Investigate, November 2010

INSIDE: A RESPONSE TO THE HERALD – “YOU GOT IT WRONG”, P6

INVESTIGATE November 2010:

ANOTHER COLD CASE RE-OPENS: SWEDISH TOURISTS MYSTERY

Swedish Tourists • Inside Job • Tuhoe’s Tall Stories

IS HEIDI STILL ALIVE? The NIMBY Fight

How a rural community dragged an unpopular quarry to its knees

Issue 118

Inside Job

New doco fingers the men who caused world financial crash ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Tuhoe’s Tall Stories, and How China & Russia Are Arming Iran

$8.60 November 2010

You’ve already been swimming with the dolphins...

Our one-stop connection will have you in Phuket same day.

Fly THAI to the world, smooth as silk.

For more information and details of our latest special deals, ask your travel agent.

www.thaiairways.com

publiceye_2290_INVEST

C ONTENTS Volume 10, Issue 118, ISSN 1175-1290

F EATURES

26

EXCLUSIVE: Heidi Seek

New evidence puts missing Swedish tourist Heidi Paakkonen alive on Auckland’s Kawau Island after her alleged killer David Tamihere was already behind bars. IAN WISHART has the exclusive story on a sighting that may offer a sliver of hope to her family, or possibly lead police to her final resting place

The Nimby Quarry Battle

Most of the time we hear of local residents battling industrial developments and losing.

But just north of Auckland, locals won one.

GERARD ZWIER documents their struggle against the Redvale Quarry

Tuhoe Re-write History

Iranian Muppet

At the centre of the Waitangi compensation process lies trust; the choice over who to believe when it comes to past misdeeds. ROSS BAKER claims Tuhoe are being economic with the facts about why their land was taken

30

Who is really stirring the pot in the middle east?

When it comes to Iran, GEORGE L SIMPSON JR argues Moscow and Beijing are using Iran as a stooge against the US

Treachery: Australian Labor

38

The Australian Labor party was so riddled with Communists leading up to World War II it threatened South Pacific security. HAL COLEBATCH has the story

The Inside Job

A new documentary fingers the financial fiddlers who helped cause the world financial crash. KEN TURAN has the story

Cover: INVESTIGATE

42

52

EDITORIAL & OPINION

70

Focal Point Editorial

Vox-Populi The roar of the crowd

Simply Devine Miranda Devine on exploding kids

Mark Steyn

The right to protest

16

Eyes Right

Richard Prosser on the Henry affair

Line 1

Chris Carter on Paul Henry

Contra Mundum Matt Flannagan on ‘being right’

LIFESTYLE Poetry

76

Amy Brooke’s poem of the month

Money

Peter Hensley on investment

Education

Amy Brooke’s education column

Science

20

Defence scientist’s CV sends shockwaves

Technology

iPad challengers

22

Online

Food

Sport

Pages

Mouseover & STUXNET Chris Forster on Delhi

Health

Cancer-fighting fruit

Food regulation The latest spring reads

Music

Chris Philpott’s CD reviews

Alt.Health

Movies

Travel

Cutting Room

Vitamin D

Copenhagen, Thailand

Kiwi shines in Red The Inside Job

Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart | Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart | NZ EDITION Advertising 09 373-3676, sales@investigatemagazine.com | Contributing Writers: Hal Colebatch, Amy Brooke, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, Chris Carter, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Morrow, James Morrow, Len Restall, Laura Wilson, and the worldwide resources of MCTribune Group, UPI and Newscom | Art Direction Heidi Wishart | Design & Layout Bozidar Jokanovic | Tel: +64 9 373 3676 | Fax: +64 9 373 3667 | Investigate Magazine, PO Box 188, Kaukapakapa, Auckland 0843, NEW ZEALAND | AUSTRALIAN EDITION Editor Ian Wishart | Advertising sales@investigatemagazine.com | Tel/Fax: 1-800 123 983 | SUBSCRIPTIONS – Online: www.investigatemagazine.com By Phone: Australia – 1-800 123 983, NZ – 09 373 3676 By Post: To the PO Box NZ Edition: $85; AU Edition: A$96 EMAIL: editorial@investigatemagazine.com, ian@investigatemagazine.com, australia@investigatemagazine.com, sales@investigatemagazine.com, helpdesk@investigatemagazine.tv All content in this magazine is copyright, and may not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions of advertisers or contributors are not necessarily those of the magazine, and no liability is accepted.

We take no responsibility for unsolicited material sent to us. Please enclose a stamped, SAE envelope. Inquiries in the first instance should be made via email or fax.

Investigate magazine Australasia is published by HATM Magazines Ltd

we protect your digital worlds

BORN IN THE USA, DESTINED FOR ENGLAND BUT SECURED

BY NEW ZEALAND FOR THE EXCLUSIVE FEW.

E B B E T T CADILLAC

204-208 Anglesea Street, Hamilton

TILTING THE PLAYING FIELD AGAIN! In May 2009 the EBBETT Group exclusively acquired 88 3.6 litre Cadillacs, which had been destined for launch in the Australian and New Zealand markets.

A further 71 vehicles, a mix of 2.8 and 3.6 models built for the UK market are now available due to the tough trading conditions in the UK. We negotiated to purchase these Cadillacs from General Motors and they will be in New Zealand at the end of January.

The initial shipment of Cadillacs was a sellout success. This new shipment is possibly the last opportunity to secure a world icon built in right hand drive. Be one of an exclusive group of New Zealanders to drive a new CTS Cadillac.

These Cadillac CTS models are 2009 new vehicles. They will be sold with a three-year, 100,000km warranty.

EBBETT Group has trained technicians and will be connected to Cadillac through the GM global computer system for all warranty and service requirements. We have a great stock holding of parts and easy access to uncommon parts.

Priced from $55,000 plus on-road costs 2.8 V6 $66,500 plus on-road costs 3.6 V6 This has to be the best value luxury car ever sold in New Zealand.

Finance and lease packages are also available.

EBBETT Marque of Excellence

EXCEPTIONAL WITHOUT EXCEPTION

204 - 209 Anglesea St, Hamilton ph 07 838 0949 | www.ebbett.co.nz

“Why I choose thermography to monitor my breast health” Allison Roe Breast thermography offers women another tool for monitoring their breast health. It’s completely safe, radiation-free, and doesn’t require your breasts to be compressed (or even touched). Best of all, it can identify changes to breast health before they become visible through other methods of testing.

Thermography looks at the physiology (biology) of your breasts, or to be more precise, how hot your breasts are! A heat sensitive infrared camera is used to image both breasts, from several different angles. The camera shows the heat patterns that naturally emanate from the breast tissue.

Regular breast thermography allows a woman to keep a close eye on her breast health. Discovering changes earlier provides the opportunity to be proactive about managing breast health.

Breast thermography is suitable for women of all ages, including younger women, those with breast implants or denser breast tissue, fibrocystic breast conditions and women with a family history of breast cancer.

$25 OFFER Appointment usually $199.

With this voucher pay only $174. Be quick!

OfferOffer endsends Saturday 31st July 2010.

31 August 2010 Call 0800 102 888 to make an appointment.

BOOK TODAY

0800 102 888 www.mybreasthealth.co.nz

Auckland (Remuera & Milford), Hamilton, Tauranga, Hawkes Bay, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch, Dunedin, Invercargill.

Allison was one of the leading marathon and road runners in the world in the early 1980s. She won both the Boston and New York marathons in 1981 and was recently inducted into the NZ Sports Hall of Fame.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM September 2010 51

Embrace the new possibilities for sharing your life and finding creativity in both photo and video. Corel has refined photo and video editing software to help you advance your craft and create personal projects you’ll be proud of.

Paint Shop Photo Pro and VideoStudio Pro X3 – it’s time to take the next step.

AvAi lA bl e no w freom yo ur fAvo ur it so ft wAr e stoc ki st

www.mistralsoftware.co.nz

FOCAL POINT

Editorial

Why there must be an inquiry A WEEK MIGHT BE A LONG TIME IN POLITICS, BUT A

month is an eternity in publishing. Since last month’s editorial the new book Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside Story has finally hit the streets to a storm of controversy.

After reading the book, Rochelle – the only daughter of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe – has come forward to call for the case to be re-opened, as have many others. Some of my colleagues in the mainstream media have, however, been too dim-witted to accurately report what I wrote, contributing to a degree of misunderstanding and misinformation floating around in regards to what Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside Story alleges against the late Detective Sergeant Len Johnston in regard to the Crewe murders.

It is true, as Herald journalist Andrew Laxon wrote this month, that I offer a “speculative” hypothesis of exactly how the murders went down. But that “speculation” is built on a solid foundation of circumstantial and in some cases eyewitness evidence that links Johnston to the crime.

When Laxon wrote that “Wishart...claims that Johnston was nicknamed ‘The Fitter’ and had a reputation for threats and violence [and Wishart] admits he has no evidence to support his theory”, he is demonstrably wrong, as thousands of people who have read The Inside Story now realise.

I have two separate and independent eyewitnesses, one a former police colleague of Johnston’s, who told me they had each been personally threatened by Johnston – one directly in regard to the Crewe case. This is new evidence, published for the first time in the book in full. It is direct testimony, not hearsay, as to Johnston’s character and actions.

It is true I don’t have “hard” evidence that puts Johnston at the murder scene when the shots were fired, but Laxon is wrong to rubbish me for that. I have a darn sight more

hard evidence that puts Johnston inside the Crewe house leading up to the murders, whereas police had nothing that put Thomas there and they still managed to convince two juries he was guilty.

The reality is, if anyone had the smoking gun, “I saw him standing beside the bodies” kind of evidence, this Crewe murder mystery would have been solved 40 years ago. We are all here debating the case because there is not a shred of forensic evidence linking any particular individual to the crime scene.

