Investigate, March 2006

EXCLUSIVE: We’re in court for the Pitcairn appeals

INVESTIGATE

March 2006:

The MP & the School Girls in Nighties

David Benson-Pope

Pitcairn trials

Mental illness

Police investigation throws up fresh, damning allegations on David Benson-Pope

Charlene

Teen Ragers Should all kids be forced to have tests for mental illness?

Issue 62

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Volume 6, Issue 62, March 2006

FEATURES THE MP & THE SCHOOLGIRLS

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We’ve all heard about the tennis balls, but the police investigation of Labour’s David Benson-Pope has turned up new accusations that he forced 14 year old girls to strip to their nighties on school camps and stand in the cold for up to an hour while he watched them. But that’s not all. IAN WISHART has been reading the police file, and fighting a Benson-Pope attempt to stop the magazine getting access to more still-secret police documents

ISLAND IN THE GUN

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THE LAST NGAPUHI

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TEEN RAGERS

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Last year nearly three quarters of the able-bodied men on Pitcairn Island were convicted of sex crimes. Some were sentenced to jail. But now their lawyers are arguing the trials weren’t fair.

RACHEL ROBINSON was in the Appeals Court and files this world exclusive story

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Ever wonder why one of New Zealand’s previously dominant Maori tribes now seems politically emasculated? PAUL MOON did, and his new book uncovers a century-old scandal that’s still having repercussions today

New research is turning decades-old scientific assumptions about mental illness on their head. Doctors now think mental illness begins in teenagers, and they’re pushing for compulsory screening of kids in the US. TINA HESMAN reports

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE

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Did you know that someone, somewhere, has a data record of that Google search you did last night? ROBERT BOYD reports on the losing battle to protect privacy in the information age, and where it’s all leading

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Cover: PRESSPIX/MARK MITCHELL

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION Volume 6, issue 62, ISSN 1175-1290

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL Turban-charged emotions

F

or a couple of weeks there, it looked like a foretaste of the Apocaplypse. Angry young Islamic men, chanting ‘Death to the Infidels’, promising ‘a new 9/11’ and a Muslim takeover of Europe.

Well, heck, that’s going to happen regardless of whether the cartoons were published. At Investigate, we’ve chosen not to publish the cartoons for the same reason we don’t publish ‘The Madonna in Elephant Dung’: they’re offensive to people’s religious beliefs.

Do people have a right to see the cartoons at the centre of it all? Of course they do, and our bet at Investigate is that anyone seriously interested in what all the fuss was about logged onto Google within hours of hearing about it and viewed the cartoons online, “In Islam, there is only one ruler, like we did.

In the law, there is an Allah, who has decreed there important legal defence to are only two states in the world: the media available that Muslim and infidel” permits the publication of confidential or private information: the ‘public interest’ defence. We’re actually pleading that defence in our lead story investigation this month into David Benson-Pope. The ‘public interest’ defence applied by the courts asks whether publication is genuinely in the public interest – ie, important – or merely interesting to the public – ie, not so crucial. It is this defence, in a legal sense, that is the gatekeeper of Freedom of the Press.

There is no doubt that the Muhammad cartoons were of proper public interest in Europe, where the Islamic population is growing so fast through migration and high birth rates that within 30 years European culture as we now know it may be gone.

I also have no doubt that the cartoons are of legitimate public interest to New Zealanders, but it’s a lot more borderline. We are not yet in danger of becoming part of the new Islamic Empire, and the NZ Muslim community is largely responsible and peaceable. They have dobbed in extremist troublemakers, to their credit. For the sake of scoring a few brownie points in the name of an abstract principle, do we really need to put the Muhammad cartoons in hard copy when we know local Muslims will be hurt by it?

To my mind, the cartoons were interesting, but not a dieat-the-Alamo freedom issue.

By all means, cover the vicious, violent, fascist reactions

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

of Islamic mobs overseas, but to argue that you can’t understand the protests unless you see the cartoons is vacuous. We see people charged with child porn. We don’t need to see what they’ve done. We can see Islamic mobs burning and in some cases killing, and we know that no cartoon, no matter how offensive, justifies such crime. We don’t need to see the specific cartoon to understand that.

The worldwide protests have given western liberals a chilling glimpse of the fate that awaits them when Islam’s growth eventually hits the West head-on. And that’s a useful thing.

“Islam is a religion of peace” declared some banners. “Death to the Europeans” or words to that effect declared another banner next to it. “Peace” for infidels in the Islamic sense is usually of the eternal, rather than temporal kind.

But the other thing Westerners don’t understand is why Islam reacted as it did. And that’s because we don’t understand Islamic theology. In the West, our governmental model is the “nation state” where government – the state – is the ultimate authority. Citizens are granted certain freedoms, including the freedom to worship, provided those freedoms are kept private and separate from the state. In other words, the nation state requires allegiance to country first, God (if applicable) second.

Islam doesn’t recognize national borders. The countries we call Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Syria are artificial constructs in the eyes of Islam. Sure, a century of Western colonialism has engendered a certain sense of nationalism in Muslim countries, but no devout Muslim would consider himself Egyptian first and Muslim second.

In Islam, there is only one ruler, Allah, who has decreed there are only two states in the world: Muslim and infidel.

Your allegiance is first and foremost to Allah, secondly to Islam, thirdly to the Islamic nation you reside in or come from, and fourthly to the nation-state you’ve chosen to live in, but only in regard to its rules that do not conflict with the teachings of Islam. The protests across Europe are the end result of bringing in migrants who don’t respect the nation-state model. When there’s a conflict of allegiance, the nation state will always lose.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006,

VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES DODGY PHYSICS

The very first letter on page 8 of the January 2006 issue of Investigate was entitled “Dodgy Safety Ads” and had no editorial comment from you. It is not the ads that are “dodgy” by R. Jordan’s physics. He or she has forgotten that the damage a projectile can do depends on its kinetic energy, which grows as the SQUARE of its speed. The second part of that letter commits the same howler, and appears to ignore the effect of reaction time (the 65kph driver has’ less braking distance left after pressing the pedal and needs it much more).

This used to be elementary 5th form physics.

Richard A. O’Keefe, Dunedin

SPEED IS NOT THE PROBLEM

Taking zero speed and zero damage as datum, clearly any increase in speed will result in a corresponding (if disproportionate) increase in damage. I suspect that the relationship between speed and damage, if charted, would fall on a curve, not a straight line as implied by the correspondent, R Jordan.

The use of the fear factor in these ads is correctly identified. The use of fear as a deterrent is effective only for the short to medium term, unless the threat is backed by consequences clearly associated with the offending action. Hence the effectiveness of the “old fashioned” policeman, or indeed the traffic officer of previous years.

We are constantly reminded that “speed kills” and “the faster you go the bigger the mess”. Once again this invokes the fear factor. However a little thought and logic will show these statements to be untrue. I have (legitimately) traveled at 160 km/h in a vehicle and on a motor bike. Worse, I have traveled at speeds up to 950 km/h in an airliner. So have many others. In terms of the ads in question, I should not have survived. Consider also why we have retired police officers, retired airline pilots, and retired astronauts. No, speed itself does not kill.

However, if the person operating the vehicle loses control of that vehicle for whatever reason, the resulting violence may cause serious injury or death to those inside the vehicle. This is because they rattle around like a pea in a whistle. And this proposition applies whether the vehicle is a motor vehicle, airliner, or any other vehicle.

Returning to the issue of road safety. I suspect that whatever speed a driver has achieved, their subconscious

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

logic kicks in to tell them they have not yet achieved the “speed which kills”. So they speed again. The fear factor has become inconsequential.

For these reasons, in my opinion, the ads are less than effective. In terms of the underlying premise, R Jordan and I agree. Education would be a more effective budget spend.

Many years ago, I was a driving instructor approved by the (then) Ministry of Transport. My colleagues and I were required to teach, as an underlying principle, the safe and efficient operation of a motor vehicle. Our clients were taught to maintain control at all times. The principle applied not only to the vehicle itself, but also in terms of the environment around the vehicle. We embraced the concept of defensive driving. These principles are as valid today as they were then.

Stan Adams, Okaihau

VITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The Clark Government blunders on down an ideological track causing ever increasing levels of infrastructural damage. One such train of events goes back to the days when the uninspiring Mark Gosche and Helen Clark jointly sabotaged the Singapore Airlines bid to buy into Air New Zealand. This trashing of the injection of capital from an experienced and successful airline led to the weakening of Air New Zealand in both decision making and financial strength.

Now let us go back to Helen Clark’s insistence that the RNZAF make redundant some 700 technicians in the wake of her ideological neutering of its strike capability.

Amongst those made redundant were many experienced senior NCOs who would normally have been called upon to train new tradesmen. The outcome has been disastrous for the RNZAF which now has difficulty replacing these people. The RNZAF has traditionally been a valuable training ground for both aircrew and technicians who in due course found their way into civil aviation. If one now overlays the Air New Zealand outsourcing of engineering services to foreign contractors, the picture is almost complete on the destruction of a vital New Zealand aviation infrastructure.

It matters little whether the Prime Minister was moved by hatred of the military and business, or by ingrained ideological stupidity. The outcome was, once again, sabotage of another aspect of New Zealand’s national power.

Hugh Webb, Hamilton

HOMEO-A-GO-GO

In last month’s Investigate health column, Claire Morrow stated that she found my article on Homeopathy in the January edition “utterly disagreeable.” As I continued to read her piece I failed to find any qualification for this statement. Instead, much of what I read of her article appeared to be long on conjecture and short on fact. Obviously written from a very anti - Homeopathy standpoint, Morrow deduces that the authors of the flawed Lancet paper on Homeopathy did “good science.” To label a so called scientific paper where the authors refused to divulge how they came to their conclusions “good science” is ridiculous.

Morrow states that Homeopathic medicine is based on a number of “mystical postulates.” This is patently untrue. Dr. Samuel Hahnemann’s conclusions were drawn as a result of strict scientific experimentation and are documented for anyone to investigate. Interestingly Edward Jenner’s first experiments with immunisation coincided with Hahnemann’s first published work on the “Law of similars” and the theories behind immunisation bear more than a passing resemblance to Homeopathy’s principles. She also states that “Homeopathy didn’t do much good” in the 1700’s. This is a throwaway comment that is contradicted by a wealth of clinical evidence from that time. Morrow goes on to talk about double blind trials being the “gold standard” yet does not appear to realise that many of the most positive and high quality homeopathic trials have indeed been “double blind”.

As I stated in my article, Professor Madeline Ennis’ published work on ultra-dilutions of histamine gave scientific evidence that vigorously shaken and diluted solutions retain biological/energetic activity of the original substance. This is research of the very highest scientific quality by a conventional scientist and is all too conveniently ignored by skeptics as it “dilutes” their argument somewhat. Thus the “theory of ultra-dilutions” is not a “mystical postulate” as Morrow states, and science has proved it not once but many times.

At a time when the WHO (World Health Organisation) comes to the conclusion that Homeopathic treatment is effective, it is unfortunate that some still feel the need to criticise it in this way.

Clive Stuart, Tauranga

THE SAFE SEX MYTH

I recently saw my first copy of Investigate - one of your back issues – with the title ‘How Safe Is Safe Sex?’ Twenty five years ago when we married and decided to use condoms as a family planning measure we were derided as totally naïve by friends and doctors. I find it strange that they are now considered officially adequate: same doctors, same condoms, same practice.

Ten years ago I raised the fallacy of the ‘safe sex’ message with the health teacher at my son’s prospective high school. Neither she nor the board were interested in studies that clearly showed otherwise. It was a case of ‘The Ministry says it, we believe it’.

Their cavalier attitude to truth appalled me to the point that I decided to keep my children at home and teach them scientific analysis and logic unadulterated by political correctness.

I am delighted to see someone with the concern and the guts to raise this issue in the public arena.

We tell kids not to smoke. We don’t hand out cigarette filters.

Jenny Barkley, Amberley

EVOLUTION IN CRISIS

Thank you very much for publishing my letter and taking the time to reply to it (Evolutionary Fundamentalism, Jan. Investigate).

I would very much appreciate the opportunity to reply to your comments and engage in the free and fair debate you claim evolutionists are afraid of. Or will you demonstrate the usual ID reaction and simply ignore any inconvenient problems and not publish this letter?

You say I “sling off at alleged major errors and fallacies in the ID books, but fail to quote any specifics of any”. Listing them takes a whole book and the Australian Ian Plimer has written such a book, “Telling Lies for God”. But luckily you provide some examples of your own.

Henry Gee’s comment that each fossil is “an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil” etc. is taken completely out of context. He was not denying the relevance of fossils, merely pointing out the superiority of the modern method of cladistics for determining relationships between species. Fossils are used as part of this system.

Further you say that Henry Gee “told us that all the scientific evidence for human evolution ‘can be fitted into a small box’.” I have seen this quote many times in ID literature and the placing of the quotation marks is an example of their misleading method of argument. What he actually said was that all the evidence from “between 10 and 5 million years ago can be fitted into a small box”. There is no shortage of evidence from 5 million to the present. So much for your comments on Australopithecus.

You write that Henry Gee also said evolution is a “completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices”. Agreed. But surely your statement “that humans must bear some resemblance to the designer” is another of these inventions. Why does this automatically follow?

Isn’t this an example of faulty logic?

You state that “the Bible has been proven correct on every historical detail”. But the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah’s flood fail even the slightest critical examination. I suppose that technically they cannot be “proved” incorrect. Other stories differ from what independent evidence indicates. It is very likely that the Exodus records the expulsion of the Hyksos Pharaohs and their followers from Egypt. Abraham is said to have met Aramaeans, Hittites and Philistines and it is stated specifically that he came from Ur of the Chaldees. Therefore there is no way he lived before the time of Moses. The Israelite tribe Dan is almost certainly both the Danaan from Homer’s stories of Troy and the Sea People tribe Denen from between the time of Akhenaten and Ramesses III. In reply to Warwick Don’s letter in the same issue you say you want a crisp response to the question what would he do if God appeared and said “I created life, Darwin got it wrong”?

I know what I would do! I’d accept that He was joking and laugh politely.

You say, “there is no compelling evidence of macroevolution”.

I would like to ask you a question (really two questions) that no creationists or ID supporters are prepared to answer. Do all ducks, geese and swans (for example) descend from a single species and if not how many ancestors or types were there? I warn you that the boundaries within and between duck genera are very

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006,

ill defined and so you cannot simply count them for your answer.

Even creationists accept that mallards and grey ducks evolved from a common ancestor but hesitate to suggest how far back we can follow it.

Terry Toohill, Whangarei WISHART RESPONDS:

Dealing with your points in reverse order – I haven’t researched ducks etc, but my gut feeling is that they are microevolutionary variants, based on what biophysicist Lee Spetner has pointed out is the inbuilt capacity of the genome to react to regional environmental differences. All domestic dogs, from poodle to Newfoundland, for example, appear to track back to a prehistoric wolf (just another name for a wild dog, really). But they’re all still dogs. They haven’t turned into carnivorous bison or the like, which is the kind of scientific leap of faith required in the “amoeba to man” evolutionary myth.

Adam and Eve is a chapter incapable of archaeological verification. But the fact that humans appear to be descended from one genetic Adam and one genetic Eve lends weight to Genesis, rather than detracts from it. You scoff at Noah’s flood, yet offer no explanation for remarkably similar flood stories from dozens of cultures, which we’ve dealt with previously in these pages.

Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think Abraham met “Philistines”.

There is nothing in the Abramic story that is inconsistent with what we know from other records in the ancient Near East, eg, Mari, Ebla etc. The intricate historical detail of daily life for Abraham described in the Bible matches other independent material, yet it was detail that would have been unknown in Moses’ time. So, again, although the chances of tracking one peasant from 4,000 years ago are slim to nil, that doesn’t mean he didn’t exist.

My comments on humans resembling the Designer were qualified in context when I wrote them.

THE THEORY EVOLVES

Before outlining “a proper scientific response” to your “God appears in the clouds” scenario, I must address certain glaring misconceptions in your response to my letter (December 2005).

1. You question equating the ‘fact’ of evolution with the reality of gravity. To those conversant with evolution this comparison is perfectly valid. Of course, neither phenomenon was always so obvious. It is only extremely recently in relation to the span of human evolution that these phenomena have been revealed to the world.

2. You question the reality of evolution “as it is commonly taught (amoeba to man)”. Quite right, if this is how evolution is still taught. I would hope most biology teachers now convey the pattern of evolution as a bush, with living species, including Homo sapiens, represented by terminal twigs.

3. You acknowledge evolution within species, but ask why is there no compelling evidence of macroevolution? There is, but you just don’t want to accept it – concordant evidence from several research areas, including the fossil record (e.g. many transitional forms). Any elementary book on evolution summarizes the evidence.

4. Evidence of a close affinity between apes and humans is derived largely from comparative anatomy, DNA comparisons and the fossil record of early ape-like hominids, not from the examples of natural selection you have cited.

10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

5. You again attempt a case for a supernatural dimension to science. But how do you establish beyond all doubt that “the truth happens to be supernatural”? Science can’t help you – yes, a true scientist does go where the evidence leads, but only within the natural world. The empirical evidence for evolution is overwhelming (so evolution is certainly no fairy tale and the time since Darwin has been far from wasted). An appeal to the supernatural, even if it exists, is scientifically bankrupt. Remember the saying about not being able to put God in a test tube?

6. I agree, students should be exposed to the strengths and weaknesses of competing theories. As long as they are scientific.

ID “theory” isn’t; it is faith based.

7. Now, to respond to your scenario: You have God pronouncing, “I’m God, I created life, Darwin got it wrong”. God, of course, would be aware that Darwin did not claim to know how life arose – that his theories relate to what has occurred since, including how it has evolved. The first obvious scientific procedure would be to establish the authenticity of the apparition – to ensure that the entity is what is claimed and not some magical phenomenon, the brainchild of a master magician. Much can be done with special effects these days. Here I suggest the services of arch skeptic, James “The Amazing” Randi should be sought. There is nothing like a master magician to unmask any jiggery-pokery! Assuming establishment of authenticity (still within the provisional parameters of science, of course), the next step would be to subject the entity, like any other natural phenomenon (for it is now part of the natural world), to legitimate scientific investigation.

And what an opportunity for answers from the deity to some vexing questions, many explicable evolutionally, but puzzling otherwise. Most significantly, why then, if “Darwin got it wrong”, is evolution so obvious (to anyone who has examined the evidence objectively)? Doesn’t this smack of trickery on the part of a presumably supreme benevolent being? Or, how do you explain the existence of disease-causative organisms? Oh, there is so much to find out. Why is imperfection so prevalent in your creation? Mind you, since scientists (as scientists) should never show an unquestioning subservience to authority, anything this entity had to say concerning the natural world could only be accepted provisionally.

Warwick Don, Dunedin WISHART RESPONDS:

Glorious! Ten points for effort. However, on behalf of “the deity” I’ ll tackle just one of your points given the confinements of space in this issue: Disease-causative organisms. I love the way so many evolutionists ultimately end up using a negative form of the Intelligent Design argument to justify evolution – in this case, the concept that evolution must be true because an Intelligent Designer wouldn’t have done such a bad job of it. The “why” of it is ultimately a metaphysical one but I offer this briefly: We don’t live in Eden, but on Earth.

All of us are allotted to die. The manner of death is almost irrelevant. Some die by disease, some by violence and some by accident.

I know, and you know, that without bacteria, viruses, fungi and a host of other organisms to keep populations and pollution in check, the planet would aeons ago have been knee deep in bodies. The price of life is the risk of death. It is the next life where perfection is promised, not this one.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 43

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INTELLIGENT READER

Congratulations on a very interesting article on the teaching of ‘Intelligent Design’.

I am appalled that teachers and ‘educationalists’ will attack so vehemently the teaching of theories or ideas that go against the accepted wisdom. This is the sort of attack that I would have expected to find being used by arch-traditionalists in 12th Century universities, or in Islamic schools today. The outbursts that you quote from the ghastly Laurie Fraser of East Kurrajong, NSW, sadly prove that many teachers today are not interested in teaching children to think for themselves, but merely in indoctrinating them to their own world-point. I sincerely hope he (or she) is not in charge of teaching anything more intellectual than colouring-in and pasting. There are many good teachers out there – to their detriment, this sort of attitude unfortunately merely reinforces the belief that teachers are those who are unable to bear the scrutiny of the real world, and have to resort to forcing their views onto children.

I must have been extremely fortunate when I was at school – I do not think that we were aware of the political affiliations of any teacher, nor indeed the religious affiliations of any but one or two (one being the school chaplain). The teaching of evolution, for instance, seems to me in retrospect to be a good example of how to teach, and how I hope my children will be taught.

Evolution was taught by looking at the evidence – both in the cases of what you term ‘microevolution’ and ‘macroevolution’. It was well argued, and very convincing. The teacher pointed out, however, that there were some problems or holes within the theory that could not be easily explained by gradual evolution. We were presented with a number of different views as to how these problems might be resolved – catastrophic evolution or indeed ‘Intelligent Design’ (although I do not remember that phrase being used), or, of course, simply the fact that we have not found the evidence yet to support the gradual evolution theory.

We were invited to consider the possibilities, review the evidence and present our conclusions. Our teacher would point out holes in our argument, evidence that contradicted us, other evidence that supported us and encourage us when we made our points well.

Sadly, I doubt that that level of teaching is on hand at East Kurrajong, or at many of the other centres of indoctrination that now pass for learning establishments in this country.

Andrew Porter, Melbourne

DOES THE LATEST ONE WORK FOR YOU?

Just thought I would like to offer my appreciation for your magazine.

However perhaps more thought should be given to the "Front Cover" as I find it extremely difficult to leave the February issue lying on the coffee table facing upwards.

Thank goodness the inner pages offer interesting and enjoyable reading once the initial image has been seen.

Maurice Cobham, via email

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE Even the Left is deserting multiculturalism

S

ydney courts have begun to hear evidence against Arab-Australian youths charged with violent reprisal attacks after the Cronulla riots on December 11. A 16-yearold from Chester Hill allegedly asked the driver of a car in Carlton his nationality before smashing in his window with a pole on the night of December 12, AAP reported. When the driver replied he was Australian, the youth said: “Are you f***ing sure you are, you f***ing sure? You f***ing Aussie” and swore in Arabic, according to police facts read to Sutherland Children’s Court by the magistrate, Paul Falzon.

Australian-born, of Middle Eastern descent, the youth is hardly a pin-up boy for Australian multiculturalism.

Thanks to an epidemic of similar law and order problems in other Western “Across Europe, one-time democracies with Muslim advocates of multiculturalism are immigrant populations, even left-wing liberals are openly wondering if the policy of beginning to join the dots, promoting separate identities for and question multiculturIt is not the “culturimmigrants at the expense alism. ally diverse community, of cohesive integration united by an overriding has been a mistake” and unifying commitment to Australia” as the Prime Minister, John Howard, put it in his Australia Day address, which is being questioned, but a welfare-driven ideology, corrupted by politicians chasing the ethnic vote, which has encouraged separate identities.

Travelling through France recently, just a few weeks after race riots there that made headlines around the world, it was startling how quickly the French have reverted to ostrich position: charming, urbane, with their low-energy economy, flaming cars and threat of “youths” from the “cités” ever present.

Early in the evening of New Year’s Eve on the Champs Elysees, car dealerships were busy bolting up plate glass windows as busloads of heavily armed gendarmes descended in preparation for the midnight invasion of barbarians from the “suburbs” – as the ghettos of Arabs and Africans are euphemistically called.

Nothing much was made in the media of these extraordinary measures, but a barman, when prompted, warned us to

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go home early because it would soon be “tres dangereux”.

Overnight, a group of about 30 “youths” from Marseilles terrorised passengers on a suburban train travelling from the Riviera. The train passengers were robbed and bashed and one woman was sexually assaulted for two hours while police stood by, waiting for reinforcements, according to a report in the International Herald Tribune four days later.

Perhaps the police didn’t want to antagonise anyone.

The words “Muslim”, “Arab” and “Middle Eastern appearance” rarely appear in such reports. In Paris, a detective involved in counterterrorism work told me guilt about vile French treatment of Jews during World War II has created a powerful victim advocacy apparatus which has been hijacked by Islamic community leaders to silence debate about the failure of some second-generation Arab and African Muslims to integrate.

“They have a French nationality because they are born [here] but they don’t have a French mind,” he said. “But it is impossible to talk about this. You have to stay politically correct.”

France’s riots coincided with a furore in Denmark over the newspaper publication of cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad. The editor of the newspaper was forced into hiding after the cartoons prompted death threats, demonstrations in Kashmir and censure from 11 Muslim countries – and caused the UN to condemn the newspaper!

Across Europe, one-time advocates of multiculturalism are openly wondering if the policy of promoting separate identities for immigrants at the expense of cohesive integration has been a mistake.

The response of the French President, Jacques Chirac, to the November riots was to reward rioters with more welfare. But he also imposed stricter requirements on citizenship candidates – that they learn French, integrate and not practise polygamy.

In Germany prospective citizens will have to sit a “loyalty test”, to test attitudes to such cultural issues as bigamy and homosexuality.

In Australia even diehard left-wing warriors such as Phillip Adams are questioning multiculturalism.

In an interview on Radio National with Emeritus Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki, credited with being the architect of Australian multiculturalism, Adams said: “It reminds one of the apocalyptic threats, predictions of Enoch Powell [a British Conservative politician noted

FAIRFAX

for a controversial 1968 speech that immigration threatened national unity].

“At the time we all decried him, we howled him down, as we should have, but at least some of those predictions are coming true.”

A big call from the PC pundit of Paddington. Of course, for once, unrest in December struck uncomfortably close to home for the chattering classes. Cronulla and Maroubra are not that far from Bondi, the beach of choice for Paddingtonians.

Zubrzycki told Adams the Cronulla riots were a “wake-up call” for multiculturalism. They illustrated the folly of dumping poor, unskilled migrants from Lebanon in the outer suburbs of Sydney in the 1980s, “on the understanding they would be looked after by their families … We left them to their own devices, with no specific settlement policy, traumatised [by civil war], unable to

speak the language, unable to come to grips with Australian culture and also largely of the Islamic faith”.

While warning of a “testing time” in 20 years, “in the form of huge … unstoppable movements of immigrants from countries in our near north and from Africa who have no hope”, Zubrzycki blamed the Howard Government for the Cronulla riots. Apparently it had ignored a 1999 report he helped write calling for a beefed-up multicultural bureaucracy. But where was “architect” Zubrzycki in the 1980s when the seeds of Cronulla were being sown?

At least our present problems can be managed by effective policing, if unhindered by political panic merchants. The majority of Sydney’s Muslims are law-abiding and anxious for harmony. And political correctness has not yet strangled public discussion, despite the best efforts of people like Adams.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 15

STRAIGHT TALK

MARK STEYN

‘Sensitivity’ can have brutal consequences

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long ago lost count of the number of times I’ve switched on the TV and seen crazy guys jumping up and down in the street, torching the Stars and Stripes and yelling ‘’Death to the Great Satan!’’ Or torching the Union Jack and yelling ‘’Death to the Original If Now Somewhat Arthritic And SemiRetired Satan!’’ But I never thought I’d switch on the TV and see the excitable young lads jumping up and down in Jakarta, Lahore, Aden, Hebron, etc., etc., torching the flag of Denmark.

Denmark! Even if you were overcome with a sudden urge to burn the Danish flag, where do you get one in a hurry in Gaza? Well, OK, that’s easy: the nearest European Union Humanitarian Aid and IntifadaFunding Branch Office.

“The cartoons accompanied a But where do you get one an obscure town on the piece about the dangers of “self- in Punjabi plain on a Thursday censorship” – i.e., a climate in afternoon? If I had a sudden which there’s no explicit law yen to burn the Yemeni or Sudanese flag on my village forbidding you from addressing green, I haven’t a clue how the more, er, lively aspects of I’d get hold of one in this of New Hampshire.

Islam but nonetheless everyone part Say what you like about feels it’s better not to” the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offence or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they’d have.

Meanwhile, back in Copenhagen, the Danes are a little bewildered to find that this time it’s plucky little Denmark who’s caught the eye of the nutters. Last year, a newspaper called Jyllands-Posten published several cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, whose physical representation in art is forbidden by Islam. The cartoons aren’t particularly good and they were intended to be provocative. But they had a serious point. Before coming to that, we should note that in the Western world “artists” “provoke” with the same numbing regularity as young Muslim men light up other countries’ flags. When Tony-winning author Terence McNally writes a Broadway play in which Jesus has gay sex with Judas, the New York Times and

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Co. rush to garland him with praise for how “brave” and “challenging” he is. The rule for “brave” “transgressive” “artists” is a simple one: If you’re going to be provocative, it’s best to do it with people who can’t be provoked.

Thus, NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom Will & Grace, in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes – “Cruci-fixin’s.” On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of “respect” for the Muslim faith.

Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president’s home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.

Jyllands-Posten wasn’t being offensive for the sake of it.

They had a serious point – or, at any rate, a more serious one than Britney Spears or Terence McNally. The cartoons accompanied a piece about the dangers of “self-censorship” – i.e., a climate in which there’s no explicit law forbidding you from addressing the more, er, lively aspects of Islam but nonetheless everyone feels it’s better not to.

That’s the question the Danish newspaper was testing: the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam.

One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they’ll marvel at how easy it all was. You don’t need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people.

As a matter of fact, that’s a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural “sensitivity,” the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want – including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the “sensitivity” of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.

No doubt he’s similarly impressed by the “sensitivity” of Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, for prohibiting the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and thus is offensive to Muslims. And no doubt he’s impressed by the “sensitivity” of Burger King, which withdrew its ice cream cones from its British menus because Rashad

ZUMA

Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word “Allah” in Arabic script. I don’t know which sura in the Koran says don’t forget, folks, it’s not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name, but ixnay on both just to be “sensitive.”

And doubtless the British foreign secretary also appreciates the “sensitivity” of the owner of France-Soir, who fired his editor for republishing the Danish cartoons. And the “sensitivity” of the Dutch film director Albert Ter Heerdt, who canceled the sequel to his hit multicultural comedy ‘’Shouf Shouf Habibi!’’ on the grounds that “I don’t want a knife in my chest” – which is what happened to the last Dutch film director to make a movie about Islam: Theo van Gogh, on whose ‘’right to dissent’’ all those Hollywood blowhards are strangely silent. Perhaps they’re just being “sensitive,’’ too.

