaceful.

“Joe was still in the belts, up off the ground, very peaceful, not really a mark on him. Richard was lying about 20 metres away. I was glad there was no fire. Joe especially looked very peaceful.”

Richard, Wayne Baldock said to his father, “just looked like he was asleep.”

That was April 2003. On 13 October 2004, New Plymouth Coroner Roger Mori signed off his “Findings Of Coroner Under The Coroners Act 1988”, the official title given to his inquest into the deaths of a topdressing pilot and his loader driver passenger. It was supposed to be the final act of a three part process, of yet another investigation into yet another topdressing accident: (1) a police investigation (2) an aircraft accident investigation by the CAA and (3) an inquest, based upon those investigations, by the coroner. There were failures in all three, some small others substantial, but essentially the process failed to provide the families of those lost in the crash with that state of mind popularly known as “closure”.

For the mother of one of those lost in the wreckage of ZK-LTF, Ann Macrae (her surname is spelt differently to her son’s), closure would have been achieved if the inquest had included a full assessment of work pressure and fatigue, involving the pilot and loader driver, leading up to the time of the crash.

As she sits in her home at Sanson, calmly and clinically describing the failures of those charged with handling the investigation, it seems ironic that near her plain, neat home, is an Air Force base named Ohakea. The place where fighter jets once flew. Now this mother is taking up a fight for a lost son, once an Air March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 45

Photography: NEILL HUNTER Force mechanic, but she refuses to be drawn into arguments of blame.

“It would have been wrong to blame Joe Lourie for crashing the plane.”

She says it goes beyond that. “Richard and Joe were right at the bottom of the chain.” The woman who loves to write, and grow huge healthy pot plants, says the investigations failed to examine the issues of work place health and safety.

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o Investigate left Ann Macrae behind, and followed our own flight path to examine her assertions. Everywhere, even two years after the event, we found emotions still raw. But farmers and others opened their doors, offered opinions, shed tears, retrieved memories.

At the end of a blistering Manawatu summer day, where temperatures had soared as high as 42 in the shade, faces listen intently and fingers draw lines and shapes in the condensation on their beer glasses as the discussion of the crash and its aftermath swoops and dives with a life of its own.

A journalist’s mind, meanwhile, settles on a topdressing veteran describing his craft.

As Richmond Harding recalls it, crashing his father’s Tiger Moth in the 50’s while spreading grass seed left no time for fear because he was too busy.

“About 20 seconds” is all you have to find a place to land after running out of fuel, he tells me. At 66 he is still young enough to fly topdressers, so too his elder brother at 68, but it’s difficult to extract from the sun-drenched aviator the thoughts of a pilot about to crash.

He walked away unscathed but wrote off his father’s plane, and remembers the aftermath. “I hitched a ride back to Waiouru. Me father growled at me,” he chuckles.

“Why didn’t you bring back the Tiger Moth,” his father had asked, in an aviation variation of a teenager crashing dad’s car.

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“I wrote it off.”

It’s a lighter moment, while interviewing the man who used to own – and remains general manager of – Wanganui Aero Works, the company he started after persuading his father to let him and his brother go top dressing instead of farming. It was a pleasure interviewing the man who speaks in a measured, calm, sensible manner, who later sold the operation, one of the biggest in New Zealand, to Ravensdown Fertiliser.

So how did he crash the Tiger Moth? Focussing on the pattern of the grass seed he was spreading distracted the young pilot from monitoring his fuel consumption. When the penny dropped that he was going down, it was more of a Toyota ‘bugger’ moment than a wild panic.

“You’ve got a job to do…pretty urgent job to do. The crash investigator Paddy O’Brien once said ‘if you can put an aeroplane on the ground and run it say 20 metres you’ll probably walk away’. Control it to the ground, don’t stall it to the ground. If it’s hill country run it up the side of a hill. Run it into the ground, don’t smash it into the ground.”

So what happened to Wanganui Aero Works’ ill-fated ZK-LTF? Timing is everything and the time of ZK-LTF’s crash is relevant to much of this investigation, central to issues of work pressure, fatigue and the demise of New Zealand topdressing pilots (and their families).

First: there are no flight and duty time (hours of working and flying) limitations either under OSH or CAA rules. In fact OSH has no jurisdiction over pilots/aviation employers; that’s done by CAA who have OSH personnel helping them. Truck drivers have limitations. Airline pilots have limitations. Australian ag’ pilots have limitations. But not NZ ag’ pilots. Once they did, 25 years ago, but it was too hard so it got scrapped. CAA recognised that ag’ flying was too dependent upon weather and seasons – “windows” – to have rules for pilots’ health and safety.

Whether that is a sensible stand or a facetious excuse for inaction is the point now thrown up for debate. The argument from those who believe the industry must be flexible enough to work during weather windows is essentially this: overall down time exceeds overall flying time, therefore there is no problem, no fatigue. The argument is based on total annual flying hours.

But in the real world there are those who point out some blindingly obvious problems with that analysis. The weather’s been bad for a month, and suddenly a week of fine weather arrives. A plane can be in the air from dawn till dusk; diving, swooping, landing, taking off, seven to ten days in a row to get the backlog of work cleared.

Was pilot fatigue a bigger factor in the demise of ZK-LTF than police, CAA and coronial investigations had suggested?

It would be fair to say that interviews with some became more “adversarial” as the logic of the counter-position sunk in. Credit must go to Bill Sommer, CAA media liaison and ex-RNZAF man who, after two long interviews, seemed to swing away from the entrenched employer and CAA positions of “downtime” and individual pilot responsibility for their own health and safety. The veterans with whom we went “adversarial” listened, but were basically immoveable.

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here are some level heads in the industry who while maintaining their view that fatigue is not an issue, say they strive to teach their pilots good health and safety.

Mike Keen of Hamilton’s Superair insists he is being accurate in his view that fatigue is not a problem in the industry, nor is work pressure.

“Where are the facts and figures?” he asks.

In two long interviews we thrashed the subject and while the 10,000-hour veteran admits that there may have been cases in the past, it is not prevalent now. He says there is too much down time, they may work, say, a 14 hour day, but only fly for six hours and spend the remainder “sleeping under a wing or having a cup of tea with the farmer.” He insists that his company regularly reminds their pilots to take breaks and manage their work load and says most operators are the same. He recently sent a memo reminding pilots of summer temperatures and rest. Of a Pacific Wings magazine story about fatigue and stress, he says it’s inaccurate because there is no data to back it up. He rubbishes the reference to an “appalling” accident rate but admits at times, “it’s bad.”

Investigate’s argument: forget about annual flying hours and down time. We asked the

Investigate’s table compiled from CAA spread sheets, graphs and data.

Helicopters (agricultural, over last four years) CRASHES

FATAL

K ILLED

80

8

9

Planes (agricultural, over last four years) CRASHES

FATAL

K ILLED

44

6

7

question: “what is going to happen when, as exists now with companies three weeks behind in their work due to weather, suddenly the weather comes right, there’s a flood of work, and it’s game on, work ‘til you drop, pilots working / flying 14 hour days and taking one 15 minute meal break (we sighted records proving it)? It’s not the big picture (annual hours, down time etc) – it’s the micro one, of suddenly going for it over three days (or longer).”

“It’s a fair point you make,” says CAA’s Sommer, adding, “Everyone else has got responsibility as well. Not just us. The pilot has that responsibility to say ‘I’m too tired’.

Now that’s clearly drummed into the guys who are flying passengers around. The safety of those passengers lies specifically with them.

[But] In the case of the ag’ operator, well the feeling of responsibility that the pilot feels may be quite different.”

Is that “feeling” called peer pressure and subtle work pressure? Sommer believes things will change: “I’m not saying it’s not going to happen, I’m sure it will be. I’m sure it’ll be examined but I don’t know if it’s going to be that easy to do.”

So why not take advantage of a crash investigation and coroner’s inquest, go proactive, highlight the awareness? Our answer: You can’t if the crash investigator seems to pull punches, saying there may have been work pressure, might have been fatigue. There’s talk of reviews of working conditions pending, but apparently no real investigation into fatigue and work pressure until after the Coroner’s hearing.

You read correctly. Arguably crucial evidence was not obtained by CAA until after the Coroner’s investigation had wrapped up.

“It’s in writing on your own letterhead” we remind CAA. A clearly concerned official says he can’t comment because the staff involved are away and efforts to date by Investigate to contact them have been unsuccessful due to leave and overseas commitments we are told.

More about the CAA bombshell soon.

Cut to the numbers, fatal and injury, what are they?

“Appalling…bad…trending upwards” are the various descriptions from CAA, aircraft magazine writers and the industry. Bill Sommer: “it’s trending up for ag’ ops and trending down for others…you can see it’s really quite something.”

One veteran said he thought about four were killed over about the last three years, perhaps about 15 accidents in total over that period. He knows that 200 have died since the 1940s when the industry began. This man has been flying for 40 years, operated a company for 23 years which had no accidents until 2001 when they suddenly had 3 in one year. (None were fatal and one of them was his first which he attributes to not flying for three weeks, not fatigue.) Veterans say CAA is fudging the numbers. CAA denies this, and says it has the graphs to prove it, that the accident numbers are climbing.

CAA admits that fixed wing topdressers combine with other light aircraft stats which, say some in the industry, is the reason the numbers aren’t accurate.

“That’s not correct, we can separate them out,” says Sommer of criticism that topdressers join hang gliders and balloons. CAA say they can extract the numbers and have done so on “ag’ ops” and besides, everyone in the industry knows the situation is bad.

Arguably though, it’s not the numbers, but the fact that flight and duty limitations do not exist for topdressing, except “civil twilight”: 30 minutes before/after sunrise/set. According to CAA technical examinations, 11 minutes had remained under the civil twilight rule for ZK-LTF to finish and go home. The device giving that data in ZK-LTF was a pseudo-cockpit recorder, a type of global positioning system (GPS), which could have been switched off due to screen glow distracting the pilot. “1826:50”, the last entry, may be early. The crash investigation says sunset was 1811hrs, “end of daylight” was 1838hrs, crash time “1830 approx”.

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Says Mark Ford, a helicopter operator flying over ZK-LTF before the crash, “It was starting to get dark in the valleys, shadow-up. Fifteen to twenty minutes and it would’ve been pretty dark.” Ford believes he saw ZK-LTF well before it crashed because it was spreading on another farm, so by the time it finished that run, landed, reloaded, waited for the loader to park and lock up, transited to the farm and crash scene for its last job of the day, we estimate it could have consumed most of the “15 to 20 minutes to dark” that Ford says was remaining. But there is a variable. The CAA report says Ford told them the time was 5.45pm.

Ford told Investigate he was only “five to six” minutes from home, which would mean his sighting was well before sundown at 6.11pm.

Even considering the diminished light in the valleys, one would expect there to have been ample light, if Ford’s original sighting time was correct. In the final analysis, according to the technical data, the crash happened just on dark.

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ark Ford is a veteran helicopter logging operator but initially nobody knew where we could find him. In the end of course it was easy, his is the only place in NZ with an ex-RAF Wessex military helicopter, in full camo, parked out the back, with another “squadron” of them in storage – plus the world’s supply of spare parts, literally, 100 containers-worth to be precise. His Wessex helicopter logging operation is as huge as the scrap he is embroiled in with CAA, an organisation he accuses of being rife with corruption.

Ford is one of those larger-than-life Kiwi blokes, a bull of a man and in his no-nonsense way and office, he shared his views of a 48, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

topdresser crash. Unfortunately CAA, according to Ford, only briefly interviewed him on the side of the road near the crash scene and appeared to focus on an issue which Investigate elects to cover, despite its controversial significance, especially to bereaved families. We do so for completeness, and in the end we say it needs to be viewed in context: was it causative, or distraction from the real issues of pressure and fatigue? It concerns the flying style of the pilot.

Friday evening, nearly two years ago and two men in a helicopter are almost home, flying about 500 feet over the mottled greens of the Forgotten World, when they suddenly see ZK-LTF below them.

“You see an aircraft flying, doing its normal stuff, you think nothing of it, you fly across, see it, oh yeah, just another aeroplane, helicopter or whatever, but for something like that to take my specific bloody attention away, and think to myself, struth, look at that thing, that thing’s near inverted, because it’s frickin’ flying almost upside down. The turns were really tight. That’s why I noticed it…it made me look twice.

For me to look back twice and say sheesh that guy’s turning it inside out. That’s exactly what I thought.”

And Ford knows all about fatigue after once taking off with running wheels (removable) still attached and on another occasion, nearly taking off with two heavy truck batteries on the ground, still attached to the helicopter. He says they now “run co-pilots and stop for lunch and breaks after about two hours”, and although it’s his own business he doesn’t pressure his pilots to keep working, “not at all.”

When asked his opinion on the difference between his industry and fixed wing topdresser he replies: “I believe there are a lot more getting killed in aeroplanes than helicopters.” (They’re not, but that’s another story.)

Others say it is not work pressure or fatigue. Hallett Griffin is a 40-year veteran who says his only accident came after three weeks of no flying and at an Australian Conference heard a military pilot lecture on BITS – “back in the saddle” – and its dangers. Griffin also acknowledges that things are not good but insists neither are they bad or appalling as alleged by others. Companies watch their pilots to ensure safety; he says he knows of pilots who have been grounded. So what does he do to instil safety and health, if a pilot is over-doing things? “Keep an eye on him. Bit of a cuff over the ear.”

We don’t know why ZK-LTF smashed into the side of a high buttress-like hill, yet there are clues. Experts have offered opinion: “The aircraft had struck the ground in an attitude that suggested it was pulling out of a dive, but with insufficient height for terrain clearance. Possible reasons for the manoeuvre include a pull-out from a reversal turn…the aeroplane struck the ground very heavily on a heading of 210 degrees M while on a 55 degrees bank to the right and on descent path of at least 30 degrees…after rebounding and crossing an intervening small gully, the wreckage

again collided heavily with the ground some 47m further on, coming to rest in several sections… The high ground surrounding the valley where the accident occurred would have increased the effects of the fading light, making height judgement progressively more difficult”, writes Alistair Buckingham, CAA crash investigator.