The entire case against Arthur Allan Thomas was built on speculation, and fab-

pathologist cracked her skull right around like a boiled egg. The pathologist also said the injuries were consistent with the butt of a rifle being smashed into her face with extreme force.

Pat’s “domestic violence” theory fails to demonstrate how a mere punch from Harvey could have caused such traumatic skull injuries. More to the point, Pat Booth’s theory disintegrates on this: Jeannette was so badly wounded the head injuries alone could have killed her the same way that actress Natasha Richardson died on the skifield last year after whacking her head on the snow,

Laxon is right that I admit my hypothesis of how the crime might have unfolded in the Crewe house with Johnston is “entirely speculative”, but the evidence underpinning this speculation is firm, both circumstantial and direct testimony ricated evidence. As I say, there was no evidence to put Thomas at the crime scene and in fact he had an alibi supported by two people showing he was 15 kilometres away.

The argument that Len Demler did it was built on speculation, and no evidence either.

Pat Booth’s daft claim that Jeannette Crewe did it then killed herself after shooting Harvey is entirely speculation, and in fact goes hard against the evidence – for example, the blow Pat claims was delivered by Harvey was so viciously hard that it knocked six teeth out, smashed her nose and an eye socket, and according to the

6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

and suffering an epidural hematoma – bleeding on the brain. There was no way Jeannette Crewe was bouncing around helping her father move Harvey’s body, and romping with Rochelle as the “mystery woman” seen by witnesses. Further, the angle of the shot into Jeannette’s head did not lend itself to suicide, without massive and extreme gymnastics on Jeannette’s part, involving holding both arms backwards, and bolt upright into the air, while she lay face down on the ground – a very odd stance for a suicide shot.

I honestly can’t understand why the media (TVNZ, the Herald, RadioLive, Otago Daily

Times, the Dominion Post) still give a shred of credence to Pat Booth, and allow him to keep twisting the knife into Rochelle and her family with his bizarre, impossible and hurtful allegations against her mother.

In contrast, the case against Johnston that I make in The Inside Story is strong enough for a retired detective inspector, Ross Meurant, to call it “disturbingly possible” in the Herald, and Laxon’s opinions need to be measured against Meurant’s more informed reading of the evidence and the nuances it presents. The submissions detailing the hard evidence that does exist, the possible motive and Johnston’s ample opportunity, are far stronger in fact than Crown Prosecutor David Morris was able to rustle up against Thomas. If you doubt me, read the book.

When Andrew Laxon writes “Even Wishart admits that his theory, which has been dismissed by other commentators, is “entirely speculative” and could be wrong”, he quotes me out of context. For a start, the “other commentators” had not actually read The Inside Story when they “dismissed” it, and secondly nowhere in the book do I suggest the facts I’ve uncovered are “wrong” – the claim is an example of the Herald journalist interviewing his typewriter and missing the keyboard entirely.

Laxon is right that I admit my hypothesis of how the crime might have unfolded in the Crewe house with Johnston is “entirely speculative”, but the evidence underpinning this speculation is firm, both circumstantial and direct testimony, and in this regard makes my evidence stronger than the evidence that convicted Thomas and stronger than the evidence used to blame Demler.

Ultimately, the test of whether I’ve made a convincing argument is over to readers of the book to judge for themselves, but I can’t let Laxon’s misinterpretation of my case against Johnston to go unchallenged, and the Herald refused to correct their errors – ironic when you consider the other glaring factual mistakes in Laxon’s piece that I brought to their attention and which they readily corrected.

Example? Well, the Herald writer opened his synopsis of the case against Thomas by saying police had accused Thomas of perching on a window ledge to shoot Jeannette through an open window, then rushing inside to club her in the face with the gun, then shooting her again on the floor, and finally shooting her husband who evidently had snoozed through the mugging and two gunshots and was still in his armchair. Of course, astute readers will know that was

never the police case against Thomas, and Jeannette was only shot once, not twice. It is commonly accepted Harvey was shot first.

If that’s what passes for fact-checking at the Herald, somebody pass me a laugh-meter next time they take a supercilious crack at yours truly.

Somebody killed the Crewes. We know it wasn’t Thomas, we now know it is highly unlikely to have been Len Demler. We are left with a cop who fabricated the entire case against Thomas, who knew where to get objects only the killer could have known about, who according to a former colleague had lit fires to intimidate, and who threatened to kill people who crossed him. This same cop turns out to have known Jeannette Crewe in advance of the murders, and been in her house, prior to a series of intimidatory arsons and then the murder.

Because of this book, New Zealanders now have a much clearer picture of the Crewe murders than they have ever had in the past, and Rochelle Crewe has come forward as a direct result. The public, and Rochelle, are entitled to ask the obvious questions that arise from Johnston’s involvement in the investigation: did he do it? Shouldn’t someone be held accountable at some level?

There are two inquiries we need to have, really. The first one is easy. In my view Bruce Hutton should be taken in for questioning, read his rights, and charged under the Crimes Act with perverting the course of

Bruce Hutton holds the axle obtained from underneath Harvey Crewe, whose wrapped up body remains floating in the water immediately below Hutton.

justice. The evidence is already there, police could do this tomorrow without breaking a sweat, if they were honest. Of course, finding honesty inside Police National Headquarters is like finding gold in a coalmine.

The second inquiry should be held into who killed Harvey and Jeannette. It is unlikely that court action will follow as, in my view at least, the probable culprit is dead.

Nonetheless, a finding based on the civil law test of balance of probabilities would give closure to the Crewe, Demler and Thomas families, and for the rest of us provide some valuable answers to a $50 million investigation made vastly more expensive than it should have been as a direct result of Hutton and Johnston’s corruption.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 7

VOX POPULI

Communiques The roar of the crowd

The first book I’ve ever read

I saw the ad on the TV regarding your book The Inside Story and said that I would like to read that. Elaine, my wife, bought the book on Thursday 14/10/10.

For your knowledge I am 73, an ex farmer and have never read a book in my life, but on the 15th I started reading this book and could not put it down and finished it 17/10/10.

It is compelling reading as I have followed the case very closely. We had a visit from Allan & Jenny in Blenheim soon after his release to borrow a JVC video camera cord as they had left their one at home. It was so nice to be able to help them.

but the promise or blackmail would have been immense, and given Johnson’s skills possible, but highly risky.

Given Johnson’s calculating mind it would be too dangerous, and in fact the ability to control this whole situation would be central to his ego, power and delight in manipulation. To this end I do not believe Hutton knew – further fuelling Johnson’s delight at manipulating even his immediate superiors.

So I guess I should get to the point, there was no woman, it was the murderer dressed as one, 75 metres would only render a silhouette (as said a mature one), easily achieved with a minimum of costume.

Bill McCallum, Blenheim

Hamish Miekle, via email

Len Johnston

Wishart responds:

Congratulations on a stunning book, you possess that rare genius of finding simplicity in the complex. I have read many books and articles on this subject and I have found none as convincing as yours.

I have for many years struggled with the notion of a women feeding Rochelle. As you suggest only a [blood] relationship could survive such a test. Which leads me to a theory I have had for a number of years and believe it does not frustrate your thinking.

I cannot believe Johnson could or would involve anyone else, the risks are just too great, surely if such a woman existed their silence could not be guaranteed, unless he disposed of that person very promptly. If such a woman existed for the subsequent 40 years, the truth would have come out.

The only way a woman could have existed, would mean she must surely have met an equally tragic and prompt demise. If such a demise was met, it could not be a police woman as the publicity would be too great and to my knowledge no New Zealand Police woman has met her death subsequent to the events. A prostitute maybe,

It is an interesting theory, and one that came up a year or so after the murders. Possible, but impossible to know for sure.

The Thomas case

Firstly congratulations on your book – it’s a compelling read. I marvel at your ability to find and link so many disparate facts, and to find the time!

Is the Police Commissioner the best person to be doing this investigation? How independent will such an investigation be?

Won’t his bent be to cover up and protect his own, just as before? Who really should be heading this investigation? Should the appeal be to the Government? Is there anything effective we ordinary citizens can do to help force this case to be re-opened?

Ross M, via email (details supplied)

Compelling

I have just read your book and feel compelled to congratulate you on the outstanding research and the brilliant end result.

Whilst it is not my habit to send unsolicited e-mails in this manner, this seems to be

8 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

an exception that breaks the rule.

It strikes me that bringing out the truth in the courageous manner that you have is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, particularly in a country as small as this.

For your interest, it was an unlikely circumstance that made me decide to go out and purchase the book. Quite simply its publication evoked such an adverse reaction from police that effectively advertised it as essential reading. For me the clincher was Greg O’Connor telling the media he would never read it! I went out and bought it the same day!

Our generation has grown up hearing about the Crewe murders and for me there has always been a sense of frustration that individual police officers were never brought to account. Ross Meurant sums up the police culture very well and that ethos remains as dominant today as it ever was.

Returning to the central player, I firmly believe that Bruce Hutton should be brought to account. His age is immaterial and I doubt in my view that he has become any more honest with the passage of time. It is likely that he remains the devious, egotistical and unfeeling liar he has always been.

Such behaviour is well entrenched. I find it absolutely abhorrent that Hutton has apparently enjoyed affluence and lived comfortably throughout his life, never having had to pay for his dishonesty.

Brian Hunter, via email

Crown prosecutor didn’t believe

School holidays and done nothing but read your book! I heard the first radio announcement of the house being found etc and my cousin’s brother-in-law was Owen Priest – never met him! However I was a young teacher at St Cuthberts College in Auckland in the 70’s. I didn’t teach them that year

Ian Wishart

Y

This Christmas, there’s one book everyone wants

Arthur Allan Thomas

Arthur Allan Thomas:

THE INSIDE STORY

CREWE MURDERS: NEW EVIDENCE

Jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, now for the first time in 40 years, he tells his incredible story as we name a new prime suspect

Ian Wishart HATM Publishing

#1 bestselling author

THE EXPLOSIVE NEW BESTSELLER.