And perhaps the British foreign secretary also admires the “sensitivity” of those Dutch public figures who once spoke out against the intimidatory aspects of Islam and have now opted for diplomatic silence and life under 24-hour armed guard. And maybe he even admires the “sensitivity” of the increasing numbers of Dutch people who dislike the pervasive fear and tension in certain parts of the Netherlands and so have emigrated to Canada and New Zealand.

“You don’t need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural “sensitivity,” the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want – including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers” Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight, pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the rough-and-tumble of a “diverse” “tolerant” society, and, when one gently raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which makes the question somewhat moot.

One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there’s very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sha’ria.

As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 17

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER The weakness of the police

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t’s full moon as I write. People go a little crazy at the full moon. I get a bit strange myself; my beard grows faster, my teeth feel pointier, and I have a hankering for my steak even more on the rare side than usual. I don’t stalk the streets with a baseball bat, or congregate in carparks to inhale adhesives, or scale the local monument with sherry flagon in hand to proclaim a new earth. But some folks do, and full moon is when they appear to do it most often. If popular conjecture is to be believed, on the night of a full moon, the phone in many urban police stations will be off the hook. The police have limited resources, they can’t deal with every call, and when the wolves are howling, it’s a fairly safe bet that the cranks will be lighting up the switchboard.

One could understand, “The focus which the police used and be more forgiving of to have, seems to be fading. such a stance, were it not Time was, the local cop was for the irksome reality someone people looked up to. that, these days, the phone also appears to be off the Now, he is becoming someone hook for many other inciyou watch out for” dents, unless of course they involve motor vehicles, and the possibility of a little revenue collecting.

Something has gone rotten with the policing of New Zealand over the last few years. It’s difficult to say exactly when or why the rot first set in; but this writer would hazard a guess that it was about the same time that the Ministry of Transport’s patrol officers were merged into the New Zealand Police Force. I think we can blame John Banks for that; his promise of “another 900 frontline police” was never going to be fulfilled from any other avenue, despite protestations to the contrary.

The merger still rankles amongst those who wore the Police uniform before it; many of the MOT’s officers came on board in a combined force carrying the rank they had held under their old employer, often that of sergeant – a rank few could have hoped to attain within the singular New Zealand Police, given that, in many cases, they had originally failed to meet its recruitment standards.

This is not to say that the MOT was a dumping ground for those not good enough to become real cops….well, OK, maybe it was.

There were some good traffic cops, however. I can

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vouch for two of them. One was the man who taught me to drive, a family friend who became an MOT officer after 20-odd years in the Army, teaching people how to drive tanks, and spending a stint in Vietnam as a door gunner on a Huey.

A few weeks after I got my licence, he caught me speeding. This was the bad old days of the 80 km/h limit; I think I was doing 90.

Approaching my trembling self with measured sternness, he said, very quietly, “I didn’t teach you to drive like that. Turn around.”

I did so, and got a size ten boot in the rear end.

“Now drive home the way you know you should.”

He got back in his black-and white patrol car and followed me home at about 70.

Was that effective policing? I didn’t get my first speeding ticket until some fifteen years later, in 1997. You judge.

The other is a local senior constable who was previously a city council traffic officer in a regional capital not far from me. A finer example of a good police officer you couldn’t hope to meet.

I think these are the exceptions which prove the rule.

Unfortunately, nowadays, they are exceptions which appear to be beginning to prove the rule as far as the entire police force is concerned.

The focus which the police used to have, seems to be fading. Time was, the local cop was someone people looked up to. Now, he is becoming someone you watch out for. I grew up in a very small town in the dairy country of the north Waikato. The local sheriff was a rather dour, somewhat blunt, very pragmatic, and extremely well-informed individual. He was, as sole-charge country cops were required to be in that more enlightened age, quite often judge, jury, and executioner, as well as counselor, dog ranger, rugby coach, and arbiter of law and order. He looked after us, as underage drinkers; he turned a discretionary eye away from our frequenting of the local hotel, but at the same time, made quietly sure that the said establishment only served us in the lounge bar, so as not to provoke the locals, and that they never served us anything stronger than beer. It was illegal, yes; but he knew where we were, and we knew where we stood, and no-one got into any trouble.

I recall an occasion when his remedy to a late evening altercation between two alcohol-fueled and testosterone-

laden 20-somethings (in the public bar), was to bundle them into his patrol car and drive them five kilometres out of town. There, at the side of one of the many main drains which criss-cross the Hauraki Plains, he made them strip to the waist, and jump in.

Ten feet wide, nearly as deep, and half filled with freezing cold muddy water, the drain was the place our sheriff had decreed that these two should sort out their differences. Then he made them walk back to town.

Nowadays, he’d be sacked from the force, and most likely hauled before the courts himself, for such a brazen display of effective pro-active policing, and for the violation of human rights, and blah blah blah.

But also, nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find any but the most dedicated of remote country cops performing such a social service at all, with almost no chance of his city colleague doing the same.

No, instead, they’ll be out on patrol, filling their quota of traffic tickets. It’s safe, it’s easy, it’s low-risk, and I’d hazard a guess that a good few of them can’t be bothered with core policing anymore. The Force has become as corrupted an institution as any other Government department over the last couple of decades, and probably for the same reasons – the increasing politicisation of its direction and focus, and the subsequent misdirection of limited resources into areas removed from those essential to the key elements of frontline policing.

In very recent years, this situation has been exacerbated by the actions of a Minister who was quite plainly being asked to perform at a level well beyond his capability, and a Commissioner who may very well have had a separate agenda.

The public are losing respect for the police. All too often, these days, Joe Public perceives his local constabulary with a derision which would have been unthinkable even a generation ago. Too often, also, this is because the police (and the courts, which is a subject in itself) appear to be siding with the criminals, and leaving the innocent to fend for themselves – or worse, to take the brunt of the law, while the perpetrators of crime walk free.

I cast my mind back to my very first column in this esteemed publication. It concerned the treatment, by our police, of Northland farmer Paul McIntyre who defended his home and property and was dragged through the courts for his trouble.

Three years later, acquitted by a judge, he still faces the prospect of losing his farm to pay his legal bills.

Only this past month (even after the full moon has passed, one could be forgiven for thinking its madness remains), another bold New Zealander has suffered at the hands of a Police Force and a judicial system which appears hell-bent on promoting the rights of wrong-doers, and alienating a once supportive public in the process.

Paul Espiner, ordinary Taranaki bloke, went to the aid of his neighbour, driving away the thugs who were attacking her house and car with a baseball bat, by smashing the window of their own car with a machete, whilst promising ongoing protection for the otherwise defenceless solo mother.

Espiner, who should have been awarded a medal, instead got a conviction for possession of an offensive weapon, while the house-wrecking, car-smashing, home invader who threatened to kill her, got away with diversion and name suppression.

I mean what is wrong with the cops who prosecuted this man?

“Perhaps there is hope yet. Maybe the police can turn themselves around, and become, once again, the respected presence which once they were, in the face of institutionalised corruption bred from the ethical anarchy of our Government-driven social malaise”

Are they afraid of the criminals? Are they in someone’s pocket?

Or are they simply frustrated by their own individual and institutional impotence, and taking out their anger on the nearest available soft target?

In between these two examples have been countless more. A Bay of Plenty farm couple, subjected to a home invasion, waited for help for more than an hour, while the police, who were doing nothing, tied up their phone line, preventing them from calling the local neighbourhood watch – who are close, available, and armed. The next such couple probably won’t bother calling the police at all.

New Year revelers near Wanaka set fire to a car, and pelted the police with bottles when they showed up to restore order. In Tauranga, a female officer was hospitalised after being assaulted with a wheel rim while attempting to shut down a noisy party.

These things don’t happen simply because people are drunk and obnoxious. They happen because a respect for the police, built up over nigh on a century, has been squandered in a few short years, through politicised leadership, Governmental incompetence, and the complicity of a morally and physically weakened constabulary, which is quick to condemn the law-and-order-promoting citizen, slow to prosecute the real offenders, and eagerly embracing of a new and nauseating regime of revenue collecting, in place of the true and essential preservation of justice.

We will have to arm the police in response, of course, and very soon, at that; but the horse has already bolted. Policing in New Zealand is rotting, from the top down, and from some repugnant bottom line, upwards. Every time the police warn against vigilantism, or punish someone braver than themselves for “taking the law into their own hands”, they lose the respect of yet another formerly supportive member of the public – someone who can see quite clearly through the hypocrisy of a force which denies the public the right to protect itself, while refusing to carry out that sworn duty itself.

Perhaps there is hope yet. Maybe the police can turn themselves around, and become, once again, the respected presence which once they were, in the face of institutionalised corruption bred from the ethical anarchy of our Government-driven social malaise.

But I fear it may be too late, and that those of us who hope against hope, for the return of wise, just, discretionary policing, may simply be howling at the moon.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 19

DOUBLE SPEAK

IAN WISHART A question of legitimacy

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adio Live’s Mitch Harris nailed it the other morning, when being harangued by a talkback caller about how it is morally wrong to invade a sovereign country like Iraq or Iran.

“It’s all about legitimacy,” Harris explained, “the legitimacy of the states in question.”

In our relativistic New Zealand worldview, where our kids are being taught to “tolerate” other cultures and belief systems and that the United Nations would make an ideal world government, we get this kind of “cultural cringe” – a moral weakness that prevents us from criticizing the actions of others when we perceive them to be wrong.

“They’re not wrong”, our teachers explain, “it’s their culture/religion/political system and we should respect it”.

Yeah, right.

Using the same logic, “The UN would actually work some commentators say the a lot better, and be a lot more West has no right to criticize respected, if it cancelled the Iran for wanting to develop membership of all “nations” nuclear weapons; after all, the West has them, why where the governments are not shouldn’t Iran?

But it is, as Harris patiently democratically elected” explained, a much deeper issue than liberals would have you believe. It is indeed a question of legitimacy.

Put simply, the situation is this: America is a democracy where the government is ultimately accountable to the people. If the people disagree with an action of government, they can vote that administration out. The democratic process is a key check and balance, however imperfect.

Then look at Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Taliban’s Afghanistan or Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, just as sundry examples. In none of those cases is/was the government genuinely democratically elected.

What does this mean? Well, ask yourself this: Is it right that a country effectively run by a gang of criminals should have an equal status at the UN or in world geopolitics with a country like New Zealand, where our politicians are actually (however imperfectly) accountable to the people?

Just because a group of thugs manages to grab the levers of power in a nation, does that mean somehow that such a nation should be considered “sovereign” or “independent” in our generally-understood meanings of the terms?

No, it doesn’t. The idea is ridiculous. But this is the central

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weakness, the Achilles Heel of the United Nations concept.

The UN would actually work a lot better, and be a lot more respected, if it cancelled the membership of all “nations” where the governments are not democratically elected. Sure, you’d drop about half of the UN membership overnight, but frankly I find it offensive that we treat countries like Zimbabwe or Iran as equals in international diplomacy.

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” intone the leaders of the West. No, not unless they carry passports they’ve printed themselves and can call themselves ‘El Presidente’ while making their inaugural speeches at the UN, while back home they hold millions of their countrymen at gunpoint.

How is it that our modern generations seemed to have lost the ability to call a despot a despot?

I blame the education system. It was a requirement when I was at high school to study and eulogise the father of the modern ‘Nation State’, Otto von Bismarck.

Bismarck wanted to unite the feuding German provinces/kingdoms (Prussia, Bavaria etc) under a collective banner called Germany. In his ideal world, citizens would not owe their allegiance to any higher power than the Nation State into which they were born, and whose authority was vested in the government of said state. In other words, supreme fairy at the top of the tree was the government, with the people or their religious beliefs secondary to that in every sense.

It is Bismarckian theory that has percolated through the creation of most nation states since the first World War and it is flawed. Under the Bismarckian model, one is forced to negotiate with and respect any number of despotic nation states, simply because they exist. You don’t look beyond the veil to the actual legitimacy of the nation state’s government – if they hold power they are sovereign, regardless of how they got there or how they maintain power.

Which brings me back to my original point. Equating America’s or Israel’s possession of nuclear arms with the right for Iran to have them is daft. The US and Israeli governments draw their legitimacy from free elections. Iran’s government, in real terms, is a thugocracy.

If we are going to make headway in this unstable new world, we are going to have to deconstruct our reliance on the nation state as the ultimate arbiter of authority. It isn’t, and crazy regimes who are a threat to their citizens and the world do not have moral equivalence with the West.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 21

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER

Stream of Consciousness: from the Gnus this hour…

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ne thing that I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy, whether crawling my way home in the car listening to several news “Bulletins” during the hour and a half that the trip invariably takes, or having made it home in time for the Ralston inspired attempt to get “Close” to us all in his now Judy-less presentation of the most extraordinary crap served up in the guise of actually being THE NEWS, I am nevertheless entertained, almost to the point of being in urgent need of a frontal lobotomy. The news indeed!

Well first up it now appears that if the potential contents of a particular news bulletin are to attract and hold the attention of anyone with an IQ above that of a drooling idiot, then quite plainly gen“If it is true that you are what you uine news of any real worth be either discarded or eat, then it is very likely also true should completely ignored. that what we are fed in a news Similarly, any event that requires anything more and informational sense forms our than a quick telephone call character and sense to “check” its veracity, accuof community” racy or for that matter even truth will also be lucky to be included in an average bulletin. Rather, with a mind to the newsroom budget, “journalists” now appear to continually scan the streams of emails, texts and faxes emanating from those wonderful fringe groups whose barrage of press releases certainly now appear to more or less dominate the content of that which we now watch or hear. And indeed why not? After all, on a simple cost benefit basis, to just go ahead and sternly read, word for word the latest and usually inaccurate and intemperate ravings of say the Anti Fat Folk Coalition, or perhaps the latest “Tests have shown statistics” from the Let’s Frighten the Be-Jesus out of the nation’s ordinary citizen Collective, then lo and behold, with a couple of sound bites or film clips from our little black journalist’s book of always available for comment complete pratts or well known malcontents, we have the better part of yet another news bulletin ready to go to air.

Certainly if pure journalism has suffered more than a little with the adoption of trivia as the dominant content now of the average news bulletin, then at least the opportunity for future advancement in the field of theatre has advanced by leaps and bounds.

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The average performance of those who now deliver the news, is, one has to say, beyond reproach. To give credence and even authority to some of the appalling nonsense that is hourly thrust into the hands of a news reader on radio, or which appears like magic on the auto-cue directly in front of camera, one requires a very special talent that perhaps barely a handful of people in our land will ever aspire to.

Imagine, as a normal, well balanced human-being (the usual station news reader having succumbed, say, to birdflu) being dragged in to a small booth, having a sheaf of papers thrust into your hand, the red light comes on, and suddenly your every word is about to boom forth from every radio tuned to this station, right throughout the land. It most likely will be around halfway through the lead story that it suddenly dawns on you that you are reading (in commendably authoritative tones) some of the most nonsensical balderdash that has ever been your misfortune to actually read out loud. Which, of course, is also the actual point in time where you will discover the difference between you, as a normal human being, and a professional news reader/ presenter. You will begin to giggle uncontrollably; you may very well, in trying to control this perfectly understandable human reaction, actually wet yourself, at which point of course the producer will simply throw to ads or a station promo. You will not of course, be asked back, but yes you will return to your normal daily life...but with one major difference, in that henceforth, if you happen to be driving on a busy road and a news jingle happens to play on the car radio you will have to immediately stop the car or turn the radio off, lest by rolling around laughing amongst the pedals and the gear stick you begin to pose some danger to your fellow motorists.

Your eyes have been irrevocably opened. No longer will you at least be a victim of presentation rather than of content, because you have actually experienced, if ever so briefly, the results of adhering to the mission statement of the modern newsroom: ‘what goes into the bulletin doesn’t matter a bugger, it’s all in how this crap is presented’. Which brings us, of course, to some of the actual garbage that by-andlarge pretty well now fills a usual TV/Radio news show.

From the Editor’s desk...Today’s bulletins, Items for priority placement and automatic inclusion: • Whales, stranding, or the killing thereof.

• People getting fat through eating Big Macs at McDonalds.

• A well spun story from our press gallery preferably read directly without any editing from a government press release.

• DO NOT FORGET today’s sound bite or photo opportunity of Her Majesty Queen Helen or at the very least an obsequious and cringing interview on preferably something entirely inconsequential.

• A quick run down on the day’s updated road toll preferably linked to a freebie statement from our biggest spending advertiser the LTSA. • Disease of the day, or ‘’a study has shown’’ type story, to cover off our health segment – maybe we can run that rubbish about condoms protecting against STDs and get a free sample and some more ad money.

• A statement from the wires from whoever this day has bashed that bastard Bush.

• A human interest story, preferably showing something very positive from the Gay community.

• A child mauled by a pit bull terrier, being attacked by a rabid pukeko or something equally disturbing for our blood and guts segment.

• An “In-News Mini-Doco” about why we no longer need fathers telling their daughters that considering life as a ‘sex worker is wrong’, with an interview here from preferably a gay M.P. to reinforce this now politically correct truth.

• The latest loony bylaw from one of the local authorities, like one just in from the wires: Printing this year’s rates bills in Maori to further conceal plundering of the ratepayers’ purse. A good story this, as it poses the question, should an official, if secondary language be used for this purpose? Check with one of our Maori radical contacts about this red neck suggestion, put it to him that if those complaining bothered to learn Maori this wouldn’t be a problem, see if you can get him to start the, Pakeha go home rant again, as we need a bit of controversy don’t we?

• Also, check out the story on the group that’s pushing for the banning of daylight saving, as they say that the extra daylight hours are cruel to bats that have less time to feed... Forest and Bird, or Twig and Tweet always provide something worth hours of talk back as a spin off.

• Finally, boys and girls, remember the newsroom motto, Violence, Bad Taste, the truly obscene, and the absolutely disgusting or patently ridiculous...All, either separately, or all together, are none of these things. They ARE news...so check the wires, the emails and the faxes, interview your typewriters or word processors, phone a few of our tame and ever predictable media prostitutes, sorry, I meant to say people from our reporter’s contact books, whatever…You know, the people who can be counted on to say exactly what we expect them to say, and on any of the crap that we ask them to have an opinion on... get all that together and a few more weeks of this, the end of the survey will be here and we probably will win an award…

• Hell we might even be number one! (Which raises the point I suppose, in news gathering sense in any case…To become number One, is it necessary to broadcast number Two’s) Sorry about that, having listened and watched altogether too many news shows I’m afraid my judgement and standards of good taste have become a little suspect as of late. For instance it’s only in recent times, and as a direct result of being re-educated by our news media I feel sure, that I have come to realise that many of the concepts that I was taught by my Mum and Dad,

were in fact entirely wrong. Fancy for instance thinking that marriage should be reserved for a union between a man and a woman...Even worse, that the fairies at the bottom of the garden had wands and wings rather than wash-board ab’s and a ring in one ear. As for thinking that stealing is wrong – that was clearly a right wing concept as now, thanks to the news, I now know that all kinds of reasons for stealing are quite acceptable. Like being on P, being poor, not having a job, being too lazy to work, or even just being a victim of a newly discovered syndrome, the news hounds can always come up with a spokesperson that will justify, just about anything. And why not? After all, we must balance the news...even if we have to take a day trip to hell to get an alternative point of view. I guess in many ways anyone of us will now know when it is time to take down the shingle as it were, because I must say that it becomes increasingly hard to comment on our community attitudes to even the simple concept as to what is even the difference between right and wrong.

That we now live in an age where babbling electronic means are in daily use to persuade us all that rampaging thugs and deviants are simply indulging in inappropriate behaviour, is a simple statement of fact, as is our overall meek acceptance in the death of the standards that not that long ago were the cornerstone of our society. If it is true that you are what you eat, then it is very likely also true that what we are fed in a news and informational sense forms our character and sense of community. In the case of the latter, we may well be, in big trouble!

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 23

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART

Have Bible prophecies come true?

I

remember, as a teenager, being utterly fascinated by the prophecies of Nostradamus and in particular some of his quatrains that mentioned July 1999 and linked it to what followers believe would be a massive nuclear war.

Specifically, the prophecy went: The year 1999, seventh month, From the sky will come a great King of Terror.

To bring back to life the great King of the Mongols, Before and after Mars to reign by good luck.

Well, needless to say 1999 came and went without this, one of the most precise predictions Nostradamus ever made, coming true.

Psychics, too, like Eileen Lakes, had predicted July 1999 for a cataclysmic “pole shift” where the Earth moved on its axis, causing planetwide “So what of Biblical prophecy, destruction.

Despite the failure of these how does its accuracy stack up? and other psychic or New So far, 100%.” Age predictions to come true, the prophecy biz is doing a roaring trade in the classifieds, on late night TV and even as guests on radio and TV shows.

Back in the 1970s, at the height of the Uri Geller craze when interest in telepathy and clairvoyance was at its peak, several international magazines put psychic predictions to the test, carefully tracking whether each of 72 specific predictions made by psychics in 1975 came true. As The People’s Almanac reported a year later, 92% of the predictions never happened, while the remaining eight per cent were vaguely fulfilled or simply no-brainers, such as that the US and Russia would remain leading superpowers that year and there would be no world wars.

In 1993, a similar study of psychics showed they missed every major news story that year. Not only did they fail to predict what did in fact happen, but the things they did predict did not happen: The Queen did not become a nun, for example.

So what of Biblical prophecy, how does its accuracy stack up? So far, 100%. We’ve covered some of the Christ-centred prophecies (Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, Micah 5:2; dying a humiliating death, Psalm 22 or Isaiah 53:2-12, for example) relatively recently, so I’m concentrating in this column on some of the lesser-known predictions that hit the nail on the head.

24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

One hundred years before the event, the prophet Isaiah predicted the nation of Israel would be captured by the Babylonians and led into captivity as slaves, away from their land (Isaiah 39:5-7). They were. The bad news for the Babylonians was that Isaiah and the prophet Jeremiah both predicted the exact manner that Babylon would fall 150 years into the future.

Babylon, they warned, would be conquered by the Medes (Persians), and like Sodom and Gomorrah it would never be inhabited again, even Arabs wouldn’t pitch their tents there (Isa. 13:17-22, Jer. 25:13) and it would be covered in swampland (Isa. 14:23; see also Jeremiah chapters 51 and 52). Sure enough, when Babylon fell, the end of this huge city, which had lasted some 2000 years, came relatively swiftly and decisively. With its walls down and the city ransacked, it became a Median city but never regained its glory. Little more than a hundred years later Alexander the Great swept through, and soon after that the population was deported.

According to Wikipedia by 141 BC one of the greatest cities in the world was a ghost town, and silt in its now untended canal system turned the region into a swamp. Babylon was never rebuilt.

Another Middle Eastern city to suffer a similar Godordained fate in the Bible is Tyre, on the modern Lebanese coast close to the modern town of Sur. In Ezekiel, chapters 26-32, God warns that he will bring many nations against Tyre, who will destroy the walls, pull down the towers, push the stones and the rubble into the sea and turn the city into a bare rock where fishermen cast their nets. Again, the prophecy was that no one would rebuild the city there.

According to archaeologists, ancient Tyre was a coastal city that spread out to an island a few hundred metres offshore. The coastal city was destroyed by the Babylonians after a 13 year siege, during which time the inhabitants had been able to ship their most precious belongings out to the island and fortify it. So the first part of Ezekiel’s prophecy was taken care of. But the rest was fulfilled 200 years later when Alexander the Great decided to get rid of the island city of Tyre as well by building a causeway out to it. He did that by ordering his troops to throw the stones and rubble of mainland Tyre into the sea. By the time Alexander finally conquered the island fortress, there was nothing left on the mainland. Both sites were destroyed. The rubble is still in the water today, and fishermen fish from it. The city, once home to 40,000, has never been rebuilt.

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COVER STORY

Minister of Sleazy Developments Another blow to David Benson-Pope’s credibility He’s already been sprung for shoving a tennis ball in a student’s mouth and bashing another in the face with his fist, and he’s been trying for two months to prevent Investigate from accessing more police documents. But now IAN WISHART can report Labour cabinet minister David Benson-Pope stands accused of making teenage schoolgirls strip to underwear and nighties at a school camp, and that’s not all

Y

ou’d think we’d already heard all there was to know about the David Benson-Pope case: the tennis balls, the bleeding nose, or the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy he claimed was setting him up on the basis of false allegations. But no, buried deep in more than 1,000 pages of documents released to the news media in December are previously unpublished allegations that the former school teacher used to make scantily-clad 14-year old girls parade for him at school camp, that he was “sleazy” towards the girls in his care and that he harassed a female teacher and vandalized her students’ best work as part of a personal vendetta.

Although Benson-Pope is no longer an associate Education Minister, as Social Development and Employment Minister he retains extensive responsibilities for youth issues.

While Investigate has been probing the police file, the embattled cabinet minister has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent more still-confidential police documents being released to the magazine. It raises an obvious question: does David BensonPope have something more to hide over the police decision not to prosecute him for assault despite a prima facie criminal case?

On 1 December last year, police announced that a longawaited release of their investigation file into the Benson-Pope 26, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

case had been delayed after direct submissions from the minister’s lawyer, John Haigh QC. As a result of that delay, Investigate immediately lodged an Official Information Act request with police seeking copies of the behind the scenes submissions from the cabinet minister, and details of any other correspondence between police and the minister.

When the Benson-Pope file was released, those items of correspondence were mostly not included. The first inkling of a reason why came in a brief three paragraph letter to Investigate from Police National Headquarters on December 19: “I have carefully considered your request, but following submissions from Hon. David Benson-Pope I have decided to refuse it in terms of sections 9(2)(g)(i) and 9(2)(a) of the Official Information Act 1982.”

Section 9(2)(a) of the Act allows for suppression to protect the privacy of individuals, and s9(2)(g)(i) is more complex. What police were arguing under that section is that because BensonPope is a Minister of the Crown, he’s entitled to special privileges: according to police, Benson-Pope’s submissions to the police – on whether he should be charged or whether Investigate could access the documents – could not be released under the Official Information Act because they come under the category of “free and frank expressions of opinions” between a Minister of the Crown and officials of a government department.

Before turning to that precise constitutional showdown

Photography: PRESSPIX/MARK MITCHELL

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 27

between Investigate and the police, however, it’s worth briefly recounting what the criminal investigation of David BensonPope actually discovered.

There were three main areas police were investigating: 1. Did Benson-Pope, while he was a school teacher at Dunedin’s Bayfield High in 1982, shove a tennis ball in the mouth of a student and then tape his hands to a desk so he couldn’t remove the ball?

2. Did Benson-Pope attend a school camp that year where he punched a student in the face, causing a bleeding nose?

3. Did Benson-Pope force male and female students to go outside in their underwear and stand in the freezing cold at a school camp for up to an hour as a disciplinary technique?

So what really happened? Initially David Benson-Pope denied categorically that it happened, but he subtly changed his tune to the ‘Winebox defence’: “I cannot recall”.

The police file however, tells a very different story about the MP’s teaching style.

According to one woman interviewed by police about events when she was a 14 year old in Benson-Pope’s class, the Labour MP was a “sleazy” teacher.

“Quite sleazy, some of the comments he made used to grate me. The girls, including me, felt that he was always staring at our legs beneath desks…With the girls he was always sleazy if he could be, he seemed to thrive on it.”

lies. Ironically, however, one of the themes running through the police file has been bullying by Benson-Pope, that he treated bright students well and the less-academically able badly, or that he simply enjoyed picking on the helpless.

One student told police that when Benson-Pope delivered canings in the corridor outside the classroom, he did so with apparent relish: “Mr Benson-Pope would whistle the cane in the air before taking a run up of about 10 feet. I’m estimating the distance but you could actually hear him running up. It was pretty psychologically damning, standing there bent over listening to the run-up.

I’m pretty sure it was a run-up for each of the three canes on that occasion. As a result I suffered severe bruising but no bleeding.

Obviously very painful to sit for the next few days.”

A second boy remembers refusing to jump the vault at PE in the third form because he didn’t feel confident. He told police his punishment from Benson-Pope was the cane. He was one of two boys given the cane for non-compliance at PE that day.

“I had to wait outside the school hall while Tony [the other offender] was dealt with first. I could hear screaming and yelling – I still remember it well today because [Tony] was such a tiny boy.”

A former teacher confirms the incident. “It’s a lasting impression because it’s the only caning I’ve witnessed. I remember Tony ran a lap of the assembly hall yelling in pain after the caning.”

“Quite sleazy, some of the comments he made used to grate me. The girls, including me, felt that he was always staring at our legs beneath desks…With the girls he was always sleazy if he could be, he seemed to thrive on it” David Benson-Pope, according to another police witness, used to address female students in his class as “fluffy-bunnies”.

A former female art teacher at Bayfield High School also has negative memories of David Benson-Pope as a teaching colleague.

“I feel that David Benson-Pope harassed me over a couple of years. He had a position of responsibility and was the president of the PPTA. Basically, if you didn’t agree with his way of doing things and way of thinking – he made it known.

“Because my kids went to a private school he assumed I was a National party supporter. Because I wouldn’t agree with his proposed strike action he made my life difficult in the staffroom by yelling at me.”

The teacher also accuses David Benson-Pope of stealing material from her class, and vandalizing students’ work as part of his alleged vendetta against her: “He would also come and take materials from my art room – that I had budgeted hard to get – and tell me that because he had a position of responsibility and I didn’t there was nothing I could do to stop him.

“Eventually the last straw was a time when he interfered with displays of my best students’ work. Some of the pieces were lost as a result. I walked out of the school threatening human rights action.

Eventually there was mediation and Benson-Pope apologized.”

Last year, when the allegations of the MP’s brutality first surfaced, he initially claimed his accusers were liars, and school bul28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

“When it was my turn,” continues the former student who’d refused to jump the vault, “I was brought into the hall. I was bent over and caned once over my trousers by Benson-Pope. I pleaded not to be caned again but was struck once more with the cane.