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sk the farmers and they say ZKLTF was simply spreading the last of the fertiliser across the face of rising ground, wings at an angle matching the lower slope but in the darkening conditions, struck one of the low ridges of the small gullies near the base of a nameless hill. A farmer standing on the side of the road points to a patch of thistles as evidence: “you see those Kellies Thistles, he shaved them off like a mower, he skipped into the ground.” That from Barry Baldock, the farmer who found the wreckage; who knows his planes, and the land.

So would a diving heavy impact, offered by CAA, be consistent with shaving thistles?

Despite that, for now we confirm that the CAA investigation was otherwise reasonably thor-

ough and “exhaustive”, as they remind the reader.

There are other factors which investigators and the coroner say may have caused or contributed to the crash such as illegal carrying of a passenger during spreading; “exuberance of the reversal manoeuvres”; “sense of urgency to complete the job…”; “pilot’s judgement may have been further eroded by fatigue and a degree of carbon monoxide absorption (cma).” Let’s deal with the latter briefly for clarification. It relates more to internal rather than external (e.g. fumes) sources of toxicology, of blood saturation levels where normal levels are 1% to 2% cma, 5% to 10% may affect the heart, 15% to 20% dizziness and nausea, 50% may kill. The CAA report includes findings relating to the pilot’s forensic results therefore it can be safely assumed that the cma was relevant, by virtue of the statement “…eroded by fatigue and a degree of carbon monoxide absorption”.

Those and other issues had to be considered by the coroner.

It is 9.30am, another fine day in the ‘naki, already signs of a scorcher but Coroner Roger Mori is happy with a simple desk-top fan in his office at the end of a long corridor in the chambers of Nicolsons, Lawyers and Notary Public. The tall lean father of a representative basketballer, calmly and fully expounds on the coroner’s role generally, and the inquest into the deaths of Richard Sinclair McRae and Jonathan Peter Lourie, ages 30 and 29 respectively.

“I’m required to make recommendations or comments in the avoidance of circumstances similar to those in which the death occurred, or in the manner in which any persons should act in such circumstances, that, in the opinion of the coroner, may if drawn to public attention reduce the chances of the occurrence of other deaths in such circumstances. So, there we are and of course it is only the sudden and unexpected deaths that are reported to me and of course obviously air accidents fall very fairly and squarely into that category.” He has dealt with about six air crashes over the 21 years but can not remember clearly if any included topdressing but may have. Sitting relaxed behind a large desk, in a casual shirt, no tie, one cannot help but be impressed with his professional yet open manner. Despite issues, some controversial, arising from this case, one of which he is unaware until informed in this interview, he clearly conveys an empathy of understanding towards families in grief. He has never lost a son or daughter and can not imagine the hurt, he says. He is probably being humble for someone having presided over countless enquiries and currently awaiting reports on the March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 49

latest aircrash in Taranaki, that of a plane which slammed into such a precarious part of Mt Taranaki’s summit, two helicopters were required.

“I try to keep myself as remote as I can from families”, ‘he says,but then explains examples of where that “rule” has been broken.

ZK-LTF’s case has at times been controversial. The families accuse authorities of prejudging “cause and effect” and to a degree, Mori even agrees: “to that extent they’re right because all the evidence is prepared in writing in advance.” While the coroner may direct further investigations after receiving reports, it is the police responsibility to call evidence, liaise with families and prepare the evidence in advance for examination at the inquest.

Mori is well versed in issues of fatigue, both professionally, and personally from a near-tragedy which could have had fatal consequences when a member of his own family, suffering fatigue, crashed a vehicle, escaping uninjured.

An expert from Massey University presenting evidence in Mori’s court about fatigue in another case, testified how physical functions may carry on normally until suddenly the brain literally stops.

“You get tired and the brain will shut off for some seconds… suddenly you’re out of control”, the coroner recounts.

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ut it is the question of whether the Civil Aviation Authority lost control of its own investigation that now rears its head. You see, at the end of the day a coronial inquest is only as good as the evidence that Coroner gets to see. If one of the investigating agencies gets facts wrong, or doesn’t cover all the bases, a Coroner may end up delivering an unsound report. And that’s what the families of Joe Lourie and Richard McRae are alleging.

The most telling piece of potential evidence in this regard is a letter written by a CAA investigator (the “bombshell”) which confirms crucial documents, the actual “flight records”, were not uplifted by CAA until “the day after the inquest”.

The letter goes on to confirm that CAA had vastly underestimated the actual flight hours of the pilot for the preceding days, and that an amended report would be filed by last December. As of the time of going to press, no such amended report has been filed that we can establish. So how could CAA get it so wrong, why do they appear to have not done the enquires “by the numbers”, checked the pilot’s flying hours, why change a report after an inquest? Because that is what this investigation reveals.

CAA’s Bill Sommer was unaware of the letter until Investigate raised it, but says he’s sure that if their investigator changed his report, they would “tell the coroner”.

Well, the investigator has changed his report; according to the document, he admits virtually (to his credit) that he got it wrong, but hasn’t told the coroner about his failure to properly investigate the issue of work pressure and fatigue, nor his amended report (after the inquest).

Another expert witness present at the inquest has told Investigate that the coroner specifically asked the CAA investigator if he was sure the numbers (flying hours) were correct. According to the source, CAA replied they were. But they are not and Investigate has a copy of the CAA document to prove it. What is the significance of that to a re-hearing?

Mori has signalled he is open to a re-hearing and even quoted the rules allowing it but emphasises the application must come from the Solicitor-General. He cannot initiate it himself.

Quotes Mori: “Section 38… if satisfied that since an inquest was completed new facts have been discovered, make it desirable to hold another, the Solicitor-General may order another to be held and in that case another shall be held.”

So sayeth the Act. And the new facts (as well as breaches and failures under the Coroner’s Act) are these: 50, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

The CAA crash report states the pilot “had not flown on any of the seven days immediately preceding the accident date.”

False.

New facts, verified by Investigate sighting documents and interviews: The crash was on Friday 4 April. On Wednesday 2 April the loader driver and pilot worked/flew from 0500hrs to 1900 hours with one 15 minute meal break! Thursday 3 April, the day before the crash: 0600 to 0645, then 0830 to 1945hrs and one 15 minute meal break! They were averaging twelve-and-a-half hour days with one quarter-hour break.

The loader driver worked 25 out of 28 days, taking one small break per day and if the loader driver was working as the pilot’s loader, so was the pilot.

Investigate’s copy of a CAA document shows the agency admits not examining flight records fully until after their report was completed and after the inquest. That document proves that their statement about no flying by the pilot before the crash was wrong, by at least 17 hours. Why? Because they didn’t investigate fatigue and work pressure properly.

While the CAA could argue that it doesn’t matter as work pressure and fatigue are mentioned in the report anyway, that would be disingenuous. It does matter, substantially. The CAA report forms the basis of the Coroner’s finding and recommendations. It makes minimal mention of pressure and stress, mixing them with items of blame on the pilot as possibilities only. So the Coroner accordingly agreed. It is like saying a driver may have had a bit to drink, but we didn’t take a blood/alcohol measurement so we’re only mentioning the “possibility” in passing.

The CAA report does at least acknowledge, “the accident occurred at the end of a long working day. The pilot had been on duty over 12 hours…80 take-offs and landings…carbon monoxide…a degree of fatigue…potential to dull the edge of the pilot’s skill and judgement.”

It’s all minimalist jargon; understandable, given the investigator is working on the premise the pilot hadn’t worked before the day of the accident. But, if one day’s long work hours were enough to warrant mention, what does the new evidence of flying almost all week do?

Second new fact: the police statement given in evidence at the inquest is that the passenger was sitting behind the pilot.

False.

The CAA report states they were abreast. Which is it? We don’t know because nobody appears to have asked the question. In fact from enquiries, the passenger was beside the pilot, but it casts more doubt on the thoroughness of the original investigations.

Approximately one week prior to the accident Joe Lourie was so exhausted from working from dawn to dark that he sent his friend, a farmer, to get food and drink for him. On another occasion he called Stratford Aero Club and asked them to turn on the lights of their building as a navigational point for landing at night, illegally. Selfimposed bad practice? Or signs of a responsible, well trained pilot under pressure? Farmers close to Joe Lourie and Wanganui Aero Works say that prior to him becoming manager of the Stratford operation it was losing business, attributed to the previous pilot nearing retirement and no longer buying into the work/fly-until-you-drop (or die) culture. That is not a reflection on the retiring pilot but rather a sign of pressure.

“The previous pilot was a lot older and probably ready for retirement,” opines a farmer. “The difference was one wanting to work and the other being very cautious. But they did lose a bit of business because they weren’t getting the manure on…Joe’s thing was to get that business back, plus a bit more.”

Topdressing companies are paid when all the fertiliser bought by the farmer has been spread. So if the job becomes disjointed, broken by weather, including wind, mechanical failures and the like, there is no

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 51

income, no progress payments. Pressure may come from farmers, “standing over” the pilot pressuring him into flying to their farm “right now” because it looks fine and they want their fertiliser on the ground, now. The plane arrives and, as the pilot suspected, so too does the wind. He tries for half an hour, then flies home again, expenses soar, and net profit plummets.

“It happens,” says a farmer. “It’s pressure from farmers, not all…they want it on now…the job has to be finished, no manure on the ground, no money …weather can hold things up for quite a few weeks sometimes,” he explains.

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hen a commercial pilot, after much procrastination and on condition of anonymity comes forward through a third party at first, and then speaks to Investigate directly.

Three weeks before ZK-LTF’s crash Joe Lourie was “doing stunts after work”. While that in itself is not bad he says, because most pilots do it, especially at the end of a day, if conditions are safe, but if a pilot is tired, the consequences may be fatal.

“It’s usually ridge-running, not barrel rolls.” It’s like a release from all the pressure which they say “will kill people”. He exclaims, when told of the flying hours, take-offs and landings logged by Lourie: “I find that incredible”. Then he pauses and says he knows it’s happening. “Some of them are doing huge hours (flying time). I’ve done eight hours and even that’s too much.”

With 1400 hours logged, he rubbishes the veterans who say flying is no more complicated than driving a car. Investigate has been told on several occasions that for an experienced pilot, flying is easier and less tiring than driving. Our informant says that driving can be “automatic” but “in flying you’re constantly thinking and when you land you feel exhausted”.

When Investigate re-interviews a veteran about the informant’s statements, he scoffs and even laughs and we are told again, fatigue is not 52, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

an issue. But, says our informant, six hours topdressing flying time in a day… “it’s big.” When a pilot gets tired they “get lazy and don’t pay attention.”

Make no mistake, Investigate accepts Lourie broke rules. Carrying a passenger restrained only by a lap belt (both were big men) while spreading was dangerous. Operating just on dark, soaring up into lighter conditions above the hills and back into dark valleys where shadows obscured the smaller ridges, was reckless.

But why, once again, was this experienced, well trained pilot making such mistakes? Was it pressure, squeezing in one more run just on dark, take the pilot home with him and save time, get back on the job early next morning, take him on the last spread instead of returning to the field, collecting him and flying straight home to Stratford, only minutes away by plane, perhaps an hour in an old slow loader on a narrow twisting country road punctuated by more stop signs and railway crossings than a Monopoly board?

We investigated suggestions it was all Lourie’s own fault: a pilot out of control, cavalier in approach. But to the farmers who knew the quiet pilot it was the opposite. “Very quiet,” is their description, “he would say what he had to and that was it kind of thing”. His employers, to be fair, are reluctant to blame Lourie but in interviewing them there is a clear perception that they discount fatigue, and blame pilot error. “He had been warned…” they explain but say no more, out of respect they say for the families.

Joe Lourie had to take responsibility, says a reliable neutral source in Manawatu (not the employers) who once met the young pilot.

He was closely supervised for six months at Hunterville with a veteran, where they say he was groomed for the Stratford position as manager/ pilot. The source says he was very impressed after meeting the big, tall pilot whom he described as “the future of the industry.” Which again begs the question: what went wrong with the 1000 hour-plus, groomed pilot?

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More enquiries and again the veterans say they know the cause and it wasn’t work pressure because there is nothing wrong with squeezing in one last load before dark. One says that if the conditions are perfect, as they were this day, then evening is the ideal time to fly, and goes on to describe the joy of doing the last loads late in the day, not because of pressure, but the elation of flying.

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armers experienced in topdressing say Lourie was a good pilot. None say he was reckless, one talks of his so called exuberant flying (as in the CAA report where technical data confirms “exuberant” manoeuvres) adding that “he could fly, he could handle it, he was a bloody good pilot” but admits he was “starting to take a few risks.” A farmer who had watched him weeks before the crash thought to himself “take it carefully, Joe”, even telling his wife, but says it was paying off commercially: “he picked up a lot of work.” But it was reaching the point where it was raising concerns. A farmer says “a lot of people commented that Wanganui Aero Works should have pulled the pin on him and cut back his hours…they must have known how many tonnes he was putting on so they should have known the hours (the pilot would need to do) to put that tonnage on. It was a waste of two good lives, I know that,” he muses.

There is another reason for the Solicitor-General to re-open the Coroner’s inquest into the deaths of Lourie and McRae. The last error in the CAA report, perhaps only small, perhaps not. The crash report says “…both occupants were ejected from the cockpit.”

False.