GET IT HERE

Whitcoulls, Paperplus, Borders, The Warehouse, Take Note, Dymocks and all good bookstores INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 9

A Thomas retrial committee member reenacts what police claim was the killer’s position, perched on a wall and windowsill.

but both Temm’s daughter and Sally Anne Morris were in the same class during the trial! Staff not allowed to talk! A few year later (77/78) Sally Anne was in my class and we were in the Waitakeres and were talking about Tracy Anne Patient who had gone missing there. I nearly drove off the road when another student asked Sally Anne if her father had had something to do with the Crewe case. She replied, “Yes, Daddy did but he never thought Thomas did it”. I was in severe danger of losing students off the road!!

I asked her again and she repeated it. I have told this story ever since and never altered it so not a case of embellishment!.

Name and address supplied

You should write about Ben & Olivia

Great about your book. I have a copy and have just started it. I’m avidly reading it and can’t wait to read all the details as I’m about the same age as Arthur Thomas and followed the case in depth at the time of the murders.

I’ve always had no doubt he was framed by the Police and I feel another one in the same position is Scott Watson (and Peter Ellis). It would be marvellous if you could take Watson’s one up too because it’s plain to a blind man that they got the wrong man and the wrong boat. Keith Hunter wrote Trial by Trickery which lays it all out so a simpleton can understand it. It’s very obvious that corruption took place in Watson’s case too. Actually the justice (injustice) system in this country is very wrong. Instead of the adversarial system we currently have where it depends on how tricky everyone can be, we should have the inquisitorial system which is more interested in getting at the truth.

Excellent work. Interesting how the Police defend their own though isn’t it, even when

they are obviously up to devious stuff. I wasn’t impressed with Greg O’Connor’s comments and thought they were very ‘unfortunate’.

How are we ever to trust our Police force?

I would be very afraid if I ever innocently ended up on the wrong side of them. They seem to quickly get a mindset and then discount everything that doesn’t fit their theory.

Helen Moseley, via email

Wishart responds:

For what it’s worth Jayson Rhodes and I wrote the very first book on the Scott Watson case, “Ben & Olivia: What Really Happened?”.

Copies of which are still available.

The cops were freemasons

A good friend of mine, the late John Read of Panmure, was the Proof Tester at C.A.C. (the Colonial Ammunition Company of Mt. Eden), who made the ammunition said to have been recovered at the Crewe house. In other words, he was the quality tester there and no-one would have been more qualified to state if the cartridge case “found” in the garden matched the bullets found inside.

Two policemen, one in uniform, one not, called on John at his home and asked him to testify that the bullet matched the case, (they had both on them). John explained that these cases were imported from England, from Eley ammunition company, and came in different sizes because the bullets themselves were made in 4 sizes. The base of each bullet had a mark to show which of the 4 diameters they were so they could be matched to the appropriate sized case. John explained to the officers about the recovered bullets/cases they’d shown him, that, “Those bullets would no more have fit in those cases than a f*****g square peg would fit in a f*****g round hole”.

10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

He was thanked for his time, then sworn to secrecy on a Bible. He was also asked by one of the plain-clothed officers to swear an oath of secrecy as a fellow Freemason.

When I knew John he was a Grand Master at Ellerslie.

I tried to interest Pat Booth in getting a statement off John Read while he was still alive, but he had no interest. Yet he still trades in his newspaper on his association with this case. John told this to me direct and, although this would be hearsay now, the relationship with the case and bullet matching would remain a fact that, if you were to contact Eley in UK, they could confirm. Unlike CAC, which went out of business, Eley are still in business and still making .22 ammunition for export.

Name and address supplied

Calf pictures stir emotions

We are disturbed by pictures of aborted calves recently on the media. How much more outraged would we be about imagery of aborted babies we don’t see – New Zealand citizens. Every school day the equivalent of 90 children (4 classrooms) are aborted or 15,000 classrooms full since the Act was passed. Makes you think doesn’t it.

Denis Shuker, Hibiscus Coast

NZ security

When US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton cancelled her NZ visit due to the Haiti earthquake, media commentators and editors went into a frenzy of speculation that military ties between the US and NZ were about to get much closer. And sure enough, a NZ Herald article, 8 March 2010 announced, “NZ-US army exercises to resume after 23-year freeze”.

An earlier Herald editorial suggested the NZ SAS redeployment to Afghanistan was the main reason for the warming relationship. The two countries have been getting quite cosy over the last few years and if the Herald editors had looked into their archives they would have found another reason was much closer to home than the mountainous battlegrounds of Afghanistan.

In 2002, news broke about the Stratos satellite installation at Albany on Auckland’s North Shore that was relaying US Navy communications from the USA to Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, not just international TV. The Canadian based Stratos Global Corporation had acquired the Inmarsat, Vsat and Iridium sat-phone networks, enabling them to clinch contracts with the

OUTDOOR LIVING with DANSKE MØBLER Find the perfect outdoor furniture for your home and lifestyle from our large collection of quality New Zealand made and imported designs and styles.

View the full collection online or phone 09 625 3900 for a free catalogue.

AUCKLAND 983 Mt Eden Rd, Three Kings. Ph 09 625 3900 • 13a Link Dve, Wairau Park. Ph 09 443 3045 501 Ti Rakau Dve, Botany Town Centre. Ph 09 274 1998 HAMILTON 15 Maui St, Te Rapa. Ph 07 847 0398 TAUpO 29 Totara St, Totara Point. Ph 07 378 3156 weLLINgTON Level 1, Harvey Norman Centre, 28 Rutherford St, Lower Hutt. Ph 04 568 5001 STOCKISTS NATIONwIDe www.danskemobler.co.nz

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 11

US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand navies.

This made it the most important satellite relay station in the Pacific outside the US installation on Guam. It was described as the “linchpin” in US / Afghanistan communications and vital for the whole operation. That sounded like big news but it never made the headlines or TV newscasts. A small article in the NZ Herald, a couple of internet news sites and that was it.

[NZ Herald, Tues Jan 15, 2002, “Auckland station to have key role with US Navy” by Adam Gifford] The contract was for 5 years but allied navies still use Inmarsat terminals on their ships and the comms are routed through Albany. [See Stratos website] Since the Iraq war, this de facto military base, hidden in plain sight, became even more important.

This fact is not lost on the Americans who use it for reliable, secure comms to their fleet in the Persian Gulf. It is an integral part of the Western military communications network.

The NZ government allows it to operate here without any interference in spite of the still current ban on US nuclear warship visits. No doubt this has opened doors in Washington and softened the Yanks’ hard line stand against NZ. But it raises an important question. How can we allow US Navy communications to relay through Albany virtually 24/7 when those same US ships are not allowed into any NZ port?

It’s a hypocritical double standard that’s rendered the anti-nuclear, “no nuke ships in our ports” policy totally irrelevant and meaningless. NZ is up to the armpits with the US military and the sooner this useless policy is dropped, the sooner we can have a more honest relationship with our traditional allies.

And talking of hypocrisy, it looks like former NZ PM Helen Clark sold out her precious anti-nuke principles to get a top job in the UN. She has been known for her strong anti-nuclear stand since the 1970s and was instrumental in getting Lange to keep the US Navy out of NZ, making many enemies in the US over the years.

But as Prime Minister, she allowed those US Navy communications to route through Albany, in effect allowing them to operate in NZ again. Thus she directly assisted the US in the Iraq war when she publically stated she would not. But why? Was it because the Yanks could have vetoed her from getting the number 3 job in the UN if she hadn’t

cooperated with them? If so, it proves she will do anything to get what she wants and is therefore not to be trusted.

If NZ is reinstated as an ally, it will regain its “most favoured nation” status which means priority access in many countries. Losing that status because of the antinuclear stand cost NZ billions, according to National party assessments in past years.

We lost more than we ever gained and now it’s time for a reality check.

It’s also time to review our pitiful excuse for a defence policy. Since we have a high value military target in Albany, where does that leave us in the event of a regional conflict? If there is ever a conflict between Red China and Taiwan, the USA will support Taiwan without any doubt and we could be wide open to attack with absolutely no way to defend our sovereign territory.

Remember during the Gulf wars, communications installations were the first ones taken out prior to a major military strike. We have no air defence systems and no combat aircraft because the present and former governments seem to have no idea or concept of regional defence.

To say we never used the Skyhawks in action, so we had to get rid of them to save money, is utter drivel. We came very close to using them in the 1999 Timor crisis and could have supported the Australian squadrons in combat if necessary.

We did contribute at least some deterrent force to the region but now we have very little left to give.

Would you get rid of your car or house alarm because you had never been broken into? Of course not and everyone would call you a fool for doing so. Potential thieves see the alarm’s flashing light or warning stickers and move on to easier pickings. Military deterrents work in a similar fashion. Smaller countries join forces to let larger nations know they will inflict serious damage on any attacking force.

Labour and the Greenies used to talk about US nuclear ship visits to NZ painting a bullseye on the country but have totally ignored the biggest target for a cruise missile attack we’ve ever had. It’s time to wake up and get real. We are an integral part of the western military alliance whether the Greens like it or not. We no longer live in a pacifist fantasy land of isolation at the bottom of the Pacific. [Thanks for nothing Helen. You made NZ a prime target and took away the only means of defending ourselves for your own political gain.]

So let’s put a few questions to our current

12 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

“leaders” and see if they can give us some straight answers for once.

Questions to the NZ Minister of Defence: What are you doing to provide adequate defence for high level military targets like Stratos in Albany?

Are you going to inform local residents of its real status? If you will not provide defence for the installation will you have it moved to a more remote location so as not to endanger the local population?

Question to US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton: If the NZ government does not provide adequate defence coverage for the Stratos satellite relay station used by the US Navy and other allied forces, will the US provide the means to defend it, if it is threatened in a regional conflict?

If the answers are “no” then one day it may well be “God defend New Zealand” because the government certainly can’t.