“I remember Benson-Pope laughing while he caned me – and that’s what got me the most. When I got home I realized I had blood on my bum.”

T

here is no question he was an unorthodox teacher.

Many former students and teachers spoken to by police felt that although his discipline style was a hang-over from the ‘Mr Gormsby’ era, his teaching approach was “new age” or “ahead of its time”.

Significantly so that even those attacked by Benson-Pope still respect many of his classroom achievements.

But it was out of the classroom, according to police witnesses, that even more borderline behaviour took place.

Benson-Pope had a huge interest in outdoor education, and organized many of the school camps each year and other outdoor excursions.

“There was some funny discipline at the camps,” one teacher says in her witness statement, “including kids having to run behind a car in the nighttime.”

In 1982, Benson-Pope took fourth-formers to a camp at the Catlins reserve south of Dunedin, where a large number of stu-

dents have now told police that teenage schoolgirls were made to stand outside in their nighties in the early spring cold as part of “discipline”.

One former schoolgirl remembers she and her friends in the dormitory had been “talking” after the lights went out, and Benson-Pope warned them that “if we didn’t shut up we would be outside.

“He was yelling at us, angry, telling us to get outside.

“I remember he told us that we had to take any surplus clothing off, e.g. jerseys and trackpants. It was just our nighties and no footwear.”

I

n other words, girls were effectively forced to strip to underwear and nighties by Benson-Pope, according to the witness. Although some of the teachers spoken to by police say it was female teachers responsible for disciplining the girls on camp, this witness and others can only recall Benson-Pope being there.

“We had to stand on the concrete, outside the long dorms.

There were a few girls involved, over a dozen. I remember [one girl] being there as she told Benson-Pope she couldn’t do it for health reasons – that night her ankles swelled up really badly as a result. I remember later a lot of the girls tried to comfort her.

“I remember the incident so clearly because it was freezing cold, I believe it was winter. We were out there for about an hour.

“Benson-Pope just stood there, watching. If anyone spoke he threatened we would have to stand out there longer. I imagine I was feeling pretty self-conscious standing there in just a nightie.”

Another senior female teacher says, “Generally he threw his weight around on those camps, but apart from forcing a girl to complete an activity that she was distressed about I have no incidents to report.

“I was not a fan of his, I just found him arrogant and actively avoided him. I was just wary.”

And remember, that’s a teaching colleague of Benson-Pope’s, not a disgruntled student.

One student remembers smelling alcohol on Benson-Pope’s breath during the camps, while a female student interviewed separately also told of staff drinking, and how one female teacher “looked the worse for wear” in the morning.

Another of his fellow teachers, Bayfield’s former Senior Master, told police he remembered an alleged assault on camp that appears to be different from the ones the media and police investigated last year.

“There was one incident at a school camp that occurred at Tautuku Camp. It was about an assault, it was serious enough that we tried to get Benson-Pope back from camp, but he wouldn’t come back from camp.

“I cannot remember how it came to the notice of the school, but the headmaster dealt with it in the end.”

The Senior Master says he was unaware of the tennis ball incident or the bash to a student’s face on camp.

“If a parent had come to me as Senior Master telling me their child had been taped to a desk and a tennis put in his mouth and left like that, I would have gotten Mr Benson-Pope into my office and found out what had happened. He would be reprimanded for it and made to apologise to the family. The child could well be moved from his class.

“If the parents had wanted it dealt with in the school we would; if they had gone to the police we would leave it to the police to deal with. It could well have been an assault.”

But Phil Weaver – the boy at the centre of the tennis ball incident – didn’t tell his parents. His mother was dead and his father, according to reports on the police file, wasn’t coping well.

“From what I knew of his father he was a bit of a drinker, I remember Phil got beatings off his father,” one student told police.

The incident involving the tennis ball has been well-reported.

Weaver tried to remove the punctured tennis ball from his mouth but Benson-Pope shoved it back in and used black tape to bind Weaver’s hands to the desk so he couldn’t pull the ball out of his mouth. According to witnesses, Weaver was left bound and gagged for more than 20 minutes until the end of the class. The police file notes the nine children witnessed it, which police call “strong” evidence for a court trial, and “none appears to have any hidden agendas”.

David Benson-Pope continued to deny to police that the incident took place, a stand so at odds with the corroborating evidence that police said his position was an “aggravating” feature of the crime in the decision as to whether to prosecute.

Police concluded a prima facie case existed and said charges could include kidnapping, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years jail for anyone who “detains any person without his consent…to cause him to be confined…”

Other options included cruelty to a child and common assault.

On the second charge of assaulting a student at the school camp by punching him in the face, police only had two witnesses, but both remembered it clearly.

No charges were considered over Benson-Pope’s actions making students stand in the cold in their underwear while he watched them.

So this, then, is the background to Investigate’s decision in early December to apply for copies of all communications between David Benson-Pope and police on the case. We wanted to ascertain that no improper pressure had been brought to bear on police, particularly after news reports that Benson-Pope had sought a delay in the release of the file to the public.

THE OIA REQUEST When police came back with their refusal to release the extra documents, the magazine immediately appealed to the Ombudsman over whether the information was indeed confidential because Benson-Pope was a cabinet minister.

“In regard to the refusal under s9(2)(g)(i), Ombudsman’s ruling in Case 983 makes clear that only opinions of an exceptionally free and frank nature should be withheld. It is difficult to see how Mr Benson-Pope’s communications with the Police could fall into this category. Mr Benson-Pope’s position as a Minister of the Crown means that there is considerably more proper public interest in the processes leading to a police decision not to charge Mr Benson-Pope, than perhaps would apply to an ordinary criminal offender.

“Additionally, s9(2)(g)(i) is more properly designed to protect legitimate Crown business in the affairs of state, rather than to protect a Minister of the Crown against whom police found a prima facie criminal case.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 29

“It is of particular public importance to see that a Minister of the Crown cannot bring undue private influence to bear on a police investigation that he is the subject of, and indeed the Minister’s plea to police for information to be withheld under this section is itself of public interest, as it may be seen to be of itself an exercise of such influence. An ordinary member of the public gets no protection from this section in such circumstances.

“Accordingly, Investigate seeks to widen its OIA request to include the content of communications between Police and Mr Benson-Pope on the Investigate OIA request.

“I

t is the magazine’s submission that the public interest properly requires full disclosure of the documentation or information originally sought, so as to clear the Minister of any suggestion of improper influence being brought to bear. Again, the fact that he pleads s9(2)(g)(i) indicates that his communications to police must have been, by definition, exceptionally free and frank, and the public have a right to know how much so.

“Turning now to s9(2)(a), again the issue here is not mere tittle-tattle of no public interest. The Minister already has a reduced right to privacy by virtue of holding high public office, and the OIA was not intended to protect the privacy of Ministers of the Crown on matters of public interest. Rather, this section was to provide protection in the first instance to ancillary people, mem-

we were not expecting the answer we received. At the centre of it all, says Belgrave, is section 9(2)(g)(i) of the Official Information Act, which reads: 9(2) …this section applies if, and only if, the withholding of the information is necessary to – (g) Maintain the effective conduct of public affairs through (i) The free and frank expression of opinions by or between or to Ministers of the Crown or members of an organization or officers and employees of any Department or organization in the course of their duty;” “In general terms,” argues Belgrave, “the purpose of this section is to avoid prejudice to the generation and expression of free and frank opinions which are necessary for good government.

“The ability of Ministers, officials and others to express their opinions on relevant issues in a free and frank manner is an essential ingredient of the climate necessary for the effective conduct of public affairs.”

To back up his analysis, Belgrave cites the 1982 Danks Committee report that led to the creation of the Official Information Act: “To run the country effectively the government of the day needs nevertheless to be able to take advice and to deliberate on it, in private, and without fear of premature disclosure. If the attempt to open processes of Government inhibits the offering of blunt advice or effective consultation and arguments [Belgrave’s

“Mr Benson-Pope’s position as a Minister of the Crown means that there is considerably more proper public interest in the processes leading to a police decision not to charge Mr Benson-Pope, than perhaps would apply to an ordinary criminal offender” bers of the public, who might be harmed by the release of OIA material out of proportion to their involvement in the circumstances at issue.

“The Minister’s reduced right to privacy is further reduced by the circumstances of the specific criminal case, and the fact that Police found a prima facie case against the Minister existed.

This is an extremely rare and constitutionally important circumstance, against which Mr Benson-Pope’s wish not to have the content of his communications with police must fail.

“I would draw attention to the Court of Appeal’s comments in TVNZ, The Queen v David Bain, CA255/95, where the justices wrote: ‘The substantial public interest in the murder and the trial is however relevant in another way. The material presented to this Court demonstrates significant media interest in and speculation about the suppressed evidence. The suppression might itself “promote distrust and discontent”. That speculation is not in the interests of the administration of justice and is itself a reason supporting the revoking of the prohibition order’.

Investigate magazine seeks an urgent review of the police refusal to disclose the information requested, given the proximity to Christmas, the fact that the material has already been collated and reviewed by Police (subject to the addition of the latest communications) and our impending magazine deadlines.”

When we got a reply from Chief Ombudsman John Belgrave, 30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

emphasis], the net result will be that the quality of the decisions will suffer.”

In other words, Benson-Pope’s submissions to police and vice versa and protected speech necessary for the maintenance of public affairs.

“The information at issue,” says Belgrave, “reflects opinions put forward on behalf of Mr Benson-Pope by his lawyer, and responses by the legal advisor for the police. For the purpose of my investigation it has been submitted that such exchanges should occur without any inhibition from concern about disclosure under the Official Information Act. “It has been further submitted that an expectation of confidentiality existed on the part of Mr Benson-Pope’s lawyer.

“By way of basic approach, I consider that the lawyer for a person in the position of Mr Benson-Pope should be free to express views and opinions without concern that such communications will be released into the public domain under the Official Information Act. The prospect of public disclosure in my view would be likely to inhibit representations that may (and should) properly be made on behalf of the client.

“There is, however, no absolute rule and it is necessary for the actual information and issue to be considered.”

Chief Ombudsman Belgrave did consider the documents Investigate is seeking, and says he’s satisfied that the opinions of

both lawyer John Haigh QC and the police legal advisor “were expressed freely and frankly”.

He refuses to release those communications because of the “expectation” of confidentiality. However, even that isn’t the end of the matter – Belgrave is required by law to consider whether the withholding of the information “is outweighed by other considerations which render it desirable, in the public interest, to make that information available.”

To that end, Belgrave says he looked again at the content of Benson-Pope’s submissions on why he should not be prosecuted, and why Investigate shouldn’t be allowed the documents, and determined that although the information might be “interesting” it was not of public interest to release it.

Naturally, Investigate fought back.

“It is a standing maxim of New Zealand law that “There is no confidence in iniquity” [Gartside v Outram, 1857, 26LJ Ch 113, per Wood VC, restated many times including European Pacific Banking Corp v TVNZ, I Wishart and Ors, 1994]. Iniquity as determined by the Privy Council does not even mean a test as high as illegality. Mere immorality is sufficient to trigger it,” we told Belgrave.

“In a similar case to the one in question, a police officer supplied information in confidence to a reporter which revealed corruption by members of the police force. Despite statutory obligations on secrecy, the courts discharged an interim injunc-

tion to allow publication in the public interest. Full publication that is, not merely reporting the matter to “proper authorities”.

Cork v McVicar, The Times LR, 31 Oct. 1984.”

In another British case, the issue of a public figure claiming confidence also came under fire: “It is in the public interest that P’s article is displayed on the website. P’s past behaviour described in the article is closely linked to his present political platform and the public should be aware of such an inconsistency in someone who is eligible. It is thus a “pressing need” and not merely information that is “interesting to the public” (Lion Laboratories v Evans [1985] QB 526, 537).

“Additionally, David Benson-Pope has an overwhelming conflict of interest in hiding behind the protections of s9(2)(g)(i). He is, in Investigate’s opinion, using his Ministerial position to influence the police and intimidate them. The activities in question do not relate to his time as a Minister. Neither he nor the Police can claim immunity from scrutiny on that basis. To do otherwise would be for the Chief Ombudsman to confirm that the Labour Cabinet are indeed above the law of the land, even for alleged criminal offences predating their political office, let alone criminal offences committed in office.”

The magazine then mounted an attack on the idea that letters from lawyers to police in this case should not be divulged.

“You cite in your letter that Benson-Pope’s responses to police regarding the case should somehow enjoy some kind of privilege INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 31

similar to a lawyer-client privilege, even though no privileged relationship exists between the accused and Police. Indeed, the legal maxim applicable is “anything you may say can be taken down and used in evidence against you in a court of law…”

“I am unable to find any statutory ground for such a privilege inside the Act itself, nor does the section that Benson-Pope relies upon include it. Accordingly, if it is not one of the statutory defences available in the Act the Ombudsman has a duty to rule in favour of the release of the information.”

The key argument appears to rest on whether Benson-Pope’s legal submissions fall within the tight definition of the section 9 defence.

F

irstly, the section applies “if, and only if”. In other words, it is a last resort section. And it can only apply if it is necessary to “maintain the effective conduct of public affairs”. Not just any conduct of public affairs – there is a suggestion inherent in the section that disclosure might result in some kind of breakdown of public affairs were the protection not in place.

Remember, the affairs in question were not public administrative matters, but personal affairs of an allegedly criminal nature that happened in a public place. For the Ombudsman to let Benson-Pope off the hook on Ministerial grounds would be like suggesting the Ombudsman should be immune from parking

Public interest is a legitimate defence in two scenarios – breach of confidence (alluded to above) and the right to privacy. As we’ve already explained that any claim to confidence fails on the iniquity test, or would if it was put to the court. By this, we mean that although the MP’s legal submissions are unlikely of themselves to be iniquitous, they are central to the overarching prima facie criminal case, and as such an important part of the picture.

The Ombudsman has already confirmed the submissions were extremely “free and frank”, which again is relevant to determining whether they were so frank as to possibly intimidate police out of prosecuting.

Then there’s the novel defence raised for the first time by the Ombudsman himself, which is that an expectation of privacy existed to such an extent that it overrides the Official Information Act’s presumption that information should be released.

The dominant recent case on privacy in New Zealand is Hosking & Hosking v Simon Runting & Anor [2004] NZCA 34 (25 March 2004).

Lord Goff, in Attorney-General v Guardian Newspapers Ltd (No. 2) [1990] 1 AC 109, has been cited in the Hosking case in NZ as follows: “His Lordship went on to discuss three limiting principles: (a) the principle of confidentiality only applies to information to the extent that it is confidential; (b) no duty of confidence attaches to useless information or trivia; and (c) the public interest in pro-

“Public interest is a legitimate defence in two scenarios – breach of confidence and the right to privacy. As we’ve already explained that any claim to confidence fails on the iniquity test, or would if it was put to the court” tickets because they hinder his ability to carry out his job without interruption.

But continuing with our breakdown of the section, it only applies to “free and frank expressions of opinion” to or from Ministers or officials that are “necessary to…maintain the effective conduct of public affairs”.

In other words, not all free and frank expressions of opinion to or from Ministers or officials are covered, only those vitally necessary to maintain the effective conduct of public affairs.

“Is David Benson-Pope’s desire to avoid more political embarrassment really a matter of national security and the maintenance of the rule of law? Because that is the implication from your letter, with respect,” we suggested to Belgrave.

And even if the Ombudsman is correct (and we think he isn’t) that the submissions are covered by that section, there’s still the question of whether public interest should take precedence over Benson-Pope’s right to privacy. The Benson-Pope case is a criminal justice issue, where justice should be seen to be done. There is some suggestion that police were pressured in regard to releasing the original documents under the OIA, and that too is a matter of enormous legitimate public interest.

The Ombudsman drew a distinction between what might be interesting to the public, and what is genuinely of public interest. He didn’t feel the Benson-Pope documents were genuinely in the public interest.

32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

tecting confidences may be outweighed by the public interest in disclosure, particularly in the case of disclosure of iniquity”.

Elsewhere in Hosking, the point is made by the Court of Appeal: “The test for the “privacy” of information, i.e. information that warrants protection (that its disclosure would be highly offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities), taken in Campbell from the judgment of Gleeson CJ in the High Court of Australia in Australian Broadcasting Corporation v Lenah Game Meats (2001), comes directly from the American privacy jurisprudence.”

In other words, the test as to whether the information being withheld is ‘private’ needs to be more deeply considered in the light of existing case law definitions. Is the Benson-Pope information likely to be “highly offensive to a reasonable person”? The actual test in US law is: “SS 652D Publicity Given to Private Life “One who gives publicity to a matter concerning the private life of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy, if the matter publicized is of a kind that (a) would be highly offensive to a reasonable person, and (b) is not of legitimate concern to the public.”

Not only would the suppressed Benson-Pope data have to be “highly offensive” to remain private, it would also have to be of no legitimate concern to the public. Yet if there were truly no

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legitimate concern, he would never have been investigated in the first place.

And further through Hosking: “The Court in Aubry [Les Editions Vice-Versa Inc v Aubry and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (1998) 157 DLR (4th) 577] recognised, however, that expectations of privacy may be less in certain circumstances. This will often be the case if a plaintiff is engaged in a public activity where the public interest in receiving the information should take priority.”

The Hosking judges considered this aspect further in quoting some US jurisprudence on the issue: “But privacy is not the only cherished American value. We also cherish information and candour, and freedom of speech. We expect to be free to discover and discuss the secrets of our neighbours, celebrities and public officials ... The law protects these expectations too – and when they collide with expectations of privacy, privacy almost always loses.”

I

n Bradley v Wingnut Films, a New Zealand case involving filmmaker Peter Jackson cited in Hosking, the American definition of whether the information should be private was used: “The Judge also felt the plaintiff would have difficulty establishing that the matter would be highly offensive and objectionable to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities.”

necessity for dissemination of information albeit involving information about private lives where matters of high public (especially political) importance are involved.”

Not only is there no inherent right to privacy, but political figures have even less protection, a point the judges develop at paragraph 120 of the Hosking ruling: “The present case raises an important issue in relation to private facts. Should public figures have lower expectations of privacy in relation to their private lives, and how does this impact on the families of public persons? Prosser identified three reasons why, in the United States context, public figures are held to have lost, at least to some extent, their right of privacy: (1) by seeking publicity they have consented to it; (2) their personalities and affairs are already public facts not private ones; and (3) there is a legitimate public interest in the publication of details about public figures. That third factor is an important consideration to which we will return.”

David Benson-Pope holds high political office as an elected MP and Cabinet Minister. He is accused of a crime potentially carrying a prison sentence. There can be no higher legitimate public interest in a democracy than scrutiny of elected public officials by the news media.

The Hosking judges continued, ruling, “that voluntary public figures (those who engage in public activities, assume a prominent role in institutions or activities having general economic,

“Freedom of expression is the first and last trench in the protection of liberty.

All of the rights affirmed by NZ Bill of Rights Act are protected by that particular right. Just as truth is the first casualty of war, so suppression of truth is the first objective of the despot – Court of Appeal” As we told the Ombudsman, his provisional view that an issue of privacy exists should be reconsidered in view of warnings from the Court of Appeal on precisely this matter in Hosking: “In his judgment Randerson J listed several reasons for his conclusion that the courts should not recognise a separate privacy tort. The same reasons were at the forefront of the arguments in this Court. The first of these is that the deliberate approach taken by the legislature to date on privacy issues suggests caution towards “creating new law in this field”. Emphasising this, the respondents contend that the deliberate exclusion from the Bill of Rights Act indicates a clear decision not to introduce any broad privacy protection in our law.”

Investigate believes it is unconstitutional for the Ombudsman to make a decision on privacy not grounded in statute – the OIA – or common law. Indeed, as the upholder of the Official Information Act, it would be ironic indeed for the Ombudsman to be creating new privacy laws where no legal basis for them exists.

The judges in Hosking, in the magazine’s view, deliver a killer blow to Benson-Pope or his lawyer’s arguments regarding privacy, when they say this: “The question is how the law should reconcile the competing values. Few would seriously question the desirability of protecting from publication some information on aspects of private lives, and particularly those of children. Few would question the 34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

cultural, social or similar public interest, or submit themselves or their work for public judgment) have no right of privacy in relation to public appearances or activities. But as Lord Woolf CJ said in A v B (supra at 554): ‘Where an individual is a public figure he is entitled to have his privacy respected in the appropriate circumstances. A public figure is entitled to a private life. The individual, however, should recognise that because of his public position he must expect and accept that his actions will be more closely scrutinised by the media. “ ‘The right to privacy is not automatically lost when a person is a public figure, but his or her reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to many areas of life will be correspondingly reduced as public status increases. Involuntary public figures may also experience a lessening of expectations of privacy, but not ordinarily to the extent of those who willingly put themselves in the spotlight’.”

In fact, so tough is the privacy test for politicians internationally that New Zealand courts note even their families are fair game for public scrutiny, especially if criminality is alleged: “In the United States the families of people who court public attention will also have lower expectations of privacy because the legitimate public interest in the public figure is not necessarily limited to the individual himself. In Kapellas v Kofman 1 Cal 3d 20 (1969) a newspaper editorial was published urging electors not to vote for a certain candidate for the city council. The arti-

cle referred to the fact that three of the candidate’s six children had committed various offences and misdemeanours. She sued for, inter alia, an invasion of her children’s privacy but the claim failed, with the Court observing (at para [17]): ‘... when the legitimate public interest in the published information is substantial, a much greater intrusion into an individual’s private life will be sanctioned, especially if the individual willingly entered into the public sphere ... The children’s loss of privacy is one of the costs of the retention of a free marketplace of ideas’.”

On the issue of what is legitimate, the Hosking bench wrote: “Legitimate public concern “There should be available in cases of interference with privacy a defence enabling publication to be justified by a legitimate public concern in the information. In P v D, absence of legitimate public interest was treated as an element of the tort itself. But it is more conceptually sound for this to constitute a defence, particularly given the parallels with breach of confidence claims, where public interest is an established defence. Moreover, it would be for the defendant to provide the evidence of the concern, which is the appropriate burden of proof if the plaintiff has shown that there has been an interference with his or her privacy of the kind we have described.

“Furthermore, the scope of privacy protection should not exceed such limits on the freedom of expression as is justified in a free and democratic society. A defence of legitimate public concern will ensure this. The significant value to be accorded freedom of expression requires that the tort of privacy must necessarily be tightly confined. In Douglas v Hello! Brooke LJ formulated the matter in the following way (at para [49]): ‘[A]lthough the right to freedom of expression is not in every case the ace of trumps, it is a powerful card to which the courts of this country must always pay appropriate respect’.”

The Hosking Bench returned to the definition of public interest used by the Ombudsman to provisionally reject Investigate, and concluded that the balance should fall to the media’s advantage unless there was a compelling reason not to: “The importance of the value of the freedom of expression therefore will be related to the extent of legitimate public concern in the information publicised.

“The word “concern” is deliberately used, so as to distinguish between matters of general interest or curiosity to the public, and matters which are of legitimate public concern. We accept in this respect the observation of Eichelbaum CJ in TV3 Network Services Ltd v Broadcasting Standards Authority (at 733) that there is a difference between material that is “merely interesting” to the public and material “properly within the public interest, in the sense of being of legitimate concern to the public”.

“A matter of general interest or curiosity would not, in our view, be enough to outweigh the substantial breach of privacy harm the tort presupposes. The level of legitimate public concern would have to be such as outweighs the level of harm likely to be caused. For example, if the publication was going to cause a major risk of serious physical injury or death (as in the Venables case), a very considerable level of legitimate public concern would be necessary to establish the defence.

“The line is to be drawn when the publicity ceases to be the giving of information to which the public is entitled, and becomes a morbid and sensational prying into private lives for its own sake, with which a reasonable member of the public, with decent

standards would say that he had no concern. The limitations, in other words, are those of common decency, having due regard to the freedom of the press and its reasonable leeway to choose what it will tell the public, but also due regard to the feelings of the individual and the harm that will be done to him by the exposure.”

Applying any of these tests, Benson-Pope’s plea to privacy in regard to his communications with police must fail.

Justice Keith, in a separate judgement in the Hosking case, went further, calling the media’s right to freedom of expression “central” to our democratic system: “The importance of freedom of expression “The right to freedom of expression is recognised in our law (notably by Parliament in s14 of the Bill of Rights), as in the law of many other parts of the world, as being of the highest importance in a modern democracy. The purposes and values underlying it are also widely accepted. They include individual liberty and self-fulfillment, the value of the marketplace of ideas and the protection and advancement of democratic self-government.

“The right of privacy should not interfere with publication of matters of public record, or obvious significant public interest,” Justice Keith writes [our emphasis].

At paragraph 267 of the Hosking judgements, Anderson J also warns strongly against the idea that public figures should enjoy special privacy protection:

“F

reedom of expression is the first and last trench in the protection of liberty. All of the rights affirmed by NZ Bill of Rights Act are protected by that particular right. Just as truth is the first casualty of war, so suppression of truth is the first objective of the despot.

“In my view, the development of modern communications media, including for example the world wide web, has given historically unprecedented exposure of and accountability for injustices, undemocratic practices and the despoliation of human rights. A new limitation on freedom of expression requires, in my respectful view, greater justification than that a reasonable person would be wounded in their feelings by the publication of true information of a personal nature which does not have the quality of legally recognised confidentiality.”

Apart from the overwhelming public interest in finding out why police chose in the end not to prosecute (and Benson-Pope’s frank submissions are relevant to that quest), Investigate believes his plea for confidentiality fails at one final hurdle.

The Ombudsman has referred to Benson-Pope’s lawyer John Haigh QC expecting all discussions to be confidential, and that this expectation of confidentiality is crucial for the maintenance of public affairs.

However, if that is indeed the case, why did the police release dozens of pages of interim submissions from John Haigh QC and even Benson-Pope himself in the original document release?

Surely releasing those documents must compromise the “expectation” of confidentiality for others dealing with police in future?

In Investigate’s view, Labour MP David Benson-Pope’s actions up to the date of this issue going to press indicate he still has something to hide, and the magazine will pursue this until the question is resolved.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 35

Island in the gun Pitcairn’s future hangs on crucial NZ court case In 1929, less than 80 years ago, it was still possible for a 12 year old girl in New Zealand to marry an adult male, with her parents’ consent. There are elderly people still alive today whose mothers or gr andmothers may have effectively been child brides in a growing colony. These past weeks however, the ghosts of long forgotten customs have been haunting an Auckland courtroom, as Pitcairn Islanders put their case for a re-think of the sexual abuse convictions that have devastated the tiny tropical outpost. As R ACHEL ROBINSON discovers, there’s more to the Pitcairn story than meets the eye

36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

I

n the back of a suburban Auckland courtroom, a woman scribbles notes as lawyers and judges bat legal points back and forth across the floor like tennis balls. To the legal professionals, this is just another court case. But to Kari Boye Young and the 50 or so people she plans to email tonight with the day’s developments, this case is life or death for her island.

Kari is a Pitcairner, she’s the closest thing the territory has to a journalist, and her own husband is facing trial on sexual offences later this year.

She’s had to fight just for the right to take notes. While New Zealand media like Investigate have a right to report court proceedings, members of the public don’t and Kari Boye Young got pinged on Day One of the appeals.

New Zealand’s cold, grey judicial system is geared up to handle the affairs of four million people; yet the entire population of Pitcairn Island could probably fit in this small courtroom at a squeeze. The irony is that while Pitcairn itself is effectively on trial, after six years of investigation and legal action locals are still struggling to make their small voices heard above the constant grinding of the wheels of justice in New Zealand and England.

After all, these appeal hearings in early February are crucial to the survival of Pitcairn, but nobody in officialdom has bothered to ask whether the isolated islanders would like a video link so they can watch proceedings in real time. And now officials are telling Kari Boye Young she can’t take notes either.

After defence lawyers make an appeal to the judges, pointing out the entire island is relying on her daily summaries, the court assents. But for the Pitcairners, it’s just another example of the ‘machine’ they’re up against.

In 1999 allegations of a series of sexual assaults and rapes against Pitcairn Island women over a period of 30 years shocked the world. Since then the thirteen accused men and their families have endured years of public backlash and a trial-by-media in an English prosecution they claim was a serious miscarriage of justice.

In a prosecution where evidence rested solely on testimonials from complainants, the accused and various islanders, the Pitcairn case has been portrayed as a black and white, open and shut case.

Six of the accused were convicted in 2004 by the Pitcairn Supreme Court on a range of charges. Charges against some men were dropped, and another man was acquitted of the one charge he faced. Two more men awaiting extradition are yet to be tried.

According to the Crown prosecution lawyers justice has been served. However, the judicial war raging around Pitcairn Island is set to continue, with the process of appeals against the convictions and prosecution well under way.

And in Auckland’s Papakura Courthouse, officially converted to the Pitcairn Court of Appeal, that’s where the latest battles are being fought as six Pitcairn Island men convicted of

a range of sexual offences in 2004 attempt to have their convictions overturned.

The Papakura Courthouse it may be, the Ritz it ain’t, but the legal minds hearing these appeals are no slugs. Justices Henry, Barker and Salmon have served on the New Zealand Court of Appeal and they come with gilt-edged reputations.

Hopefully, in the view of Kari Boye Young and a handful of other Pitcairners sitting down the back, the judges will have a better comprehension of the issues than the Radio New Zealand journalist who attended for Day One and published a story saying the men didn’t realise it was illegal to rape women. The news story was picked up by wire services and made headlines around the world, but the journalist missed a major legal point.

At issue in this appeal, you see, is a concept known in New Zealand as “statutory rape”. Statutory rape occurs in New Zealand or England, for example, when a man has sexual intercourse with a girl aged under 16, regardless of whether she consented. Because of her age, the law says she cannot legally give consent even if she wants to, and the perpetrator is thus guilty of statutory rape.

On Pitcairn Island, however, the locals are arguing they believed the age of consent was 12. What their lawyer was trying to say when he was misquoted around the world was that island men didn’t realise consensual sex with a 12 year old was rape. Because of the legal mire swamping Pitcairn, the Crown has not termed the offences as statutory rape. It is an issue that looms large in the courtroom, as Judges and lawyers try to pin down what law applies to the complainants who were aged between 12 and 16. The Judges raise concerns that consent was not talked about in the trials, when surely in these blurry circumstances consent is relevant.