New fact: Witnesses to the crash scene, those who found the wreckage, say the pilot was in the wreckage, “Joe was still in the belts, up off the ground, very peaceful, not really a mark on him. Richard was lying about 20 metres away…”

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Barry Baldock then went on to describe the state of the wreckage, and the pilot’s position in it which, for brevity and sensitivity, we have condensed as above. Investigate received allegations that Lourie was not the pilot. McRae, the loader driver was a trained pilot, with aspirations of becoming an ag’ pilot and it is not unusual for official and unofficial training to take place on the job. After enquiries however with police, crash scene witnesses and anonymous witnesses who have no agenda, we are reasonably satisfied that Lourie was the pilot. But cumulatively, the CAA report errors are such they raise substantial doubts about the integrity of the inquest.

So what does the Coroner think of all this?

Roger Mori hints that he is less than happy with the situation. Investigate contacted the Coroner again about the evidence, including the bombshell CAA admission that they got it wrong over the “the pilot hadn’t flown during the week”, and that CAA was intending to amend its accident report. His reaction? A typical no-nonsense one: “S**t, that’s all been done subsequent to my report!”

He adds, incredulously, “they (CAA) can’t change a report once it becomes an official document in a Coroner’s inquest.” He tells Investigate “it’s something that should be investigated.”

We then discuss apparent breaches in the Coroners Act about the informing of parties, such as families and employers. Neither family or employer were informed of the inquest and although blame for that falls on the police, Mori typically doesn’t duck the issue and talks about it being “extremely rare” and “system failure.”

He evinces clear frustrations over certain parties, such as the pilot’s wife, being inadvertently excluded from the inquest.

“I was bloody annoyed”.

Investigate explained to the Coroner the results of enquiries to date and the evidence that proximate cause could more strongly be fatigue.

In legal terms, more commonly associated with the insurance industry,

proximate cause means after weighing-up all other possible contributory causes, in the final analysis there is one direct, stronger cause. Mori replies with talk about that being “logical …best explanation…what you’re doing is researching and asking questions…probably the answer is yes…I would say that’s fairly accurate”. If nothing else, let that at least be of some comfort to the families because blaming the pilot, as hinted in the CAA report, and by some industry members, is an easy assumption.

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ut it’s up to the Solicitor-General’s office to apply to the High Court, as provided for under the Coroners Act, on the grounds that there are sufficient new facts from the formal evidence: changes to CAA report after the inquest; their admission to erring; breaches of the Act due to the exclusion of families’ members; evidence presented but rejected without being heard.

A re-opened coronial investigation could not only put the pilot’s actions in a clearer light, but also bring an end to commercial and peer pressures that many in the agricultural aviation industry say are killing pilots.

“It was a beautiful sight,” says a farmer’s wife, describing ZK-LTF approaching their farm air strip in the low light of predawn. She

says the combination of the plane’s lights, the early dawn colours, vapour streaming off the wings of the white Falcon like long white ribbons, was something she will never forget.

The interview turns quiet as she recalls the image, describing it again, painting a word picture that stays in the mind. Later she says that I should go to a small airstrip, at night.

A quarter after nine pm on a country airstrip in Taranaki, and the pilot from the big Cresco topdresser, 3714kg fully laden, parked on the grass, walks through the darkness, and looks puzzled to find a journalist. There are no lights and nearby buildings are in darkness; the place is abandoned apart from pilot and scribe.

He says he landed about 8.15pm, is happy to talk about his job, a tall solid man who now leans over the roof of his car, slumping his body in a sign his day is over. He shares things like hours, working conditions and the importance of the industry.

“Seven hundred thousand tonnes of fertiliser per year, we have more turn-over than any other industry, it’s important we don’t fall over.” He says he manages his fatigue, “you’re not always flying…”, then hesitates.

Later he says he’s off to the central North Island and as we talk more there’s a distant rumbling growl, rising like rolling thunder in the still night. From the track leading to the airfield, a monster lumbers suddenly into view,

headlights blazing like eyes, a creature common to rural New Zealand: a topdressing loader. Truck-cab at the front, loader-cab and bucket at the back, Kiwi ingenuity at its best.

“My loader driver, he’s coming with me,” says the pilot. Then an older man in a black singlet climbs down and wanders over. The pilot and I exchange farewells, the other looks on silently, confused, then both get into the pilot’s car, and drive away, leaving me alone in the dark, imagining a different scene, two years ago, when pilot and loader took another way home, via grassy slopes of a valley, on a night in the Forgotten World.

The distant silhouette of a giant mountain looms, with snow still present where weeks earlier it too became a place of tragedy, scene of a fatal air crash. Time to go. I’ve booked a cabin overlooking the ocean hoping to enjoy the view but it won’t be, because it’ll be 10.10pm, and I’ve had no dinner, only a quick lunch and the first interview was at 9.30pm, later than the others on this long week when a chief reporter said they too “hate the early morning interviews.” Twice during the 45 odd minute drive to New Plymouth street lights from small towns in the distance seem like approaching car lights, illusions, eyes tiring, itching, then the realisation: could be fatigue.

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The GLA DIATOR S Horrific road smashes involving young drivers are increasingly dominating news coverage on both sides of the Tasman. In New Zealand, we’ve introduced ‘boy racer’ laws and extensive restrictions on young drivers, prompting calls for similar tough measures in Australia. But as PAUL HAM explains, the real cause of the problem may actually be the feminization of society he nannyish, knee-jerk campaign by the New South Wales government and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph to introduce new laws for P-plate drivers to stop them killing themselves is not only a bleak manifestation of the infantile element in modern Australian political thought, but a sad symptom of a society that fails to grasp the fact that laws will not stop young men from doing blindingly stupid, terrifyingly dangerous, or amazingly heroic things.

The problem is – as the sad case of Emile Dousset and other young drivers’ shows – laws cannot stop the intrinsic anarchy of youth. The experience of history, which we seem to be in the process of rapidly forgetting, teaches that adults need to channel the male instincts, rather than throttle them with laws, if we are to have any hope of generating something worthwhile from our sons.

Strict schooling, parental discipline and national service were once the traditional conduits for controlling the errant young male. None is likely to return. The relentless surge of progressive education, which has destroyed a generation of young people’s minds, marches on. The reintroduction of national service is clearly unlikely – it would be electoral suicide, and too expensive. And there is barely a flicker of life in the old family punishment regime – crushed by the anti-spanking campaign and other lobbies that criminalize or socially stigmatise any

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form of effective parental child discipline. So politicians have spotted a vote winning opportunity: we’ll do the job of the parents.

Encouraged by the supine complicity – or, in the weird case of the Daily Telegraph, a cheerleading press – the Australian political class has seen fit to barge into our homes and tell our children how to behave without ever asking us.

“If parents can’t control their kids, we’ll have to do it for them,” runs the thinking; cue the busy bodies in government, who are parking their tanks on the parental patch with bossy impunity.

And yet the politician who demands parental as well as political power is a tiny symptom of a profound delusion in the western body politic: Governments actually think they can play mum or dad in outlawing the oldest, most creative and destructive urge in the human species, namely, a young man’s propensity to behave recklessly.

In this process, parents have become the mere finger-wagging appendages of a society that increasingly relies on the crudest form of dissuasion: the law.

The punishment of our kiddies is being appropriated by state legislators who cynically applaud the introduction of laws to control youth because they suppose them to be “voter friendly”. Hence the proposed shiny new proposals for curbs on P-Plate drivers, which go hand-in

“In other words, young men like showing off to their mates…what an extraordinary thing”

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hand with our mania for age limits, anti-spanking laws, anti-drinking abuse – a more insidious force in society than reckless driving. Few saw laws, anti-smoking laws, bicycle helmet laws, and prohibitions of all fit to remark on this rather unfortunate fact; one report nauseously kinds of behaviours perceived to be dangerous. praised the girl’s courage in rising to the challenge of pregnancy at so In this light the tragic case of Emile Dousset is instructive. His father young an age. (Even as the Telegraph was studiously ignoring the Graeme is, by all accounts, a responsible, decent man who made details of Homer and Schyf ’s relationship, it still managed to run – it very clear to his son that the Nissan Skyline R34 GTR parked in with a straight face – a story about a 37-year-old man accused of bedthe garage – a machine powered by a 2.6-litre, six-cylinder engine with ding a 15-year-old girl he met online. The headline? “Jailed for preying a top speed of 251km/h – was off limits. Graeme repeatedly warned on girl.”)

Emile that the car was not to be driven; he tried to educate his But back to Emile. Perhaps in an effort to impress his passengers, he son about the dangers of speeding, and the importance of sped to a residential street popular amongst rev-heads. He then accelerresponsible driving. ated to somewhere between 180 and Emile listened, but disobeyed his 200 km/h, struck a dip in the road, father, and set aside his dad’s reasoned went airborne for 40m, and smashed “The punishment of our kiddies appeal to good sense – the flight of into a telegraph pole. Stunned resiis being appropriated by state any ordinary young man’s desire for a dents emerged from their homes to thrill. One night, last November, while legislators who cynically applaud find the dead bodies of Emile and his father was overseas, Emile took the Carl flung on the nature strip; trapped the introduction of laws to convehicle out for a spin in the town of in the split car was Natasha, who died trol youth because they suppose Wyoming, NSW, where a 50km/h with her unborn baby (whom she’d limit applies. The P-plater drove first named William). them to be “voter friendly” to a service station and picked up two Emile has become another tragic passengers, Carl Homer, 33, and statistic in the supposed “epidemic” Natasha Schyf, Homer’s pregnant 15-year old girlfriend. Both were of P-plate road victims. His case fed the portrayal of male youth of impressed by the gleaming vehicle, and curious to see how young today as, at the very least, disobedient and reckless.

Emile would handle it.

At worst, if the government and the media are correct, a spawn of At this point it is worth interceding to remark on the manner in half-formed, testosterone-fuelled yahoos are at this very moment ramwhich virtually every commentator chose to ignore the really disturbing paging across our fair land, smashing up their dads’ cars and their lives story here: in impregnating a child, the 33-year old Homer was mani- in brazen high-speed rallies; drinking themselves legless; or drugging festly guilty at the very least of carnal knowledge – and possibly child themselves to the hilt.

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That impression is plain wrong, of course; in the midst of the media hysteria over the epidemic of teen driver deaths came news that, rather than spiking skywards, fatal accidents involving P-plate drivers have fallen to their lowest levels in history, falling 30 percent from 1992 to 2002. And it’s not just young drivers who are getting safer: NSW closed 2004 with the lowest number of road fatalities overall since 1949, with a total of 522 deaths. To put these numbers it in context, NSW Health estimates that roughly a dozen times that figure die in the state every year due to smoking. ut the NSW government is not put off, and is instead trying to legislate against stupidity. For example, young people must now stay on their P-plates three times longer now than their parents were: they progress from L plates to red beginners’ P plates to a P2 licence (green P plate) before they get their full licence – a three-year process, involving several tough hazard perception tests. No wonder P-plate drivers are in the spotlight for road accidents. If that regime doesn’t work, what will?

But the government wants to extend the regime, and Roads Minister Carl Scully has

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drawn up a paper of options to reduce Pplate driver fatalities: they include a proposed ban on fast or dangerous cars and raising the age limit for licence-holders. To be fair, even as he pursued this course, he recognized an insurmountable problem: only by banning cars will crashes be avoided, said a helpless Scully spokesman last November.

Never mind that this doomed experiment will be ignored: no self-respecting young larrikin will care much about a distant government bureaucrat droning on about the “PPlate driver menace”; a curb on young drivers may even encourage speedsters onto the roads.

In earlier times, fathers were proud of the motive, if not the occasionally disastrous consequences, behind any healthy young son’s desire to show-off, or embrace dangerous situations. It is a biological inevitability. That is why young men volunteer for war: they, unlike women or older men, have an idea of themselves as bullet-proof. In a word, many young men reckon they’re unbreakable.

But this fact seems beyond the realm of comprehension of the legions of precious counselors, bossy journalists, government busy-bodies and tut-tutting feminists who are wheeled out with weary inevitability to bemoan the “youth of today” and their pre-

dilection to do very dangerous things every time a young person is killed or hurt.

If Lord Byron had lived today, no doubt swimming the Hellespont by “Club-footed Persons” would have been banned soon after he drowned. Sadly for the cosy modern world of health inspectors and safety first, the dashing young man who defies order and authority to express his peculiarly male urge to be the fastest or the strongest or a hero will always be with us – if in a suppressed or warped form.

That’s because we live in an age in which the female is in the ascendant, and manhood is seen as something awkward, smelly, yobbish or plain embarrassing. The male virtues of courage, mateship, loyalty and do-or-die heroism are either dead, or dying, stamped out by a fusillade of laws, restrictions, codes and feminist-driven contempt. Indeed, this blokish larrikinism is regularly portrayed as a kind of mental illness and something to be ashamed of; the “male” in us is not quite “human”, rather something abnormal, even bestial. Men are inured to being presented as the buffoon or the idiot in endless films and TV shows; they seem to have swallowed the nonsense that they’re less intelligent than women.

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FOTOPRESS logical wiring that gives girls pause to think,” as he told journalist Kate Legge in the Australian recently. Having accepted this as a self-evident truth, Legge added: “This biological handicap is exacerbated by a lethal mixture of sloppy parenting and unprecedented commercial and peer pressure”.

It is worth weighing the meaning behind this extraordinary statement: young men are no longer merely stupid or loutish; they are actually biologically inferior to girls. “New research” or “experts” say so.

But surely a biological handicap must be qualified in terms of its effect on human behaviour? If the male “biological handicap” only results in rev-heads crashing their cars, or picking fights, then perhaps it is a handicap; if, however the male “handicap” produces young men willing to sacrifice their lives for their country at a time of war; or rush in fearlessly to save the life of someone in danger; or embark on daunting expeditions of discovery, then surely it is a gift?