Name withheld for security reasons

POETRY

Is it poetry? Then send submissions to Poetry Editor Amy Brooke: amy@investigatemagazine.tv

The Port of Lyttleton, a Night in 1990 The Jhoy sails out of Tokyo with denim crews and carbonned laws Her citron cranes will warmly lift White Rhino down to frozen wharves.

We catechize without reflection Loneliness outside of class, The First Four Ships, Last Four Elections, Hymns sprayed up on the underpass The charm is really in the dock.

An empty net, unmended, clears Pretentions from volcanic rock, Club Med, or terror, reigns here.

I hear the rustling radio Speaking demotic indigo Through rusting archipelago Riceland above, Iceland below, And in the theatre’s gurgling row, Sheepstealin’ in Iilyria; Our local genius, coal, will flow And Soviet haemorabilia.

Greig Fleming

LARGE VENUE Powerful Easy Install Dual Lamp High Definition

EDUCATION Teacher Friendly

HOME THEATRE

Reliability Long Lamp Life Ultra Short Throw

Stunning Picture Quality 1080p Resolution 200,000:1 Contrast Ratio

MEETING ROOMS Bright Wide Screen Wide Connectivity

BUSINESS TRAVELER Light Weight Portable Wireless PC Free

RELIABILITY, QUALITY AND RANGE. Whatever your application, Epson provides the perfect solution - a range that IT ALL STACKS UP TOWith MAKE EPSON Whatever your application, provides perfect solution - a of range that soldNUMBER 1. delivers on price,Epson performance andthe reliability. millions projectors delivers on worldwide, price, performance reliability. millions the of projectors sold Epson is and a clear numberWith 1; leading way in technological worldwide, development Epson is aand clear number 1;such leading theshort waythrow, in technological offering features as ultra wireless connectivity, Whatever your application, Epson provides the perfect solution - a range that delivers on price,

superb picture quality and much It all stacks up to is make Epson Number 1. development and offering features such as more. ultrasold short throw,Epson wireless connectivity, performance and reliability.

With millions of projectors worldwide, a clear number 1; leading the wayquality in technological development offering features such as ultra short throw, wireless superb picture and much more. and It all stacks up to make Epson Number 1. connectivity, superb picture quality and much more. It all stacks up to make Epson Number 1.

For information on our range of projectors call 0800 EPSON 4 (0800 377 664) or visit epson.co.nz

For information on our range of projectors call 0800 EPSON 4 (0800 377 664) or visit epson.co.nz

SUBSCRIBE

& GET THE EXPLOSIVE NEW BOOK ON THE CREWES! HURRY, Limited offer

INSIDE: A RESPONSE TO THE HERALD – “YOU GOT IT WRONG”, P6 INVESTIGATE November 2010: Swedish Tourists • Inside Job • Tuhoe’s Tall Stories

When you subscribe to Investigate this month for only $110*, we’ll also give you Ian Wishart’s new bestseller, Arthur Allan Thomas: The Inside Story.

Keep it for yourself or use it as an ideal Christmas gift.

ANOTHER COLD CASE RE-OPENS: SWEDISH TOURISTS MYSTERY

IS HEIDI STILL ALIVE? The NIMBY Fight

Issue 118

Inside Job

New doco fingers the men who caused

THE world SHOCKING NEW EVIDENCE financial crash IN A 40 YEAR OLD COLD CASE

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Tuhoe’s Tall Stories, and How China & Russia Are Arming Iran

Ian Wishart

How a rural community dragged an unpopular quarry to its knees

WAS THE KILLER OF HARVEY & JEANNETTE CREWE A POLICE INSIDER?

Arthur Allan Thomas

A NEW WITNESS COMES FORWARD: “Dear Ian, I have had information since 1970 that I have been far too frightened to release. I made an effort to inform the Police in 1970 and spoke to a Sergeant Johnston ... he told me that if I ever rang the Police with that information again or made any attempt to have it made known then I would be the next bastard found in the river” AWARD-WINNING INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST IAN WISHART HUNTS DOWN SIGNIFICANT NEW LEADS, AND FOR THE FIRST TIME, ARTHUR ALLAN THOMAS DESCRIBES HIS ARREST, HIS YEARS BEHIND BARS AND HIS LIFE SINCE HIS RELEASE – AN INCREDIBLE, NEVER-BEFORE-TOLD STORY...

$8.60 November 2010

SAVE $34 (while stocks last)

Arthur Allan Thomas:

THE INSIDE STORY

CREWE MURDERS: NEW EVIDENCE

Jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, now for the first time in 40 years, he tells his incredible story as we name a new prime suspect

Ian Wishart #1 bestselling author

HATM Publishing

LLER, THAT’S A BESTSE , FOR JUST & THE MAGAZINE AS TAKEN M X & , P U L L A 0 1 1 $ CARE OF

Check out our Christmas book offers ONLINE at ianwishart.com OPTIONS:

NAME ADDRESS

Yes, send me the special offer of Investigate and the

POST CODE

Arthur Allan Thomas book for just $110

PHONE

FAX

Yes, just send me 12 issues of Investigate for $78

E-MAIL

Yes, send me a two year subscription to Investigate,

CREDIT CARD NUMBER

plus Arthur, for just $188

NAME ON CARD AMEX

DINERS

MASTERCARD

EXPIRES VISA

Yes, just send me 24 issues of Investigate for $156

BANKCARD

CHEQUE IS ENCLOSED

*$110 offer includes magazine subscription, book and courier to you

Photocopy or clip out this coupon and post to Investigate, PO Box 188, Kaukapakapa, Auckland 0843 or order online at www.ianwishart.com, or fax 09 3733 667; offer for a limited time

SIMPLY DEVINE

Miranda Devine

Climate activists blow up kids, and credibility IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT IT’S NOT SATIRE BUT the

10:10 campaign’s advertisement showing a teacher blowing up children was a serious attempt to drum up support for climate alarmism.

The video, which attracted condemnation around the world this month, shows a teacher encouraging her young charges to follow the 10:10 campaign’s plan to reduce carbon emissions. When she asks for a show of hands from those who want to join the campaign, all but two of the children thrust their hands in the air.

“That’s absolutely fine, your own choice,” the teacher says, smiling. Then she presses a red button and the two little holdouts explode, their blood and gore spraying all over their classmates.

The same scenario is repeated in a workplace and on a soccer ground where those reluctant to join the campaign are messily vapourised.

This nasty ad wasn’t the work of Chaserstyle fringe comedians. This was a serious product of the environmental establishment, an organisation sponsored by Sony – until the company pulled out this week – and in partnership with the Guardian newspaper.

Politicians, schools, and celebrities all over the world have joined 10:10. Even our very own Hugh Jackman has been photographed wearing a 10:10 promotional necklace.

The video was scripted by ex-pat New Zealander Richard Curtis of Four Weddings and a Funeral fame, and was the brainchild of the UK’s version of Michael Moore, Frannie Armstrong, director of The Age of Stupid.

It was the considered message from the very heart of the green movement – stand in the way of our plans and we will eliminate you. It’s green Darwinism, known in earlier times as The Final Solution.

Frannie and friends removed the video from the 10:10 website when complaints

started, but it was too late. She has let the cat out of the bag.

Now we have the evidence that during the long silence after the twin blows last year of the Copenhagen climate summit and Climategate, green zealots had been busy plotting revenge.

They flipped the switch in their brains that takes them down the blood-spattered path of totalitarian death so well-worn in the 20th century. Now we know – climate change alarmism is a death cult.

We heard the message in its starkest form last month from the US Discovery Channel’s suicide bomber James Lee, whose eco-man-

kinder, gentler new parliament for Brennan’s pet Greens was euthanasia. It’s where their heads are at. Killing people.

And if you’re not dead then they’ll make you suffer.

Already this winter we have had stories of people forced to huddle over hot water bottles and even sleep with cats to keep warm because they can’t afford to keep paying soaring electricity bills.

The pain inflicted is deliberate. You are intended to suffer. In this land blessed with abundant reserves of cheap coal-fired energy, your suffering is what environmentalists and policy makers call reducing demand. You

Already this winter we have had stories of people forced to huddle over hot water bottles and even sleep with cats to keep warm because they can’t afford to keep paying soaring electricity bills ifesto demanded no more “filthy human children”, before he was shot dead by police.

And we heard it in the subtle endorsement

by Father Frank Brennan when he defended a vote for the Greens during the last election. “On some policy issues, I daresay the Greens have a more Christian message than the major parties,” Brennan wrote in rebuttal of Cardinal George Pell’s rather better description of the Greens as “sweet camouflaged poison”.

But, whatever way you dress it up, the climate alarmist message ultimately can be boiled down to death.

No surprise that the first big issue in the

16 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

are being forced to turn off the heater, pull out your electric plugs and bathe in lukewarm water in order to – ahem – stop climate change.

Electricity consumers are being hit twice – first with doubled prices to pay for inefficient green power such as wind and solar and then to catch up on infrastructure investment neglected by sloppy state governments.

Then there is Julia Gillard’s looming unpromised carbon tax. If it is priced at between $20 and $50 a tonne, as the Energy Supply Association of Australia told the Business Spectator’s Robert Gottliebsen, then power bills will double again.

In other words, over the next four to five years your electricity bill will quadruple.

Suck it up, because your pain is the aim of the new green paradigm. Yet the greater aim is not to change the planet’s temperature because no one knows how to do that.

For one thing, evidence used by alarmists to justify killing people and by the Government to justify a carbon tax is looking increasingly flimsy.

As the brilliant Perth-based mathematician David Evans, who wrote the Government’s carbon accounting program when he worked at the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) told a climate seminar last week, the temperature record is based in part on suspect readings.

At a seminar by the American climate sceptic think tank the Heartland Institute in Sydney, Evans displayed images of tempera-

ture measuring stations around the world, including in Melbourne and Sydney, which stand next to heat-generating air-conditioners, freeways and asphalt runways.