“I still jump in my chair when they use that word, finding it hard to accept that people talk about my neighbours and relatives as ‘rapists’,” says Kari Boye Young in a dispatch to the Island. “For the issue, as all we Pitcairners know, is not ‘rape’, but underage sex. Some of the girls were indeed young, but all the more reason for the Poms to send some help. 13 ‘rapists’ out of a population of 70-odd (in the 70s and 80s) is quite staggering, and should really reflect on the authorities.

“But that Google Alert article makes us all look pretty Neanderthal and emptyheaded: ‘Pitcairn men did not know rape was a crime’. Of course everybody knew rape was a crime, but we did not know that was what we committed.”

It’s this point that the defence team are arguing in court, as they allege a serious abuse of process on the part of the Crown in deciding to proceed under English law and appointing a New Zealand court.

The Crown, headed by Public Prosector Simon Moore, in turn states categorically that the trials were just, the convictions solid and the sentences fair.

The five-strong team of defence lawyers, including Public INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 37

“Was it fair, argued defence lawyers, to expect members of one of the most isolated communities in the world to know that the laws had changed, if no one had actually told them?”

Defender Paul Dacre, presents findings to the court that shed new light on the case, raising serious questions about whether justice has been served.

Although on the surface the case seems to be very black and white, closer inspection reveals that it is not an easy one to resolve. The majority of Islanders are still disputing the findings of the Supreme Court that six of their most able-bodied and influential men committed acts of rape and sexual assault.

The prime arguments presented before the three judges however did not focus on disputing the actual convictions of rape and indecent assault. Instead, the rights and wrongs of prosecution under Britain’s 1956 Sexual Offences Act took centre stage. If the English statute is found to be void in terms of Pitcairn Island the convictions against all six men are likely to be repealed.

H

owever, regardless of the outcome of the court’s findings, at least one party is likely to contest the judgement at the Privy Council.

The Council is the last appeal provision for the Islanders, after which the long legal battle will finally be laid to rest. Matters of English jurisdiction and rights to Pitcairn Island, apparently acquired through settlement, are currently before the Privy Council.

But it is the Court of Appeal hearing in Auckland that currently holds centre stage. For the accused islanders, the defence legal team has split into two parts. Public Defender Paul Dacre and barristers Charles Cato and Allan Roberts were appointed to represent the accused, but since the conclusion of the trials in 2004 four of the six convicted men have jumped ship to independent QCs Grant Illingworth and Adrian Cook.

The Crown-appointed defence, represented by Cato, is first to its feet in the hearing. Cato, along with Dacre and Roberts, represents Len Brown and Steven Christian. Brown was convicted of six indecent assaults and sentenced to 400 hours of community work and two years supervision. Christian, the former mayor of Pitcairn, was convicted of five rapes and sentenced to jail for two and three-year concurrent sentences.

Cato tells the court that a combination of several serious defi38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

ciencies in the machinery of justice on Pitcairn, taken together, amount to a miscarriage of justice in the decision to prosecute the men. His three-pronged argument touches on the failure of the Crown to properly import English law to the Island, the lack of policing or enforcement of the law, and several long delays in the process of prosecution.

One example, he says, is the delay of a year between the announcement that charges would be laid, and the date that charges actually were laid. This, he argues, unfairly kept the accused in a state of unbearable suspense.

A more serious delay of a year, between the appointment of Public Prosecutor Simon Moore on the one hand and Public Defender Dacre on the other, is alleged to have prejudiced the April 2004 trials.

“They [the Crown] did not get their house in order,” Cato tells the judges.

Crown lawyer Christine Gordon disagrees, questioning exactly how the lack of a public defender prevented the appellants from getting involved during the government deliberations and investigations during that time.

But the major thrust of Cato’s argument focuses on the fact that the men have been tried and convicted under an English law that he claims has no moral or legal jurisdiction on Pitcairn Island.

The British Sexual Offences Act of 1956, and the amendment of 1970, outline age of consent, definitions of rape and indecent assault, and the sentences applied to them. From the outside it looks like a clear-cut case of commit the crime, do the time.

However Pitcairn’s complete isolation from the developed Western world has created a unique situation in which, it is argued, it was impossible for the Islanders to know the English laws, let alone which of those applied to the Island.

Despite Radio New Zealand’s report, the defence team did not try to convince the court that the people of Pitcairn did not know rape was a crime. Instead they argued that England’s age of consent of 16 years was not known, and therefore the rape charges where consent was not an issue were inherently unjust.

What’s more, Cato argued the lack of published statutory law on the Island made the prosecution unjust not only in terms of the law, but also in terms of human rights.

“Because the 1956 Act was never actually published on Pitcairn, Illingworth argues it is outside the powers of the English judicial system to prosecute Island men under the Statute”

“It is my submission that knowledge of the legal consequences is vital to the prosecution of crimes.”

When independent QC Grant Illingworth presents the second part of the legal challenge to the outcome of the Pitcairn trials, an alternative submission to Cato’s argument, he states that as a black letter law point the English law did not have jurisdiction on Pitcairn.

Within the British Sexual Offences Act is a provision that states the law comes into force upon publication. As the statute was never published on the Island or available to them through reasonable means, Illingworth believes the law is void as far as Pitcairn is concerned.

“This is a black letter law point. The 1956 Act was not in force on Pitcairn Island during the time of the offences.”

Acting for defendant Terry Young, Illingworth lets the court know that, contrary to the Crown’s assumptions, until a few years ago Pitcairn operated by rules pertaining to the 1790s, when mutineers from Bounty first settled the island.

Unlike modern English law, which states that the age of consent for both genders is 16, the 1790 common law holds that the age of consent is 12, with rape automatic in cases where the complainant is aged under 10. A grey area exists between the ages of 10 and 12.

It wasn’t until 1885 that Britain raised the age of sexual consent from 12, and New Zealand didn’t raise the age of consent until 1896. Was it fair, argued defence lawyers, to expect members of one of the most isolated communities in the world to know that the laws had changed, if no one had actually told them?

When questioned by the three judges hearing the appeals, crown prosecutors were forced to concede that in some of the charges the issue of consent was not touched upon in the trials, as the complainants were under 16 and therefore consent was deemed to be invalid by the New Zealand-based prosecution team.

In his submissions, Illingworth tells the court this was unjust, as there is a very clear difference between the law as to age of consent operational on Pitcairn and the age of consent as it is known in modern day England.

“Pitcairn is a special case in that it has been left alone for two centuries.”

While he says this does not make them a lawless society able to do whatever they please, it does raise questions of whether the Crown used a judicial sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The court heard that it is entirely probable that the Pitcairn society developed from the laws taken with the settlers in 1790, with no evidence that these laws ever developed along English lines.

It is not unheard of for sexual offences to be tried on the Island. However these cases have been few and far between, and prosecuted under Island law with Island sentences. The most severe penalty for offences under Island law is three months in prison.

H

ow isolated is Pitcairn? Up until 1985 there was no phone, with communication through Morse Code and letters that took up to a year to reach their destination. The defence counsel submitted to the judges that it was near on impossible for Pitcairners to have access to the law that governed them.

With limited education, little contact with the outside world and a government advisor with no knowledge of English law, Pitcairn society has been locked in a cultural timewarp, effectively a continuation of late 18th century England.

With a strong Tahitian influence and no guidance as to acceptable sexual practices, a sexual culture outside the norms of Western, English conduct developed.

Illingworth tells the court Pitcairners have their own book of laws, and the only English law book on the Island is kept under lock and key in the jail.

Because the 1956 Act was never actually published on Pitcairn, Illingworth argues it is outside the powers of the English judicial system to prosecute Island men under the Statute.

Instead, he says, the Crown must look at the common law as it applied in 1790, and the Island ordinances.

Under this approach a prosecution for statutory rape would fail unless the complainant was aged below 10.

Consent must be taken into account, and non-consent proved, for the convictions to be just.

For those offences alleged to have been committed against

girls under the age of 10 it was accepted that the accused would be tried and punished to the full extent of the law that did apply to Pitcairn.

Illingworth tells the court that he isn’t excusing the offences, but pointing out that it was not legal or just to try men under a law that did not apply to them. As far as the Islanders knew, the little brown book of Pitcairn laws was all that applied to them.

“It may have been a misunderstanding on their part, but no one told them otherwise,” says Illingworth.

T

he Crown maintains its position that 1956 English law has jurisdiction, and that the absence of proof of a prejudiced trial is not sufficient grounds for a miscarriage of justice. Also touched upon by the defence was the submission that it was fundamentally unjust for an English case to be tried in a New Zealand setting.

However the Judges seemed to reject the idea that this prejudiced the trials in any way, and the Crown submitted that it was common sense for the Governor to customise the trials and appeals to a British Pacific colony such as New Zealand.

After three days of the defence submissions Crown lawyer Kieran Raftery takes the stand first for the prosecution submissions.

Raftery wastes no time climbing into Cato’s argument that it is an abuse of process to prosecute under the 1956 Act. “As found by the Supreme Court that these men did in fact commit acts of rape, with a very similar definition of rape under the common law and the 1956 Act, it therefore was not improper for the Crown to prosecute under this law.”

Raftery asserts that the crimes were serious enough to warrant the Crown’s action.

He tells the court that time does not stand still, and the law that evolves in England is applicable to the colonies despite a lack of publication.

Raftery also attacks Cato’s assertion that the lack of publication and appeal rights given to the Islanders constitutes an abuse of process.

The laws that must be published, he argues, are only those made by the local Governor, of which the Sexual Offences Act was not one.

Despite Raftery’s well thought out and logical submission, the judges seize on several key factors of concern that could impact strongly on the outcome of the appeal.

Some of the counts of rape were for girls aged between 12 and 16, where the NZ legal team working from 1956 British law believe it is rape regardless of whether the children consented. The judges pursue this point further.

If indeed Pitcairners believed the age of consent to be 12, and yet consensual sex was deemed to be rape under English law, the convictions can hardly be judged to be fair, they challenge.

Then there’s the thorny question of natural justice, the right to a fair trial. Under the hastily put together legal package that allowed prosecutions to be laid, the Crown not only deemed the 1956 English Sexual Offences Act to be in force on the Island, but did not give the Islanders rights of appeal that normally apply to other British subjects. Wasn’t this a case of the Crown wanting to have its cake and eat it too – trying to enforce a law that had never been published and at the same time telling the Islanders that even though British law applied, the same appeal rights did not.

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Raftery maintains the right to appeal automatically applied to the Islanders as British subjects, even though the machinery of justice to actually make an appeal happen was simply not in place on the Island. Fellow prosecutor Simon Mount then takes the stand seeking to demonstrate the historical precedence for the Crown’s prosecution.

Again, he submits that the “snowstorm” of laws that descended on the Island between the start of the police investigation and the trials were simply setting in concrete the specifics of a justice system already in place, a point strongly denied by the defence.

In their replies the defence claim that the number, weight and timing of the ordinances amounted to the instant, justadd-water creation of a legal system on Pitcairn in order to retrospectively prosecute, and contributed to an abuse of process on the part of the Crown.

Ah, but, says Simon Mount for the prosecution, “ignorance of the law is no excuse”.

“The British law was accessible and foreseeable to Pitcairn Islanders, and the non-consensual nature of the crimes makes them sufficiently serious for the prosecution to proceed,” he tells the court.

Not so fast, suggests Judge Barker from the bench: the defence submissions were that the combination of several deficiencies in the justice system relating to Pitcairn caused a miscarriage of justice to take place. “You can’t single out just one factor.”

The affidavits of Tom and Betty Christian used in the Supreme Court to establish the Islanders’ knowledge of British law used to prosecute serious crimes were called upon in the Crown submissions.

But as defence counsel Cato touched on, a very small English police presence and few prosecutions on the Island somewhat dulled the effect of the law, so much so that the Islanders arguably could not foresee the consequences of their actions.

Mount, however, remains unmoved. “You do not need a lawyer to tell you rape is wrong.”

Nonetheless he admits there is some merit to the defence case, but only if it is demonstrated that it was impossible for the accused to have known the law and its consequences. Although it is a human right to have access to the law, it is also a human right not to be raped.

What Mount doesn’t explain is that a failure by Britain to publish the 1956 Sexual Offences Act on Pitcairn may have itself contributed to the crimes by failing to alert Island women of their new legal rights. For nearly 50 years after the Act was passed, the isolated Pitcairners lumbered on with a 1790 morality that saw sex with consenting 12 year olds as OK. The sum of Mount’s submission to the court is that the English responsibility is to peace, order and good government of all colonies, including Pitcairn Island. The decision to prosecute under the 1956 Act was not detrimental to this goal, and therefore an abuse of process is not a justifiable argument.

Not all is plain sailing for the prosecution team, however. As noted, Keiran Raftery has told the court that the machinery of justice had not been in place on the Island, while his colleague Mount suggests it was.

But was it really? The only government advisor on the Island was the schoolteacher, who had no legal background or training. How a British justice system was expected to function with

the Head Office of Administration based in New Zealand and minimal input on the Island was not explained.

“It is an odd situation,” Mount concedes to the court.

But despite the number of ordinances needed to enable the trials to go ahead, Mount argues the fundamental structure was in place.

“Charges could be laid, the Supreme Court had all the necessary power to hear the cases, judge and sentence them.”.

The third member of the prosecution team, Christine Gordon, maintains that the new ordinances and delays in prosecution were simply in order to try all the men together, providing a measure of fairness to them.

She denies defence claims that it amounts to systemic bias, telling the court that there is in no way any bias in the way the Crown handled the prosecutions.

“The only thing for this court to consider is if the men were given a fair trial.”

Gordon attributes the delays in the prosecution process to the number of defendants and charges laid, requiring special attention and consideration as to a venue.

Provisions of accommodation for the legal circus that descended on the Island in 2004, doubling the current population, as well as a court venue to try the men simultaneously, warranted the year long wait.

The delays, she insists, did not affect the provision of a fair trial, both for the accused and the complainants, and the claims of prejudice in delegating the trials to New Zealand courts, judges and lawyers are unfounded.

Legal argument over the jurisdiction rights of England to Pitcairn and definitions was heard from both sides.

This included the submission by Grant Illingworth that local Pitcairn ordinances superseded English law, a provision seemingly overlooked by the Crown.

“Nearly good enough is not good enough in regards to criminal convictions,” he tells the trio of judges.

Raftery fires back: the crime of rape stays the same no matter which law it is prosecuted under, and that the trials and convictions were merited.

While the outcome of the Appeal Court will not be known for another few weeks, a careful examination of the arguments presented by both the defence and prosecution counsel make it obvious that the Pitcairn Island case is not a clear cut matter.

Instead, it is a complex and difficult case in which justice seems to have taken a battering both in the prosecutions and in the wilful neglect of English authorities in relation to Pitcairn Island. The ultimate impact on Pitcairn, and indeed its survival if many of its able-bodied men are jailed, is yet to be seen.

Rachel Robinson is a graduate of AUT with a Bachelor of Communications majoring in Journalism. This is her first story for Investigate

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 41

A Very British Coup How King Dick’s sidekick scuppered Maori nationalism

Not everything that happens in politics is immediately apparent.

Some secrets take longer than others to surface, but eventually, all things that are hidden do tend to emerge. In a major new biography by historian Paul Moon, one such secret is put under the spotlight, revealing a significant conspiracy in Maori politics which took place nearly a hundred years ago, and is still having an impact today 42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

By far the biggest impact Ngapua had on the country was through his role leading the Kotahitanga movement. This was a Maori autonomy organisation that combined almost all the tribes in the country under a shared desire to establish a separate Maori Parliament and legal system

Ngapua, walking to the left during speeches at Waitangi, 1899 (All photos courtesy National Library)

M

ention Hone Heke Ngapua to most New Zealanders and they will probably either shrug their shoulders at this unfamiliar name, or maybe recognise the similarity with the name of his famous great uncle, Hone Heke. Yet, Ngapua was quite possibly the single most powerful Maori who ever lived – particularly at the height of his career in the late 1890s. So how is it possible that less than a century later, this major political force is virtually unknown? In order to understand his plunge into deep obscurity, it is first useful to know something about who Ngapua was, and why he grew to such enormous stature in Maoridom.

Hone Heke Ngapua was born in Kaikohe on 6 June 1869 (the house he was born in is still there). His father, Hone Ngapua, was the nephew of the great warrior Hone Heke. His mother, Niurangi, was the daughter of a Ngati Whatua chief, and was one of the first Maori women in the country to vote. Ngapua’s genealogy alone made him one of the highest-ranking Maori in Nga Puhi. He was schooled in the Bay of Islands, and went on to secondary school at St. Stephen’s in Parnell, Auckland. Following a brief stint as a law clerk, he entered the civil service as a translator but, within a few years, became one of the country’s youngest ever Members of Parliament, entering the House in 1893, aged just twenty-four. However, despite his rapid ascent, he was not universally popular. The two main reasons for this were his personal religious and political convictions.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 43

mine his work, both as a politician and as a representative of the Maori people.

Carroll was especially concerned at the huge support that Ngapua enjoyed in the Northern Maori electorate, and was suspicious of Nga Puhi power. His chance to topple all that Ngapua stood for came in early 1909, when the tangi for Ngapua – who had recently died of tuberculosis aged just 39 – was being organised.

Hone Heke Ngapua

Nakahi and Kotahitanga Ngapua’s religious non-conformism was seen as notorious by many of his colleagues. While his Maori opponents, such as Apirana Ngata, Maui Pomare, and Peter Buck, were committed Anglicans, Ngapua was raised a Methodist by his mother, but also at times reverted to the subversive Nakahi cult that his father belonged to. Nakahi’s doctrine was a fusion of Christianity and traditional Maori beliefs, and had traditionally been strongly anti-establishment.

Moreover, in Parliament, Ngapua was sometimes openly critical of what he saw as the laziness of the Anglican Church – particularly in Northland – and compared its lethargy with the aggressive spread of Catholicism in the region. This put him off side with some of his colleagues as well as his adversaries, making him even more of a lone voice in the House.

By far the biggest impact Ngapua had on the country was through his role leading the Kotahitanga movement. This was a Maori autonomy organisation that combined almost all the tribes in the country under a shared desire to establish a separate Maori Parliament and legal system. The council of paramount chiefs who ran the movement (which represented most adult Maori in the country) nominated Ngapua to be ‘the chief of chiefs’ – the man who would effectively preside over the entire organisation. The fact that he was only twenty-six years old when the offer was made gives some idea of how powerful a personality he was.

As his power increased, however, so too did the concern of his opponents. His biggest adversary was James Carroll – a Member of Parliament and close confidant of the Premier, Richard Seddon. Carroll engineered a number of situations during the next decade to humiliate Ngapua, and to under44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

Tangi – the plot to bury a tribe It was late in the morning of 9 February, that the news of Ngapua’s death was delivered to his parents in Kaikohe via a telegraph from the Post Office. At this same time, Ngapua’s emaciated corpse was being cautiously embalmed to avoid those in contact with his body possibly contracting tuberculosis. By the early afternoon, he was dressed in a black suit and placed in a lead-lined coffin, ready for his final journey north.

There was little real affection for Ngapua evinced by the Government. Despite his fifteen years of service to the House of Representatives, the nation’s Governor chose not to be present at the tangi, and instead travelled to the Bush Districts Agricultural and Pastoral Show at Woodville. Similarly dismissive of Ngapua’s mana and achievements, on the day of Ngapua’s burial, the Premier decided to attend a presentation at the Auckland Public Schools’ Cricket Association. To accentuate the frostiness of Ward’s feelings towards Ngapua, the normally non-political obituary he ought to have delivered was tinged with a faint criticism which marred the announcement. Ward’s short and routine statement acknowledged that Ngapua ‘…was in many respects a striking representative of the Maori race. He took a keen interest in all political questions. His geniality and other admirable traits made up for largely minor defects’.

Apart from Carroll – whose presence at the tangi had motives rooted more in the living than the dead – the only official Government representative was the Minister of Works, John McKenzie. However, McKenzie decided to pay his respects only because he was at Kawakawa on other business when the date of the tangi was confirmed, and reluctantly agreed to an amendment to his work schedule and show his face on behalf of the Government.

The press, at least, were more charitable. One statement, which sums up the sentiments of journalists who had observed his career, was printed the day after his death. It recalled that Ngapua ‘…was the best known of the members of Parliament representing the native race, and by his genial and kindly personality made many friends among both races’. This, at least, was a fitting European tribute to Maoridom’s greatest political warrior of the time.

On 17 February, a journalist travelling with the funeral procession, jotted down his observations as the growing party accompanying the cortege edged towards its final destination: ‘The remains of the late Mr. Hone Heke, accompanied by the Hon. J. Carroll and a number of Southern natives, reached the settlement of Ngawha yesterday afternoon. A large gathering of Maoris awaited the body. This morning the cortege – an imposing procession of 500 people – came on to Kaikohe, the birthplace of the lamented chief, where preparations for what will probably prove to be one of the largest tangis held in New Zealand in recent times are in progress’.

The pressing numbers who had joined the final leg of the procession were – by dawn on the 20th – just a few kilometres from the centre of Kaikohe, and were starting to converge with other groups of Maori, and a smattering of Europeans from the area who were also winding their way towards the town. As the coffin bearing Ngapua approached the outskirts of the town, around 150 Nga Puhi men stood in front of its path in a solid mass. Some of the Europeans accompanying the hearse were at a loss to understand what was happening, but the Maori who were with them had half-expected that this might occur. They therefore sent two of their own party towards this body of men, to serve as challengers. The two groups eyed each other with stern glares, advanced a few metres, and halted. The large group of Nga Puhi men standing before the hearse then erupted into a thunderous haka. Stamping their feet in unison, the ground shook, and their guttural shouts sounded the sentiments of respect and loss that Ngapua’s death had aroused in them.

Clouds of dust were kicked up as the haka proceeded, giving an almost spectral atmosphere to this group as they pounded out the words of challenge to their dead chief. As soon as the haka was over, the group that had delivered it joined the hearse as it travelled the final short distance to the town’s centre.

A

grave had been dug at the Marino urupa (cemetery), and it had been lined with heavy volcanic rocks, ready to accept the casket. The other usual tangi preparations were also underway, but the preparations were embraced by an eerie quiet. Not one person felt sufficiently compelled to challenge the wishes of Ngapua’s hapu regarding the kawa – or protocols – of the tangi. The sorrow over Ngapua’s death enveloped many of those present. Tame Parata – the MP for Southern Maori – who had joined the throng, later recounted his feelings on hearing of Ngapua’s death, and how he, along with hundreds of others from outside Northland, dropped everything to attend this tangi: ‘And I may say…as one of the representative chiefs of the Maoris of the South Island, that I, myself, felt the most extreme distress when I received the communication for the Native Minster informing me of the death of my friend and colleague Hone Heke. I felt I could not lose an hour over my own private concerns, but must endeavour to get up here and accompany his body back to his own people, take it home as a colleague to his father and mother and the people of his tribe to which he belonged an ancient custom of the Maori people, which was called Kia whakahokia te tinana ki te iwi – to be laid beside his ancestors’.

Yet, at the tangi’s conclusion, there would be a surprising twist in proceedings that would result in Nga Puhi’s political aspirations being buried with Ngapua.

By Friday the 19th, the seams of Kaikohe were beginning to stretch under the pressure from the crowds of people who were starting to pour in. Some came because they had known Ngapua personally or by reputation, some because they felt the obligation of tradition to pay their respects, and some possibly simply out of the curiosity that such major occasions inevitably foster. At first it was hundreds of people, and then, thousands.

By the time of the tangi, around eight thousand people had converged on this small settlement.

Around 9 o’clock on the morning of Saturday the 20th,

The large group of Nga Puhi men standing before the hearse then erupted into a thunderous haka. Stamping their feet in unison, the ground shook, and their guttural shouts sounded the sentiments of respect and loss that Ngapua’s death had aroused in them

Ngapua’s final journey into the heart of Kaikohe commenced.

The hearse inched its way towards the site where the coffin was to be placed for the tangi. At the perimeter of the location, it stopped, and a party of men from Kaikohe took the coffin on their shoulders to carry it the last fifty metres to its destination. As this sad procession shuffled along, it was immediately flanked on either side by two rows of women who began to wail with grief as Ngapua’s body passed through. The New Zealand Herald correspondent described how the men carrying Ngapua’s body then ‘…burst into a melancholy dirge, swaying their bodies in rhythmic time to the mournful cries’. The New Zealand Times reporter was obviously impressed with the magnitude and spectacle of this Maori funeral: Close on one thousand natives are already in camp. The approach of the cortege [to Kaikohe] was heralded by a volley of continuous gunshots from the lookout party, situated upon a knoll near the roadside. As the funeral party, partly obscured in clouds of dust, drew near, a haka contingent marched out, and after giving vent to their grief in dancing and loud lamentations, escorted the sad procession to the marae enclosure, where a raised platform had been constructed for the reception of the coffin. At this point, women of different tribes, dressed in black and decorated with leaves, rent the air with heartrending wails and beckoned the casket with evergreens towards its temporary resting place, where tribe after tribe knelt and paid its respects to the departed chief. The ceremony was of a most impressive and affective nature. Numerous costly wreaths and hundreds of telegrams of condolence have been received from all parts of the Dominion.

Ngapua’s coffin was placed on a stand under a ‘ house’ that had INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 45

When Carroll, Buck, and an assortment of rangatira from other iwi arrived at Ngapua’s parents’ home, the accounts of what took place veer in dramatically different directions. The accepted version – which has sprouted from an article Buck wrote over four decades later – is that Carroll spoke with Niurangi, and that she was so proud to have such dignitaries present that at the tangi she felt it necessary to make an appropriate gesture in response.

In accordance with the principle of reciprocity embedded in the notion of utu, she publicly offered Buck to become Nga Puhi’s new ‘husband’ – to assume the seat for the Northern Maori electorate that had been Ngapua’s since 1893.

H Prime Minister Richard ‘King Dick’ Seddon (L) and former Governor Sir George Grey

been especially erected for the event. It was actually more of a roof supported by four wooden posts. Around the coffin was placed an array of his personal effects that had been brought up with him on the carriage from Wellington. Throughout the day, mats and other ‘…native curios…’ began to pile around the coffin as people delivered these gifts as personal tributes to honour the deceased.

The Plot The momentous outcome of the tangi, which would unfold in the late afternoon of Ngapua’s burial, was devised by Ngata and Carroll, and may well have been brewing in their minds for weeks, as Ngapua’s physical decline hastened. When Ngata heard of Ngapua’s death, he certainly would have experienced the normal human reactions when an acquaintance passes away. Moreover, although Ngapua may not have been a close political ally by this time, the two men were both unified by their culture and their urge to improve their people’s lot, and had shared a friendship. However, temporal considerations were seldom far from Ngata’s thoughts, and within the space of a few days, he had tied together a knotted plan to advance his vision for Maoridom – taking advantage of Ngapua’s demise to further the career of one of his most devoted disciples – Peter Buck.

In Wellington, Ngata could not have predicted the extent of the consensus that had settled around the tangi, but it was to make his scheme for control of Maori politics in Northland much easier to slip through the cordon of mourning at Kaikohe. As Ngapua’s body had passed through Auckland on the final leg of the journey north, Carroll, who was escorting the coffin, picked up Buck in Auckland to accompany the procession north.

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owever, this neat portrayal of the scene at the tangi – offered to subsequent generations as a cosy, self-contained legend – begins to falter under closer scrutiny, and against the weight of those oral histories that have survived and the details of the circumstantial evidence. The first aspect that hints at the un-seaworthiness of the standard representation of events is the catalogue of awkward or unanswered questions. For example, why was Ngapua’s mother speaking at the tangi when Nga Puhi kawa expressly forbade women to speak at such occasions? Why did Niurangi speak when, as part of the whanau pani (the mourning family), custom demanded that a representative chosen by the family would speak on their behalf? Why did Niurangi accept someone foreign to Nga Puhi to be the iwi’s representative in Parliament? Why did Ngata not even make an effort to attend the tangi of a colleague, an alleged friend, and one of the most significant Maori leaders of the period? And where was Hone Ngapua throughout all the negotiations and why did he allow his wife to speak? There was obviously much more to the story that has been revealed thus far. In piecing together the fragments of inherited recollections of the tangi, a more disturbing portrait emerges of what transpired that day.

By all accounts, Hone Ngapua was devastated by the news of his son’s death. Of course, it had been expected, but this in no way made the experience any less painful. On the day of the tangi, he was still inconsolable, and withdrew to his room while Niurangi summoned all her reserves of stern determination in order to cope with the manuhiri who were starting to file through the house in what would become a seemingly endless procession. At times, other whanau members would step in to greet guests while Niurangi would join her previously-estranged husband in private and offer what slender comfort she could.

Hone’s emotional condition at this point would turn out to be of critical importance. When he was told that Carroll and Buck were on the outskirts of Kaikohe, he expressed nothing but disinterest. His son’s relationship with Carroll had never been especially close, and many times, Ngapua had conveyed to his father his misgivings about the direction in which Carroll wished to lead Maori. Far from Hone and Niurangi being awed at the arrival of dignitaries from other iwi, they remained gracious but were hardly impressed at all. They knew the rangatira status of their son, and Hone, as one of the most senior rangatira of Nga Puhi, was not the sort of person to cower in the presence of men such as Carroll. As one hapu member put it: ‘He [Hone Ngapua] recognised himself as Nga Puhi Tuturu [‘real’ Nga Puhi]. He was the same hapu as Hongi, who had con-

quered most of the North Island – a true warrior and of rangatira class. He wasn’t afraid of anyone or intimidated by anyone.

He wasn’t like that’. Likewise, Niurangi was the daughter of one of the highest-ranked Ngati Whatua chiefs, and was similarly aware of her status. The story that Ngapua’s family were somehow awed by Carroll’s presence does not fit comfortably with what is known about both Hone and Niurangi.