Today’s society denies young men that accolade. They are simply mentally-challenged louts. One wonders how the nation would respond if we were invaded (as we nearly were in 1942) – perhaps we’d introduce a new law banning war? etting aside the absurd claim that the “commercial and peer pressure” on boys of today is “unprecedented” (e.g., how does one calculate this new precedent?), Carr-Gregg’s fundamental concern is that parents seem surprised when their boys misbehave: “I sit in my office gobsmacked at tales not out of place at a Roman orgy,” he observes. “Parents don’t seem to have a clue. One couple allowed their teenage son free range at home while they went to Noosa. He had a party. The house was trashed and the parents were astonished. These are intelligent professional people.”

Yet Carr-Gregg contradicts this admirable portrait of the modern young man’s party-organising abilities by claiming that today’s generation of boys “is the most vulnerable…we have ever seen”. On the one hand the little darlings are holding Roman orgies, the next they’re the vulnerable victims of a conspiracy of bad parenting, bad schools and ferocious marketing that “short-circuit”, in Legge’s phrase, a boy’s path to manhood.

In response, Carr-Gregg and legions of other psychologists, most of the media, and even feminist-mums are pressing for a return to more authoritarian styles of parenting and schooling. (Though, tell-

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ingly, they draw the line at anything possibly effective – like corporal punishment. They want carrots without sticks; they plead for the imposition of discipline without any disciplining force.)

But their plea, however welcome, is a little late. One groans wearily at this belated recognition of the failure of thirty years of progressive “liberal” education, whose seeds lay in the barren soil of the 1960s baby boomer era. It is now awfully clear that a child will not find his or her “inner creativity” without some instruction in the method of expressing it: i.e. lessons in grammar, ordered thinking, reason, logic, the rules of syntax etc.

Another fascinating reversal for these New Authoritarians is that they now acknowledge “gender difference”. “Risk-taking behaviour is unquestionably a gender issue on Australian roads,” writes Kate Legge, for example. “Young men have been found to score significantly higher than females when tested for impulsiveness and sensation-seeking,” she adds.

And research by Peter Palamara of the University of Western Australia’s Injury Research Centre has found that young men are more likely to engage in risky driving when carrying a same-aged, same gender passenger. In other words, young men like showing off to their mates…what an extraordinary thing.

This identification of “gender difference” is an intriguing break with the past: throughout the 1970s, feminists were telling us that there is no such thing as gender difference. Men and women were the same, at least psychologically. (No wonder so many women burnt their bras in that wretched era, the high watermark of idiocy, during which the greatest insight of feminism was that “manhood” was a cultural phenomenon imposed on children; a little girl would naturally choose Ken over Barbie if only she was given the chance. Any parent knew – and knows – this to be utter rubbish.)

One consolation from the wreckage of the past – and of poor young Emile - is that at least many people are talking a similar language. Many people seem to have noticed that men and women are, er, different; and most people seem to agree that the progressive education and parenting models of the last 20-30 years have failed to produce welladjusted young men. This seems an auspicious place to begin finding ways to channel male recklessness, aggression and risk-taking into something constructive.

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If Geoff Mackley were a cat, he’d be well and truly encroaching on his quota of lives. But as the world’s ultimate storm-chaser, Mackley the human is little short of a survival miracle…the kind of guy you’d stand next to in an electrical storm.

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e carries a video camera, a digital still camera, a satellite Mackley had other ideas. Armed with predictions of bad weather, he phone and a flame-proof suit. He has been pursued would pack photographic gear into an old Land Rover and go to where

by Army helicopters; almost blasted off a a flood was anticipated, shooting it as it happened. mountaintop; and dangled over gaping chasms. Little “Nobody was doing that then, as far as the media goes. It still wonder, perhaps, that they call Geoff Mackley amazes me that to a large extent the media don’t even do that now.

‘Rambocam’. It began as a childhood hobby of taking photos of You’d think that if a news event is about to happen, go there before natural phenomena and developed into an extraordinary career with a it starts!” worldwide reputation of going where others fear to tread. The New In spite of a lack of formal training in photography and broadcastZealand-based photographer, cameraman and reporter, Geoff Mackley, ing (or arguably perhaps because of it), Mackley began working for the carts his cameras and satellite phone virtually anywhere where a tsu- TV3 news team in 1990, just after the new network’s establishment. nami has struck, where a cyclone is perilously hovering, where a volcano He took pictures of natural disasters around the country for the 6pm is erupting and he’ll often be the first one there. His priceless pictures, news and has been working for TV3 since. which appear in science books, newspapers, on TV and in magazines, In September 1995 he got his first big international break. Majestic have come to define how people throughout the world perceive Mount Ruapehu was predicted to erupt again and he was waiting natural disasters. patiently nearby with his camera equipment. When the grey ash shot Not surprisingly, the activities of this intrepid photographer have into the troposphere, his career as it is today was launched. Mackley’s been the focus of a mass of media attention. The Discovery Channel pictures began appearing on TV news shows, in newspapers and in featured a series about him named Dangerman and he’s appeared in magazines throughout the world. The words “meal ticket” began flashabout 17 other TV shows and been interviewed hundreds of times in ing in his mind, and pretty soon Mackley was taking pictures of volcathe last 12-months for newspapers and questioned at length for his nos erupting overseas and selling them to a wide range of media. His soon to be released autobiography. humble intention in 1995 was to generate sufficient income in order While making it clear he could never even conceive of tiring of his to recover the cost of the trip and be able to go on another trip and work, which is now allthen another… consuming, he confesses Mackley is coy about to being pig-sick of how much he makes a I feel the same I did when I was 20. I exercise being interviewed. year now. He says he When we first condoesn’t want to boast. everyday. If I go for a run, it’ll be for about 3 tacted him on the 11th of “Two hundred thouhours. I spend a lot of time running in the bush, February, he’d arrived sand?” we press.

I work out, do weights and martial arts home in Ellerslie, Auck“It’s a bit more than land, half-an-hour earlier that,” he defers, – which from Rarotonga, where in translation means it’s he’d been taking photographs of damage to waterfront buildings notably more. Almost as an apology for this bounty, Mackley seems caused by a 14-metre storm surge driven by Cyclone Meena. He sug- keen to impress that he works very hard for what he earns. He evigests I call back that evening to enable him to have time to update his dently does. He seems completely focused. There’s no room in his life website, www.geoffmackley.com, amongst other things. Yet, in the for marriage or children. He allocates much of his time off work to manner of the eternal newshound, when I contact him at 8pm, he says maintaining a high level of fitness. His 178-centimetre tall, 76-kilohe’s unavailable, as he is monitoring emergency channels for TV3, and gram muscular form is probably in far better shape than bodies half intends to maintain this vigil over most of Saturday and Sunday. his age. “I feel the same I did when I was 20. I exercise everyday. If I “Try Valentine’s Day, 10am,” he offers. go for a run, it’ll be for about 3 hours. I spend a lot of time running in But the 14th, at 10am, proves similarly fruitless; two menacing-look- the bush, I work out, do weights and martial arts,” he asserts. As his ing cyclones, Olaf and Nancy, are brewing in the South Pacific region broadcast camera alone weighs 7 kilograms and climbing mountainand Mackley is furiously poring over weather reports, trying to decide if ous terrain at any time is a possibility, being unwaveringly fit is an he should go to Samoa, where one of the fierce storm’s is predicted to essential part of his life. hit. Later in the day, I finally hit journalistic paydirt, nailing the elusive “I’m also careful to eat well. I don’t eat crap. If you put bad fuel in Mackley to the end of a landline, albeit that the interview becomes a car it doesn’t work properly. Well the body’s the same. It’s common punctuated by the crackle of police scanners and emergency vehicle sense,” says Mackley. sirens in the background. You can’t, it seems, keep Mackley down.

Currently about 90 percent of his time at work is spent monitoring Mackley, 41, was born and raised in Christchurch; his mother a high what’s going on around New Zealand and the rest of the world. He school librarian and his father employed by a customs broker. It was uses the Internet and radio for this. “That’s the key thing - that it’s 90 his dad who first kindled Mackley’s interest in photographing percent gathering information and 10 percent going out and after somenatural phenomena. thing,” he maintains.

“Dad used to take me and my two younger brothers, Richard and Naturally, he’s amassed an extensive knowledge of the world’s Steven on trips to take pictures of freak conditions, such as snow- weather patterns and now knows what’s likely to happen where and at storms and flooding. We were brought up with an interest in nature. any given time of the year. He says there’s no busiest time of year. It I started doing what I’m doing because I’m interested in nature and it is invariably busy, as Mother Nature has different seasons around the evolved to what’s happening now. I never really expected that to hap- world. The cyclone season is from November to April. Tornado pen. I never thought for a moment I’d be doing this,” he ruminates. season is in May and June. August through to November is typhoon He completed the 7th form, and then in the late 1980’s attended the and hurricane season in the US and volcanoes may erupt at any time.

University of Canterbury to study psychology, because it was “very He says the Internet has been an invaluable source for information interesting,” then dropped out after one-and-a-half years of the about weather and volcanic activity, enabling his career to flourish. He degree course, because he didn’t think it was going to be a meal ticket. asserts: “The Internet is the beginning and end of everything! Because

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the Internet is completely free of boundaries. It’s instant. I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’m doing now, 10 years ago.”

The meteorology services worldwide put data on the Internet for everybody to see instantaneously. In addition, there’s an aviation website that provides updates immediately a volcano begins to erupt which Mackley watches “constantly,” so if a crater blows, he’ll be one of the first people to know about it. One can find links to his sources on his website.

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he total cost of his equipment is in the vicinity of $100,000.

He said that although it’s expensive, he expects it to last for years. He uses a satellite phone at disaster scenes, which is a necessary requirement in regions lacking a functioning infrastructure. This is used to transmit photos to a few news services, but as he’s charged $16 per minute, it is uneconomical to send shots around like confetti. Consequently, he prefers to put highresolution versions of photographs on his website for newspapers and magazines to download - although this mode of dissemination comes at a cost too.

He says that although the majority of media outlets publishing his work remunerate him without having to be prompted, there’s invariably a percentage which don’t. “It’s a pain in the arse really, because

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when you’re trying to sell still photos, many outfits will avoid paying for them if possible. You’ve always got to track down whether or not they’ve used it or not. Half the time they won’t bother to tell you and it’s not worth chasing up 20 or 30 newspapers just for $100 or whatever,” he complains.

An assortment of his best images can be viewed on his website. He uses a Nikon F90 digital camera for his still photos and says a good photo, as any news editor will tell you, has to tell a story in one shot, ideally with people in it or an object to give it scale.

He believes an image can be a wonderfully powerful tool to help people in need of aid. And one of the best moments of his 20-year career was being able to bring aid to the small island of Tikopia following the strongest cyclone ever in the South Pacific, a cyclone which thrashed villages with 350 kilometre per hour winds, completely destroying everything. His was an extraordinary story.

Cyclone Zoe, as it was named, hit Tikopia, which is one of the Solomon Islands, in late December 2002, bringing gigantic waves with it. “I’m not an expert, but I can see from a satellite map when an island is being hammered and it’d be common sense to go and see what’s happened to these people, [about 1,200], who no one has heard from for 4 or 5 days,” he says. But the airforce and military, in both New Zealand and Australia, did nothing. So he decided to fly to Tikopia in

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a Cessna and discovered an island completely wrecked. Mackley, who was freelancing, photographed the devastation from the air, only because it was impossible to land. This story was on the news that night, and broadcast all around the world. He reported that the place looked as if it had been hit by an atomic bomb.

He says matter-of-factly: “I suspect if I hadn’t gone there and brought it to everyone’s attention, it’s quite possible nothing would’ve been done. The New Zealand Airforce claimed that it was impossible to get there and then I got there in a Cessna.”

The day after his first report, someone from a French newspaper contacted him and asked him to get on the island anyway he could, at their cost. Accordingly, he chartered a helicopter from Vanuatu. He filled it with packets of noodles and arrived on Tikopia to be the first outsider there since the cyclone hit and 4-5 days ahead of any official rescue mission. “I thought it was extraordinary, because I wasn’t 68, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

doing anything that I considered to be that out of the ordinary. I just went to the airport and asked ‘Who owns that Cessna? Is it possible to fly to Tikopia?’…‘Yes’…‘So let’s do it.’ And it was the same with the helicopter,” he asserts.

Fortunately, there were no casualties, as the Tikopians were accustomed to cyclones and were sheltering in caves in their highlands.

Indeed, the camera is a very powerful tool when used correctly. Bringing images of chaos and destruction to the world is the direct cause of aid arriving — a prime example the aftermath of the tsunami. Mackley believes the amount of aid donated is directly related to the TV coverage — the two being very closely linked. “I don’t feel so bad filming misery and destruction if I know it’s going to bring some good. There are a number of Pacific Islands that are not that well off and they know full well who I am and they welcome me when a cyclone’s coming - because they

know that film of the event getting on the news greatly enhances their prospects of getting aid,” he offers, seeming grateful to be of help.

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nfortunately however, Mackley has found that providing images of destruction can be a two-edged sword. While he regards the camera as a means to elicit donations, sadly, time and time again, he witnesses huge damage being inflicted upon Pacific Island nations by grossly unbalanced news stories. The media, he accuses, ham up the bad part of an event, with little apparent thought of the consequences. He has seen all facets of the media exaggerate the devastation caused by storms; and resultant negative publicity has dissuaded hordes of tourists from journeying there.