Thermometers that might once have stood in paddocks are registering higher temperatures due to what’s been built next to them, whether that’s a brick building, wastewater reservoir, carpark or incinerator.

These humble bits of technology in prosaic locations across the planet determine surface temperature trends, yet their readings have been influenced by the so-called urban heat island effect.

Since the whistle was blown by American sceptic Anthony Watts, some have been eliminated.

But, as Evans pointed out, their results remain in the temperature record. That is the record which has so alarmed climate zealots

“That’s absolutely fine, your own choice,” the teacher says, smiling.

Then she presses a red button and the two little holdouts explode, their blood and gore spraying all over their classmates.

they think nothing of advocating the murder of people who don’t agree with them.

Eco-fanatics are no different to totalitarian ideologues through the ages. Evils such as Nazism don’t arrive with devil’s horns; they come in disguise – “sweet camouflaged poison”.

So we should thank Frannie and her 10:10 comrades for their vile ad. They naively removed the camouflage too soon. devinemiranda@hotmail.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 17

STRAIGHT TALK

Mark Steyn The right to protest

WHILE I’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT FREE SPEECH IN

Copenhagen, several free speech issues arose in North America. I was asked about them both at the Sappho Award event and in various interviews, so here’s a few thoughts for what they’re worth: Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven’t touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It’s one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it’s hard to see why it’s in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the president of the United States to denounce him, and the secretary of state, and the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honour killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that

he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the Western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been cancelled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person?

Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the president, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s

of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it.

Maybe Pastor Jones doesn’t have any First

If you reward bad behaviour, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a Bible, U.S. government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys Bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation

18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

Amendment rights. Musing on Koran burning, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer argued: [Oliver Wendell] Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre... Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theatre today? What is ‘being trampled to death’?

This is a particularly obtuse remark even by the standards of contemporary American jurists. As I’ve said before, the fire-in-acrowded-theatre shtick is the first refuge of the brain-dead. But it’s worth noting the repellent modification Justice Breyer makes to Holmes’ argument: If someone shouts fire in a gaslit Broadway theatre of 1893,

people will panic. By definition, panic is an involuntary reaction. If someone threatens to burn a Koran, belligerent Muslims do not panic – they bully, they intimidate, they threaten, they burn and they kill. Those are conscious acts, at least if you take the view that Muslims are as fully human as the rest of us and therefore responsible for their choices. As my colleague Jonah Goldberg points out, Justice Breyer’s remarks seem to assume that Muslims are not fully human.

More importantly, the logic of Breyer’s halfwit intervention is to incentivize violence, and undermine law itself. What he seems to be telling the world is that Americans’ constitutional rights will bend to intimidation. If Koran-burning rates a First Amendment exemption because Muslims are willing to kill over it, maybe Catholics should threaten to kill over the next gayJesus play, and Broadway could have its First Amendment rights reined in. Maybe the next time Janeane Garafolo goes on MSNBC and calls Obama’s opponents racists, the Tea Partiers should rampage around town and NBC’s free-speech rights would be withdrawn.

Meanwhile, in smaller ways, Islamic intimidation continues. One reason why I am skeptical that the Internet will prove the great beacon of liberty on our darkening planet is because most of the anonymous entities that make it happen are run by people marinated in jelly-spined political correctness. In Canada, an ISP called Bluehost knocked Marginalized Action Dinosaur off the air in response to a complaint by Asad Raza, a laughably litigious doctor in Brampton, Ontario. Had his name been Gordy McHoser, I doubt even the nancy boys at Bluehost would have given him the time of day. A similar fate briefly befell our old pal the Binksmeister at FreeMarkSteyn. com: In other words, a website set up to protest Islamic legal jihad was shut down by the same phenomenon. In America, The New York Times has already proposed giving “some government commission” control over Google’s search algorithm; the City of Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the Constitution signed, is now so removed from the spirit of the First Amendment that it’s demanding bloggers pay a $300 “privilege” license for expressing their opinions online. The statists grow ever more comfortable in discussing openly the government management of your computer. But, even if they don’t formally take it over, look at the

people who run publishing houses, movie studios, schools and universities, and ask yourself whether you really want to bet the future on the commitment to free speech of those who run ISPs. SteynOnline, for example, is already banned by the Internet gatekeepers from the computers at both Marriott Hotels and Toronto Airport.

But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like me. Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She’s the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up “Everybody Draws Mohammed” Day, and then, when she realized what she’d stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark’s Mailbox to object.

I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us: “You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.”

On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent.

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that’s the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he’s just a craven squish. Which is odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.

Listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, The Seattle Weekly and Bluehost internet services are telling

us about where we’re headed. As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that “in my country everyone is free to criticize the President”, and the Soviet guy replies, “Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President.” Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals’ loathing of their own.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behaviour, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating.

Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop.” Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

While I was in Denmark, one of the usual Islamobozos lit up prematurely in a Copenhagen hotel. Not mine, I’m happy to say. He wound up burning only himself, but his targets were my comrades at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. I wouldn’t want to upset Justice Breyer by yelling “Fire!” over a smouldering jihadist, but one day even these idiots will get lucky. I didn’t like the Danish Security Police presence at the Copenhagen conference, and I preferred being footloose and fancy-free when I was prowling the more menacing parts of Rosengard across the water in Malmö the following evening.

No one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won’t be there for you. © 2010 Mark Steyn

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 19

EYES RIGHT

Richard Prosser A flutter on the GGs

SO BREAKFAST TV HOST PAUL HENRY IS IN GONE. Henry

is a controversial figure, no fan of political correctness, a shock jock prone to provoking controversy and upsetting the delicate sensibilities of liberals and wowsers. His latest so-called “gaff” involves questioning the credentials of Governor General Sir Anand Satyanand in terms of the ViceRegal’s nationality, and his ability to be representative of the New Zealand nation.

It’s a fair call, in my opinion, and one on which this writer has commented before.

Satyanand was in fact responsible for Yours Truly declaring himself a Republican, even though at heart I’m actually a fairly strong supporter of the Monarchy. My disillusionment with our constitutional status quo stemmed not from Satyanand’s appointment to the office of Governor General but rather from his execution of it, which in fairness probably had more to do with the conventions surrounding the office itself, than with any particular individual occupying it.

My particular beef with the GG arose from his failure to invoke the reserve powers of his office and refuse the Royal Assent for the Appropriation (Parliamentary Expenditure Validation) Bill prior to the last election.

That was the one where the Helen Clark Government and its supporters passed a law, retrospectively, to make it alright, after the fact, that they had stolen our money for their own electioneering purposes, and then lied about it. Remember that business? We had a big online petition, 40,000 people signed it in a matter of days, it was all over the blogosphere like a rash, and this writer dedicated an entire column to it. Along with a few other odious episodes it was the final undoing of Helengrad, and for your favourite commentator it was the undoing of any respect I might have had for Anand Satyanand. I mean no-one, Muggins included, expected for a moment that the Governor General’s trusty

old convention-bound seal of approval would not be forthcoming in the validation of this scurrilous piece of legislation, but honestly, the man is a former Judge, and he allowed the passing of a law which legalized theft. A man with any decency, conscience, moral fortitude, clear sense of ethics, or respect for the gravity of his constitutional position, should in my view have either refused, or resigned, or both, one could be forgiven for assuming; but no.

However, I have long since said all that I am going to say about that particular sorry affair, and right now my disgruntlement gland is otherwise occupied. This month’s rant does

the mornings is watching television. What I will say, however, is that I do believe it was completely valid of Henry to ask whether or not Satyanand was a New Zealander, because frankly that was my own first thought when he was given the job back in 2006 – not because he’s of Indian descent, but because I’d never heard of him. Neither had the media, by all accounts; little appeared to be known and less was said about the new Governor General four years ago, apart from the fact that he was “of Fijian Indian extraction.” Later we were informed that he had been a lawyer and then a Judge. Only since this latest Paul Henry scandal has this writer

So who or what would make the best Governor General for New Zealand, and why? A New Zealander, obviously, and someone universally recognized and respected by the people concern our Queen’s Representative, but it isn’t really about him. Before I go too much further I should say that I don’t give a damn about the man’s ethnicity. As it happens I like Indians, as is no secret, but he could be from Mars for all I care; what matters is whether or not he, or anyone else occupying the office which he holds, is capable of being an effective and appropriate stand-in for the Monarch, and today, that they are able to embody and reflect the essential nature of the New Zealand nation.

Nor am I necessarily putting in a plug for Paul Henry. I don’t know him personally, and the very last thing I have time for in

20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

become aware that Satyanand was also a Parliamentary Ombudsman, and I confess I have yet to discover what that actually means.

And we are now reassured that Sir Anand is in fact a New Zealander born and bred, which is relevant because in the last half-century it has become the convention for the Queen’s Representative to be a local. Up until the 1950s and 1960s there was no doubt about the Vice-Regal’s credentials, because the Monarch sent them personally, to New Zealand and to the rest of the Empire. Suitable Lords, Knights of the Realm, or retired Generals would be selected by the Foreign Office and duly dispatched to the various Colonies to

oversee good Government in the name of His or Her Majesty.

Since those heady days however the fashion has shifted to reflect the changing nature of democracy, the Monarchy itself, and the evolution of the Empire into the Commonwealth. Back then we knew that the deputy sent to rule over us wasn’t a New Zealander. Nowadays we need to know that they are, and Henry can be forgiven for asking the question of Satyanand, because, like this writer, it is probable that he’d never heard of him. Back then we didn’t need to know who the appointee was, because it was taken as read that their CV was acceptable to the Crown; now, we do need to know who they are, because it has become the role of the Governor General to represent the nation and the people of New Zealand as much as the Monarch themselves, and it’s something of a stretch to expect the chosen one to do that successfully if no-one’s ever heard of them. Am I painting a picture here?