Thus, the evidence to this point hardly suggests that the Ngapua hapu felt the extent of gratitude towards Carroll’s delegation that would warrant giving consent to such a major political sea-change for the iwi. On top of this circumstance was a lingering animosity that the Ngapua hapu felt towards Carroll, and maybe Ngata too – born out of the efforts of these two men to undermine both the Kotahitanga movement and Hone Heke Ngapua’s valiant attempts earlier in his Parliamentary career to transpose the wishes of the movement into European legislation. There were certainly no favours owed to Carroll or Ngata, and the very suggestion that the power and mana of Nga Puhi would be delivered into the hands of one of Ngata’s� protégées������������������������������������������������ does not conform to the thinking of the Ngapua whanau at this juncture. It would also indisputably have been against Ngapua’s wishes. He had, on a number of occasions, explained to others how inappropriate it was for Maori from one hapu or iwi to become involved in the internal affairs of another hapu or iwi. There is another aspect that is also incongruous in Niurangi’s alleged wish for Buck to replace her son: she had no mandate to determine the successor to the Northern Maori seat, and even if she did claim some preference, it would have been inappropriate for Carroll to unquestioningly accept this. In recommending Buck as a replacement, Carroll was ignoring the due process that would normally apply in circumstances such as this.

As if to confirm the cool relations that flowed beneath the pleasantries exchanged at the tangi, the mastermind behind Carroll’s political interference – Ngata – had decided not to attend. The suggestion that he was too busy working on amendments to the Native Land Act in Wellington may have some merits, but stumbles somewhat when the honour that ought to have been afforded to someone of Ngapua’s mana is considered.

Parliamentary work hardly balanced the obligation to attend the tangi. Even if Ngata was genuinely tied down by his job, his absence at the tangi of one of Maoridom’s most important leaders would none-the-less have been painfully obvious, and would have had the effect of entrenching some of the existing Nga Puhi suspicions about Ngata. Moreover, this was February, and the House of Representatives was not scheduled to open until mid June, so it is difficult to imagine what work was so pressing that Ngata was unable to leave it for a few days.

Incidentally, the whanau’s scepticism over Ngata’s true motives were confirmed thirty-one years later when Ngata led a haka at the Waitangi Marae at the commemoration of the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. At the conclusion of the haka, he walked past a few senior Nga Puhi kaumatua and muttered to them under his breath: ‘Kaitoa Nga Puhi Whetu Mataroa’. This comment referred to the battle at Whetu Mataroa when Nga Puhi had attacked Ngati Porou in revenge for the murder of one of Hongi’s cousins by Ngati Porou. Ngata was establishing that the haka he had just performed was symbolic utu for the Nga Puhi attack over a century earlier.

There was obviously much more to the story that has been revealed thus far. In piecing together the fragments of inherited recollections of the tangi, a more disturbing portrait emerges of what transpired that day

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hen Carroll arrived at Hone Ngapua’s house, and introduced Buck to him, the three briefly discussed Ngata’s plan that Buck fill the empty Parliamentary seat. This was the first that Buck had heard of the idea. Carroll had guarded the secrecy of the plot, and Buck was in a state of shock when he found out about the offer. Hone’s profound grief was now compounded by Carroll effectively dismissing the importance of the hapu being able to mourn the loss of their son, and using the tangi as an opportunity to usurp Nga Puhi’s power in accordance with Ngata’s recommendation. Enraged, heart-broken, conscious that his iwi was being shifted to the sidelines of national Maori politics, and in no state to counter the machinations of Carroll and Ngata, Hone Ngapua slumped into an even deeper state of depression. He could not muster the strength to maintain his presence at the tangi, and he returned to the house in the early afternoon to be alone with his misery. In the sprawling mass of people lingering around the site of the tangi, Hone Ngapua’s absence for part of the day was not noticed. It was Niurangi, as the matriarch of the whanau, who would now be exposed to the pressures of Carroll’s persuasive arguments. Without her husband with her to counsel her, she succumbed to Carroll’s soft rhetoric, and his platitudes for her son finally won her over to his way of thinking.

More than forty years later, when eulogising over Ngata’s death, Buck had cause to reflect on the events of February 1909.

He was appropriately gracious when describing Ngapua, whose seat had been delivered to him, and who seemed to have been affected by Ngapua’s charisma. Thus, Buck wrote: ‘Heke was

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 47

younger than previous Maori members and he spoke perfect English in a charming manner. He had a happy disposition not easily ruffled, and he was regarded as the best “stonewaller” in the House’. However, it would probably be more appropriate to relegate this account to the category of hearsay. When Buck was dramatically wrenched from his medical practice by Carroll to replace Ngapua as Northern Maori’s Parliamentary representative, he had mainly second-hand knowledge of Ngapua, presumably fed to him by Ngata and Carroll. Buck acknowledged, for example, that he had seen Ngata in action in Parliament in the early 1900s, but significantly, referred to Ngapua in the context of reputation rather than observation. The two had met, but only very briefly. Buck’s story continued with a peculiar interlude, in which he asserted that Ngata and Ngapua were drawn into a friendship through a shared love of music, with Ngata possessing a baritone voice, and Ngapua that of a tenor.

It is the portion of Buck’s account dealing with his assumption to power in February 1909, however, which arouses the most interest. If Buck’s version is to be believed, he was abruptly tugged out of relative obscurity and a stable career as a medical doctor to a role of some political consequence without any inkling whatsoever that this would transpire. And as with all the other repetitions of this conventional version of the story, neither Ngata nor Carroll are credited with any foresight at all regarding the need to find a replacement for Ngapua, even though the issue had been impending for months as Ngapua’s death approached. According to this rendering of events, the successor to the Northern Maori seat was decided on as a kneejerk reaction, with no suggestion as to any premeditation: In the general election of 1908, both Ngata and Heke were re-

48, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

elected. Unfortunately, Heke died early in 1909 before the new Parliament assembled. His loss was serious because he was popular with the Pakeha members and he possessed all the qualifications needed to advocate Maori progress. Sir James Carroll and representative chiefs of various tribes escorted Heke’s body from Wellington to his northern home in Kaikohe. I [Buck] joined the cortege at Auckland. Heke’s mother, in an address to the northern tribes, proposed that their debt of honour for the return of their son’s body should be balanced by marrying their son’s widow to a chief from the south. The proposal met with general support and the selection of a husband was left to Sir James Carroll. The proposal meant the gift of the vacant Northern Maori seat to someone from outside Heke’s tribes, and it was both unexpected and startling. Sir James asked for time and next day, after a diplomatic speech which disposed of two political aspirants in his own party, he offered the name of Te Rangihiroa [Buck]. I was utterly dumbfounded, but as the Ngapuhi offer was the most magnanimous ever made by any Maori tribe, I stayed dumb. Later, Sir James confessed he had wired to Ngata for advice and the prompt answer was “Te Rangihiroa.” And so it came to pass in due course that I was married to Heke’s widow and entered Parliament to help Ngata fight the good fight.

There are questions arising from this extract which also draw attention to discrepancies between the official version of the transfer of power to Buck, and the oral histories of Nga Puhi which cover this matter. To start off with, there is an imbalance in the reciprocity relating to the return of Ngapua’s body.

Buck claimed that Niurangi surrendered Nga Puhi’s political presence in the House of Representatives to another iwi – a concession of colossal proportions – on the basis that that there

was a debt of honour for her son’s body being returned home.

The descendents of the Ngapua hapu observe that the return of whanau members who had passed away in other parts of the country was, and is, commonplace, and while assistance would be acknowledged and appreciated – sometimes with the offer of a koha, or gift – to make the offer Niurangi allegedly did was utterly out of all proportion to the return of Ngapua’s body to his home. Neither was there any precedent in Nga Puhi history (or any other iwi for that matter), for such an offer, and on this scale, to be made. The connection between the body of a Member of Parliament being returned home, and the relatives offering the seat to an unknown person not connected with the whanau, the hapu, the iwi, the electorate, or even the person (in this case, Carroll) returning the body, is extremely curious, especially as the person concerned – Buck – was a virtual unknown to the hapu.

There is also the matter of Niurangi’s supposed insistence that Ngapua’s replacement be ‘…a chief from the south’. The emasculation of Nga Puhi’s mana that this would occasion has already been discussed, but if this was literally what Niurangi demanded, then Buck could not be accepted as Ngapua’s replacement because he was not of rangatira lineage, and Niurangi had specified a chief. Neither can an explanation be provided as to why Niurangi would dismiss outright any of the chiefs of Nga Puhi, Te Rarawa, Te Aopouri, or even Ngati Whatua, as possible candidates for the vacant seat. Furthermore, the reference to ‘…a chief from the south’, has an almost contrived sound to it. As though it was designed to fulfil someone’s expectation that Buck would be nominated, rather than being made as a spontaneous gesture.

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inally, there is the duplicitous role that Carroll was playing out. At first, Buck states that Carroll was as surprised as anyone else at what Niurangi was supposed to have said and needed time to absorb the shock. Yet, Buck notes that Carroll was not so shocked that he was unable to dissuade two potential aspirants to the seat, and later, Carroll ‘confessed’ that he had telegrammed Ngata and confirmed Buck’s appointment.

Moreover, before Carroll had even arrived at Kaikohe, he had specifically sought out Buck – whom he seems to have hardly known at that point – and ordered him to accompany the tangi. Why, then, did Carroll initially feel he needed to hide this communication? Why did he feel answerable to Ngata?

Why did he refuse to recommend the possible appointees and wait for Ngata to recommend someone? All these questions point to the conclusion that an arrangement had been calculated well in advance and was simply enacted when the time was suitable.

There can be no doubt that Carroll had been directly involved in devising the entire scheme, and in doing so, had turned the tangi into a theatre of conspiracy. In his eulogy, written on the same day that Ngapua died, there may be something of a tacit indication, if of nothing else than of Carroll’s acute awareness of the importance of finding the ‘right’ replacement for Ngapua. Carroll concluded what he labelled his ‘Appreciation’ for Ngapua by citing a whakatauki: ‘E Puhi, E, kei Tai; kei te Whakarua koe, e–i’. The translation read: ‘Vacancy hungers for a trite supplement’. Sadly, though, the telegrams between

Published by David Ling, RRP $39.99

Ngata and Carroll detailing this intrigue have somehow disappeared from the archives.

As a final twist of the screw, Carroll demanded that Ngapua not be buried with his ancestors at the ancient Marino urupa, but at the cemetery of the Aperahama Anglican church. He told Niurangi, when ‘guiding’ her thinking, that if Ngapua was buried in the church grounds, the Government would pay for a grand tombstone and a monument to commemorate the deceased Member of the House of Representatives.

Otherwise, the Government would turn its back on Ngapua and his whanau. Carroll was almost certainly bluffing about these alleged Government threats, but the effect was real enough, and Niurangi, now completely ground down by the pressure Carroll had exerted on her, consented to this as well.

Superficially, the tangi had finally been granted its customary debate over the location of the burial. However, it was not a dispute based on the mana of the dead, but rather, on the mana and ascendance of the Young Maori Party.

So what of the longer term consequences? There were several, some of which have filtered down to the present day.

First, Ngapua’s death heralded the demise of the Kotahitanga movement, but not its extinguishment. The idea of a separate Maori Parliament has been raised frequently in the intervening decades, most recently by Hone Harawira, who on election night in 2005 stated his intention to see the creation of a separate Maori Parliament, along similar lines to what Ngapua proposed over a century earlier.

Of more lasting significance have been the effects on Nga Puhi political power following Ngapua’s death. Ngapua was the last Maori of chiefly ancestry to represent the tribe. Carroll had ensured that an ‘outsider’ – Peter Buck – would act for Nga Puhi after 1909, and in the meantime, he financed the education of a new echelon of Northland Maori leaders, who lacked chiefly whakapapa links to the region, and whose allegiance was to Carroll and his vision for the future of Maoridom. Even today, Nga Puhi has not recovered from the effects of this sea-change in its political history, and remains, for its size, a comparatively diminutive force in National Maori politics.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 49

D N I M R E V O R E T T A M DOWN DE SI UP CH AR SE RE S ES LN IL AL NT ME G IN NEW DATA TURN

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While NZ debates whether to make 12 year olds accountable for crimes, new international research gests even 18 year olds may not truly understandsugwhat they’re doing. As TINA HESMAN and MATTHE W FRANCK report, it appears that issues in our teenage years can affect us for life

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ew brain research is shattering assumptions held for generations about the adolescent mind, fueling a battle over teen mental health, the rights of parents and the effectiveness of treatment. The research has broad implications not just for parents and their teens but also for everyone who shares a part of their world – at school, in the workplace, on the highways and the Internet. Policymakers will have to decide what to make of these findings as they ponder issues such as crime and punishment, educational testing programs, drug use and even video games.

The findings are forcing scientists to redraw the line between normal teen behavior and severe mental illness, while questioning how the brain truly develops. The picture that’s emerging is a teen brain not merely awash in a brief tide of hormones but also in the middle of a tumultuous overhaul.

Those transitions, scientists now believe, are so significant that they may unlock the mysteries of mental illness, explaining why some teens take their own lives, why others harm their classmates and loved ones, or why some emerge later in life with crippling mental disorders.

The research already looks forward to a day when teens could be tested for suicidal depression as easily as they are for diabetes. Even so, the technology to predict who will get a mental illness is still years away, says Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, director of cognitive neuroimaging at the Brain Imaging Center at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. And researchers are still struggling to pin down normal brain development. That’s not an easy task, because the brain grows in fits and starts, and everyone develops a bit differently. So what may look like the warning sign of disease may be only delayed development, she says.

“For parents worried about their children getting labeled too young, I can sort of see that, because the indicators aren’t hard and fast yet,” Yurgelun-Todd admits. “We have hints. We have suggestions of trends that seem to be more typical,” but no definitive diagnostic test yet.

But already there are signs that society, and parents in particular, would reject such a tool.

Efforts to offer even the most basic mental health questionnaire to high school students have been met with fierce resistance nationwide. Critics have attacked state and federal calls for increased screening.

Those actions are fed by a belief that millions of children have wrongly been medicated to control their behavior. Many parents question the validity of a mental health diagnosis, fearing that their children have been or will be falsely tagged with a stigma they’ll never outgrow. At the center of the controversy is the teen brain, its confounding architecture and the profound question of what’s typical in a teen and what’s not.

“Behavior that’s normal in a 13-year-old, most of us would call pathological in a 30-year-old,” says Joseph Parks, medical director for the Missouri Department of Mental Health. “But where do you make the cutoff?”

Under the old thinking, the adolescent brain was fully formed, needing only to be filled with facts, figures and experiences to become an adult mind.

At the same time, many people rejected the idea that young people were even capable of developing mental illnesses.

“You couldn’t even get the diagnosis until about the mid(19)80s,” claims Dr. Kelly N. Botteron, an assistant professor of child psychiatry at Washington University. “Earlier child psychiatrists thought kids were not even cognitively capable of getting depressed.”

The new research shows a teenage brain as an organ in transiINVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 51

“Early identification matters because treating the disorders early could head off the worst manifestations of the diseases, giving young adults a better chance at a productive life, argues Botteron” tion with a volatile and vulnerable composition. “It’s not entirely clear that the brain is ever finished developing,” says Dr. John Csernansky, director of the Conte Center for the Neuroscience of Mental Disorders at Washington University.

The evolving teenage brain clearly isn’t adultlike until the early 20s. So the old stereotypes of teens may have some merit.

If teens act “young and stupid,” it may be because brain areas that dampen impulsivity and govern rational thought are among the last to mature.

All that is fine when the brain develops normally.

But what’s shaking up those involved with mental health is what happens when the teen brain fails to successfully reinvent itself as an adult brain. Researchers increasingly believe if that process misfires, teens are vulnerable to developing mental illness.

In fact, many now believe that several severe mental illnesses have roots in the developing teen brain. That’s true, they say, even if symptoms aren’t seen until years or decades later.

What concerns many is the possibility that early warning signs might be disregarded, as parents, educators and others ignore what looks to them like typical teen behavior.

Early identification matters because treating the disorders early could head off the worst manifestations of the diseases, giving young adults a better chance at a productive life, argues Botteron.

“If an adult gets depressed and loses a year of function, they can generally get back close to where they were, but if a kid loses a year, it’s really hard to catch up again in terms of development.”

The implications of the research are vital in an age when soci52, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

ety is increasingly aware of the consequences of abnormal and violent teen behavior.

While no one can say for certain whether school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 are the result of mental illness, few question that early detection would reduce violent acts by teens.

Sometimes mental illness is to blame when children disrupt class or get into fights at school. Some may turn to drug and alcohol use to help ease the pain, leading to run-ins with the law.

Perhaps the chief hope of the new research is that it could someday mean the difference between life and death for teenagers suffering from bipolar disorder (often called manic depression), schizophrenia and major depression.

Each of those disorders can lead to suicide, which for years has ranked as the second or third-leading cause of death for teens.

Kaitlin Harris was one of 94 Missourians aged 15-24 to commit suicide last year.

Pretty, popular and a straight-A student, fifteen year old Kaitlin looked to those who knew her like she had the world.

But on March 25, she finally lost the battle she’d been fighting with depression for more than three years.

“I don’t think Kaitlin wanted to end her life,” muses Robin Harris, her mother. “She wanted to end her pain.”

Harris is now pushing her school district to adopt a program aimed at identifying early those teens who are potentially suicidal.

But determining when and how to respond to warning signs

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of adolescent mental illness is a thorny ethical issue with explosive implications. owhere has the controversy been greater than in Illinois, where a state-appointed commission’s report calling for universal mental health screening for school-age children was assailed as an encroachment of parental rights. The commission has since retreated from its recommendation.

Critics have also attacked a federal panel’s call for increased screening. In the wake of the criticism, several federal agencies have said that they do not support universal mental health screening for children, particularly without parental consent.

Leading the fight against teen mental health screening is a coalition of critics that has made allies of Scientologists like Tom Cruise and conservative activists like Phyllis Schlafly.

Much of their opposition is based on religious grounds. Some question whether mental illness even exists. Others parents fear that a child they view as normal will be incorrectly labeled as mentally ill.

But perhaps a greater share of the resistance roots from a skepticism over whether mental illness in youth can even be accurately diagnosed, much less treated. Those doubts increase as more children are medicated for behavior problems.

Mental health professionals say there’s some validity to the criticism. They point to a system that tolerates hasty diagnoses, often by physicians with no mental health expertise.

In short, they admit that at the very least, the field of adolescent mental health suffers from a crisis of credibility - one that scientific research may be unable to address.

Much of the skepticism of mental illness and its diagnosis is grounded in the fact that doctors have no blood tests, brain scans or chemical analysis from which to base their conclusion.

“You can’t examine somebody’s thoughts like you can Xray their insides,” argues Dr. Anne Glowinsky, a psychiatrist at Washington University. “When somebody comes to the ER and says `I’m suicidal,’ we don’t have a test (to confirm) that.”

No such tools exist because the brain hasn’t given up its secrets easily.

Most of what scientists know about how mental illness affects the brain comes from examinations of dead people.

Until recently, scientists couldn’t peer into living brains to look for changes associated with normal development or the ravages of disease. That is beginning to change, as researchers develop ever-more sensitive brain scanners.

In the past several years research groups have published composite pictures of healthy brains and those affected by mental illness. The differences between the healthy group and people with depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder appear striking, but don’t distinguish between causes of psychiatric disorders and the consequences of having a mental illness.

And the composite pictures are somewhat misleading.

They present the most clear-cut findings from studies of dozens to hundreds of brains. But a snapshot of an individual brain may fall somewhere between “normal” and mentally ill.

Consequently, scientists still can’t scan an individual and say with certainty that the person does or does not have a mental illness based upon the structure or function of the brain.

“Among the last areas to become fully wired are the frontal lobes and temporal lobes. Those parts of the brain are significant because they control abstract thinking, impulsiveness and emotion” There is no question that the brains of people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder look and work differently from those of their healthy peers, says Harvard’s Yurgelun-Todd. And those changes probably start earlier than most people suspect.

Her research into adults with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder showed significant brain changes. Those alterations were already present when schizophrenics had their first episode, and she began tracing the illness to its earliest appearance.

It now seems that “some people may be genetically ready to develop illness,” but the defect does not become apparent until the brain matures.

Dr. Judith L. Rapoport and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health also have been searching for the roots of schizophrenia. For a decade and a half, they have repeatedly scanned the brains of people ranging from toddlers to adults. Along the way, they began to discover how normal brains mature.

In 2004, the group published its first analysis of the maturing human brain in living people. The general layout of the brain doesn’t change as people mature, Rapoport explains. But the brain grows and shrinks, gets rewired and refined, parts are encased in protective coatings, brain cells die, and sex hormones and neurotransmitters flood in. This all happens under the influence of genetic and environmental blueprints designed to shape the organ into a brain ready for the responsibilities of adulthood.

The timing of the hormonal surges and brain changes with the onset of mental illnesses probably aren’t coincidental, researchers say. One theory holds that because brain structures involved in emotion are developing in the teenage years, the brain is more susceptible to emotional disturbance at that time.

Neurochemical systems are also developing during adolescence. Dopamine, a brain chemical that governs pleasure, motivation and interpreting perception, reaches peak production in early to mid-adolescence.

It is also one of the brain chemical systems most affected by schizophrenia. Drug and alcohol abuse or other experiences that affect dopamine may contribute to mental illness during certain sensitive times in the brain maturation process, research suggests.

Understanding normal brain development is crucial to understanding mental illnesses because some of the areas most changed during adolescence are also implicated in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other psychiatric disorders.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 53

The details of normal brain development are still just sketches. What goes wrong in the brain during mental illness is even more unclear. The portrait that is emerging is drawn in gray and white. Gray matter and white matter, that is.

Take a slice of the brain and the outer layer appears gray, while most of the middle is a mass of white. The layers look as though they are separate entities, like the skin and flesh of fruit. But gray and white matter are composed of the same stuff – brain cells.

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he gray matter is the cell bodies of neurons, the brain cells responsible for processing information. Long projections, called axons, extend out from the cell body of the neuron and connect it to other brain cells, like the cables that link computers in an office. The axons are wrapped in fatty protective coating called myelin. The myelin coating helps the neurons transmit information more quickly, much the way insulation keeps electrical impulses traveling along a wire. The axons with their myelin sheaths make up the white matter.

During brain development, the gray and white matter increase in volume, Rapoport says.

White matter growth accelerates in the teen years and continues into adulthood. The “growth” is actually the result of myelin encasing the brain’s connecting wires.

The earliest parts of the brain to get wrapped in myelin are the parts that control movement and language – skills young children need, explains Dr. Henry Nasrallah of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. But some parts of the brain don’t really come online until the teen years.

Among the last areas to become fully wired are the frontal lobes and temporal lobes. Those parts of the brain are significant because they control abstract thinking, impulsiveness and emotion.

The fact that teenagers’ brains aren’t mature has led many people to ask whether teens can be held fully accountable for their actions, Yurgelun-Todd told the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington last November. The research could influence debates about whether the death penalty should be imposed for crimes committed by teens, whether kids are responsible enough to drive at 16 and whether 18-yearolds are ready to vote on who should lead the country.

The research into the development of the brain during adolescence is beginning to show how the brains of mentally ill people are different.

Dr. Melissa P. DelBello, co-director of the Bipolar Disorders Research Program at the University of Cincinnati, and her colleagues have been peering into the white matter of the brain. In teenagers with bipolar disorder, the white matter is disorganized, particularly in the frontal regions, the researchers found.

Since those regions govern impulse control and attention, and help regulate emotion, disruptions there can produce erratic behavior.

While the white matter is being wrapped in its protective coating, the gray matter of the brain is undergoing its own changes. Inefficient or confusing connections between neurons, called synapses, are pruned and some cells die.

From the ages of about 14 through 16, people lose about 20 percent of the synapses in the brain, Nasrallah found.

54, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

This loss of gray matter, he suggests, is “like a company laying off 10 percent of its workers and still being profitable and efficient.”

The pruning may actually help the brain work better, not harder.

Children have more overall brain activity than adults, probably because they use their brains less efficiently than adults do, believes Dr. Deanna M. Barch, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington University.

“It’s almost like they need more brain than an adult to perform the same task.”

In schizophrenia, the pruning process doesn’t work the way it should and doesn’t allow for specialization. Some areas of the brains of people with schizophrenia are less active than in healthy adults, but overall, their brains are more active, she says.

Working memory – the type of memory that lets you hold a phone number in your head for a few minutes and contributes to long-term memory – is defective in people with schizophrenia, Yurgelun-Todd says.

“If this is missing, it’s going to put people at a disadvantage for being able to read their world and respond.”

That can be particularly crippling during adolescence when skills for social interaction, intuition and nuance are emerging.

Rapoport’s studies show that children with early-onset schizophrenia rapidly lose gray matter from the frontal and temporal lobes, and they lose more gray matter than their healthy peers.

The pattern looks like a great exaggeration of normal maturation, Rapoport reports.

“It’s way out of whack and happens much too fast.”

But the way to slow the process is unclear. It could involve medicating children who display warning signs of schizophrenia but don’t yet have the illness.

Says Harvard’s Yurgelun-Todd: “We have no problems taking aspirin to prevent heart disease or vitamins to prevent colds, so if you know you’re going to get a devastating brain disease, maybe it’s not so bad to take a drug.”

And drugs may not even be necessary to head off mental illness, she said. Simple changes in the way children are raised could be as effective.

“The human brain is very susceptible to its environment, both positive and negative.”

Some people think censoring movies, TV and video games could help promote mental health in youngsters. But it may be more important that families provide stimulating activities, good role models and a supportive environment for their children, Yurgelun-Todd believes.

Researchers hope that learning to control the rush of neurochemicals and hormones and shape brain development could help cure mental illness. Yurgelun-Todd is optimistic that science will soon be able to diagnose mental illness at its earliest stages, but she doesn’t have confidence that society will embrace the changes necessary to minimize the ravaging effects the brain disorders can have on young minds.

But new efforts to define normal, healthy development and to track brain changes associated with mental illness may lead to predictive tests that could show which children are at risk of getting a psychiatric disease.

Parents are already familiar with growth curves that rate their children’s weight, height and head size. The new stud-

ies may lead to a similar growth curve for brain development, Washington University’s Kelly Botteron says.

But a brain scan for mental health as reliable as a mammogram or colonoscopy is probably decades away, scientists say.

For now, psychiatrists and psychologists must still rely on interviews and observations of children’s behavior to diagnose mental illness.

As scientists seek a breakthrough, critics of mental health treatment are poised to trounce on programs that seek to identify mentally ill youth.

In recent months, much of that resistance has been directed at a questionnaire used by hundreds of high schools nationwide to identify teens who may need help.

The program, called TeenScreen, was developed by Columbia University, which structured the screening tool based on the latest brain research. The program’s developers say it has already shown success in identifying troubled teens who might otherwise slip through the cracks.

Last year, more than 50,000 students were screened nationwide, and dozens of schools were on waiting lists to participate. But the program has been assailed in many communities.

Some school boards have rejected the program after parents complained that it might falsely label their child.

Two parents in Indiana have sued TeenScreen, claiming they did not consent to their daughter being screened. Activists are tapping into fears held by many parents that far too many children are being medicated for problems such as attention deficit disorder.

“TeenScreen is nothing more than a way for the psychiatric industry to troll for patients,” says Roger Teagarden of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis. The organization is supported by the Church of Scientology, which opposes mental health treatment.

The backlash against teen mental health screening extends far beyond just one program, with criticism directed at the federal government.

In 2003, a report released by the New Freedom Commission – formed by President George W. Bush – issued a report calling for increased mental health screening. The same report cited TeenScreen as a model program.

Illinois followed the federal lead, forming its own commission to make recommendations on mental health. The panel initially called for “universal screening” of children for mental illness. No state in the nation had taken such a bold position.

But the Illinois draft report was immediately attacked by critics, including one of the state senators who supported the bill creating the mental health commission.

Today, state Sen. Chris Lauzen, R-Ill., agrees that states must work to identify mentally ill youth. But he says parental rights must be paramount, even if that means that some children’s mental illness might go unnoticed.

“If I were going to err, I would err on the side of the person who loves that child and not the person who knows what’s best for that child.”

As criticism mounts against screening efforts, the challenge facing mental health professionals is to win over skeptical parents.

Science may someday help, offering the hope that a parent could one day look over a brain image and trust the validity of a diagnosis.

“The research could influence debates about whether the death penalty should be imposed for crimes committed by teens, whether kids are responsible enough to drive at 16 and whether 18-year-olds are ready to vote on who should lead the country”

Parks, medical director for the Missouri Department of Mental Health, reckons the stigma that accompanies mental health treatment is partly due to public doubts that various disorders actually exist.

Parks and others say that reaching mentally ill teens requires as much of a societal breakthrough as a scientific one.

Part of that effort involves elevating the status of mental health by boosting public confidence in the accuracy in diagnosis and the efficacy of treatment. But that’s not an easy sell, given that the mental health system is already overburdened.

Family practitioners and pediatricians are doing most of the work of diagnosing and medicating mental disorders among children. Often that’s happening with office visits of 15-30 minutes, simply because insurance won’t pay for a more complete diagnosis.

Parents like Robin Harris, whose daughter Kaitlin committed suicide last year, say the time for action is now.

Harris is urging her local school district, where Kaitlin attended school, to become the second in the state to offer the TeenScreen program. Doing so, Harris says, could give teens the support and respect they need to open up and admit they have a problem that needs treatment.

In the moments before she killed herself, Kaitlin drew an angel on the mirror in her bedroom. The angel was Kaitlin’s emblem. She had drawn it many times before and included the words “I have wings to fly” inscribed on the wings.

Now her mother keeps an angel statue at the base of Kaitlin’s tombstone. Under the angel, Harris stashes business cards from a suicide prevention group. She has refilled the cache several times.

“I don’t want to miss an opportunity. Even those kids who seem to have it all together, I don’t want to miss an opportunity to give them resources.”

On Kaitlin’s birthday last year, Harris handed out the suicide information cards to the teenagers who had gathered to honor her daughter. Then they released balloons to fly toward heaven.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 55

WORLDBRIEF

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE… They’ll Be Watching You They’re gunning for George W. over illegal phonetapping in the US, but there’s a lot more going on at the cutting edge of privacy invasion than you realize, reports ROBERT BOYD WASHINGTON

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ou may never have heard the term “data mining,” but it’s at the core of the argument that’s raging over government eavesdropping on Americans. It’s also how commercial companies learn about who you are, where you go, what you eat, what you like, what you buy.