“People believe what they see on the news – and they shouldn’t. A cyclone hits a small

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Pacific Island, [for instance Tonga]. It is highly reliant upon tourism extraordinary lengths Geoff Mackley will go to “get the shot”. It was and although the residents clean up the damage in a few days, because in the mid-1990s, down at Waiouru on ar my land. The a few selective shots of flattened buildings are shown in the news, Department of Conservation was supposed to round the wild horses making it look as if everywhere is decimated and no mention is made of Kaimanawa up and attempt to sell them, before killing the remainer. that it was all cleaned up in a few days – because that’s a boring story, However, Mackley had become privy to information that a number of I’ve seen huge economic damage being caused for 6 to 8 months,” he horses had already been killed and dumped in a big pit on army land, says, sounding annoyed. “Sure, there were a few damaged buildings, with no effort having been made to sell them. but that’s not indicative of what the whole country looks like. Often “Of course, the army personnel wouldn’t let us in there. Several that’s how the media portray it. If there’s widespread destruction, I’m reporters and newspaper cameramen found out the location of this certainly going to say that, but if there isn’t, I don’t,” he says. pit, and we decided we were going to storm in on army land and get In addition, he said that the amount of misreporting about the pictures of the dead horses, come what may.”

Tikopian disaster was “incredible.” For the first 4-5 days, all the inforHe had a 4-wheel drive vehicle, while the others had cars. The cars mation that emanated from the island came only from Mackley. He became stuck in the mud, by which time the army was chasing them in was guarded about what he said, because he didn’t know if anyone the helicopter. Consequently, everyone piled into Mackley’s all-terrain had been killed or not. Thus, he reported that the damage was very vehicle and he pressed on the accelerator in hot pursuit of the horse pit. bad and it would be amazing if there weren’t many casualties. Then to Meanwhile, the army landed the helicopter on the road in front of his shock, he heard stories from outfits such as CNN and the BBC them in an attempt to stall their progress, but ineffectually so. about thousands of people being killed and the island being hit by “It was like a scene from a Die Hard movie.” tornadoes and tsunamis Later, Mackley’s vehi– events that in fact had cle became stuck in the not occurred. He conground, so all the reportOn his website is the phrase: ‘Life is an tends: “It beggars belief ers and cameramen piled incredible adventure or it’s nothing at all.’ where they get those out and began running things from in the first up the hill, towards He really believes it place, considering no one the pit. else was giving them Because it was a steep information except me! So you can see why one would be cynical about hill, the army couldn’t land the helicopter and so hovered above, yellthe media.” ing for the group to stop – but this was falling on deaf ears, as this Although he rarely writes news stories that accompany his images, media mob knew the army didn’t have authority over them. The army he’s occasionally a target for caustic reactions to them. “I’ve had people then landed the chopper at the base of the hill and some personnel got from airlines phone me and say: ‘Your story just cost us millions of out and ran up the hill, only to get back in the helicopter again. “It was dollars worth of business because hundreds of people cancelled their really quite comical. And then, in the end, another helicopter appeared airfares minutes after your story went on,’” he offers. with the police in it, and we did listen to them. We knew that while the The title ‘Dangerman,’ for the 2004 TV series made for the Discovery Army didn’t have any authority over us, the police did. So we left, but Channel about his activities was a misnomer. His work is perfectly safe nothing happened to us. The police thought it was quite amusing that he says. “I’m no closer than anyone else who drives a car, to danger. a group of reporters had managed to evade the army for 3 or 4 hours,” When people drive down any two-lane stretch of rural road, they’re says Mackley, chuckling. passing within half-a-metre of every other car, going at 80-100 kilomeFrom this point on, cameramen and reporters from TV3 and TVNZ tres an hour. I don’t have car-size rocks landing that close to me at called him “Rambocam” and the name stuck. volcanoes, ever! Yet people take it for granted that driving is not a risk, One of the best facets of being Mackley is that everyday is a new day. when in fact, it is. It’s more of a risk than what I do,” he offers, adding “I don’t have the day-to-day pressures that everyone else has – just than when he climbs a volcano he’s in complete control of how close sitting in a traffic jam and doing the same boring job for years and they he gets “to the action” – unless of course the action gets close to him. are sitting in the same traffic jam and haven’t really moved forward or He has had close calls however, one in Mexico during a hurricane. “A achieved anything, and know full well what they’re doing tomorrow or building fell. I was underneath the balcony of the building and all the the day after,” he says. In contrast, Geoff Mackley doesn’t know what debris – about 50 tonnes of concrete – cascaded down about a metre he’s going to be doing from one day to the next. He could be on the away from me,” he says. Luckily, he was uninjured. other side of the world the next day, facing a volcano that’s erupting or standing in a region devastated by a tsunami. He doesn’t know, and nother reminder of his mortality occurred in Indonesia. that’s part of why he regards his life as so exceptional. On his website His taxi driver got lost en route to the railway station, so is the phrase: ‘Life is an incredible adventure or it’s nothing at all.’ He he missed the train he intended to catch, which subse- really believes it. “I live for each day. I intend to be doing this for as quently collided head on with another train, which was long as I can. I probably won’t be able to climb volcanoes forever, but then ploughed into by another train. He’d be dead had I can certainly fly to the other side of the world, get in a rental car and it not been for the taxi driver’s incompetence. Indeed, transport he drive to a hurricane, until I’m…who knows…there are people runsays is his biggest risk, because every time he’s on a train, a bus or in a ning marathons in their 80’s,” he says. car, there’s a potential for serious injury, which is out of his control.

He has a reputation as one of the top photographers of natural Injuries have not yet put him hospital. “In this job, you’re either disasters in the world – if not the top. Yet as the sirens on the police alive or dead!” scanner in the background grow in their intensity, you can almost see The name Mackley wanted to use for the Dangerman show was his Mackley beginning to twitch down the end of the phone. Always, nickname, Rambocam, but as copyright laws protect ‘Rambo’, it was there’s another story just around the corner, another mountain to not an option. So how did he acquire the wonderful nickname climb. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Rambocam? This is another interesting story, demonstrating the

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FRONTLINE TRADING BULLETS FOR BALLOTS

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LIFESTYLE

MONEY

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT Can a market keep growing? Peter Hensley reckons commentators aren’t factoring in the looming retirement of the baby-boomers

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he past five years has witnessed the US authori- people have felt wealthier and the enthusiasm (fuelled ties conduct a huge economic experiment. In an by the debt drug) has spilled over into real estate with effort to avoid an economic calamity they have people holding the mistaken belief that property never reduced interest rates to a point where they have virtu- decreases in value.

The US Government and the American consumer ally been giving money away to institutions. That is, have been spending beyond their means. Foreign Govbanks could borrow funds at 1% interest (from the ernments have been buying US Treasuries (ie loaning Federal Reserve) and lend it out to punters for mortthe US Government money) in an effort to keep them gages at 4 and 5%. President Bush and the US Governafloat.

The saying goes, if a person owes the bank $10,000 ment instituted massive tax rebates whilst at the same and cannot pay it back, the person has a problem. Howtime encouraging punters to borrow against the value ever if a person owes the bank $10,000,000, and cannot of their houses (with home mortgage interest being tax pay it back, the deductible in the bank has a probUS). These factors lem. Foreign The saying goes, if a person owes the bank combined enGovernments sured that the $10,000 and cannot pay it back, the person and institutional buying public had has a problem.

However if a person owes economists are enough liquid watching the situcash to keep the the bank $10,000,000, and cannot pay it ation closely. economy running back, the bank has a problem Generally, if a at full steam. country’s deficit The side effect stretched over 5% of their GDP (Gross Domestic Prodof this massive experiment of providing oceans of uct), their currency was devalued and their government liquidity has meant that the country (USA) and its buydebt (bonds) was placed into junk bond status.

The US ing public have gone further and deeper into debt than deficit is projected to reach 7% of GDP this year and ever before. The US budget deficit (difference between foreign Governments are still queuing up to lend them income tax and government spending) is the biggest ever recorded. Consumer spending has also created the money. We live in interesting times.

It is obvious now that the US authorities have largest trade deficit ever seen. In the short term the exanother problem. They have successfully avoided a stock periment has worked. The stock market has not crashed,

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market crash, but have created a debt bubble that now presents its own problems.

Too much money in an economy typically translates into inflation. The US now has an excess of money in its system with its money supply (ie dollar bills on issue) effectively more than doubling in the last decade. To compound their problem, the 77 million baby boomers have not started saving for their retirement, expecting to either sell their shares or property (or both) to fund their later years. It does not take the brains of a rocket scientist to imagine what could happen next. The first baby boomers start to retire in less than 5 years.

The man on the street is either blissfully unaware or doesn’t care about his nation’s economic problem. He or she is acutely aware of the size of their mortgage payment and has been watching it increase steadily over the past twelve months. Sooner or later they will either make an effort to pay off their mortgage or choose to walk to away from it altogether. Individually, this decision will not impact the community (or nation) however collectively it might be a different story.

The Great American Consumer accounts for over 70% of GDP. If they stop going to the malls or stop paying their mortgage, then all hell is likely to break loose. With the national saving rate close to zero, it is likely that 77 million baby boomers are likely to reduce their spending in an effort to start saving for their pending retirement. A likely scenario is that the average greying American Consumer will alter their spending habits in order to save some ready cash for their pending retirement. They will possibly combine this with reducing their mortgage or debts in general. This change in consumer spending is likely to affect the wider economic landscape in ways they possibly could not imagine. In the words of Rachel Hunter, It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

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LIFESTYLE

TOYBOX

BRIGHT SHINY THINGS These new gadgets provide plenty of distraction

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ure plasma pleasure is the promise of Fujitsu’s latest flat-screen TVs. Featuring Advanced Video Movement (AVM) technology, high resolution XGA e-ALIS technology, and some pretty gorgeous accessories to boot, these are some of the slickest televisions on the planet – and they look great even if they’re turned off. Which they don’t need to be, thanks to improved phosphor technology that extends panel life to a whopping 60,000 hours.

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ang & Olufsen’s A8 earphones are some of the lightest (weighing in at just 22 grams) and most sophisticated on the market. The sleek anodized aluminium design allows them to be virtually sculpted to the needs of the wearer, and each pair comes with its own stylish leather carrying case.

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ose, a classic name in speaker technology, has taken home listening to another level with their new Lifestyle 48 system. Intelligent listening systems and extension features allow for listening in practically any room of the house, one never needs to be tuneless again. Combined with the system’s ability to account for the acoustics and favourite viewing positions for powerful home theatre and moving music, the new Bose home entertainment systems bring listening to life.

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he Nokia 9300 combines popular voice communication features with important productivity applications in one well-appointed device. Now the tools you need to stay in touch and on top of schedules, email, news, and messages are conveniently at your fingertips.

The modern design of the Nokia 9300 is the first indicator of the sophisticated features that lie within. Sleek and compact, the device opens to reveal a full keyboard and wide 65,536color screen.

Stay organized throughout the day using the Nokia 9300. You can use the built-in calendar to set reminders for important events, access the tasks list to write a memo or shopping list, and browse the Internet to look up directions, find a business address or recommend a good place to meet for dinner. It is easy to synchronize data on the Nokia 9300 with applications on your PC using Nokia PC Suite software, so that the most up-to-date information is stored on each device.

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LIFESTYLE

HEALTH

SLICE OF LIFE The circumcision debate has reignited, with a Melbourne doctor calling the controversial cut a lifesaver. But is it really?

W Claire Morrow

hat do you call the useless bit of skin at the mentioned condoms. So you conclude that to prevent end of a penis? The man. Sorry, that just your tiny baby from ever contracting HIV or HPV, you popped out. And while it may be funny, should go messing about with his penis. it’s also just as inaccurate an answer as any, since, like I’m not saying the science is faulty: I’m saying that if men, the human foreskin is actually not particularly use- my boys can’t think of a better way to avoid contracting less; it protects the penis underneath. It also harbours HIV than surgery, then we have a whole other set of the Human Papilloma Virus, which causes penile and problems on our hands. cervical cancer. Oh yeah, and it is also said to facilitate the The value in Prof. Short’s research is to be found in transmission of HIV. countries with endemic HIV. Encouraging routine cirOn second thought, it’s worse than useless – it’s an cumcision of newborns in countries which already supabsolute death trap! Off with their…anyway. port the practise may have implications for reducing the Somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent of Australian spread of AIDS in conjunction with public health teachboys are, like my own two sons, uncircumcised. The ing about safer sex practices. (Less happily, it may also Royal Australasian College of Physicians sees no reason fuel the belief that condoms aren’t necessary). Unfortuto support routine newborn circumcision, so it is not nately, countries with high HIV rates don’t tend to have regularly performed in Australia or large clean modern obstetric units New Zealand except for religious or much in the way of local anaesThe mere mention of or medical reasons. thetics and sterile equipment, so Ah, but wait. The aptly-named one would have to assume that adult circumcision is Professor Roger Short of Melcomplication rates of circumenough to make a grown the bourne University and the Royal cision would be higher than that man’s eyes water Women’s Hospital’s obstetrics in Western countries. department, has recently sugOf course, there are other reagested that we reconsider our attitudes. Short’s research sons for circumcision, religion being chief among them. has shown that because the HIV virus enters the body Jewish and Muslim babies are circumcised in first week via the foreskin, circumcised men have 7 times less chance or so of life, rapidly (as one would hope), and generally of contracting HIV than uncircumcised men. with local anaesthesia.