Naturally the usual suspects have jumped on Henry’s comments and decried them as racist, and insensitive, and unacceptable, and all the other limp-wristed erectile-dysfunctional things which such people find themselves unable to avoid getting offended about.

I say rubbish. Henry asked the Prime Minister whether the next Governor General would be someone who looked and sounded more like a New Zealander, that’s all. He didn’t say “You should pick a white man or a Maori for the job,” but if that was his inference, then why should he be vilified for thinking it? If better than nine out of every ten New Zealanders are white or Maori or some degree of blend thereof, do they not have a right to ask that the person selected to represent them is, well, representative of them?

The unions, the Mintos, the bleeding hearts, and the pinkos and the leftie-liberal journalists and all the rest of the rent-amob sycophants who are so quick to criticize the likes of Paul Henry, would do well to remember that the vast majority of New Zealanders don’t think like them and never did, and they have grown tired of political correctness, are becoming annoyed at having their culture knocked, and are sick to death of having to listen to minorities whinge about how hard-done-by they are.

Frankly I can’t believe that a billion-plus Indians in India are genuinely aggrieved by the opinionating of one television presenter in tiny little New Zealand, but if they are, then personally I say they should harden up, build a bridge, and get over it. The deci-

Bob Goldberg/NEWSCOM

sion to become offended by anything said or done by someone else is, after all, entirely a matter of personal choice.

I don’t believe in multiculturalism, and I’ve never made any secret of that fact. I don’t believe in biculturalism either, and neither do I believe we have any such thing in New Zealand anyway. We do have a uniquely Kiwi culture which is not the same as can be found anywhere else in the world. The mixing of the British and Maori cultures has produced a set of values and a way of life quite unlike that which predominates anywhere else in the English-speaking world, India included. It is, or should be, required of all migrants from every part of the world to respect and adopt this culture, and it should be a prerequisite of the Governor General that they are able to properly represent and promote it. Now maybe the best way to ensure the latter would be to appoint someone whom a majority of the population have, well, you know, actually heard of? Am I sounding like a stuck record yet?

So who or what would make the best Governor General for New Zealand, and why? A New Zealander, obviously, and someone universally recognized and respected by the people. This writer has suggested the Maori Queen or King more than once, but no-one else appears interested; Sir Ed Hillary would have been a shoo-in, but unlike any of the political patsy appointments of recent years, Ed would probably have actually had the testicular fortitude to actually tell the Government of the Day where to get off if they had strayed out of line, which is quite possibly why he was never given the job.

Which leads me to ask what it is that we actually want from the Office of Governor General; a Head of State? A de facto Head of State? A simple figurehead, ceremonial in function only, or someone with genuine executive clout and the willingness and strength of character to use it? The latter option lends itself best to an elected Vice Regal, and your favourite commentator’s sense of the nation’s mood suggests that the time for this is fast approaching. Motivated perhaps by a desire to assert nationhood, or a dissatisfaction with the lack of accountability of the Prime Minister to the electorate, my feeling is that the people are readying to stamp their authority on the direction of Government by installing a greater power above it.

Perhaps this sentiment foreshadows a move towards a Republic, though I doubt it; there is no great desire for such a change amongst the wider public, and here in the South, where Monarchist loyalty is strongest, if we are to have to have a Republic foisted upon us, then our own independent version of it as a separate State within a federated New Zealand is the very least we will demand as a concession.

Sir Anand Satyanand may have done the job he was appointed to do, which these days is namely to be a tame rubber stamp for a fundamentally undemocratic and essentially unaccountable Government. But while the liberals have their knickers in a twist and their hearts in a flutter over Paul Henry’s non-PC criticism of the Governor General, are we prepared to gamble our future as a nation by backing the wrong horse when it Kyodo comes to picking his successor?

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 21

LINE ONE

Chris Carter The martyrdom of St Paul MORE THAN A LITTLE BIT SPOILT FOR CHOICE THIS

month,when it comes to matters that have rattled my cage, along it would seem with all sorts of other New Zealanders. First up, and in no particular order: the victory once again of the shrieking minority of left wing hand-wringers, plus the newly re-branded NZ Herald, now playing the part of tabloid hymn book to the mentally challenged, who combined very successfully in gaining the downfall of arguably one of the best and smartest operators that Television New Zealand had in its on-air line up.

The essential crucifixion of Paul Henry for little more than an ill-judged off the cuff remark regarding the possibility in the future of perhaps appointing as our next Governor General someone more likely to be seen internationally as being native born, immediately gained the rabid attention of the bull horn bearing John Minto who, along with around a dozen of his slack jawed mates, appeared the very day of this ill judged Henry comment, complete with plainly very professionally pre-prepared, full colour signs to complement their usual,insane accusations of racism that they aim at the drop of a hat towards anyone at all that presumably takes their warped fancy.

Naturally, the now very Left oriented NZ Herald, having as always been pre-informed as to the Minto rent a mob’s need for the usual complete cooperation for a little bit of free “journalistic” assistance, and particularly as Paul Henry is a top competitor for the available morning news market, what a chance for the Herald to do a real number on the TV One Morning Show, selling this attack as “concern” that Henry is a racist, very easy for low order journalistic hacks never the less highly skilled in the tabloid habit of manufacturing news rather than reporting real news!

Television Three also was not about to let

an opportunity to stick it right up their main commercial opposition either and joined the Herald with much glee as they competed with dozens of articles and “news” stories to ensure that Henry’s goose was bound to be cooked. Indeed, such were the volume of stories being manufactured that they were bound to be picked up overseas so next we have the Indians diplomatically calling for an apology for insulting our Indian G.G., when in fact anyone now but a card carrying idiot is now very much aware that the man is a Kiwi through and through.

Minto and his merry men must be laughing their socks off as to how successful the ritual assassination of Paul Henry really was, espe-

the worst attempt in recently recorded history to tip off the media as to the liklihood of his previously much beloved leader Phil Goff getting the Julius Caesar treatment in the very near future, the old ‘anonymous letter’ trick. Having the authorship of this devious if not actually craven attempt to kick poor old Phil in the blokes bits being rumbled very quickly as being the work of Chris’ own personal penmanship, he then hides from the waiting media who naturally want to know what’s going on, sods off back to Auckland for a bit of mental health leave (on full pay of course) returns briefly to Wellington to give, I suspect, a Goff ordered apology, that being about as genuine as a rea-

Minto and his merry men must be laughing their socks off as to how successful the ritual assassination of Paul Henry really was cially as the whole deal was never ever about Paul’s ill judged remarks about the Governor General, it was all about him being a real danger to the far left’s influence within the news media and in particular his continual rubbishing of the much lefty revered bible of political correctness.

My pick? Like the Terminator, he will be back! Guaranteed!

Then how about this further demonstration as to the appallingly low character of yet another of our senior politicians.

Chris Carter Labour MP for TeAtatu ( not related,thank God!) has spent the last couple of months very publicly engaging himself in an orgy of self destruction. Starting with

22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

son for even one of his many overseas parliamentary trips and was as popular amongst the comrades as being caught out in the first place. So back to Auckland did our hero fly to continue on with the re-assembly of his previously well thought of mental ability to squirm his way out of anything, but sadly this was not to be.

Andrew Little, the newly installed keeper for what appears to be now a Party in self destruct mode, realized with commendable speed that their Chris was not only away with the fairies mentally but not unlike a woman scorned was about to visit hell on those he perceived were his enemies i.e. anyone in the Party who didn’t subscribe to his

theory that the reason his spending habits were not supported by the Party was simply because he is gay.

This rather nebulous excuse appears to have not settled too well with Mr Little who in short order arranged for the troops a specially convened meeting of the Party Council to hear first hand from Carter himself, his sorry tale and pleas of mitigation which may, to be fair, have saved the day excepting that it appears that the counselling and the group hugs designed to return Carter’s mental state to normal had not worked.

In front of his political peers Carter proceeded to threaten – even blackmail – his fellow Parliamentary colleagues with a mass outing, tales from the depths of political wrongdoing so politically dire as to presumably finish Labour forever. Talk about a terminally wrong move to try on before a bunch of union heavies, this kind of stand

Chris Skelton/ PRESSSSPIX

over tactic they learned how to handle at mother’s knee so Carter, in essence, was tossed out the door and told to never darken it again.

Only question now remaining? Will Chris

Carter now, as threatened, write his tell all book? Should do eh, would be an all time best seller.

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

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 23

CONTRA MUNDUM

Matthew Flannagan Pluralism and being right RECENTLY I ATTENDED A LECTURE ON SCIENCE AND

religion at the University of Auckland. As is normal after such talks students stayed and discussed issued raised by the presentation.

One student brought up a fairly common chestnut, he objected to the claim made by some Christians that their religion was true and that other religions were false. It was not the first time I have heard someone contend that it is arbitrary, dogmatic, irrational, bigoted, etc to claim that Christianity is true in the face of pervasive religious pluralism. Frequently I have been accused of these things for making similar claims.

This objection is often exasperated by another stance I hold to. In an earlier column (“God, Proof and Faith,” Investigate, Oct 09) I argued that one is rational in accepting certain Christian beliefs even if one cannot prove that they are true to a sceptical inquirer. The fact that so many other people do not hold these beliefs, and often hold contrary beliefs, often attracts accusations of arrogance. Isn’t it arbitrary for Christians like the student at the talk and me to assume that our particular faith is true and everyone else’s worldview is incorrect?

I think the answer is no.

However, before I explain my reasons for this assessment let me first address one assumption that sometimes undergirds it. It is not unusual to hear that that affirming that one’s position is right and that those who disagree are wrong is itself arrogant. However, this belief is not only mistaken, it is incoherent. My wife Madeleine Flannagan puts it well, “The statement, “you think you are right” is always asserted by someone who themselves thinks they are right to assert that I think I am right. However, if their objection is cogent, then I should reject their objection. This is because the person who objects that I think I am right is suggesting that I adopt an irrational stance, that I should believe something that I think is

incorrect; but if I think it is incorrect then I am not going to believe it.