Data mining is the process of using computer technology to extract the knowledge that’s buried in enormous volumes of undigested information. Trillions of bits of raw data are culled from telephone calls, e-mails, the Internet, airlines, car rentals, stores, credit card records and a myriad of other sources spawned by the information age.

“A lot can be learned about a person through the combination of massive amounts of data and the use of sophisticated analytical techniques,” explains Daniel Solove, an associate law professor at George Washington University in Washington.

Whenever you search for information or a product on the Internet, say on Google or Yahoo, you leave a trace.

“Every single search you’ve ever conducted - ever - is stored on a database somewhere,” says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School in New York. “There’s probably nothing more embarrassing than the searches we’ve made.”

Once it’s been collected, the data harvest is stored, organized, searched and analyzed by complex computer programs called algorithms.

The programs scour the data for hidden patterns or relationships, such as a suspicious number of insurance claims by an individual or repeated phone calls between, for example, Afghanistan and Detroit.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating the Bush administration’s use of wiretaps to monitor such calls without a court warrant.

Data mining turns up such potentially meaningful patterns as, say, Person A telephoned B, who e-mailed C, who met with D and E, who rented an apartment together in F-town. Someone at that apartment made a phone call to someone in Country G in the Middle East. Human investigators can take it from there.

Data miners are like gold or diamond miners, who have to burrow through tons of useless material to get the nuggets they 56, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

want. They couldn’t do it without modern computing systems.

“Human analysts with no special tools can no longer make sense of enormous volumes of data,” says an advertisement from Megaputer Intelligence Inc., a data-mining firm in Bloomington, Ind. “Data mining automates the process of finding relationships and patterns in raw data.”

In the war against terrorism, data mining is a way to “connect the dots,” something the government failed to do before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Jeffrey Ullman, a computer scientist who teaches a course on data mining at Stanford University in California, offers a hypothetical example: Suppose you wanted to check a list of 10 suspected evildoers to see if any two of them spent two nights in the same hotel at the same time, perhaps to plot a terrorist attack.

According to Ullman, you’d have to search through at least 250,000 names to spot the suspicious meeting. That’s too much for a human analyst but not for a computer.

“Through data mining, (government) agencies can quickly and efficiently obtain information on individuals or groups by exploiting large databases containing personal information,” the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in a report to Congress last year.

“Before data aggregation and data mining came into use, personal information contained in paper records stored at widely dispersed locations, such as courthouses or other government offices, was relatively difficult to gather and analyze,” the GAO said.

A GAO survey found almost 200 data-mining programs in operation or planned at 52 government agencies in 2004.

For example, the State Department draws on a Citibank system to detect fraud or waste by employees using government credit cards.

There’s a “greatly increased government hunger for private information of all sorts,” says Jonathan Zittrain, an expert on the social implications of the Internet at Harvard Law School.

“As such databases grow, the government essentially possesses its own stockpile of the nation’s communications on which to perform searches.”

A national security data-mining operation might work like

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 57

“Every single search you’ve ever conducted - ever - is stored on a database somewhere. There’s probably nothing more embarrassing than the searches we’ve made” this: A search engine - perhaps similar to Google’s – monitors phone calls and communications over the Internet, collecting certain key words, such as “bin Laden,” “the sheik” or “nuclear plant.” It stores the findings in a computer database and looks for links between the key words and other names, places or telephone numbers.

To make sense of the findings, analysts may use a “data visualization” program to create a three-dimensional map, showing the words as hills on a landscape. Higher peaks mean the words appear more frequently. Closer peaks mean the words are related in some fashion.

Data-mining tools also are used in marketing, finance and politics. Investigators detect insurance fraud. Businesses get leads on good sales prospects. Police confirm which precincts 58, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

are the most crime-ridden. Political candidates learn where best to spend their time and money.

Quadstone, a data-mining firm in Boston, touts its services: “We’ve created software that can predict your customer’s behavior. Whether you’re in the banking, brokerage, insurance, retail, or telecommunications industries, we give you the ability to use past customer history as a tool to understand, predict, and influence their future behavior.”

The distinction between government and private data mining is blurring.

“Agencies at all levels of government are now interested in collecting and mining large amounts of data from commercial sources,” the GAO reported. “Agencies may use such data ... to perform large-scale data analysis and pattern discovery in order to discern potential terrorist activity by unknown individuals.”

The FBI’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, for example, submits queries to commercial databases for information on suspected suicide bombers, which it can combine with secret government files.

Several government data-mining projects – such as Total Information Awareness and the MATRIX, an acronym for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange - were canceled after a public uproar.

Other government data-mining projects include Talon, a program run by the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity, which collects reports on demonstrators outside U.S. military bases. Thousands of such reports are stored in a database called Cornerstone and are shared with other intelligence agencies.

The Pentagon’s Advanced Research and Development Activity, based at Fort Meade, Maryland, runs a research program whose goal is to develop better ways to mine huge databases to “help the nation avoid strategic surprises ... such as those of September 11, 2001.”

Data-mining experts make a distinction between the appropriate use of the technology to detect terrorists or catch criminals and its possible misuse to invade privacy or inhibit free communication.“The realization that every digital movement is recorded and monitored itself will chill private behavior,” Zittrain wrote in the Harvard Law Review.

But Gregory Piatetsky, a Boston-based consultant to datamining companies, defends the technology.

“I believe that data mining technology can be useful,” he says, noting its success in detecting credit card fraud and money laundering. In national security cases, the government “may have linked several e-mails from a bad guy to other guys that we know nothing about. Before you can determine whether that guy is good or bad, you first need to intercept” the e-mails.

Some experts say it’s all right to use data mining against terrorists, but not against domestic crooks.

“My concern is that the government can’t distinguish between fighting the war against militant Islam and ordinary crimes,” Stanford’s Ullman says. “Just like bank robbery differs in degree from going through a stop sign, terrorism differs in degree from drug crime. ... It’s OK to use such a system to pursue terrorists.

In fact, I believe it is essential. But we need safeguards to assure it will not be used to track ‘ordinary’ criminals.”

For more background information, go to www.twocrows. com and click on “About Data Mining.”

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thinkLIFE money

A blunt instrument

Don’t be fooled by ‘negative gearing’ hucksters, writes Peter Hensley

T

he boys and girls at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand were called together just before Christmas and asked to come up with plans which would assist their boss Dr Alan Bollard to curb the upward spiral of house prices. His job is to preside over price stability and ever increasing house prices means he could fail his next job appraisal. At present his weapon of choice has been the overnight cash rate. He has steadily been cranking it up and has been disappointed with the results. Normally if he pushed the Overnight Cash Rate (OCR) up, mortgage rates would also be pushed up. His counterpart in the USA is experiencing the same dilemma. Alan Greenspan in the USA has been hiking up the Federal Reserve’s base rate with the same goal in mind. His advisers, too, have been amazed that this action has had little influence on longer dated bonds and mortgage rates.

Generally, when the price of short term money goes up the price of long term money does the same. Both Governors wanted to push the price of mortgages up, thus making them unattractive, which in turn would remove some of the demand that has been pushing house prices into the stratosphere.

Both Alan B (NZ) and Alan G (USA) have worked out that house prices have apparently gone past the notion of true value for money and have been heading higher solely because of demand.

Looming retirement has seen Baby Boomers transform themselves into property developers and speculators. They have just bounced off a bad experience with shares and managed funds which has seen their perceived retirement plan derailed over night. During the nineties they were lured into the trendy international shares sector because it was booming at the time and because of a possible over exposure their wealth plan was severely disrupted.

This experience could have deterred them

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from participating in the recent upward run of New Zealand and Australian shares. They feel comfortable in buying a real asset (property) which they can drive by and look at from time to time. The fact they don’t understand the basic concept of positive cash flow, has seen them take on a level of debt that even the banks should be afraid of.

New Zealand banking loan criteria appears to be more preoccupied with securing liens against non income-producing assets, than they are with positive cash flow. Lending managers of banks and institutions have been seduced by ever increasing bonus targets and they have blithely ignored the basic fundamental concept of debt. It has to be repaid, with interest. Ever increasing property values do not translate into cash flow.

The majority of loans made over recent years have been made on negative cash flow. Intelligent use of LAQC’s have seen the Government become unwitting partners in the great real estate scam. Instead of an individual buying the property, they use an LAQC company. An LAQC – or Loss Attributing Qualifying Company – allows the shareholders to transfer the loss that company has made onto their personal income tax, thus reducing their own tax liability. For some inane bizarre reason this makes the individual feel good. The reality is that they are losing money. They feel good about reducing their tax burden, when in reality paying more tax is a consequence of wealth and should not been seen as a hurdle.

LAQC’s were initially set up to encourage entrepreneurs to have a go and set up their own business. Authorities recognised that the first couple of years might be tough and allowed any company loss to be transferred to the individual income of the ones taking the risk, thus providing a helping hand to a start up operation.

“

Looming retirement has seen Baby Boomers transform themselves into property developers and speculators. They have just bounced off a bad experience with shares and managed funds which has seen their perceived retirement plan derailed over night

”

Photography: Andrew Martin

Property investors are encouraged to utilise an LAQC. Debt interest is a legitimate tax deduction and with the size of loans outweighing potential income, investors are almost guaranteed to make a loss, depending upon a future increase in the value of the property in order to make a profit. The mantra they reassure themselves with is “property never loses value”.

Sure, it may maintain its value over time, but if you are cash flow negative (which means that you are losing money) and the price does not go up, well hello, the longer you keep paying, the bigger the loss.

As indicated Alan Bollard (NZ Reserve Bank Governor) is looking for a back up now that the OCR interest rate increases appear to be ineffective against the relentless rise in property values. The popularity of LAQC’s has been raised as a potential target as has regulating institutions’ loanto-value ratio, thus attempting to eliminate 100 +% mortgages. Both of these factors were raised in a discussion document issued by the Reserve Bank in December.

Bollard’s problem stems from the fact that his actions in pushing up short term interest rates has created an inverse yield curve. This is where investors get paid more for short term money than they do for long term money. The general opinion amongst economists is that an inverted yield curve is a very good sign that a recession is due to hit the economy shortly.

The USA has a similar problem as its Central Bank Governor has been battling the American share of the world wide property boom. Greenspan has been raising short term interest rates and, as in New Zealand, it has had little effect on the market. Housing finance has been the boom industry for the past five years.

Some pundits suggest that prices have been detached from reality (and true value) for some time. The only difference is that Greenspan retired from office on January 31, so it looks like he’s retired a winner and no major disasters occurring on his watch. His replacement will be left to carry the can.

The fact that Bollard is looking outside the square and is canvassing opinions about what other weapons he might utilise in fighting house price inflation could indicate that he is serious about the matter. It is my belief that tinkering with LAQC’s would have far wider implications in the market place and it would not be fair on budding entrepreneurs if that slight tax advantage was removed in order to fix a problem that shouldn’t need fixing. Also it would be very strange if he was allowed to encroach on banks and institutions lending policies and attempt to control loanto-value ratios on residential housing. That would definitely be a step backwards for our free market economy.

It is possible that Bollard is wiser than that and is using the media in an attempt to get the following message to the market place: The property market could be over valued and investors should take care when analysing their cash flow projections as negative gearing (excess debt) is another word for losing money.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 61

thinkLIFE education

“P

arents write on the slate of who we are”, says Dr Phil McGraw, host of the popular “Dr. Phil” TV show.

Many reject this belief because they may have had abusive parents. They make every effort to block out anything associated with that bad experience. Often that in itself causes them to lose out on the many things in life they might have otherwise allowed themselves to enjoy; things like love, trust and deep, rewarding relationships.

Often, the fact that we make every effort to steer clear of certain things in our every day life that remind us of our childhood means that our parents still have huge influence over how we live our lives today, what decisions we make and in many cases what kind of life partner we choose.

It is critically important to understand what was written on our slates and how it affected and still affects us, if we are to mend our wounds and move on in life. It is equally important to grasp exactly what we, in turn are writing on our children’s slates, if we are committed to giving them every opportunity to succeed in life.

You might think working yourself into a stupor to support your family is honourable. It is, if it’s not at the expense of yourself or your loved ones. Your family will be much worse off if you suffer a stroke or heart attack. In many cases it also tells your wife and children what is number one in your life. That can often encourage your children to get themselves into trouble, because it might be the only way they can get you to spend any time with them. To a child starved for attention, any attention will do.

Often not spending quality time with one’s daughters can drive them into the arms of less desirable boys, because they don’t know how they should be treated as women. That’s why having regular datenights with one’s daughters are so important. It sets a standard. Apart from that it also gives them a sense of self-worth, which is vitally important to keeping them from succumbing to peer pressure.

But, if the one male figure in their lives has always rejected them, being treated badly by other males becomes normal and

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Writing on the wall

Education isn’t just about academia, but life skills, argues Jacques Windell they start believing that they deserve what they get.

How many missed hockey games, or school plays does it take before someone comes to the conclusion that they’re not worth the effort? What are you writing on your children’s slates?

Your children watch you like hawks!

What are you telling them, without opening your mouth? What are you teaching them about things like money and being responsible citizens? Judging by the country’s current account deficit and personal credit card debt, not a heluva lot.

Our children are being taught that spending other people’s money in abundance is the way to get ahead in life and that their worth as human beings is mea-

sured by the car they drive and the house and toys they don’t yet own.

They never get taught about repercussions. All they see every month is a brand new house, home entertainment system or car. They never see Dad rolling around in bed at night wondering how he’s going to pay for it all, especially as interest rates continue to rise.

The fact of the matter is that businesses are going to have to tighten their belts as interest rates, fuel prices, etc continue to escalate. Economists are predicting a growth rate as low as 2% this year. So the perks of company cars and company petrol may well get revoked. That means finding money for transport not budgeted for. And then there’s those invest-

“

How many missed hockey games, or school plays does it take before someone comes to the conclusion that they’re not worth the effort?

ment properties. What happens when on top of having perks revoked interest rates hike again?

For now some banks are still encouraging people deeper into debt and bending over backwards to remove any conceivable obstacle they might incur. But, for how long will the bank be your best friend?

It reminds me of the true story of a Kiwi man who built his company on debt. Although he was extremely dedicated, he also lived it up large. But, one day the factoring company who, up to that point had helped him with much needed cash-flow decided to pull the plug. In a matter of months he was forced to sell a company with an asset base of well over $200,000. In order to rid him-

”

self of $200,000 of debt he sold his business for $1. His wife separated from him shortly afterwards.

What motivated a very intelligent man to be so foolish? His slate. On it his stepfather had written that he would never amount to anything. He tried to get there too fast, because he wanted to prove a point and it led to his financial demise.

If you’re still skeptical about who writes on the slate of who you are, think again.

Let’s be honest. We’re teaching our children to gamble with their futures. There are consequences to debt and they can be dire.

Your children don’t have to sign their names next to a life sentence of debt. Given the right guidance they can get ahead without having to gamble on their futures.

A country’s current account balance measures what a country saves minus what it spends. For NZ it shows that since 1990, it has been a net borrower, in order to finance spending. The last time NZ was a net saver was in 1973.

We really need to take a hard, long, honest look at ourselves first and then share it with our children if we are to give them the tools they will need to bring this country back from where we’ve taken it.

What we as parents, or slate writers must understand is that the days of milk and honey are over.

One organization taking that message to heart is Liberty Trust (www.libertytrust.org.nz), which among other things provides home finance without interest and tries to promote a lower reliance on credit with all its pitfalls.

Trust chairman, Kelvin Deal, Chartered Accountant says there’s a need to educate kids with financial lifeskills: “Rising house prices, student loans, lack of guidance, media advertising and easy debt make it very difficult for young people today. Home ownership brings social stability, better health and quality of life but is a goal our children have little hope of ever achieving without training and preparation.” He argues that parents need to actively train their children to work hard, resist bad peer pressure, save, spend wisely, and avoid unnecessary debt. It’s an issue close to his heart.

“Teach them the power of interest and provide a goal of home ownership. We’re a New Zealand charitable trust, for example, and for 16 years we have been lending without interest to New Zealand families.

At the cost of one percent p.a. over ten years people are sponsoring their children through the Trust so they can purchase their first home interest free, saving many years of debt and tens of thousands of dollars interest.”

The fact of the matter is that the culture of debt in NZ simply has to be addressed.

America now owes Asian banks more than 8 trillion dollars? Our own current account deficit is around $12 billion.

Where will we be in the next 20 years if things are allowed to continue? Where America is now? Who will own NZ? What you write on the slate of our future leaders will determine our collective future.

So please write wisely and give our children all the tools they need to ensure a bright future for all.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 63

thinkLIFE science

Riders on the storm

Is it possible to blast a cyclone off course, or suck a hurricane dry? Mike Goldfein profiles the new stormchasers

T

he idea has all the potential for a techie remake of The Poseidon Adventure. Picture a tugboat straining to tow a huge barge into the teeth of an angry hurricane like Katrina. Bolted down to the barge are 20 jet engines, nozzles aimed toward the heavens. The B-movie-like script calls for these littleengines-that-could to fire up and blow away the storm – or at least weaken it.

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Of course, it’s equally possible that the barge would sink to the bottom of the ocean, mission unaccomplished, after being swamped by 15-metre seas.

That possibility hasn’t deterred Massachusetts Institute of Technology research scientist Moshe Alamaro, who has sketched such a hurricane disruption technique in a scientific paper.

“I think that from the engineering

point of view, we can easily do that today,” Alamaro says as he shows computer graphics simulating the engine-laden barge. “It’s just a fantastic problem, very interesting, and I think we can have an impact.”

Dismissing Alamaro’s scheme as little more than the laboratory musings of a utopian scientist might be easy. But it turns out he is not alone. And after the billions of dollars in damage, lost lives and shat-

“

It is critical that we determine if weather can be modified to the extent that lives are saved and property damage is limited tered communities along the Gulf Coast left in the wake of Katrina and Rita, the research has gained new attention.

Researchers examining weather modification techniques to thwart hurricanes and tornadoes, dispel fog and create rain received a boost last month when a Senate committee approved legislation by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to provide $90 million for research and development.

“It is critical that we determine if weather can be modified to the extent that lives are saved and property damage is limited,” the Texas Republican argues. “This work is vital, especially as we near the end of such a devastating hurricane season.”

“Indeed small changes do have large effects on weather systems,” says Dr. Ross Hoffman, a principal scientist at Atmospheric & Environmental Research, a weather technology company in Massachusetts.

Hoffman has become something of a rock star in the relatively buttoned-down world of atmospheric science.

”

By making tiny artificial changes in temperature, he was able to force Hurricane Iniki, which hit the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1992, to veer 60 miles off course, missing land entirely. A similar change caused Hurricane Andrew, which crushed southern Florida that same year, to weaken from a Category 3 to a Category 1.

“It was tenths of a degree over a very large area,” Hoffman says. “Some day, we’re going to find that ‘Oh, my goodness, we actually have the ability to control the weather on a large scale.’”

Hoffman doesn’t suggest that the jump from computer to reality will be easy. He hypothesizes that it might require something like a constellation of satellites capable of beaming down vast quantities of solar heat to do the trick.

Trying to tame hurricanes isn’t a new idea. The federal government ran Project Stormfury from 1962 to 1983 attempting to discover a way to modify the massive storms.

Scientists sprayed silver iodide into four hur-

ricanes, theorizing that this cloud-seeding technique would drain their energy.

The results were initially encouraging, as wind speeds temporarily dropped 15 to 30 percent. Only later, however, did they realize the flaw in the study. “It turned out the hurricane was going to do that anyhow,” says Dr. Hugh Willoughby, a professor at Florida International University, and a one-time Project Stormfury scientist.

“We started looking at unmodified hurricanes and found that they weakened through the same process,” says Willoughby, who went on to become director of hurricane research for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Willoughby now calls hurricane modification “the alien abductions of meteorology” and says he remains unconvinced that mere mortals can defeat a 300 mile-wide storm that has the energy of “a big nuclear warhead going off every half hour or so.”

Still, he adds, “Maybe there is some clever thing we could do, but we don’t know what it is.”

In Jupiter, Florida, Peter Cordani is convinced he has an answer.

Cordani, a private businessman with no formal scientific training, is spending millions of his own money to beat back hurricanes.

His company, Dyn-O-Mat, manufactures water-absorbent products such as garage floor mats. Cordani speculates that the polymer powder used in those mats could be sprayed into hurricanes, sapping their strength.

“I think it is going to suck the moisture out just like we claim it will,” he says.

The fine white powder swells into a thick gooey substance when it gets wet. Sprayed from a few dozen tankers, Cordani dreams the substance will cut a wedge from a hurricane’s eyewall by raining tons of waterlogged polymer goop into the ocean. He adds the substance is environmentally friendly, since it dissolves upon contact with salt water.

Though the mainstream weather research community has largely dismissed Cordani, he’s in the process of organizing a group of as yet unnamed universities and scientists to conduct formal studies with his powder.

“Someone has got to do something,” he says when asked why he’s spending his own money to prove an untested theory.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 65

thinkLIFE technology

Rescue me

The new generation of portable GPS devices are destined to replace street maps, says Ian Wishart

Y

ou’re out the back of beyond somewhere, the kids are screeching in the seat behind, you took a wrong turn about 30 kms ago, and a goat ate your map book. So what are your options?

If you’ve got one of the new Navman range, like the iCN 520, you’d be a reasonably happy puppy. Navmans, and devices like them, were some of the hottest selling tech ‘toys’ over Christmas, and there’s a good reason for that: owning a Navman means never having to say you’re lost. Not only does Alpha Male get to save face with his better half by never having to ask directions, there’s also many a better half out there discovering that taking instructions from a Navman is a lot easier than trying to read an upside down map.

The principle behind the devices is simple. The iCN 520 hooks into the global positioning satellite system (GPS) devised by the US military, which provides an elec-

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tronic map grid of the planet’s surface.

Now this is ideal if you’re planning a missile strike on Tehran and you want to make sure you hit number 37 Ayatollah Street with your payload, because the military GPS is accurate down to around 30 centimetres. But outside of Soldier of Fortune readers, hikers and yachties, GPS in New Zealand has not been a ‘must have’ technology. Until now.

What Navman did was figure out a way to link the incoming GPS data with New Zealand’s road maps, thus turning GPS into something far more practical for the average punter.

Simply punch in the address you want to go to, and the inbuilt computer calculates a route to get there.

Not only does the LCD screen throw up a road map featuring your vehicle moving in real time, but it also provides audio cues so you don’t even have to look at the map.

“

The Navman comes with complete NZ roadmaps built in. About the size of a cigarette packet, the unit is portable and can be used virtually throughout the western world provided you buy the map data for other countries you intend to travel

”

“In 600 metres, turn left. In 100 metres, turn left.”

It is this audio guide, like having a navigator in your passenger seat, that makes the system almost idiot-proof.

Well, almost.

On our first test drive of the unit, it gave us a bum steer. The task seemed simple enough. I entered the address of a destination I knew well, and decided to follow Navman’s suggested route rather than my own. All was well – the Navman unit’s slightly posh British female voice telling me to turn left here or right there, or whatever, until I came to a suggested turning point that ominously carried a sign saying “No Exit”.

“This’ll be fun,” I thought to myself as I followed the Nav’ girl’s instructions and turned right.

Sure enough, 300 metres further on, I ran out of road and found myself confronted by a couple of cows standing where Nav’ girl thought the road should be.

“Hah,” muttered my female passenger.

“They should never have chosen a woman

to give directions. Everyone knows women can’t read maps!”

The problem, as best I could figure, is that often in rural areas legal roads exist that have never actually been completed.

Paper roads, if you like, that exist in council records and, obviously, in the maps that Navman uses.

Turning the car around to head back to the main road, Nav’ girl kept telling me: “Perform a U-turn at your earliest opportunity”. Clearly the unit was convinced a road existed and I was now, in its view, heading in the wrong direction.

Thankfully, Navman’s designers foresaw these niggling kind of problems. The real beauty of the units is they will instantly recalculate and load an alternative route if you take a wrong turn. Thus, it eventually accepted my refusal to drive through a paddock and gave me another set of directions to successfully follow.

In this sense, the Navman is indeed idiot proof. It is guaranteed to get you where you’re going, provided you use common sense if necessary. By the same token, the

Navman is not a device you would use as a routine guide to your city. What I mean by that is that the computer will pick out a guaranteed route, but it won’t necessarily be the quickest route. The iCN 520 does have the option of programming preferences such as back roads or motorways, and these would have a bearing on which route it ordinarily chose, but on the default settings for example it wasn’t necessarily calculating the fastest route to Auckland Airport.

As a tourist I wouldn’t be without one, however, and in the news business where you are called to venture far and wide to unfamiliar suburban streets the Navman is also a big asset. Equally so for those who hate reading maps and find it much easier listening to instructions without having to remember street names.

The Navman comes with complete NZ roadmaps built in. About the size of a cigarette packet, the unit is portable and can be used virtually throughout the western world provided you buy the map data for other countries you intend to travel (Australia/ North America/Europe for example).

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 67

feelLIFE

sport

Super 14 meets kryptonite

Investigate’s new sportswriter Chris Forster wonders whether rugby will be weakened by its workload this year

I

t speaks volumes for the power of the media dollar. While most of us wallow in the warm, muggy nights and bask in a rare golden summer, the Southern Hemisphere’s finest rugby talent is going hell for leather inside our greatest sports stadiums.

The all new, super-sized version of the Super 12 is already upon us. Add extra slice of Springbok and another helping of the Wallabies – and whammo you’ve got the all new Super 14.

A five year, NZ$474 million dollar deal between SANZAR and Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited had finely-tuned athletes sweating, kicking, rucking and running extremely fast in front of their adoring fans in early February.

The Blues and the Hurricanes kicked off the whole 95 game marathon at Eden Park, in front of 35,000 adoring fans. .

Recently retired All Blacks captain Tana

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Umaga was there. In fact 19 All Blacks were on show six weeks after completing their Grand Slam rampage through the UK. If their battered bodies stand up to the big hits, endless rucks and sprawling mauls plus the pressure of performing – the best of the best will still be going at it on the 27th of May. You could be excused for thinking’s it’s all a bit too much, too soon. After all the West Indies haven’t even started their cricket tour of New Zealand yet.

For NZRU deputy CEO Steve Tew it’s about rugby surviving and flourishing in the professional era … “competing on a global stage”.

Super 14’s main competitor for bums on seats is the National Rugby League, and they don’t get underway for another month. There’s competition from the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in

March, the Soccer World Cup in June, tennis grand slams, golf majors and any other truly global sport vying for a slice of the big bucks we fork-out for pay television and to fill the grandstands.

Tew makes no bones about the necessity to move with the times and it means more rugby. He’s been heavily involved in the New Zealand Rugby Union’s negotiations, which took two full years to thrash out in a deal with SANZAR partners South Africa and Australia and the bigspending News Limited.

This seasoned rugby administrator is a firm believer in attacking the competition with the ‘more is better’ strategy.

“We needed to expand to the Super 14 to match the revenue of 10 years ago when the Super 12 started”.

Tew sees the bumper opening night crowd at Auckland’s Garden of Eden as

“

It’s now over to the SANZAR partners, and their backers, to make sure the game and its stars come ahead of profits. Otherwise the fans, and more importantly the viewers – might start voting with their feet and their remotes about the latest extension of an already bloated rugby season

”

a positive sign the expansion will “bed down” nice and early.

Long gone are the days when it was all blokes and rugby diehards at rugby games. These days the oval ball is directed at women and families. But it’s the big bucks of Rupert Murdoch that really “walk the walk”.

By expanding the Super 12 to include two new franchises – it helps News Limited fill air-time through Sky Sport in New Zealand, Fox Sport in Australia and SuperSport in the Republic of South Africa..

It also helps satisfy a growing pay TV audience in the UK, and beyond. Or at least offer the British viewers a viable alternative to the endless diet of soccer, soccer and more soccer.

The Australians are happy. They get the Western Force to expand their representation to four teams, despite all the moans and groans about lack of player depth there.

Former All Blacks coach John Mitchell’s a much-maligned man in New Zealand.

But he’s learnt from his tumultuous sacking after the 2003 Rugby World Cup failure. Mitch has assembled an almost entirely home-grown squad to try and make a splash in their debut season from the far-flung home base of Perth.

The New South Wales Waratahs were last year’s beaten finalists and, under impressive coach Ewen McKenzie, look the best Australian bet at making the finals.

The under-performing Queensland Reds have told coach Jeff Miller to pack his bags at the end of the season, even if they lift the Super 14 trophy.

The Brumbies glory days seem to be over. The ageing Wallabies pairing of George Gregan and Stephen Larkham will need to rediscover their best form to propel the Canberra-based franchise into the top half of the competition.

The South Africans have a new franchise kicking off from the Afrikaans heartland of Bloemfontein. They’re a ferocious bunch known as the Cheetahs, full of bullocking hard men like Os du Randt and Jannie du Plessis.

Most ardent rugby fans find a fifth team from South Africa hard to stomach, given their other four teams have struggled to make an impact in the ten editions of the Super 12.

Last year the Blue Bulls of Pretoria made the top four for the first time, but the Stormers, Cats and Sharks filled three of the bottom four slots on the table.

They’ve also been hamstrung by horrendous travel schedules of up to six matches on the road, when everyone knows South Africans don’t travel well.

The Cheetahs have split from the underperforming Cats of Johannesburg – who finished a lowly 11th or 12th in the last four seasons of the Super 12.

The five competing franchises in the Rainbow Nation have a rather large incentive to survive this testing first season off Super 14. The worst performers get relegated and replaced by another provincial powerhouse in next year’s edition. And noone takes failure or humiliation quite as hard as the South African rugby public.

New Zealand’s rugby stocks have never been higher. The All Blacks are undisputed top dogs and main attractions in the rugby world, after their all-conquering record of 11 test wins from 12 in 2005.

Defending Super 12 champs the Crusaders have lost long serving Red and Black icons like Andrew Mehrtens and Justin Marshall to the lure of the pound and lucrative swansongs in the UK. Robbie Deans is the most successful coach in Super 12 history, into his seventh season and a cheerleader for the expanded competition. He believes the

Western force have provided extra bite inside Australia.