The Human Papilloma Virus, or HPV (a nasty little That’s all very well and good, but my bigger concern is bug that causes cervical cancer in women and the much with the pursuit of circumcision for “socio-cultural reararer penile cancer in men), also lives under the foreskin, sons” (“so that the boy matches his dad” is a surprisso women with an uncircumcised partner have twice the ingly common justification). Parents wishing their child risk of developing cervical cancer. to be circumcised for these sorts of aesthetic reasons are This research is actually in line with previous research advised to wait until the child is over 6 months old and on the subject, so I’m going to go along with the man have the procedure performed under a general anaesand presume he’s correct in his research findings. It’s the thetic. Since the parents will be out of pocket for at least conclusions that follow on from these findings that I part of this procedure, and they will have to go to some have trouble with. Let’s walk through this: you live in a trouble to arrange it, most simply don’t bother. western democracy which has soap, running water and The other main argument I have heard in favor of the condoms widely available. Rates of HIV are low in your procedure is that it reduces the risk of later health probcommunity. The spread of both HIV and HPV viruses lems – especially the risk of circumcision later in life. The can be nearly entirely stopped by the use of the afore- argument here is that since a small number of boys and

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grown men require circumcision for medical reasons, we should do it to all of them when they’re young. OK, then, why not just take out the appendix and the tonsils at the same time, so they don’t cause trouble later? Well, the mere mention of adult circumcision is enough to make grown men’s eyes water. They can only begin to imagine the pain. Any boy should be spared this. It would be intolerable. Agony. It would be about as bad as the pain a woman would be in after childbirth. Only without the labour or the birth.

Kinda puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

A quick browse of the internet will reveal that the circumcision issue has almost cult status amongst some groups. On the one hand are pages touting lurid pictures of the incredibly rare penile cancer, coupled with the exhortation to spare your son this grave fate through circumcision. On the other hand, the clear and certain statement that the pain involved (and there is bound to be some) will permanently damage your child’s brain, and testimony from grown men who claim to be emotionally scared by the procedure. Either way, I can only suggest that new parents weighing their choices not put too much faith in websites authored by mysterious, nameless “professor-at-a-wellknown-university” types.

And then there’s the sex thing. Usually dads consider this more of an issue, because the little lads’ mammas feel sure that their babies will remain as pure as the driven snow. But just in case you’re

wondering…we simply don’t know for sure. It seems to make no difference whatsoever. Theoretically the uncircumcised lads should have greater sensitivity, but how can you really know? Men who’ve been circumcised after becoming sexually active generally experience some difficulties adjusting, but then again, the equipment is being changed mid way through the race. Most blokes are happy with what they’ve got.

Which I think goes a large way towards explaining why dads want their sons to be like them. All of this talk of the terror of circumcision could be taken as a slight against one’s own dangly bits. It is true that there are some medical conditions are more common in uncircumcised infants and boys. A surprising number of them can by treated with steroid creams. Rarely, circumcision might be of more assistance. Urinary tract infections can be treated with antibiotics; if there is an underlying condition that causes it to recur, circumcision may indeed help, but again this is rare. Complications of circumcision are hard to reckon because of varying interpretations of what constitutes a “serious” complication, but the rate is generally put at about 2-5%, and include everything from bleeding to mutilation, though the very serious complications are exceptionally rare. Death is theoretically possible, but I haven’t been able to find a report of one. The risk of serious complication from not being circumcised is lower. For a normal boy, the risk of circumcision clearly outweighs the potential benefit.

March 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 83

LIFESTYLE

SCIENCE

RELATIVITY, SCHMELATIVITY Sure, Einstein hit it big in 1905. But let’s not forget the really important inventions of a century ago – like the windscreen wiper, says Pat Sheil

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he Japanese thumped the Russians in the Russo- brain-dumped in most cases. The fact is that humans Japanese War. Sailors mutinied on the battle- live in a Newtonian world, where the three laws of ship Potemkin. Norway gained independence motion clearly affect everything from cricket to sex, from from Sweden, Sun Yat-sen founded his secret society to driving a car to falling down the stairs. Relativistic expel the Manchus, and Sinn Fein was founded in Dub- insights are momentarily gleaned from encounters with lin. Oh, and England flogged the Aussies in the Ashes. powerful drugs or inspired physics teachers, not by liftBut if you ask a group of scientists what happened in ing a beer in the pub or running down an infant with a 1905, they’ll all say the same thing: Einstein published supermarket trolley.

But in a bizarre coincidence, 1905 saw major breakhis Special Theory of Relativity. Now, there’s no denying that this was a significant event. A 26-year-old patent throughs in the application of Newtonian physics and clerk had the temerity to tear classical physics to confetti old-fashioned 19th century chemistry which set the tone and throw it out the conceptual window, and while for the new century in ways that are much easier to unmost people say the 20th century started in 1901, and derstand. Ideas, patents and processes that we still use others contend it really began in 1914, most scientists all the time and which changed our everyday world, for date our brave new world from Einstein’s theoretical good or ill, depending on your point of view.

For instance, 1905 saw the invention of the jukebox, detonation of ’05.

On top of that, in 1905 he used Brownian motion to by one John Gabel of Chicago. There had been coinconfirm atomic theory, and explained the photo-electric operated Edison phonographs seen in the preceding decade, but these only played effect (for which he was one tune, and were so quiet awarded the Nobel Prize for Relativity has a short certhat they could only be heard physics in 1921 – he never got ebral half-life - an hour is long by putting a listening tube to a prize for relativity, funnily your ear. Gabel, who had preenough). It was a big year for enough for it to be brainviously built cigar vending Albert, though he didn’t dumped in most cases machines, manufactured and really become famous until marketed the “Automatic the effects he predicted in his General Theory of 1915 were confirmed four years later Entertainer”, which offered a choice of two dozen difduring a total solar eclipse, when the light of a distant ferent songs played through a massive 102-cm. horn.

In one of those fortuitous coincidences that pepper star was measurably bent by the sun’s gravity. He was the history of technology, the rise of the jukebox was right – relativity actually applied in the real world.

Yet even then, with his peers in awe of his achieve- given a hefty boost by the invention of thermo-setting ment, the rest of the world simply took the scientists’ plastics, also in 1905. Chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland word for it: this Albert Einstein was one brainy guy. had just sold his photographic paper process to George Even today, we have to take this on trust, because rela- Eastman for a million dollars and, by 1905 standards, tivity and all that it implies is not exactly self-evident as was cashed up in a very big way. He hit pay dirt again by founding the plastics industry virtually single-handed, we go about our daily lives.

So counter-intuitive is it that even though most of us and felt that his first breakthrough invention in the field can come to grips with the ideas if the basics are prop- was so significant that it was only fair to name it after erly explained, very few of us are able to explain it to himself. Bakelite was born.

Technically, Bakelite is a polymerisation of formaldeanyone else a week or two later. Relativity has a short cerebral half-life - an hour is long enough for it to be hyde and phenol. In practical terms, it was the first plas-

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tic that didn’t soften when heated, and as well as creating an explosion of consumer electrical goods, kitchenware, telephone housings and a thousand other doo-dads and gizmos, it transformed the recording industry as it was ideal for the pressing of 78 rpm discs.

The world was becoming “new-fangled”. If you tired of the 24 Bakelite 78’s on the Automatic Entertainer, you could catch a motorised omnibus (the first ones plied the streets in 1905) and make your way to the cinema. Well, you could if you were in Pittsburgh, where the first dedicated nickel cinema, or nickelodeon, was opened by vaudeville promoter Harry Davis. It would be 25 years before the movies and the depression killed off vaudeville for good, but Davis pulled in a lot of nickels without having to pay any flesh-and-blood entertainers, and it didn’t take long before others caught on – within three years there would be 8,000 nickelodeons across the USA. Given that hi-tech entertainment was on a roll in ’05, it was fortuitous that someone came along with a promotional tool that couldn’t be ignored to keep the show on the road. French chemist and inventor Georges Claude worked out in that year that by pushing electricity through a tube filled with neon gas (which had only been discovered six years earlier), a new form of lighting could be had, and one that could be bent and twisted into letters, shapes, and logos. His invention was to make him a fortune, and to reach its apotheosis in the town of Las Vegas, where it took on ever-more-lurid forms.

It shouldn’t be at all surprising that Las Vegas was founded in, yep, 1905.Music, lighting, entertainment, transport, mass-production – in 1905 the 20th century really started to hit its straps. The first signs of

what the century had in store came as cracks began to appear in the Victorian/Edwardian edifice of starch and prudery. And not just in the dark, thrilling back rows of the nickelodeons, though preachers were already warning of the moral turpitude to be found in these places. Even talking about sex almost became respectable with the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. Einstein had never seen a neon light or ridden in a motorised omnibus when he wrote his seminal paper. He had never used a Bakelite telephone or put a coin in a jukebox. He may have seen a moving picture show or two – he was a patent clerk after all, and knew a thing or two about the latest inventions. Perhaps the absence of such distractions, and the sheer boredom of working in the Swiss bureaucracy played a crucial part in the extrapolations that led to the Special Theory.

Then again, being a freakish genius probably didn’t hurt.

Years later, as he was driven home from the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study in the pouring winter rain (Einstein was sufficiently a man of the 19th century to have never learnt to drive a car), his driver would have been thankful for the inspiration of Mary Anderson. Mary spent many a freezing evening in New York streetcars, as the drivers stopped, got out, and letting in a blast of snow or sleet wiped the window so they could see where they were going. She got sick of it, and realised that the answer was not relativistic, but deeply Newtonian. She understood that the solution was quite straightforward, and after knocking out a few sketches, patented the first windscreen wiper.

In 1905.

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LIFESTYLE

TRAVEL

CAMBODIA’S RENAISSANCE In Cambodia, the grandest temple of all returns from the ruins, as a nation turns its back on the troubles of the past, reports Alan Solomon

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IEM REAP, Cambodia – The first approach, no restoration efforts at Angkor Wat, at the shrines within matter how you approach it, isn’t all that impres- nearby Angkor Thom and at others in the region.

That went on, with a few interruptions, until sive. From the main road, the profile beyond its moat is low, like a very rough pencil sketch of Parlia- the onset of World War II. The Japanese weren’t much ment along the Thames but less grand and imposing. interested in public works during their period in resiThe three visible spires, leaden in color, plump and oddly dence. When the French tried to reassert control after the Japanese surrender, pockets of indigenous mottled at this distance, don’t inspire at all.

The camera comes out because it must. Through the fighters resisted.

While all this internal skirmishing was going on, and viewfinder, it all looks even lower and longer and like even as the situation in neighboring Vietnam was turnless of a wonder. ing into what it turned into, restoration by the French But then ... wow.

“Where are the words,” wrote French naturalist- heroically continued until the communist Khmer Rouge explorer Henri Mouhot, who famously happened upon finally booted them back to Paris in 1970.

Over the next 20-plus years, more grief followed for nearly forgotten Angkor Wat in 1861, “to praise a work of art that may not have its equal anywhere on the globe?” Cambodia. The legacy of two decades’ worth of bombAngkor Wat is a temple. More accurately, it was a tem- ings, coups, invasion, occupation and civil war includes memories of unimaginable ple, built by a Khmer king suffering and killing, and in the 1100s to honor the Hindu god Vishnu and to From 1970,’ said an informa- millions of land mines that, even today, continue to tear hold his own ashes, later tion officer with the tourist limbs off children’s bodies. rededicated to Buddha as the office in Siem Reap, ‘no one Through all this, of regional religious dynamic course, tourism wasn’t changed, still later a ruin, and came to see Cambodia.With exactly a burgeoning entertoday essentially an incensesome exceptions prise. “From 1970,” said an scented museum. information officer with the It is massive. It is magnificent. But it takes a closer look to appreciate. Angkor tourist office in Siem Reap, “no one came to see Wat’s greatness sneaks up on you, comes at you in stages. Cambodia.”With some exceptions.

In 1986, according to government figures, a total of That it comes at you at all – that you’re welcome to 565 tourists came to see Angkor Wat. Most of the visivisit – is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Angkor Wat was built between 1113 and 1150 by tors were from Russia and Cuba. Cambodia, at the time, Khmer King Suryavarman II, then largely abandoned was occupied uneasily by the communist Vietnamese after Thai armies attacked in 1431. For most of the next army, which was battling the communist Khmer Rouge 400 years, the temple sat there, watched over by the occa- and other armies representing other factions.

It was not an easy time – nor an easy visit. Tourists sional monk and the odd monkey, looted of its more came, when they came at all, on day trips from the capiportable riches and, slowly but literally, falling apart.

When Henri Mouhot sent back excited reports of its tal, Phnom Penh, 250km away.

“You couldn’t spend the night,” said an Americangrandeur – and as the French (supplanting the Siamese) were establishing a colonial presence in Cambodia in the based tour operator who has been bringing people here mid-1800s – more Europeans came to see for since 1987. “It was too dangerous.”

The only hotel in Siem Reap – the now-luxury Grand themselves.Meanwhile, French archeologists launched

“

”

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KRT Hotel d’Angkor – “was a $10 hotel that was worth $2. You had to haul water to the rooms to flush the toilets.”

Snipers haunted the jungles on the peripheries of the temples. As recently as January 1995, a tourist from Texas and her driver were shot and killed, and the tourist’s husband wounded, by gunmen near Banteay Srei temple, 30km from Angkor Wat. That year, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) had just completed an 18-month stay that the world hoped would bring a stabilizing presence in this political mess of a country. It didn’t quite – more coups and violence followed – but in 1995, the tourist count had reached 44,808.

In 1999 – a year after the death (of natural causes, maybe) of Khmer Rouge strongman Pol Pot – the total was 85,460. “After he died,” said the tourism spokesman, “we’ve seen major investment.”

What was one badly faded hotel in Siem Reap 10 years ago became, as of late last year, 56 hotels in all price ranges, including backpacker lodges but also two five-stars, for a total of 3,000 rooms. As you read this, almost certainly there are more. Hotel construction was and is ongoing and everywhere.

“It’s good to see the reputation is changing,” said Bruno L’Hoste, French-born operator of Le Tigre de Papier, one of Siem Reap’s more sophisticated watering holes. “It’s good to get out of the `war zone.’”

War zone. In a stone pillar just to the right of the West Gate of Angkor Wat: bullet holes. By the standards of today, they are old.

The moat is more than 200 metres wide and 7km around. Visitors walk a stone causeway over the water to the West Gate, the main entrance. Beyond the gate are what look to be three spires of moderate size, two flanking a central tower.