No sane person holds to a belief they think is wrong or inferior to other viewpoints. I mean, why would you? You would hardly rank the differing views and then decide to hold the second or third most plausible view? You hold the view you think is the most plausible – the correct view – and by doing that you tacitly reject the other views.”

So merely saying you are right and others are wrong by itself is unremarkable, we all do it. I find though that objectors like those I encountered at the science and religion talk frequently want to say more than this.

They contend that it is arbitrary, dogmatic, irrational, bigoted, etc to believe that your

oted, etc) cease to believe the Christian faith is correct. In doing so I will be adopting a stance that is contrary to that held by numerous other people – Christians. It seems that I cannot escape the problem. Unless I can offer proof that Christianity is wrong, I will be being arbitrary, dogmatic, irrational, bigoted and so on.

The reality is that in the pluralistic world we live in, a person cannot avoid taking a stance on ultimate questions, such as, “does God exist?” “What is the place of human beings in the cosmos?” What is ultimately real?” “Is there life after death?” “Is there such a thing as sin?” “Is there a highest good for human beings?” “What is it?” And so on.

Even being agnostic or apathetic is to take up a stance towards these questions, it is to

In the pluralistic world we live in, a person cannot avoid taking a stance on ultimate questions, such as, “does God exist?” position is right, in the absence of proof, if numerous other people do not agree with you.

I think there are two problems with this contention.

First, note that the contention itself is one that many people do not hold to; hence, if the claim is true, it is arbitrary, dogmatic, irrational, bigoted, etc to believe it without proof. Further, the proponent of this contention has not offered any proof – simply asserting we should adhere to this contention is not proof – so it must be arbitrary dogmatic, irrational, bigoted, etc for the objector to accept this contention.

Turning to the second problem, suppose I do accept this contention and I (wanting to avoid being arbitrary, dogmatic, irrational, big-

24 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

implicitly hold that they are unimportant or if they are important that one has insufficient grounds for getting an accurate answer.

Not only is taking a stance unavoidable, it is also unavoidable that any stance taken will differ from that taken by numerous other people, and that any stance taken will be such that one cannot prove it from premises that all people accept. In this respect religious perspectives are no different from secular ones and it is arbitrary, dogmatic, irrational, bigoted to pretend that they are.

Dr Matthew Flannagan is an Auckland based philosopher/theologian who researches and publishes in the area of Philosophy of Religion, Theology and Ethics. He blogs at www.mandm.org.nz.

For real Christmas stories for your children or grandchildren

Amy Brooke’s latest tale of the Holly and the Ivy “The Holly and the Ivy when they are both full-grown of all the trees that are in the wood The Holly bears the Crown…”

Christmas has always been a special time for Holly. But when once again she is too unwell to go out with the carol singers on Christmas Eve, she is disappointed. She is puzzled too, by a strange dream that has begun to come to her as she falls asleep.

When her tall, mysterious aunt from the North arrives to stay, the dream begins to take a different shape, as the old stories from far-off times in history and legend times meet the new hope of Christmas, and the wonder of a very special child.

•

New Zealand children’s writer Amy Brooke’s wonderfully imaginative stories have been compared to those of C.S. Lewis Narnia’s stories and Susan Cooper (The Dark is Rising). Avoiding the current fad of politically correct storytelling for children, she writes timeless tales for the real child reader which stand the test of time, magical, inimitable, and engaging.

Illustrated by Dean Raybould

The Third Star & Other Stories

Magical stories for younger children where the Little Folk come back again, a grey cat is not what it seems, a hungry little mouse has a wonderful surprise, and a spoilt little girl learns a lesson just in time! And if you loved the Milly Mandy Molly stories of your childhood, don’t miss the happiness of Jasper and Granny May Again, The Golden Firepot or the poignant and moving The Duck Who Went to Heaven.

Don’t miss Amy Brooke’s wonderfully imaginative stories for children and young adults.

“Quite simply, New Zealand’s best children’s writer.”

All Amy Brooke’s books can be ordered from Nationwide Books info@nationwidebooks.co.nz

V i s i t w w w. a m y b r o o k e . c o . n z

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 25

HEIDI STUNNING NEW EVIDENCE IN SWEDES MYSTERY

Another cold case looks set to blow up in the faces of New Zealand Police, just weeks after controversy erupted over the Arthur Allan Thomas case. IAN WISHART has new information on the Swedish tourist murders of Heidi Paakkonen and Urban Hoglin

26 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 27

D

ocuments obtained from the estate of a deceased Investigate reader have thrown new light on a 21 year old cold case – the disappearance of Swedish tourists Urban Hoglin and Heidi

Paakkonen.

The couple disappeared in April 1989 on the Coromandel peninsula, and David Wayne Tamihere was arrested soon after on suspicion of their murders. The body of Urban Hoglin was subsequently found by pig-hunters at the foot of a bluff in the Coromandel ranges in 1991, but Heidi’s body has never been found.

For years it has been presumed Heidi Paakkonen is also buried somewhere in the Coromandel bush, but the documents passed to Investigate suggest that is not the case – she was last seen alive north of Auckland.

The story begins on Kawau Island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf, and a Christian couple’s suspicions in the mid 1980s that a local criminal with drug and organised crime connections had constructed a house complete with a large underground facility.

The couple, who’d accidentally discovered the facility while visiting the property on business, felt the complex could have been used to hold people against their will, and because of its remote position primary access to the outside world was via the sea and a private jetty.

The couple raised their concerns – including what they believed were criminal activities they’d witnessed - with Auckland detectives at a special meeting in 1986 with members of the Criminal Intelligence Section.

“We suggested that the police simply needed to get a search warrant and raid the place, as that way they could expose and contain anyone on the property. It would be a very easy place to surround and isolate, and my friends would be able to furnish them with detailed plans of the house, as they had visited there on occasions,” reported the deceased Investigate reader in a confidential briefing paper for former police commissioner John Jamieson in 2002.

“The detective suggested that they had surveillance devices and that they could check it out without necessarily moving in physically. So we left it at that, assured that something would be done. There has been no indication that anything was ever done, and as far as we know the activities have continued since then.”

Swedish tourists Urban Hoglin, 23, and his fiancée Heidi Paakkonen, 21, disappeared while tramping on the Coromandel Peninsula in 1989.

That was in 1986. However, the briefing paper for the former police commissioner contains a bombshell revelation from the couple in May 1989.

“They saw Heidi Paakkonen [at Kawau Island near the campground] just as the police were starting to search for them in the Coromandel (they live nearly two hundred kilometres from the Coromandel).

Heidi was with a dark-haired man, definitely not David Tamihere, and was struggling to hoist a very heavy pack on to her back. The straps were down near her elbows and she was clearly distressed.

“My friend’s wife stepped forward to help

28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

lift the pack, whereupon the man snarled, ‘Don’t touch her!’. He then walked on and impatiently beckoned her to follow. She seemed terrified and kept scanning the surrounding bush as if anticipating something.

“My friends were convinced it was Heidi and so phoned Detective Hughes who was heading the investigation... Detective Hughes thanked them for the information but assured them that it couldn’t have been Heidi as they were sure she was in the Coromandel. The police did not contact my friends any further regarding their sighting.”

The couple told police they had also seen what they believed was the Swedes’ Subaru

vehicle parked at the Sandspit ferry wharf the vehicle police were at that stage still seeking sightings of. The police paid no attention and the car was eventually found empty in a Mt Eden street.

On the face of it, you could be forgiven for wondering if this was just another one of hundreds of “possible” sightings of Heidi Paakkonen. Indeed, the late inquiry boss Detective Inspector John Hughes told Metro in October 1989: “Just about every psychic and medium in New Zealand contacted us.

We’ve got two entire files packed with letters – a lot of them very sincere and we recorded them. There are also a few nutters.”

But Hughes appears to also admit, he was concentrating on Coromandel because that’s where he believed they died.

“We also had a team of detectives carry out a canvas of the whole of the Coromandel Peninsula. They interviewed everybody – people in shops, hotels, schools, camping grounds – in an endeavour to trace the movements of a person we were interested in at the time.”

But not at Kawau Island, and not as late as the end of May 1989, long after the last public sighting of Heidi on April 11.

Disenchanted by the response from police, and worried about the drug house with the dungeons, the Kawau Island couple decided discretion was the better part of valour and said nothing further until 29 September 2002, when the late Investigate reader told former commissioner Jamieson, “the couple, whom I haven’t seen in years, visited my church.

“After the service we discussed the aforementioned events and I was shocked when they retold the story of Heidi Paakkonen.

I can’t explain this but a crucial part of the story they related on Sunday was news to me. Either I somehow didn’t hear it when I spoke to them years ago, or they neglected to tell me, but their sighting of Heidi was not the first time they had met.

“Heidi and Urban had actually stayed [with them] before they moved to Coromandel, and they had spent some time talking to them. They even had some sort of church service together and had shared Communion with them.

“So, their later [May 1989] encounter with Heidi was not a case of mistaken identity! Heidi could not have been in the Coromandel at that time.”

More to the point, Heidi Paakkonen was alive long after police thought she was dead, and the man she’d been seen with could

“THE MERE FACT THAT SHE WAS BROUGHT TO KAWAU ALL THE WAY FROM COROMANDEL SUGGESTS THIS WAS NO RANDOM RAPE AND MUGGING, NOR WAS IT THE WORK OF A LONER” not have been David Wayne Tamihere because he had been arrested on a separate matter in mid-May 1989 and jailed on remand, so he could not have been stalking the bush on Kawau at the end of that month. In other words, this was a positive sighting of Heidi in the company of a man who was not Tamihere, about 150km away from Coromandel, just before police began searching for her.