“There’s no love lost between them and the teams they’ve pilfered (players) from”.

Deans is also in full favour of the South Africans “adding real desperation” with their worst team relegations system at the end of the competition. Deans picks the juggernaut Blues as the team to beat.

The Aucklanders are awesome on paper and with David Nucifora now heading the brains trust with player depth to burn – you’d put them down as top four certainties.

The Hurricanes are another franchise chockful of talent, with the inimitable Tana Umaga to inspire them in his postAll Blacks career.

The Highlanders will need Anton Oliver to inspire a typically robust southern forward effort if they’re to last the distance and be a factor come playoffs time in May. The Chiefs have enticed All Blacks Mils Muliaina and Sam Tuitupou south of the Bombays, and have the ability on paper to surprise if the front-liners can last the distance in the key games.

Player welfare will be the bottom line if the Super 14 is to click and make Rupert Murdoch the megabucks he demands over the next five years. With the season now starting in early February and the All Blacks still chugging along in Europe in November, that’s a helluva workload of tackling and practice sessions and endless scrutiny from the rugby mad media.

A few rugby experts have tipped top franchises like the Blues, Crusaders and Waratahs to rest their talent against their weaker foe, or be prepared to sacrifice targeted matches in South Africa.

Dreaded words like rotations, timeout and draft come into play.

Crammed schedules come with the territory and create the major handicaps to this Super 14 becoming a runaway success. The fans will inevitably have to put up with lacklustre games, off-days and the dreary diet of injury stories fed up by the mass media.

It’s now over to the SANZAR partners, and their backers, to make sure the game and its stars come ahead of profits. Otherwise the fans, and more importantly the viewers – might start voting with their feet and their remotes about the latest extension of an already bloated rugby season.

Chris Forster joins Investigate from this issue. He is also sports editor at Radio Live.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 69

feelLIFE

health

Tubular blues

Fertility treatment is becoming an ethical minefield, explains Claire Morrow

A

ustralia’s treasurer, Peter Costello, famously advised his fellow citizens to have one for mum, one for dad, and one for Australia, and backed up his advice by offering a cash bonus to parents of new Australians. The birth rate is falling, and women who do have children keep putting it off until later in life. I know two women in their early 30s with young children; like myself, they have been offered nannying jobs in playgrounds. “A young woman who’s competent with children?”, other mothers think. “Must be the nanny.”

Australians are desperate to breed, so why do we wait until we’re pushing 40, when it’s a much harder proposition? Deadline pressure. The average maternal age at birth of the first child was 27.6 years old in 2003, and around 10% of first-time mothers were over 35 that year. More importantly, since the ‘70s the fertility of Australians and the parity (number of children born) have been steadily declining, and maternal age at first birth has been increasing. Unfortunately, the older a woman is when she commences

“

her reproductive career, the more difficulties arise.

Since the 1970s women have been delaying marriage and childbirth. They become established in their careers with the intention of having their babies after they have seen the world and made some money. Then their mid-thirties come, the clock is ticking and the woman is what used to be called “obstetrically senescent”. “Elderly primigravida” is also an outmoded term but it is descriptive. Forty may well be the new thirty, you may be fit, you may look young and you may be healthy, but your cells age no matter how many anti-oxidants go in your diet or on your skin. You are born with the eggs you will need later. They are not replaced; they age. There is no “age-defying ovary serum” you can pin your hopes to. The older the mother is when the time comes to make a baby, the more likely the risk of infertility, miscarriage, still birth, prematurity, birth defects and ceasarian delivery. Because there is so much more intervention, it opens the door to more risks.

You are born with the eggs you will need later.

They are not replaced; they age. There is no “agedefying ovary serum” you can pin your hopes to

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”

A recent warning advised that egg freezing is not guaranteed and women shouldn’t count on it as a way to delay pregnancy. This notion – freezing – involved storing eggs for later use, even after menopause. Huh? Freezing eggs is what happens when young women need cancer treatment that will render them infertile. It is their only chance of having a biological child in the future. IVF Australia director Ric Porter commented, “We try to encourage women to have babies now because the success rates just aren’t high enough…We don’t promote or advertise it, so the demand for it is very low.”

When pregnancy doesn’t happen, or occasionally when a specific fertility problem causes recurrent miscarriage, we have come to regard as not uncommon the invasion of technology into the procedure. IVF was first successful (the baby lived) in 1978; in New Zealand, the first success was chalked up in 1983. “In Vitro” (in glass, although they use plastic) refers to fertilization that occurs outside the body. Not all procedures that occur in an IVF centre are, in fact, outside the body, so the correct term is assisted reproduction technology (ART). Which sounds a bit like a Monty Python sketch. The type of procedure performed depends on the reason for the infertility – sub-fertility or “difficulty conceiving” being the more accurate and rather nicer terms.

ART may or may not have ethical issues surrounding it, depending on the procedure used. I suppose one could argue that there is a question of personal ethics that varies by religious or moral belief as well as the level of desperation of the individual. But the embryo is, after all, part of the human family, and there is something sad and ridiculous about wanting a baby so desperately, accepting all the pain and inconvenience and heartache and expense of assisted reproduction and then leaving a couple of spare embryos in a freeze to be flushed or experimented on if you don’t need them after all.

In the 35 years we have had to develop a moral framework for such matters, we have done woefully, of course. Current laws do not reflect the range of strange dilemmas that actually or hypothetically exist. The religions, of course, have been a bit quicker to develop a framework, because they have more practice with such things. From a legal point of view, for example, stealing an embryo could result in such charges as…. well, if you stole the test tube it was in, then that would be a crime. An embryo is neither a possession or a living thing, it would seem.

It must be rather difficult to implant something that doesn’t exist, but they do their best.

On the adaptability of religion, we find that traditional Buddhism adheres to the Catholic doctrine on life but a pragmatic approach is possible, so long as one steers clear of Buddhist academics. The Hindu religion likewise holds that life begins at conception, but popular interpretation varies.

Some have argued, perhaps speciously, that if IVF destroys embryos, it is speeding up the process of reincarnation. Under these doctrines the problem is the destruction of any form of life, so for example, cloning may be acceptable, but freezing embryos is not. Since Jewish law (Muslim law is similar) finds that the soul is inserted into a foetus at least 40 days after conception, there is not a problem with assisted reproduction. My local IVF centre can even arrange rabbinical supervision to ensure kosher handling of eggs and sperm. No kidding.

In Italy, IVF is legal with the proviso that any embryo created is transferred to the mother. That is, no freezing or discarding embryos. The Catholic line is still against it, however, on the grounds that it separates sex and reproduction. Catholic men can use (no kidding) a special collection condom (instead of the infamous “take-this-cup-into-that-little-room” system) that would seem to satisfy the spirit of the no condoms rule, but nonetheless breaks the rule all at the same time. Muslim law allows the reproductive part, but with no donor tissue. All eggs and sperm must belong to the parents. If the parents separate through divorce or death, the embryo mustn’t be used.

There is an extreme environmentalist argument that we should not be creating more children, and on the opposite side of the spectrum is a Marxist-feminist argument that the government should fund all women who want babies to have them, no matter the cost or the diminishing returns.

Who says the Left is not a big tent? Australian Independent Senator Brian Harradine has argued that that this is a bad idea because it is not highly- effective life saving treatment and our Medicare dollars are stretched already (gotcha) and also he’s very worried that single women will use IVF to produce kiddies without ever going near a man. Yeah, that’s a worry. There is also a feminist argument that states that this is an expensive emotional and physical ordeal for women, and if they weren’t pressured by society and men and Big Fertility Companies, they wouldn’t do it. Right, no sane woman would put up with pain, heartache, inconvenience and expense to have children, who are known for not causing any of the above.

Making your head spin? Medical treatment of infertility has real risks and side effects because it uses real surgery and real medicine and there is no way around that. There is a theoretical likelihood that some procedures will cause long term side effects like ovarian cancer, but this is not known for sure. The current recommendation is to transfer one embryo in IVF following findings that this is just as likely to result in a take-home-baby, reducing the likelihood of twins to that of any woman the same age. Twins are a blessing but they are high risk and stressful so no need to create them unnecessarily. Most people will accept some forms of assisted reproduction as ethical, although not necessarily all. Or, we could make it easier and more acceptable for women to have babies in their twenties, even (perhaps especially) if they are scholars or career-minded. Solves a lot of problems, right there.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 71

feelLIFE

alt.health

Bird flu or cash cow?

They’re saying it’ll be the mother of all pandemics, or is that just a marketing ploy, writes Hilary Butler

M

acquarie University Professor Peter Curson1 understated the situation when he said New Zealand governmental headless chook preparations for the bird flu were over the top.

The baseline for whipping up hysteria about this great bird flu pandemic to come is, of course, the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Not a word of the 1976 Swine-Flu fiasco, when neurotic American medics / media announced that a virus similar to the 1918 flu was about to wipe out America! The vaccine was made, marketed, manufac-

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turers indemnified, bad reactions started, the vaccine withdrawn… and guess what?

The epidemic never happened.

I looked in vain for a newspaper to comment on an item in the appendices to Parliamentary Journals in 19192 reporting that by January 1918 Mr P. L. Hickes had liberally stocked all hospitals with the highly “successful” vaccine used in 1917 in the war fields of Europe, to prevent the 1918 pandemic from happening.

Ignorance is bliss.

Along comes Pandemic Preparedness.

First item you are to stock? Paracetamol to ease any aches. Why recommend paracetamol, which has been known since 2000 to undermine the immune system and prolong the flu from 5 days to 8 ½ days3 , and can kill when given for the flu4 , and is the major cause of acute liver failure and transplants in USA5 ?

Why recommend Tamiflu, which doesn’t work6, has significant side effects7, and other anti-viral drugs are becoming flu resistant at an alarming rate8?

Right on our doorsteps, Selenium deficient New Zealand has the possible answers.

• Selenium deficiency causes flu viruses to mutate, increasing viral virulence9 10 11 . Ironically bird flu epidemics are occurring principally in selenium deficient areas in the world.

• Elderberry’s ability to stop influenza and bird flu virus attaching to cells and cause infection was first studied in bird flu12 and the effectiveness of the unpatented compound that is Sambucol was recently confirmed in laboratory trials in London13 by reputable flu expert, Dr John Oxford.

• Meanwhile doctor/Scientist Dr Laibow14 is left to discuss why Vitamin C will be of major use, on a fringe website.

• Fresh garlic not only is antibacterial, antiviral to all viruses tested15, antifungal and antiprotozoal, but it also has beneficial effects on the cardiovascular and immune systems16 17.

Doctors know New Zealand is selenium deficient, and that selenium supplementation reduces the death rate, disease incidence, severity and viral activity in many diseases including hepatitis B, HIV, influenza, coxsackie induced myocarditis, AIDS and viral haemorrhagic fever18. Doctors know that bird flu is changing before their eyes19 isn’t nearly as dangerous as they have maintained up until now20 with mild infections far more common than previously thought21. Of course, their reasons for admitting that, was to hype up the possibility that large numbers of mild disease could quickly become a pandemic. Sane people overseas have already figured that quarantine will be ineffective22, but New Zealand planners haven’t. Pete Hodgson’s official line is “Pandemic Planning too important for politics23”.

The FDA in America is now in full “stalk” mode, issuing ‘cease and desist’

letters to any company promoting natural products which may be of benefit to bird-flu suffers24. Will the Trans-Tasman Therapeutic Goods Agency do likewise?

All this supposedly good-for-us Governmental planning worldwide, isn’t happening without bribery and arm twisting.

Overseas, vaccine companies have told Governments that if they won’t mandate ordinary flu vaccine, which doesn’t work 25, yearly, for all ages, they won’t develop a bird-flu vaccine26. New Zealand fortunately, opted for a private deal with Australia’s CSL vaccine manufacturer27.

It’s hard to escape the view that Governmental planning IS all about buttering international politics, cashing the cow, cow-towing to paranoia, lining the pockets of Donald Rumsfeld’s company that makes Tamiflu 28 and the pharmaceutical companies listed in politicians’ stock market portfolios, stockpiling expensive

and potentially useless antibiotics, opting for a vaccine of as yet unknown value.

It is politically incorrect to advise sensible practical preventives that ordinary people can understand like the dead easy job of making their own elderberry extract or wine in a country over-run with elderberry plants considered weeds by councils and DOC alike; encouraging self-help with garlic, selenium and vitamin C. The only official “practical” advice is to wash your hands, which is great, since even doctors in hospitals appear to have forgotten the value of this rudimentary practice.

Which leaves the listed items above, and all the other unknown potentially useful unpatentable unprofitable answers inside the nutters’ pantries.

Long live the nutters.

Hilary Butler is director of the Immunisation Awareness Society in Auckland

“

Why recommend paracetamol, which has been known since 2000 to undermine the immune system and prolong the flu from 5 days to 8 ½ days , and can kill when given for the flu, and is the major cause of acute liver failure and transplants in USA?

”

REFERENCES New Zealand Herald, 22 January 2006 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/print.cfm?c _ id=1&objectid=10364832 Appendices to Parliamentary Journal 1919 Session VI, V.II pg 19 H – 31.

3 Pharmacotherapy 2000 Dec;20(12):1417-22. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list _ uids=11130213 4 http://www.wect.com/Global/story.asp?S=1555858 5 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/112161379/PDFSTART http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/29/health/29cons.html?incamp=article _ popular 6 http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=5513 7 http://scotlandtoday.scottishtv.co.uk/content/default.asp?page=s1 _ 1 _ 1&newsid=9901 8 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060115/ap _ on _ he _ me/flu _ drugs _ resistance; _ ylt=An 9 Selenium deficiency and Viral infection: http://www.nutrition.org/cgi/reprint/133/5/1463S 10 Host nutritional selenium status as a driving force for influenza virus mutations http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list _ uids=11481250&query _ hl=1&itool=pubmed _ docsum 11 Selenium deficiency increases the pathology of an influenza virus infection.

FASEB J. 2001 Jun;15(8):1481-3. No abstract. http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/15/10/1846 12 http://www.nutraingredients.com/news/printNewsBis.asp?id=65394 13 http://www.itv.com/news/britain _ 783168.html 14 http://energywave.com/lifestyle-survival-issues/Avian-flu.htm 15 Planta Med 1992 Oct;58(5):417-23. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list _ uids=1470664&query _ hl=13&itool=pubmed _ docsum 16 Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 2001 Oct;57(3):282-6. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=A bstract&list _ uids=11759674&query _ hl=13&itool=pubmed _ docsum 17 http://www.nutrition.org/cgi/reprint/131/3/955S 18 unpublished paper and personal communication Professor Ethan Taylor. 17/11/2005 19 http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/10/news/flu.php 20 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,17787401,00.html 21 Arch Intern Med 2006;166:119-123.

22 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/10/14/DI2005101401462.html?referrer=email&referrer=email 23 25 November 2005 24 http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2005/NEW01274.html 25 Impact of influenza vaccination on seasonal mortality in the U.S. elderly population. Arch Intern Med. 2005 Feb 14; 165(3):26572http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list _ uids=15710788&query _ hl=1 26 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/26/nflu26.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/10/26/ixnewstop.html 27 3rd November 2005.

28 Tamiflu was developed and patented in 1996 by a California biotech firm, Gilead Sciences Inc…. Rumsfeld holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million… http://www.atimes.com/atimes/ Front _ Page/GK04Aa01.html 1 2

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 73

tasteLIFE

TRAVEL

Prince Edward Island

It is one of Canada’s hidden treasures, writes Ellen Creager, and a trip not to be missed

C

HARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island I remembered this place in July. I specifically remembered blue ocean, red dirt and emerald potato fields the color of Ireland.

So when I heard spring was a bargain in this Canadian province, I jumped at the chance to come back.

There was one tiny catch.

In late May, it’s still sort of winter up here. On the northeastern side of the smile-shaped province, dirty snow clung to the red hillsides that sweep down to a grumpy, gray Atlantic ocean. Most tourist attractions and shops were still deep in winter’s sleep. Anne of Green Gables doesn’t even braid her pigtails until the tourist buses start rolling in June. The Northumberland Strait separating Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick was like a Slurpee.

But I didn’t find out any of this until I got here.

All I knew was that I was aiming to take a six-day vacation on a budget.

You can drive to Prince Edward Island, but it’s 1,400 miles from Michigan. So the first wrench in the works was airfare, US$550 (all currency references in US$) from Detroit to the Charlottetown airport.

The cheaper alternative was a $442 ticket to nearby Halifax, Nova Scotia. From there it’s a 4-hour drive to the island.

But arriving at the Halifax airport, I encountered a second problem. The car rental agency had nearly run out of vehicles. Instead of the $23-a-day compact I reserved, they forced me to take for the same price a yellow Mustang convertible.

The sacrifices I make for this job.

I put the top down and roared up the highway to the MacKay Bridge in Halifax.

“That’s a rental car, isn’t it?” the toll taker said.

So much for traveling incognito. The

74, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

car was as rare as a two-headed flamingo.

It had a bigger personality than I did. But duty called.

Until 1997, Prince Edward Island was accessible only by boat or plane. When the 8-mile Confederation Bridge opened that year, residents were afraid pesky mainlanders would flood the place. For a province that calls itself simply “The Island,” nobody was keen on the prospect.

Had the bridge changed Prince Edward Island? It did not seem so.

Near the town of Summerside, little fishing boats clumped together far out in the bay. The countryside was a paint-bynumbers landscape of 10 shades of budding green. White church spires rose in the distance. Farmers on tractors turned the damp red fields.

And tourists were nowhere to be seen.

The shops, cottages and restaurants were as still as a sack of potatoes.

On the flip side, the upscale Loyalist Hotel in Summerside was bustling with locals – and just $77 a night, including tax.

Its restaurant served heaping plates of blue mussels in garlic and butter for only $5, about half the price you’d pay in the States.

The next morning, nearby Malpeque Bay looked cold enough for oysters to wear earmuffs. Rain spattered the empty summer homes. So I veered east, searching for spring on the 174-mile-long island.

I found it, sort of, in Cavendish.

Once a backwater of potato farming that some called Spud Island, Prince Edward Island struck tourist gold in 1937 when it decided to preserve the fame of Anne of Green Gables and her creator, novelist Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Today, the fictional, red-headed orphan is the island’s symbol. The Green Gables house in Cavendish was the author’s inspiration and is part of Prince Edward Island National Park, the island’s biggest tourist attraction.

“Do some people think Anne was a real girl?” I asked the guide at the restored 1880s-era home. She nodded.

“We try to let them down easy.”

If you want Anne pretty much to yourself, May is the time to come.

Ditto for the national park, a nearby long strip of white beach, sand dunes and camping sites.

And double-ditto for Red Point Provincial Park on the island’s eastern shore. There, some piles of snow – snow! – remained, and a whole winter’s worth of driftwood cluttered the beach. Strangely, the water was humming as it lapped the shore. At the nearby Basin Head Beach, I realized why – the Singing Sands. When you walk on the Singing Sands, your feet make a scuffing sound, almost a musical note.

Later, I found another sign of spring: At the Johnson Shore Inn, Floridians Arla Johnson and Julie Shore were already open for the season. Their 4-year-old inn perches on a red cliff on the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Compared to Cape Cod, where Johnson lived for 10 years, Prince Edward Island is

“

Until 1997, Prince Edward Island was accessible only by boat or plane. When the 8-mile Confederation Bridge opened that year, residents were afraid pesky mainlanders would flood the place

”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 75

unbelievably cheap and undeveloped, she said. The only issue? The summers are short.

That May day, gray clouds scuttled across the sky. Warmed up with hot tea, chocolate chip cookies, a crackling fire and a little background Mozart, I didn’t feel so cold.

“There are lupins in spring,” said Shore, showing a picture of blue and purple spiked flowers that cover the island.

But wasn’t this spring? Didn’t May qualify?

No. That’s why the night at Johnson Shore was still value-priced – $129, including hot breakfast. I slept like a rock after listening to the wind at the windows and watching the green blinking light of the Naufrage Lighthouse.

The next morning at picturesque Naufrage Harbor, the fog was lifting. A warm breeze blew. Lobstermen were just starting to come back in from the ocean.

“How did you do?” I called to the captain of the Peggies Two. “It was a good day,” he said, unloading hundreds of wriggling lobsters from a dozen coolers.

On the island, lobster is a big tourist draw, because between May and July, lobsters practically jump into the traps. To capitalize on this event, dozens of Prince Edward Island churches offer all-you-caneat lobster suppers for about $17. The suppers are famous. They’re popular.

They’re not open until June. I was out of luck.

But when the lobster truck driver found out I was from Detroit, he invited me to his house for dinner.

“My wife is cooking 10 pounds of lobster,” said Mark Murphy. “She won’t mind.”

I must admit, the invitation was tempting. Even on Prince Edward Island, lobster is kind of expensive when you are on a budget trip. And apparently on the island, asking strangers to dinner is completely normal, a friendly Anne of Green Gables kind of thing to do.

I called his wife, Edna, to be certain.

“Sure, come on over,” she said.

So, what the heck. I did. Their house overlooked the ocean in Georgetown, 30 miles from Charlottetown. We ate lobster that Mark Murphy’s brother had caught that morning. We ate coleslaw, mashed potatoes and rasberry cheesecake. A retired Mountie, Mark Murphy told stories of his days fighting crime in Toronto and writing a book, “Police Undercover:

76, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

the Biker, the Mafia and the Mountie” (Avalon House, $13.95). Edna was from Newfoundland and worked at the post office. They had four children and eight grandchildren spread from Prince Edward Island to British Columbia.

“HasP.E.I.changedsincetheConfederation Bridge went up?” I asked them.

Murphy shook his head no. A native, he was gone for decades. He came back. It was just the same.

“The island hasn’t changed in 100 years,” he said.

Well, that’s not exactly true. The bridge is here. The island has developed some commendable golf courses such as Crowbush Cove. The capital, Charlottetown, seems busier. Yet, its relative remoteness from just about everywhere protects Prince Edward Island from becoming just another crowded island that’s loved to death by tourists.

In May, I did find bargains. At the historic Inns on Great George in Charlottetown, a room that rents for $179 a night in summer was just $97, including tax. The same room would be $350 a night on Cape Cod. Another bargain: Visitors do not pay to cross the bridge or ride the ferry to the island. They pay only when they leave. For $38, I took the Wood Islands car ferry from the island back to Caribou, Nova Scotia, and enjoyed the ride.

In the line to board the ferry, a crowd of little girl hockey players from Cape Breton surrounded the yellow Mustang and held up their hands to peer in the windows. While searching for tourist attractions, I apparently had become one.

Is Prince Edward Island a value destination? If you can get here, it is. Tourism was a little iffy in the Maritimes last year, and the high price of gasoline won’t help this summer, either.

So those who make it

to the island should find open arms.

While summer resorts may be expensive, you’ll find deals on cottages and cabins.

Even in high summer, many attractions are free or cheap. In U.S. dollars, it’s only $4 for the Green Gables house, $3.50 for the Potato Museum, $1.40 for the Irish Moss Museum and $3.30 for the Fisheries Museum. The Dandelion Festival May 30 that celebrates the “simple and majestic” weed, is free. Theater productions at the Charlottetown Festival are bargains; tickets for “Anne of Green Gables – The Musical,” now in its 40th year, are $16-$33.

Even the island’s French, Scots and Irish heritage is inexpensive. Folk dancing, singing and piping is everywhere.

The well-known Summerside College of Piping puts on concerts June 28 to Sept.

3, and tickets are just $10.

For entertainment, people here even listen to bingo on the radio.

So if you slow yourself way, way down, Prince Edward Island is a value. Even in May. Even if you are driving a loud sports car that marks you as a hopeless tourist.

And if by chance or charm an islander invites you to a lobster dinner, be sure to accept.

GETAWAY GET YOUR BUSINESS SEEN! This space could be yours!

From $110 a month (12 mth booking) or $150 a month (3 mth booking) Email sales@investigatemagazine.com for details

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 77

tasteLIFE

FOOD

Something fishy

Here come the vegequarians!, says Eli Jameson

M

artinis have different effects on different people. “One is plenty; two at most; three I’m under my table; four I’m under my host!” the American wit Dorothy Parker is said to have once quipped. A crystal cone of gin (or vodka, for philistines and James Bond wanna-bes) causes some people to become geniuses, and others to just think they are. And some martini drinkers, noted comedian Bill Cosby in his preDr. Huxtable era concert, “Himself”, just “hum a lot when they talk”. (“How are you-mmmmm…nice to see yoummmmm”, and so on).

The other night, however, I was witness to a true bit of martini-inspired brilliance, and what I believe was the birth of a new word. My wife, a committed vegetarian since the age of, oh, eight, had announced earlier in the week that she was going to start trying to get some fish in her diet, and to celebrate we had another couple around for a dinner that would include a Thai fish curry (recipe follows). Over pre-prandial cocktails, we explained the – for her – bold experiment my wife was attempting, and that she was trying to become one of those vegetarians who eats creatures of the sea but not the land.

“Oh”, our friend Matt announced, rolling the olive from the bottom of his glass into his gob. “A vegequarian!”

For a movement – vegetarianism – that is often associated with a certain dour humourlessness, a playful term like vegequarianism is a great antidote to all the different gradations (vegan, lacto-ovo vegetarian, veglegon, and so on) that divide up the movement like breakaway sects of Mormonism or Islam. Indeed, although they are often very secular people, vegetarians in all their various ilks and incarnations generally have very fundamentalist attitudes when it comes to their eating habits, and believe that anyone that

78, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

doesn’t adhere to their level of anti-carnivorous asceticism is somehow not quite worthy.

(Indeed, I am quite lucky in this respect: even before her decision to belly up to the raw bar, my wife has had only one rule for meat in our house – it doesn’t bother her, so long as she doesn’t have to eat it or cook it. But I’ve known couples that nearly came apart over this very issue: one fellow I know in New York visits steakhouses like other men frequent brothels – furtively and on the sly, lest his habit be discovered, something that almost assuredly bustup his marriage. Another unfortunate bloke of my acquaintance has partnered himself with a neurotic Hollywood actress who treats him like a dog, giving food rewards – steaks, or the privilege of ordering them when they are out together – for good behaviour – baubles and five-star holidays – and revokes them when she’s not happy about one thing or another. Needless to say, he leads a very tense, unhappy, feastor-famine type existence).

In any case, my wife’s newfound fondness for fish has opened up a wealth of options in the kitchen – and being able to share a couple of fine, thick, purple tuna steaks will give me something to do with all that NZ pinot noir in the cellar I’ve been worrying about leaving too long. Plus, it will probably make us both healthier in the long term. Regularly masking vegetables in risottos laden with butter and parma cheese is a recipe for a happy, if not necessarily long, life.

It has also gotten us interested in some cuisines we’d never been confident enough to really seriously play with up until now – cuisines such as Thai, which is covered with encyclopaedic depth and breadth by David Thompson’s gorgeous tome, Thai Food (Arharn Thai). For anyone who has ever loved Thai food but been nervous about trying it at home (what do I do with

“

One fellow I know in New York visits steakhouses like other men frequent brothels – furtively and on the sly, lest his habit be discovered

”

bamboo shoots?; how do I make a curry paste?; will the shopkeeper think me racist if I ask for “kaffir lime leaves”?), this book is a must-have that explains ingredients, recipes, and even Thai history and religion through the lens of their ancient and venerable cuisine.

Once one becomes familiar with the essential vocabulary, and a few basic techniques, it is hard to turn out a losing dish. Furthermore, like studying a foreign language, learning a completely alien cuisine makes one appreciate and understand elements of one’s “native tongue” that much more. I was fascinated to note the parallel use of anchovies in both Thai and Mediterranean cooking; whereas a European might add some of the little fishes to a hot pan and liquefy them to add a salty savouriness, the Thai use their own fish sauce, or Nam Pla. And thus both cooking cultures suddenly made a little more sense to me.

So far we’ve been making baby-steps with the vegequarian project: the fish curry has been a big hit, though the actual process of roasting shrimp paste has the missus rushing for the relative fresh air of the garden. Ceviche was suggested by another mate, and that’s on the menu for later this week. I’ll let you know how it goes.

FISH CURRY WITH CUCUMBER (from David Thompson’s Thai Food (Arharn Thai) Although Thompson suggests sea bass or barramundi, I’ve had great success with thick, oily filets of fresh blue-eyed cod.

Ingredients: For the paste: 10-15 dried long red chilies, deseeded, soaked and rained Large pinch of salt 1 tablespoon chopped lemongrass 3 tablespoons chopped red turmeric 1 tablespoon chopped red shallot 3 tablespoons chopped garlic

1 tablespoon white peppercorns 1 tablespoon shrimp paste (gapi) that’s been roasted for a few minutes on the stove For the curry: 3 tablespoons oil Large pinch white sugar 2 tablespoons fish sauce ½ cup thick tamarind water (made by combining tamarind or tamarind puree with water and mixing until thick) 2 small cucumbers, peeled and sliced into half-moons 250 g barramundi, sea bass, or cod 1. First, make the paste, either by bashing the ingredients together in a mortar and pestle or giving them

a whiz in the blender, stopping occasionally to scrape down the sides. It should be as fine as possible without overheating the paste and cooking it prematurely; add a little water if it needs some loosening. Leftovers will keep in the fridge for up to a fortnight.

2. Heat the oil and fry 3 tablespoons of the paste over a medium heat for about 5 minutes, until it becomes fragrant and the colour deepens. Lower the heat and season with sugar, fish sauce, and tamarind water. Add cucumber, fish, and simmer until cooked – this will just take a couple of minutes.

Check the seasoning – it should be sour, salty, hot and slightly sweet.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 79

seeLIFE PAGES

Battlers, black dogs & bubbles

Michael Morrissey discovers New Zealand’s Prime Ministers have been a somewhat motley crew over the decades BATTLERS, BLUFFERS AND BULLY-BOYS: How New Zealand’s Prime Ministers Have Shaped Our Nation

By Richard Wolfe, Random House, $39.95.

M

inus its subtitle, it would not be surprising if readers thought this was a history of boxing. And certainly, no one is likely to succeed in securing this high office unless they come out of the corner fighting, ready to throw left jabs, right upper cuts and follow through body blows.