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The West Gate leads to another causeway, this one 10m wide and 360m long over a grass field, the walkway bordered by a series of great carved nagas, the multiheaded snakes linked to Vishnu and found at so many sites here. Two stone libraries, in varying states of disrepair and resembling small museums, stand as sentries on either side.

Only now does the sheer size of this complex kick in. Vatican City could fit nearly five times on the 500 acres within the walls protecting the temple.

Walking along and looking ahead, you get a first good view of Angkor Wat itself. From here, the towers are commanding. And seen from an angle, it becomes clear they are five: Four lesser (relatively speaking) spires boxed around a soaring central tower.

There will be another terrace, and then yet another wall surrounding the temple – this one actually a gallery.

Along its corridors are eight bas-reliefs, carvings in that same gray stone – in all, more than kilometre’s worth – each telling epic stories: of the Battle of Kurukshetra, of the Battle of Lanka, of victories and pageantry, elephants and gods and invasions, of heaven and hell ...

The carvings weren’t always gray, just as the friezes around the Parthenon weren’t always bleached white.

“They were painted at that time,” said my guide, Sokun. “You can still see some color.”

Archeologists estimate it took 37 years to complete Angkor Wat. Its sandstone came from a quarry 40km away, hauled here by elephants and horses and humans, but that was the easy part. As much as the temple’s massiveness, it’s the carvings – in number, in detail and in quality – that boggle. Although to get here we have passed nagas, a few stone lions and not a few celestial dancers (apsaras), this is where they really start to kick in: This is the heart of the structure, the temple pyramid – three levels, each with enclosures, terraces, towers, galleries

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and quirks (including a “hall of echoes” activated by a firm thump of the chest, ideally your own).

It is useless to try to describe all this in words. Even when on the site, with perspective being provided by a quality guide, it’s impossible to grasp what’s here.

That said, we’re going to try.

Every surface is adorned with something carved by ancient hands – dancers, gods and goddesses, demons and kings. Thousands of them.

All that shapeless “mottle” we see from the road is, seen up close, art.The years have done what years do. The elements have softened some edges. Religious conflicts have left Buddhas damaged and Hindu lingas (ritual phalluses) shattered. Rubbings have done some harm and have left unwanted residue. Pillars are gone.

Heads are missing from torsos, most sold for profit and scattered around the world.

Does that matter? Of course.

But looking up at the central tower from the third level ...

It rises 70m above the ground, just 3m shorter than the towers of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, which was begun soon after the completion of Angkor Wat. The Wat looks higher, probably due to the pyramid arrangement. It certainly feels higher.

The climb up narrow steps to the base of the central tower is frightening to all but those with inordinately fine balance or remarkably small feet. There are four stairways up; at just one, the south stairway, has a railing has been installed to assist descent by the nervous.

Only children and fools bypass the railing.

When this was the sanctuary of Khmer kings, only they and high priests could walk on this higher ground. That we can walk here makes it no less humbling. From that highest point, all is visible.

No wonder the Khmer Rouge army held it for years during the civil war. It was its strategic position, and its emotional position. To Cambodians, there is no more powerful national symbol than this.

In 1992, the year U.N. peacekeepers came in, Angkor was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. When UNESCO speaks of Angkor, it is of an archeological park that includes not only Angkor Wat but hundreds of temples and lesser structures – with restorations in progress by the nations of the world – scattered over more than 230 square miles.

Among them: the shrines of Angkor Thom, notably Bayon, with its own bas-reliefs and its prominent heads emerging seemingly from everywhere; Ta Prohm, still in the grip of strangler figs; Banteay Srei, whose pink delicacy gives it its own charm.

Here in Greater Angkor are terraces etched with elephants and platforms guarded by stone lions, and ruins that once were temples but now are little more than piles of stone blocks in a jungle pocked with red signs warning of land mines ... and soon, perhaps, to be packed with tourists.

“Come now,” urged Canadian ex-pat Michelle Vachon, a reporter for the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. “The place is changing so fast.

Come now before they Disney-ize the place.”

Is that possible?

“Our tourism is cultural and natural,” said Thy, another guide, with confidence. “We have learned from other places.”

So that is Angkor.

But here, too, are rice fields and water buffalo and fishermen and thatch houses on stilts, villages where men wear sarongs and mothers nurse as they gossip and where children play naked in the rivers – where they laugh as children laugh everywhere when there is peace and there is food.

This is the Cambodia of today along the roads not far beyond Angkor Wat. Sometimes it is difficult to know which, truly, is the wonder.

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LIFESTYLE

BOOKCASE

RICHARD PEARSE DIDN’T FLY A new Wright Brothers biography tackles Pearse, as Michael Morrissey discovers in this crop of the latest literature offerings

THE PENGUIN NATURAL WORLD OF NEW ZEALAND

By Gerard Hutching, Penguin, $39.95 Some days I think surely we have had enough books about New Zealand flora and fauna and then two counter thoughts come to mind : ■ we can never have enough books about our plants, trees and wonderful birds and insects, ■ if it’s a good book, yes, we can do with it.

The Natural World prompts both of these positive thoughts. And of course new species get discovered and so we need new books to document these discoveries.

This book has two parts – the first part (In the Beginning) is only 26 pages long and the second part (Our Natural Heritage) has 343 pages which at first glance looks a trifle unbalanced but then the second half contains “New Zealand’s Natural World A-Z” which is the central part of the book. This central alphabetised section mixes up fauna and flora which might disquiet some though it makes for easy reference and encourages that free wheeling habit of association and contiguity by alphabet alone which is the hallmark of browsing dictionaries and encyclopaedias.

I’ll start negative and finish positive. There is an entry on snails but none on slugs. (And we have some magnificent slugs.) Naturally, our unique creepy-crawly, the 550 million old peripatus, is well displayed. Alas and alack, no giant centipedes – well, they have become rare.

No entry on insects. There is an entry on endangered plants but none on endangered birds though there is a list of rare (ie, endangered) birds on p 380 – but it has only five (why not ten?) Parakeets are listed but not lorikeets. The entries on beetles, mountains and rivers (no mention of braided rivers) are far too short as is, arguably, the entries on dinosaurs. The entry on blue whales states they weigh up to 150 tonnes but it is well known that a specimen weighing 190 tonnes was caught in Antarctic seas in 1947.

Let’s look at the positives. Wetas are well documented – I learnt there are at least four species of giant weta 90, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

alone. And it was honest of Hutching to note that the giant wetapunga sometimes patriotically claimed to be the heaviest insect in the world is outweighed by the African Goliath beetle. Impressively researched is the note on the huia – often erroneously stated to be the only species where the sexes have different-sized bills (so do the African green woodhoopoe, Hawaiian honeycreeper and the trembler from the lesser Antilles (admit it – you had no idea!). Other choice new titbits of knowledge – the largest extinct gecko (“Two feet long and as thick as a man’s wrist”) used to live in New Zealand; male puriri moths live for only one day; New Zealand has only 10 species of ants while Australia has 5000; New Zealand has 3153 glaciers (I thought it had about 20); Maori called English “cicada language” because of its harsh sound; Mitre Peak is the highest sea

cliff in the world; New Zealand’s wild ferret population is the largest in the world; whales eat an estimated 100 million tonnes of squid a year; and why sleeping fantails don’t fall off branches (you’ll have to buy the book to find out why not).

Photography is excellent – particularly striking shots are those of a wetapunga half covering someone’s face, a trio of spy-hopping orcas, a male kakapo doing a mating dance, the third largest ammonite fossil in the world (as large as a wheelbarrow), and a tuatara snacking on a gecko. Perhaps I have been a mite tough on this book – despite some omissions and overly short treatment of some potentially larger topics, it’s excellent overall.

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLES: The Lives and Times of Hitler’s Inner Circle

By Anthony Read, Pimlico, $34 Adolf Hitler may well be the twentieth century’s most written about person. Logically, that is because, for better or for worse, he is regarded as the individual who most influenced history during that apocalyptic epoch.

Less well known are his gang of offsiders – Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Speer, Borman, Heydrich, Hess, Rohm etc.

This outstanding, well-researched and wellwritten multi-biography gives detailed psychological, political and historical portraits of these top Nazi officials both in relation to Hitler and to each other.

Prior to reading Devil’s Disciples, these figures were only known to me as two dimensional cartoon-like characters. Now, regrettably, I know them better. Out of the shadows into the light, they appear morally as dark as ever. It must be said they were all

highly competent individuals with the exception of the bumbling Ribbentrop (though even Ribbentrop had his times of triumph) – and, of course, totally ruthless. Goring, in particular, was a man I had conceived as a rather foolish fat guy, morphine-riddled, who got things wrong. Fat he certainly was – in later life (though handsome, lean and dashing in his youth) – foolish he was not. (And apparently not morphine-addicted either.) He wasn’t a coward either but a fearless top air ace, renown for his boldness. Militarily, he was more prudent than Hitler for he opposed the invasion of Russia. A collector – or looter – of top class European art, he lived like a medieval monarch complete with forests, fire-lit castles, baronial halls stuffed with hunting trophies – a vulgar but formidable Teutonic lord. He was popular even in Germany’s darkest hour and when captured had his jailors rocking with laughter. Judge Norman Birkett described him as “suave, shrewd, adroit, capable, resourceful”, though by any moral standards, a monster. Yet (almost) I found myself having a sneaking liking for him. It must be remembered that Hitler, Goebbels and Goring all had great charm as well as charisma.

Himmler, by contrast was a more colourless individual whose Machiavellian ruthlessness eventually ousted Goring as Number Two beside Hitler, though when he betrayed Hitler at the end, he himself, like them all, lost everything. All of Hitler’s cohort – particularly Goebbels and Goring – were engaged in an eternal dance of power around the central focus of Hitler. As has been often commented – and here explored in telling detail – Hitler often encouraged the competition.

No Hollywood mogul ever wielded as much power as the club – footed Goebbels. Unlike family man Goring, he had an insatiable sexual appetite and made full use of the casting couch – as dictator of all art forms he controlled casting for films. Like Hitler, he was a failed artist (ie playwright) who, surprisingly, nourished the delusion that Hitler would emerge as a socialist. Ironically, a Hitlerian ban on any art that wasn’t beautiful and true to nature – which led to an exhibition of degenerate abstract art – proved so popular Goebbels had to shut it down.

Excellent as the histories by Richard Overy and Antony Beevor are, none of their books tops this massive, compelling labyrinth, expertly documented and unravelled by Anthony Read – a drama, which however one may dislike it, is the greatest of the twentieth century, a doomed Gotterdammerung-like tragedy that haunts us still. Though the Nuremberg trials may have seemed like the conclusion of these dark performances, the curtain calls of history continue.

THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

By Ian Mackersey, Timewarner, $29.95 What are the greatest inventions of all time?

I’m going to stick my neck out and say the wheel, harnessed and transmittable electricity and the aeroplane. The aeroplane in its transmuted form, the rocket, will one day take us to the stars...

What this book makes powerfully clear is that the first flight on December 17, 1903 was no accident, no fluke, no product of amateur backyard inventors, but a technologically sound construction – the product of many hours of meticulous, planning, research and always-dangerous trials.

True, the Wright brothers had a bicycle shop (often used by less successful rivals as a put down of their efforts), but don’t kid yourself – these boys were astute and patient engineers/ technologists. Of the two, tall ascetic Wilbur was the knowledge-retentive, mathematical one, while girl-shy Orville turned out to be the better pilot. They were both non – drinkers, non-smokers, sons of a venerable but ideologically stormy bishop; upright, morally beyond reproach yet courteous and, when not working with their fabled concentration, friendly. In short, they deserved their success.

When international recognition and success came – five years after their first flight – it was overwhelming. In France, a crowd went wild, the French pilots, including Louis Bleriot, had never seen such impeccable flight control, such steeply banked turns.

It had started years before with the lads making experimental flights with engineless gliders. Wilbur grasped firmly the notion that it was control and lift that were the key prob-

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lems not the engine. Mackersey paces his book expertly so that the long build-up of experimentation and partial success climaxes initially about half way through with the brothers’ first successful flight. This is one of the great technological dramas of history and a defining moment of the twentieth century – the American century.

Three key figures – among many – are well outlined in this enthralling account – Samuel Langley who had $50,000 from the American army to develop a glider that was never to achieve true flight; Octave Chanute, an important pioneer of flight who greatly encouraged the Wright brothers before eventually falling out with them; and Augustus Herring, a confidence man of the worst type who kept trying to cotton on to the tails of Wright brothers – thankfully, he did not succeed though not from want of trying.

Though their initial successes were satisfactorily witnessed, the brothers cagily withdrew from the public eye and got into a Mexican standoff with several governments – the brothers wanted money (lots of it) before they would demonstrate. The governments, understandably, wanted performance first, before any money was handed over. The brothers were overly defensive and poor negotiators – yet they triumphed in the end. For some years, (after Wilbur’s death in 1912), the Smithsonian Institution tried to claim that Langley’s craft had attained flight before the Wright brothers but eventually they backed down. It is gratifying to know that Orville at least survived to see their place in history indisputably confirmed. Footnote: Mackersey, cruelly, though I believe accurately, briefly mentions Richard Pearse as becoming airborne but not an achiever of true controlled flight – a failure that Pearse himself admitted in a letter in 1928.

REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS

By Susan Sontag, Penguin Books, $27 This will probably be Sontag’s last book as this eminent woman of letters recently died of cancer – though, on occasion, posthumous works are quarried from a well known author’s unpublished papers. A New York-based writer, Sontag always seemed more like an essayist who wrote novels than a novelist who composed essays. Despite The Volcano Lover winning the National Book Award, it is her essays which will be remembered and re-read more than her fiction.

Sontag’s early collections of essays – Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will – were dazzling. She was an intellectual of formidable powers who wrote essays which the “aver92, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2005

tive – Sontag pulls the carpet from under ideas she espoused in On Photography, written nearly 30 years ago. There are millions, she says, who are not inured to what they see on television – “who do not have the luxury of patronising reality.” In a rebuke directed at intellectuals (including herself), she insists that images of atrocity continue to remind us, do not allow us to forget, what awful things human beings are capable of. The conclusion of this moving essay rises to a fever pitch of humane pleading that is not found in her earlier work. Perhaps it was her own suffering as a cancer patient that informed these passages. If so, it is a pain Sontag has declined to centre on herself but pass onto us, all humanity, at large. Thus Sontag’s final work concludes on a note of high moral uplift expressed as always in her elegant and eloquent prose. Bravo, Susan!

age” educated person could understand. Not for her the wilful obscurities of the poststructuralists, though she was a keen admirer of Roland Barthes and edited a reader of his work. Her speciality – in the tradition of the great essayists – was the epigrammatic sentence compressing several notions into a single witty byte.

Sontag’s work also revealed an early obsession with cinematography and photography.

In the world of the Sontagian essay, Hollywood did not exist – her preferred choices were European auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Jean – Luc Godard. In this final book length essay, she combines her fixation on photography with her ongoing moral concern with man’s inhumanity to man – plus as noted by Virginia Woolf and Sontag herself – women and children.

War photography is the central theme. Roger Fenton, official photographer at the Crimea, was the world’s first war photographer – the camera having been invented only a few years prior. Fenton’s brief was “not to photograph the dead, the maimed, or the ill”. The result, as Sontag sardonically observes, was “war as a dignified all – male outing”– complete to carefully rearranged cannon balls showing the aftermath of the doomed charge of the Light Brigade. This sterilised view of war couldn’t hold up for long. Sontag alludes to the conscientious objector Ernst Friedrich who in 1924 published close-ups of soldiers with huge facial wounds and, naturally, to Robert Capa, most famous of all war photographers, killed in action like so many of that singularly dangerous occupation.

Ever the true intellectual – ready to retract earlier ideas if time reveals a different perspec-

RATS: A Year with New York’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants

By Robert Sullivan, Granta Books, $35 Rats are usually a non-starter as a dinner conversation topic. Femmes and chaps alike don’t care for the disease-carrying rubbish scavengers as gossip. The Black Plague gave them some of the worst press any animal has had to live with. To call someone a rat is about the worst insult you can dish out. And we’ve all heard those suburban horror stories about rats chewing on babies’ faces. The scene in 1984 where Winston Smith has to face his worse fear – rats – is arguably the most horrible in all literature.

If this is your take on rats, you will probably give this book a wide berth; on the other hand, gnaw your way into it and you might find there’s more to the much disliked rodent then you imagined. For a start they are tough little buggers. Their teeth, dedicated ratwatcher Sullivan writes zestfully, are “stronger than aluminium, copper, lead, and iron. They are comparable to steel ... they can exert a biting pressure of up to seven thousand pounds a square inch”. This compares to 1500 pounds for a wolf and a mere 750 pounds for a German shepherd. No wonder they can chew through concrete.

All your fears about rats are more or less true – rats do bite babies; there have been instances of them attacking fully grown adults; they carry bacteria, viruses, protozoa, fungi, mites, fleas lice and ticks; they spread trichinosis, tularaemia, leptospirosis. (I don’t know what the last two are but they sound bad). And for a bonus – typhus, rabies and salmonella.Reader, there have been no surprises so far but here come three : ■ the author finds rats disgusting (surely he loves them just a bit?)

■ he spent a lot of time prowling around in dirty, dangerous dark alleyways watching them ■ he really doesn’t know why he set out on the rat-watching project. It appeared Sullivan gathered enthusiasm as he went.

Or was that when he had enough information to quit alleys and skulk home to write his very well-written book? Rats of course do die themselves and one of New York’s less savoury nineteenth pastimes was getting tough dogs to kill as many rats as they could in as short a time as possible – the record was 100 rats in five minutes 28 seconds.

The tough Irish impresario drew the line (and please don’t try this at home) at men biting rats’ head off. Amazingly, I learnt from Sullivan’s compendious little book that kiwis are global leaders in rat extermination. In 2002, 120 tonnes of rat poison taken to Campbell Island did in 200,000 rats – a world record!

Sullivan gleefully lists some of the dottier causes of plague before it was discovered (only as recently as 1894) that rat fleas were the culprit – restless night birds, huddling frogs, wormy fruit, large spiders, circling ravens, mad dogs and vapours rising from the earth. To which I say – rats. Rats are renown for their versatile eating habits and you want to encourage them leave cooked rather than raw food. They love scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese and cooked corn kernels but tend to dislike raw beans, peaches and raw celery.

Sullivan is adamant that the notion that there is one rat per person in a city is erroneous – that would mean in New York there were about 8 million. A rat expert has estimated the Big Apple’s quota as 250,000 – which sounds a bit on the low side. Why? Rats have sex 20 times a day.

Fire, Sparkle, Brilliance...

The Tycoon Cut Diamond is a masterpiece of modern gemology. With 9 crown facets, the Tycoon Cut Diamond is significantly more brilliant than traditional fancy cuts and reflects light unlike any other diamond.

GIA certified, discreetly laser-inscribed for au-

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LIFESTYLE

MOVIES & DVDs

HOWARD’S WAY The Aviator deserves every Oscar it won, and House of Flying Daggers dazzles

House of Flying Daggers Released: February, 2005 Rated: MA

✯✯✯✯

E Shelly Horton

very scene in House of Flying Dag gers is a work of art. Strongly contrasting landscapes and rich colours make the characters seem like they are living in oil paintings.

Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, this Chinese film easily crosses the East-West divide. It falls in what is known as the wuxia genre, which means the story is all about swordplay and chivalry; viewers can expect plenty of stylised martial arts fights with dramatic camera angles and mind-exploding choreography.

Gravity is not a concept director Zhang Yimou chooses to accept.

But it’s not all style and no substance. Set in ninthcentury China during the Tang dynasty, House of Flying Daggers is driven by a classic love triangle. The players are two Tang officers –the handsome young Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and the older Leo (Andy Lau) – who try to trick blind dancer Mei (Zhang Ziyi) into leading them to a rebel group known as the Flying Daggers.

Takeshi Kaneshiro – Asia’s answer to Brad Pitt – breathes steamy sex appeal into his role. Andy Lau, who’s more your Harrison Ford type, struggles to escape Takeshi’s shadow. But it’s Zhang Ziyi who steals the show. She looks like a delicate princess, but a flick of her wrist would smash your nose into a million pieces.

Imagine a fragile Winona Ryder who could kick Jennifer Garner’s butt.

It’s inspiring to see such strong lead roles for women.

Female roles in Western films just can’t compare. In House of Flying Daggers the women are fierce warriors who can fight dozens of men at a time without also having to look like they could arm-wrestle Arnie.

The film does have a couple of flaws. For one thing, the plot wraps up a bit too quickly in the end with its twists, revelations and double-crossings. And the sex

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scenes are very clumsy – obviously the lead characters are fighters, not lovers.

House of Flying Daggers’ Chinese title is Shi Main Mai Fu, which literally translated means “Ambushed From Ten Directions”. I prefer this title because it better captures the eye-popping special effects and head-spinning action that had me rushing out of the cinema to practice my karate chops on my younger brother.

The Aviator Released: February, 2005 Rated: MA

✯✯✯✯✯

T

he Aviator has already garnered more stars than the American flag and I just gave it five more.

This Martin Scorcese – directed film is a masterpiece. Viewers are swept along by the excesses of Howard Hughes’ life and wrapped up in the glamour of a seductive, groundbreaking era. Hughes lived an amazing life, and the world is a better place for hitching a ride in his slipstream. The Aviator uses a great story to showcase Hollywood’s finest actors of the moment. Now I don’t know anyone over twelve years old who actually likes Leonardo DiCaprio, but credit where credit is due: he’s captivating in this film. He doesn’t look like Howard Hughes, yet he has captured the essence of his drive, ambition and cuckoo-crazy episodes – to say nothing of the billionaire’s need for perfection, big-picture brain and desire for busty women. DiCaprio shows how a man could burst under all that pressure and wind up naked and locked in a room surrounded by bottles of his own urine.

And as always it’s all about Cate Blanchett. She of the impossible cheekbones personifies Katharine Hepburn and everything we loved about her. Blanchett nails her mannerisms, voice and headstrong behaviour. But it’s not a crass mimicry – it’s an homage. I look forward to the day a movie is made about Cate Blanchett to see who will be brave enough to portray one of Australia’s finest actors.

Kate Beckinsale stacked on ten kilos to play Ava Gardner, and the curves suit her well – as does the sassy and strong role. Alec Baldwin is at his charming and suave best as Hughes’ arch-rival, Juan Trippe.

John C. Reilly is downtrodden as always as Hughes’ accountant. Alan Alda should be given more roles as he is horribly accurate as a corrupt senator. The only two who don’t shine are Gwen Stefani as Jean

Harlow and Jude Law as Errol Flynn. But director Martin Scorsese had the sense to keep those parts brief. The special effects are astounding (one particular plane crash is so graphic I shielded my eyes from flying debris), the energetic music had me bopping in my seat and the cinematography is rich and luscious.The world needs more eccentric geniuses like Howard Hughes and Martin Scorsese.

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DVDs

By TIM KERR

ALISTAIR COOKE’S AMERICA PG, 663 Minutes

places, including New Orleans, the home of many jazz greats, Vermont and San Francisco. What is made obvious right away is the passion Cooke has for this ‘adopted’ country and also the effect this country has had on his life. In episode two he discusses the Spanish conquistadors who settled in Mexico, Arizona and Texas, right up to looking at 1972 America in episode thirteen where Cooke visits Hoover Dam which helped transform the desert into a gambling paradise.

Special Features: Interview with Alistair Cooke that took place on the television programme Pebble Mill at One, interviewed by Bob Langley. This documentary series also comes with English subtitles.

Final Word: Certainly more accessible than a daunting 3cm thick ‘coffee table book’. These 13 episodes on 4 disks manage to impressively chart a 400 year history of a nation which most outsiders (and insiders) choose to criticize. On this note it was refreshing to watch and listen to a man who delighted in this country despite its differing views. This is quite possibly the reason he took to this nation like he did.

We have had the book of Alistair Cooke’s America sitting in our living room shelf for as long as I can remember.

Its dust jacket is faded and torn in places and I’m not sure how much it’s been read. It should have been; Newsweek described it as ‘The first and maybe the finest tribute to the nation’, and, if this DVD is anything to go by I’d agree.

Alistair Cooke was one of Britain’s best loved American correspondents and for over 50 years he reported on all aspects of American life in his BBC radio series Letters from America. In 1973 he wrote and presented this insightful thirteen part documentary (following closely his same-titled book) in which he provides his own personal history of America, telling numerous interesting stories about the people, places and events that shaped the nation. These 50 minute episodes succeed in covering much historical ground: The past 400 years of American history in fact. In the introductory episode ‘The First Impact’ Cooke visits some of his favourite

BLACKBALL M, 93 Minutes As sporting movies go it is not often you find ones that involve the game of lawn bowling and as for playing the game, unless you fit into the ‘acceptable’ age category you might be looked at quite strangely. In the seaside town of Torquay this game is taken very seriously, especially by Ray Speight (James Cromwell) – gifted bowler and club champion for 20 years; a man lacking the conviction to take his skills to the national level, content with his 20 year reign at the local bowling club. Beyond the manicured lawns however, in the run down section of town resides Cliff Starkey (Paul Kaye) who plies his skills as a bowls prodigy, ready to take on Speight. Armed with his American agent and sportswear executive Rick

METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER M, 141 Minutes Yeah, like you, we never foresaw ourselves reviewing a Metallica DVD. However, this one is different. Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky set off to produce a kind of cinematic fanzine about the heavy metal band they loved, but in the process captured on film the disintegration of rock’s bad boys during the recording of their recent album St Anger. The documentary, shot in largely fly-on-the-wall mode throughout, throws up a stark contrast between the carefully manufactured demonic images that music companies use to market their metal bands, and the human fragility of the men in the band itself.Rather than Metallica, the group could arguably rename itself The Lost Boys, because the DVD shows them trying to break free of the marketing machine that grips them.

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(Vince Vaughn), Cliff begins to turn the game of Lawn Bowls into quite a spectator sport receiving much attention for his ‘bad boy’ persona. A person Speight seeks to ensure never gets to play in Britain’s championship.

Unfortunately for Speight, one of Starkey’s biggest fans is a local teacher named Kerry, Speight’s daughter.

Special Features: Commentary by Director, Mel Smith, Cast & Crew Interviews, TV and Radio Spots, Theatrical Trailer.

Final Word: A ‘family movie’, one which pertains to the familiar theme of good triumphing over adversity.

As I uphold the belief that British comedy is the best comedy I have to be honest and say that despite this being a decidedly British movie it doesn’t quite hit the spot.

While playing to concerts of thousands of angry young men thrusting “the horns, man” (a fist with forefinger and pinky raised) into the air, Metallica’s musicians are agonising over how to write lyrics rejecting the anger and violence and drug use of their youth in favour of something more positive. The boys from Metallica, you see, are all grown up. They’re fathers, they’ve kicked the drugs and booze, and they sip Evian water.

Heck, the band even hires a motivational shrink to analyse a communication breakdown within the band.

While the language is offensive, the documentary is fascinating.

Special features: 40 additional scenes, intimate interviews with band members about the film, audio commentaries from both the band and the directors.

Final Word: Not a ‘family’ movie, but certainly a deeper insight into the people caught up in the ravenous demands of the heavy metal music biz. - IW