Sociologically, it is fascinating to try and find a pattern of commonality among the individuals that have been Prime Minister. Up until Jenny Shipley, one could have said, without fear of contradiction, that one thing they had in common was they were all male. Formerly, it looked as though the road to the highest office in the land was frequented by farmers (or who at least came from farming stock) – eg Keith Holyoake, Sydney Holland, Jim Bolger. Many were not formally educated and did not even have School Certificate – Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser, Holland, Holyoake, Walter Nash and Norman Kirk and more surprisingly, in recent times, Mike Moore and Jim Bolger left school when aged 15. In later years, university-educated professionals, particularly lawyers and accountants, became dominant – Robert Muldoon, David Lange, Geoffrey Palmer, Helen Clark.

Prolific author Richard Wolfe has thor-

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oughly worked his ability for pithy subtitles – William Fox, our second Prime Minister is subtitled “Gentleman, Artist and Politician”; Richard Seddon: A Glorious Disregard for Hard Knocks or George Forbes: Political Half-back. David Lange is grandly encapsulated: Magnificent, Tumultuous Tempestuous Years.

It is salutary to be reminded that our colonial past is so recent that Francis Bell was our first native-born Prime Minister in 1925. Prior to Bell, the previous 19 had nearly all been born in the British Isles. The striking lack of formal education is also thrown into high relief by the fact that when Kirk made Rowling his Minister of Finance in 1972, he was the first person with a degree in economics to hold that portfolio!

Showing a gift for arcane statistics, Wolfe observes that nearly all had their birthdays in January to May and none at all in July. Thankfully he has spared us translating this fact into astrological terms. In earlier times, change of office could be rapid – Harry Atkinson’s third term of office in August/September 1884, was just seven days, though he was actually PM five times. In my lifetime, Mike Moore was the shortest with just two months. Currently, Helen Clark, now in her third term, looks sure to enjoy one of the longest terms in office.

The lives and accomplishments of our 37 Prime Minsters are succinctly summarised in this lively and useful overview. One point of interest – since our first Prime Minister (Henry Sewell) took

office in 1856, some 17 years after the invention of photography – every one of our leaders has been photographed. For my money, Joseph Ward is the handsomest and from a choice of two, Helen Clark the prettiest. Whether posterity will classify her as a Battler, Bluffer or Bully-Boy remains to be seen.

I HAD A BLACK DOG

By Matthew Johnstone, Pan Macmillan, $19.95

D

epression, it seems, is on the increase.

Isn’t that depressing? Interestingly (or depressingly), the mental health of a nation is apparently never so good as when it is at war – presumably, a common enemy unites us in resolve and takes our minds off individual problems. Unfortunately, we are at peace, and the black dog of depression is snapping at many heels.

Until reading the foreword to this slim, illustrated book, I was under the impression Winston Churchill had coined the phrase “black dog” for his wartime down swings of mood but Gordon Parker, Executive Director, Black Dog Institute (sic) informs us that Samuel Johnson first associated the Celtic-ancient phrase with depression and Churchill popularised it.

At times, the black dog can be so heavy that colours themselves go dark or black.

New Zealand-born, now Sydney-based artist, writer and photographer Matthew Johnstone, has skilfully illustrated his own book. All the well-known characteristics of depression are here – slowing down of

activity, no enjoyment of life, no pleasure, memory and concentration impaired, no confidence, irritability, lack of appetite, undermining of love and intimacy, repetitive negative thinking and so forth. The illustrations are simple, direct and witty – often making use of half tones for the shadows which seem thematically appropriate.

Perhaps the one that appealed to me the most was the one of the man (the author presumably) entirely encased in a block of ice to represent being devoid of feeling.

Equally powerful was the depiction of feeling totally isolated which shows the sufferer alone with his black dog on an inflatable lifeboat at sea surrounded by giant waves.

As the text aptly states, “The Black Dog is an equal opportunity mongrel”.

Hopefully, for those who are depressed, this book may provide an uplift and for those who are not, a measure of understanding.

TEACHER MAN

By Frank McCourt, Fourth Estate, $50

T

he story of Frank McCourt’s rise from obscurity to fame is one to warm the cockles of any writer’s heart. Here is a guy who spends his early days in poverty, then, later on, looking back from his mature years writes a book that he expects will sell “a few hundred copies”. Instead, it becomes a best seller and sells over two million copies. If there is one image of poverty branded on my mind it is that of McCourt licking empty fish and chip paper just for the smell and lingering taste of the already eaten fast food.

Teacher Man is his third book and while it has much in it to like – for McCourt comes across as a likeable fellow – I doubt whether it will have the impact of his first book. However, millions of teachers world-wide may well prove me wrong.

Teaching is not for the faint-hearted and schooling poor Afro-American pupils must be like an assignment in educational hell. Over 30 plus years, McCourt estimates he has taught 33,000 classes - so the stories collected here are, no doubt, a canny selection.

In order to teach even the idea of grammar, let alone its specifics, McCourt happenstances across the notion of asking “why why why?” until in response his students begin telling stories. When the normal syntax sentence “John went to the store” is converted into “Store the to went

John” the class grasp the label gibberish eagerly and a break through is achieved – grammar is necessary to communicate.

The idea of McCourt’s that most captivated this reviewer was generated when he discovered his students were faking parental-excuse notes. He describes them as “gems of fiction, fantasy, creativity” – “boilers exploding, ceiling collapsing, fires sweeping whole blocks, babies and pets pissing on homework, unexpected births, heart attacks, strokes, miscarriages, robberies”. Since giving them a writing assignment was usually an up-hill operation, he hit on the idea of presenting the class with copies of these colourful excuse notes as examples of their writing.

This quickly led to the piece de resistance, “An Excuse Note from Adam to God”.

The pens began flying over the paper. Of course this and other stratagems (such as getting students to sing recipes) was not educationally kosher. When McCourt was asked to see the Superintendent of Schools in Staten Island he feared for the worst – but miracle of miracles – the Super approved because of the calibre of the writing produced. However, he cautioned McCourt against setting his students an excuse note for Al Capone!

All I can say is, I wish Frank McCourt had been my high school teacher of English.

CHAMPAGNE

By Don & Petie Kladtrup, Fourth Estate, $34

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et’s see – sardine oil, Coca-Cola, coldliver oil, body balance, curdled milk, Lion Red. Any lifting of the pulse yet? How about – champagne? Eyes light up, people smile, sigh – and that’s before they’ve even had a glass. As the authors lyrically write (having gathered together a slice of paté, a hunk of cheese, a fresh baguette and a bottle of chilled champagne), “Just saying the word is like waving a magic wand, people begin to smile, relax and even fantasise”.

Part of the poetry inherent in the history of champagne is that of dramatic contrast – the region of Champagne from which the famous bubbles emanate is a blood-soaked region. Attila the Hun had an epic battle here, millions of soldiers fought World War One in these sunny precincts. Champagne, as we all know, is not champagne without bubbles. But, as this warm and loving history tells us,

this was not always so. Back in the fifth century, champagne was red, cloudy and sans bubbles. Though, in fact, the bubbling of wine is a natural process caused by the spring-time awakening of aggressive yeasts – a chemical process not understood until Pasteur analysed them in the late nineteenth century.

Ironically, Dom Perignon, the name forever associated with champagne, also made red non-sparkling champagne but he refined immeasurably the process of wine-making, ensuring only the best grapes were used. Together with rigorous pruning in spring, early morning harvesting, and pressing grapes gently, his innovative skills gradually led to clear finer wines. Bubbles were always stubbornly present and champagne as we now recognise it, bubbles and all, was celebrated in a painting by de Troy for the king in 1734 which honoured the new drink – sparkling champagne. In a battle with burgundy, the Champenois claimed that the bubbles cured malaria.

(Alas, not so.)

Politics, war and champagne have been inextricably intertwined, or fermented, from early days. The Sun King, a contemporary of Perignon, sent a message to his enemy William of Orange – begging him to allow free passage so that his envoy could fetch some champagne. Napoleon wittily declared, “In victory you deserve it, in defeat you need it”. A century later, when the Germans stormed into France, champagne conquered them – thousands of German soldiers were found not dead but dead drunk. Champagne riots occurred in 1911 with 3000 angry winegrowers armed with hoes, hatchets and sharpened vineyard stakes attacking a truck carrying “foreign” wine – 4000 bottles from outside Champagne.

As I was reading this lovely history on the patio of my house on a warm Auckland summer’s day, it struck me something was missing - you’ve guessed – a glass of champers. With only a mild twinge of guilt, I drove to King Dick’s and bought a bottle – readers, please do not tell on me – but it was not Bernadino nor even Lindauer brut but the real thing. So as I read of how the Nazis requested 350,000 bottles a week, and of how brave Albert Corpart of Pommery & Greno continued to harvest grapes under whistling shells, shrapnel and leaking poisons from unexploded shells, I toasted the good health of cham-

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pagne and – of Dom Perignon! Of Moet!

– the makers of champagne!

RESOLUTION: The Story of Captain Cook’s Second Voyage of Discovery

By Peter Aughton, Phoenix, $29.99

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aptain James Cook’s three epic world voyages make him the greatest explorer of all time. The second, documented here, equivalent to three times around the globe – some 75,000 miles – was in many ways the most remarkable, taking him twice to the outer limits of Antarctica, the first known ship to have achieved so southern a latitude – 71 degrees, in January 1774. Though he was not a boastful man, he permitted himself on this occasion to claim he had “gone it as far as it was possible for man to go”, a reasonable claim to make for a sailing ship. As Aughton writes, “he was hundreds of miles inside the Antarctic circle and a whole century ahead of his time”.

Also, understandably, he could not have at that time predicted massive iron icebreakers. Aughton quotes liberally from Cook’s journals and the descriptions not only convey the frightening size of icebergs but the massive rolling seas which on occasion washed right through Cook’s cabin.

The conquest of scurvy and John Harrison’s clocks which allowed precise calculation of longitude were two huge factors that contributed to Cook’s brilliant successes. The persistent dream of a great southern continent – as portrayed by Dalrymple – still haunted the European mind. Ironically, it was the not quite discovered but uninhabitable Antarctica that fitted the bill – though not in the way anticipated.

Like many local readers, I have read accounts of Cook’s voyages before.

Aughton’s book added some colourful incidents new to me – fermenting beer exploded from barrels and ran all over the decks where it was eagerly lapped by goats who were soon lurching drunkenly about the ship; they had on board two apparatuses to make fresh water; the bloody account of the brutal sport of bare-fisted boxing; the charming young Maori girl who danced for the crew, stroked the cat’s fur the wrong way and mistook a cabin boy for a cabin girl; humans did not get scurvy (one case only) but the ship’s animals were badly affected.

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In Aughton’s account, Cook is firm but fair, tolerant but occasionally given to hardness when a situation called for it.

In some ways Cook’s mana and achievements were never to be more worthy of high regard for on his third voyage he became more bad-tempered and arrogant, more given to harshness and eventually paid for his deteriorating attitude with his life. Aughton admirably summarises Cook’s accomplishment: “The voyage with its great forays into the Antarctic Circle, its great sweeps through the Pacific Islands, the charting of the New Hebrides and New Caledonia, the mapping of Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego the discovery of South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands, was the longest voyage of discovery ever undertaken”. To which one can only respond – Bon Voyage Captain James Cook!

THE CALL OF THE WEIRD: Travels in American Subcultures

By Louis Theroux, Picador, $34.95

T

wo points I’d like to make before actually reviewing this book – interesting to note that Louis being the son of even more famous father Paul is not mentioned and Louis’s cheeky put-thesubject-off-guard-by-pretending-to-benaive technique – an effective strategy for prompting utterance of unguarded truth – is disappointingly not used in print.

Also, it could be said the book has a certain “warmed-over” feel because subjects already interviewed are being re-visited to see if they’ve changed their kooky beliefs – sometimes yes, sometimes no. Considering the subject matter, the style is a bit tame – think what a field day Tom Wolfe would have had with this bunch of weirdos.

Despite these reservations, this is an interesting book well worth reading.

Because I’m pro-Jewish for a variety of reasons – their victimisation over centuries; Jewish intellectuals tend to dominate the world of ideas (and C.P. Snow pointed out that Jews have won more Nobel prizes than any other ethnic group) and I’ve had a few Jewish girlfriends – I don’t react favourably – in fact, with hostility – to rabid anti-Semites. So groups like the Aryan Nations (”You show me a commie, I’ll show you a Jew!” “Our world is sick and Hitler gave us the cure!”) or

the blonde teenage twins Lamb and Lynx who call themselves Prussian Blue, and are exponents of White Power music who don’t like Nigger music eg rap, jazz, blues, hip-hop – and any other such racist fundamentalists – go down like a lead balloon with this reviewer. At times, it’s difficult not see these folk as suffering from clinical paranoia though Theroux’s suggestion that they consider therapy was firmly rejected (“waaaay out of line!”).

It’s a minor comfort to consider that these subcultures generally have a small following – the National Alliance, the largest neo-Nazi group in America, has between 800-1500 paying members; patriotic and militia groups numbered 858 in 1996 but only 194 in 2000. The chilling Heaven’s Gate group which gave America its largest mass suicide on native soil never had more than 100 members (39 less following their “exit” (ie suicide) from their “vehicles” eg bodies).

Among the nine subcultures examined, two are associated with the sex industry and perhaps most unsavoury of all is gangsta rap. Please excuse my naivete but I hadn’t realised that some gangsta rap exponents are (or were – several having been murdered by rivals) actually gangsters. Cocaine dealing, pimping, drunken brawling, coded threats, songs about “dope dope shoot shoot shoot kill kill kill” being the principal themes, according to hip-hop historian J-Dogg Shaw.

I can’t say I found any of these subcultures attractive either morally, aesthetically or sub-culturally speaking. Perhaps the least offensive are the UFO believers who generally are a gentle bunch. But not all – Thor Templar, Lord-Commander of the Earth Protectorate, who sported a psychotronic helmet and alien mutilator gun and claimed to have killed 10 aliens, was none too tender – he“zapped them with the mutilator gun to make them materialise, then dismembered them with an edged weapon”. (Men in Black has a lot to answer for). Come to think of it, if there is any difference between him and a delusional paranoid lunatic, I’d like to know.

Interestingly enough, when Theroux catches up with him, he is no longer active in the alien area but has moved on to attacking the Bush administration. A fellow UFO-believer is of the view that the reason why the Americans are in Iraq is because there are stargates there. And I thought it was oil.

seeLIFE MUSIC

Walking the line

Chris Philpott gets across the Johnny Cash anthology

JOHNNY CASH Ring Of Fire: The Legend Of Johnny Cash

RICHARD ASHCROFT Keys To The World

Q

ot on the heels of first single “Break the Night with Colour” comes Keys To The World, the third solo outing from former Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft, arguably his strongest showing yet.

But while comparisons to the current batch of Britpop stars (see: Oasis, Razorlight, Snow Patrol) will abound, smatterings of strings and Verve-sounding throwback tracks remind us that Ashcroft was partly responsible for the trend in the first place. As a result Keys Of The World is exciting to listen to.

Aside from the obvious cross-genre songwriting talent Ashcroft has, I’ve always felt that his greatest work is the slower tracks he composes, even stretching back to his early days. Two tracks stand out for me here: the beautiful “Cry Til The Morning” and the more cerebral “Why Do Lovers?” Elsewhere “Why Not Nothing” and “Music Is Power” also stand out.

If I had one complaint, it would be the lack of variation in some of the later songs, a distraction from the quality of this CD. Despite this, Keys To The World is a solid release from one of the great songwriters of our time, and should end up as one of the highlights of the year.

uite simply, Ring of Fire: The Legend of Johnny Cash is a brilliant collection of songs from Cash’s career, from his early days playing with the Tennessee Two, to his later years with Rick Rubin.

As one of only two or three people alive who didn’t previously own a Johnny Cash record, I was a little sceptical going in – however I was surprised to find that Cash’s music is remarkably easy to listen to. His music requires little effort on the part of the listener as his character shines through, making his music all the more intriguing.

Ring of Fire contains every great track of Cash’s career, including “Ring of Fire”, “A Boy Named Sue”, “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk The Line”. Also surprising were covers of songs by U2, Depeche Mode and Soundgarden, and his beautiful and moving cover of the Nine Inch Nails track “Hurt”. It is testament to Cash’s unique talent that he was able to tackle music from these artists and create something so compelling.

Ring of Fire is an impressive CD which covers all you need to know about the Man in Black, and should satisfy new listeners and older fans alike. Highly recommended.

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H

BETH ORTON Comfort Of Strangers

M

y last run-in with Beth Orton came when I acquired her 1999 release Central Reservation, following a great performance at the 2000 Big Day Out. Unfortunately my interest waned fairly quickly, and while I enjoyed Comfort of Strangers, I think the same thing is going to happen again.

Strangers is a typical Beth Orton release, touching on pop, jazz, electronica, folk and country elements, yet not resting long enough to become any of those things. This works to great effect on tracks like “Worms”, “Shadow of a Doubt” and “Heartland Truckstop”, and makes it impossible to describe the quality of Orton’s work in only a few words.

But despite the seductiveness of many of the individual tracks, Comfort of Strangers is not an album for those looking for consistency and it is this aspect that drove me away. I can appreciate the minimal and subtle sound, and I do enjoy the occasional appearance of a string section or a harmonica – it’s just that it isn’t particularly exciting or dynamic on this album.

Fans of Orton’s previous work will love Comfort of Strangers, but for me it has proved no more than a novelty which is fast wearing off.

seeLIFE MOVIES

Hustle and Flow

Squalid entertainment

One movie glows, the other’s a train wreck, writes Shelly Horton Hustle and Flow Released: March 2006 Rated: R

E

veryone loves a dreamer. Trapped in hot and sticky Memphis, small time drug dealer and pimp DJay dreams of becoming a famous rap star. He believes in himself and he has a plan.

DJay (played superbly by Terrence Howard) is a complex character. Even though you get sucked into DJay’s ambition and drive, at no time do you actually

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like him. He sprouts philosophical theories while he sells his prostitutes from his old Chevy.

Hustle and Flow certainly isn’t a glamorous Hollywood version of the road to stardom. There is an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. Dreaming is the only way characters can escape their lives. Some times the black rap slang is so thick the movie almost needed subtitles. But it certainly gives a sense of realism.

But DJay’s sad, grimy life is perfect fodder for the lyrics of his songs – “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” and

“Whoop That Trick” wouldn’t have any meaning if he was living in middle-class America. He records them on his tragic little Casio tape deck and plans to hustle rap superstar Skinny Black (played by real life rapper Ludacis) into listening to his flow.

The build up to the meeting with Skinny Black is palpable. His whole life has been leading to this moment. This is his one chance. You taste his hunger and feel his nerves. Then it all goes brutally wrong. You feel DJay’s sorrow as his dream is crushed… or is it?

The Squid and the Whale

The Squid & the Whale Released: March 2006 Rated: R

D

ivorce is horrible in real life and it’s horrible to watch on the big screen.

In The Squid and the Whale you watch a divorce tear a family apart.

Billed as a black comedy, I struggled to find anything funny about this film.

Bernard, the father (played annoyingly accurately by Jeff Daniels) is a self-absorbed novelist who is forced to teach writing because he can’t reproduce his former talent. When his wife Joan (played subtly by the captivating Laura Linney) discovers her

own talent for writing, his jealously divides the family. The two teenage sons struggle to deal with the separation.

To rub salt in the wound Joan starts a new relationship with the younger son’s tennis coach and Bernard has an affair with one of his students who also happens to be the first love of his eldest son.

Yup. Nasty stuff.

The 12 year old son, Frank (played surprisingly well by Owen Kline) acts out his anger and hurt by swearing, drinking and making inappropriate sexual comments. He’s obviously disturbed and crying out for help and yet he’s ignored. The 16 year old son Walt (played convincingly by Jess Eisenberg) is desperate to impress his father and tries to

pass off a Pink Floyd song as his own. His selfish father simply says, “I liked your song.

It reminded me of my second novel.”

The dialogue is overly complex and unrealistic. It’s as if having two writers in the house means every sentence must impress.

In fact it’s just annoying.

The saddest part of the film is it’s based on the real life of writer and director Noah Baumbach. He sets the film in Brooklyn's Park Slope, where he lived in the 1980s during and after the break-up of his own parents, former film critic Georgia Brown and novelist Jonathan Baumbach.

It feels like The Squid and the Whale was a form of therapy. I hope he feels better because his audiences won’t.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 87

seeLIFE DVDs “Serenity” finds the free lance rogues in the employ of Capt. Reynolds on the run from a representative of the powerful Alliance, who believe they are harboring a spooky stowaway whose psychic gifts could be used as a weapon. All of the primary cast of the TV series return for the film, which reflects the show’s freewheeling spirit - fast and furious, cleverly written and driven by its characters, not the special effects.

Extras include a couple of deleted scenes and commentary by creator Joss Whedon, who fills us in on the life, death and (brief) resurrection of “Firefly,” which is also examined in a short documentary .

CHARLIE & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY PG, 115 minutes

W Simply the best

From spies to mercenaries, spaceships and chocolate factories THE CONSTANT GARDENER M, 129 minutes imply the best adaptation of any John Le Carre thriller to make it to the big screen, Fernando Meirelles’ Kenya-set thriller stars Ralph Fiennes as a mild-mannered British diplomat and Rachel Weisz as his activist wife – who has gone missing and may have been murdered. This wheeling, flashbacking pic is full of intelligence and intrigue.

Steven Rea

Cannes and Toronto.

Lizzie, a solo mum played by Emily Mortimer (Bright Young Things), has been secretly authoring letters to her son supposedly from the young boy’s “father”, telling of his exploits as a seafarer in many foreign ports. Struggling to maintain the illusion, she hires a stranger (Gerard Butler) to pose as the “father” for a weekend visit. But naturally, in a light romantic movie like this one there’s an unexpected twist. More than one, in fact.

It’s a great feelgood flick.

DEAR FRANKIE M, 100 minutes

SERENITY M, 118 minutes

A

feature movie based on the success of the shortlived TV sci-fi series “Firefly” about a motley bunch of space travelers whose ship is for hire.

S

nother little charming indie production that won honours at the Seattle International Film Festival and Heartland, as well as being noticed at

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A

illie Wonka for the Next Generation. Johnny Depp turns another unique role on its head playing Wonka to Freddie Highmore’s Charlie, in the 21st century adaptation of Roald Dahl’s bestselling children’s novel.

A darker breed of chocolate compared to Gene Wilder’s version from 1971. Depp’s character displays an intense dislike of children which, whilst creating dramatic tension, remains more or less unresolved by movie’s end. Great digital effects though, and the kids like it.

THE WILD GEESE M, 133 minutes

A

h the 1970s, a decade of disco, flares and fading empires. This 28 year old movie pre-dates the political correctness movement, as former James Bond star Roger Moore leads his fellow British thespian heavyweights Richard Burton and Richard Harris on a mercenary mission to darkest Africa. I remember, when this movie first hit the big screen in New Zealand, anti-apartheid groups protesting the film’s colonial worldview.

Now on DVD, the film loses none of its punch and indeed gains some from the lack of high tech distracting gadgetry like cellphones or laptops that had not, of course, been invented back in 1978.

Variety magazine called it ‘rip-roaring blood and guts action’. What more could a non-PC viewer ask for? Extras include documentaries on the making of the movie, audio commentaries and interviews with the stars, and a doco on producer Euan Lloyd.

2AROTONGA !ITUTAKI

!WARDED @,EADING #OOK )SLANDS (OTEL AT THE 7ORLD 4RAVEL !WARDS

!WARDED PRESTIGIOUS @,UXURY 4RAVEL AWARD AND NAMED h/NE OF THE 7ORLDS 5LTIMATE (OTELSv BY ,UXURY 4RAVEL -AGAZINE

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, September 2006,

touchLIFE

TOYBOX

PHILIPS DIGITAL PHOTO DISPLAY

Bling me sometime Gems natural and technological

Longines Evidenza by swatch

From the Swatch Group this summer, the Longines Evidenza Complications range. The tonneau-shaped stainless steel case protects a self-winding mechanical movement beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour, meaning as long as you’re wearing it the watch won’t go flat. And if you do take it off it’ll keep ticking for about 42 hours. The watch features a moon-phase display and 31 day calendar with day and month apertures, and is water resistant to 30 metres. RRP for watches in the range is $3,010 to $4,405.

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It’s the way of the future. Why waste money on a photo frame that can only show one picture? Well, that’s what the team at Philips figured after one trip too many to Grandma’s, so they’ve just released this digital photo frame.

It looks like any other, but it is powered by mains or battery and will read photos stored on memory cards and flick through them so your photo frame in the lounge is suddenly dynamic art with a pot pourri of ever-changing imagery. Great idea. Want one. Must see Noel Leeming where they’re in stock now.

SUMMER ICE

CANON EOS –1V Body

The EOS-IV is solid, rugged and stands up to the elements like no other. The EOS-1V – "V" is for vision – is packed with advanced features and functions including 45-point AF, an Assist button to offer quicker access to frequently used functions, and a fast 10fps shooting speed with the PDBE2 and the NiMH Pack. The EOS-1V continues the EOS tradition, leading the way for AF SLR cameras – it is indeed the Professional Choice.

Visit http://www.canon.co.nz

Valentines Day may have passed, but there’s always a good reason for fresh bling. Every month, for example, 350,000 New Zealanders celebrate their birthdays. Another good reason is that the kiwi dollar remains artificially high, and that situation can’t last much longer. At the moment, the high dollar makes imported items like gems great value for money. Guthries Jewellers manufacture all their own range, and each piece is a hand-made one-off. How expensive is it to make? Fraser Guthrie told Investigate he’s done rings from as little as $2,000 to as much as $500,000. The key he says is to establish a budget and work within it. The average spend is from $3,500 to $7,500. See www.guthries.co.nz for more information

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The PIER has an RRP of $899 in self assemble form and is covered by a twelve-month manufacturers warranty against defects. For further information on the BM Lifestyle PIER by Baumann Meyer contact 1300 656369 or visit www.baumannmeyer.com.au

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006, 91

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realLIFE

15 MINUTES

I’ve never been to me Ian Wishart talks to Charlene

W

hen Charlene Oliver first heard the song that would make her a household name worldwide, she burst into tears. “Those lyrics – ‘Hey lady, you lady, cursing at your life, you’re a discontented mother and a regimented wife’ – they hit me hard. I was a battered wife, I’d married at 16, had a child to my first husband, and Ron Miller’s song just spoke to me. I didn’t even know him but I just cried and cried. He actually stopped the tape to give me space to cry. It was such a beautiful song.”

Just 26 years old, Charlene felt she knew the story of the song innately, and she knew it would also speak to women worldwide. The young singer was part of the Motown stable, working with artists like Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder, and she really, really wanted to record ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’, penned by Miller and studio partner Ken Kirsch.

It was 1976, however, and Rick Dees’ ‘Disco Duck’ was doing big business in the charts. The little known Charlene’s ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’ was released as a single, but only reached 97 in the Billboard Top 100 before disappearing forever – or so she and her record company thought.

In fact, so spectacularly unsuccessful was her debut album and a follow-up that Charlene gave up music, became a Christian, worked with autistic children and eventually moved to England with her new husband. By 1982, she’d almost forgotten her former life. But little did she know what Providence had in store.

“In 1982 a DJ, Scott Shannon, started playing it on his Florida radio station and it just absolutely caught on and people were calling in asking for it all the time.

Now I was living in England at the time, working in a candy store doing cleaning, selling sweets and cigarettes and everything, and I got a call from my mom saying that somebody at Motown was looking for me, and then I got a call at 2am from Jay Lasker at Motown telling me my song

94, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, March 2006

1982

“

The little known Charlene’s ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’ was released as a single, but only reached 97 in the Billboard Top 100 before disappearing forever – or so she and her record company thought

”

“

My gosh, you can imagine earning a real simple wage in a sweet shop in London, and all of a sudden they want you signed back up with a label again. It changed my life

2005

”

was on the charts! I thought at first it was a bad joke!”

They brought her back on a Concorde flight to New York as her song rocketed to number one around the world.

How did it change her life?

“My gosh, you can imagine earning a real simple wage in a sweet shop in London, and all of a sudden they want you signed back up with a label again. It changed my life. I had basically given up the music because I was so burned out.

But it was funny because when I was in England I had a feeling that something was going to happen but I didn’t know what it was. I remember just crying and asking, why hasn’t ‘Never Been To Me’ made it, this song is so beautiful?

“And then bam! And I plan on doing the same thing again, I plan on it happening again, and I want to come to your country! I want to come to New Zealand so bad – it seems like an amazing place!”

Charlene may yet get the chance. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the writing of ‘Never Been To Me’, she’s about to release a dance-mix version.

“You should hear it,” she laughs down the line, sensing my skepticism that the song could translate to a dance beat. “It really, really works. We’re going to put it up on the website soon (charlenesmusic. com where, incidentally, you can also listen to the original version online for free) so people can listen to it, and then I’ve got a new album out, probably mid year.”

For a song that sold somewhere in the region of six million copies (and in today’s frenetic music industry 4,000 copies is enough to secure a number one record some weeks in Britain), and continues to be played on classic hits stations worldwide, I ask the inevitable question: did ‘Never

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Been To Me’ set Charlene up for life?

“That’s a whole new story. I don’t get anything. I’m one of those stories in the industry. It was me not taking precautions.”

Indeed, says Charlene, the come-frombehind slow-boiler took her so much by surprise she was in no position to cash in on the success.

“I was offered Vegas at $50,000 a week, but I had no band. I just wasn’t ready and wasn’t prepared, so I couldn’t do it.”

Motown, on the other hand, was ready.

It dusted off Charlene’s songs from the

seventies and repackaged them, and work began swiftly on a follow-up single, the duet ‘Used To Be’ with Stevie Wonder and a new album. Her gospel album The Sky Is The Limit followed soon after, along with a rock album, Hit & Run Lover.

Although she’s been largely out of the music biz since having children in the late 1980s, Charlene is looking forward to a comeback this year.

“Can lightning strike twice? Well, I’m certainly going to try. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”