The next question that arises is, “Why Kawau?” It’s only accessible by boat, and while the Swedes’ car was seen at Sandspit it’s highly unlikely her captor took her across on the public ferry. That means a private boat had to be used for the trip, presumably one belonging to a house on Kawau Island.

The briefing to former police commissioner John Jamieson draws that link as well.

“It’s interesting that she was brought back from Coromandel to the same ‘out of the way’ place that she and Urban had visited earlier.

Was an initial contact made while staying [at the island] by someone who subsequently followed them to the Coromandel and then, after killing Urban, brought Heidi back?

“There are two issues here: the criminal

base and the ongoing activities there [and] the Heidi Paakkonen sighting. The two may be connected, but both need to be thoroughly investigated for the sake of the many people involved, especially the Swedes’ families and particularly David Tamihere who may be innocent of that particular crime – he is certainly not responsible for the murder of Heidi Paakkonen.”

But there’s another disturbing aspect to this, its similarity to the later disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope in the Marlborough Sounds. Ben & Olivia disappeared by boat. Kawau Island’s drug house was accessible by boat. Heidi Paakkonen was brought back to Kawau Island by boat. The mere fact that she was brought to Kawau all the way from Coromandel suggests this was no random rape and mugging, nor was it the work of a loner.

The blonde, attractive Swede’s body has never turned up. While the briefing to the former police commissioner suggests she may have been buried in the bush on Kawau Island, the report also noted: “There is an extremely remote possibility that Heidi is still alive”. q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 29

Built on sand The quarry that should never have been What was to have been a massive lime quarry north of Auckland stands empty after a successful ‘nimby’ battle by residents and a failure to abide by its resource consents.

GERARD ZWIER was one of those residents, and this is their story

I

n 2003, Redvale Lime Company Ltd, headed by Mr Paul Hopper, made an application to Rodney District Council (RDC) and Auckland Regional Council (ARC) to put a limestone quarry on a 56 ha site in the Wainui area next to the Northern Motorway. It had sold its property in Dairy Flat to Waste Management Ltd and needed a new source for its supply of crushed limerock.

The essential aspects of the application were that it proposed a quarry to extract limestone for the next 20 years to a depth of up to 45m; i.e. as deep as the Nautilus in Orewa is tall. The initial overall assessment of the application by Rodney District Council was that it was a Non-complying activity.

30 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 31

The production of 200,000 cubic metres of soil and limerock per annum would require an average truck traffic flow of 210 truck movements per day and maximum truck movements on any day during peak months of 272 trucks per day. Assuming an 8 hour work day that meant residents would have to put up with 34 trucks per hour, or one truck about every 2 minutes.

Resource Consent Application The then RDC Reporting Officer, Mr Chris du Plessis, reviewed the various planning documents and recommended that the application be declined, saying that – with respect to the relevant plans: On balance the proposal is contrary to the objectives and policies of the Operative District Plan, Proposed Plan Change 55 and the Proposed Plan 2000. While these plans recognise the need for quarries to be located in the rural zone the receiving environment in question has been developed to such an extent that insufficient buffer distances are provided to mitigate or avoid the adverse effects to neighbouring rural residential activities …. The objectives and policies of all the plans emphasise the maintenance of amenity values and rural character.

Neighbours were outraged by the proposal and vowed to fight it. They formed an Action Group subcommittee “Stop the Silverdale Quarry” under the umbrella of the existing Wainui Environmental Protection Society Inc. (WEPS).

As it was a “non-complying” activity, the application went to a joint Council Hearing where counsel for Redvale, Mr Martin Williams, argued that while it was acknowledged that there were 11 much smaller lifestyle properties surrounding the site, the zoning was “rural” and for that reason, the quarry should be allowed to be established.

Experts were hired by Redvale to provide evidence that any adverse effects could be mitigated. Mr Hegley acknowledged that while there would be additional noise generated by the diggers and trucks, these adverse effects could be reduced by acoustic walls and ensuring that limerock crushing would be done in an enclosed building. Ms Melean Absolum submitted that a variety of plantings would deal with any negative effects on the landscape and reduce the visual impact of the industrial activity.

During the joint Council hearing a change was proposed by Redvale to eliminate the back-loading of material to the quarry site.

This meant a change of assessment from

a non-complying activity to a discretionary activity – a significant change in the type of activity contained in the application. This then led on to a very costly and protracted hearing in the Environment Court which finally resulted in Redvale obtaining consent to quarry on 20 January 2006. However, this came at a price: the consent came with more than 100 conditions which Redvale was required to adhere to.

Conditions and Enforcement The Environment Court imposed a raft of mitigating measures to counteract possible negative effects on the receiving environment. These included the redesign of Pine Valley Road – Old Pine Valley Road intersection, restricting access to the site from the north, sealing roads, the erection of various bunds, a building to house the limerock crusher, an acoustic wall along the accessway and numerous plantings.

However, in the latter half of 2005, Redvale had already started quarrying prior to obtaining consent and without meeting many important consent conditions. A large number of residents on neighbouring properties complained to the RDC and the ARC but the often hesitant and inconsistent action from the two councils proved to be ineffective in achieving compliance.

This continued during 2006 with residents emailing, writing and submitting photos and details of truck movements.

On 20 April 2006 RDC served the first of many abatement notices, this one requiring Redvale to cease using Sidwell Road access and issued an infringement notice for this.

A month later RDC served a further abatement notice requiring all quarrying operations to cease. But this didn’t stop the quarrying activity. During June 2006 neighbours again complained about unacceptable noise being generated by trucks, diggers and an open-to-air limestone crusher and in August 2006, RDC served yet another abatement order and an infringement notice for the illegal export of limerock.

Complaints from local residents increased during the latter part of the year about quarrying taking place without compliance with consent conditions.

On 28 November 2006 RDC served a further infringement notice. During December of that year the ARC also issued three abatement notices relating to inadequate erosion and sediment control measures, construction of an airstrip and construction of unauthorised works in a watercourse. Yet another

32 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

abatement order was served by RDC in midDecember which required Redvale to cease all earthworks in excess of 200 m3

Quarrying or Construction?

All the while Redvale maintained that it was not quarrying, and therefore did not have to comply with the consent conditions. Redvale insisted it was merely “constructing the access way into the quarry”. However, as residents already had to put up with the noise made by

the excavation of the large amounts of limerock, the crushing of the limerock in a mobile crusher and literally hundreds of trucks leaving the quarry site laden with crushed limerock that argument did not hold.

The RDC lawyer at Simpson Grierson, Mr James Hassall finally agreed with the residents who had complained about the noise and truck traffic that illegal quarrying was being undertaken and on 19 December 2006 he issued a letter to Redvale advising

“MR HEGLEY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT WHILE THERE WOULD BE ADDITIONAL NOISE GENERATED BY THE DIGGERS AND TRUCKS, THESE ADVERSE EFFECTS COULD BE REDUCED

BY ACOUSTIC WALLS AND ENSURING THAT LIMEROCK CRUSHING WOULD BE DONE IN AN ENCLOSED BUILDING”.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 33

that quarrying should stop. When yet again compliance was not achieved, RDC decided on 26 January 2007 to prepare an enforcement order application. Several residents were asked to assist in this process by preparing affidavits.

In the meantime, Redvale appeared to make some progress in meeting some important pre-quarrying consent conditions: on 22 February 2007 RDC approved the landscape plan and the traffic management plan and two months later Redvale received the sign-off of the Old Pine Valley Road – Pine Valley Road intersection upgrade.

Because RDC believed that finally some progress was being made on meeting the consent conditions the council changed its mind and resolved not to go ahead with lodging the enforcement order on 16 February 2007.

Disappointingly Mr Lloyd Barton, RDC Manager Resource Management, waited until 15 March 2007 – i.e. a month later – to advise the residents of this decision saying that “in our view, Redvale Lime has now

use the prohibited access from Sidwell Road which resulted in yet another abatement order and infringement notice from RDC on 20 April 2007. In response to neighbours’ complaints about Redvale’s use of the opento-air crusher, the ARC wrote to Redvale on 30 April 2007 saying that Redvale was breaching Air Discharge Consent Condition 20 and it asked Redvale “to cease all lime processing until it could comply with all the relevant consent conditions”.

Following the Court’s direction, mediation was undertaken by all parties during June 2007. This mediation resulted in some progress: proposed protocols for the Liaison Officer were developed by WEPS (and endorsed by Redvale) and later that year a geologist, Mr Mike Dunphy, was appointed as Liaison Officer.

In addition, a “Programme of Works” was proposed by Redvale which provided a suggested timetable for the construction of the acoustic fence, a wheel wash and the northern and eastern bunds, all to be completed

crusher, the absence of a decent wheelwash, the lack of an acoustic fence on both sides of the access road, the lack of the acoustic bunds, the continued illegal use of Sidwell Road and other issues. RDC’s position was that a large number of the consent conditions did not apply because “they relate to the quarry when it is operating and not when it is under construction as it is at the moment” – even though large numbers of trucks were carting limerock off-site daily and being sold to Redvale’s customers.

Mediation Fails During September 2007 the parties went back to mediation and a visit to the Redvale site was organised to show the crusher in action. The ARC commented later that while there was only a small amount of dust visible from the operation of lime crushing, this was likely because the limerock was damp at the time. With regard to the noise produced by the excavator and an idling crusher it was shown that it did not register above the noise

“A JUDICIAL TELECONFERENCE IN DECEMBER 2007 RESULTED IN THE SCHEDULING OF AN ENVIRONMENT COURT HEARING IN MARCH 2008. DURING EARLY JANUARY, REDVALE CONTINUED USING THE CRUSHER AND ON 16 JANUARY RDC ISSUED YET ANOTHER INFRINGEMENT NOTICE FOR BREACH OF THE ABATEMENT NOTICE” met all the prerequisite conditions”.

The local residents did not agree that this was the case – the Old Pine Valley Road access road had not been finished, the acoustic walls had not been built, the acoustic bunds hadn’t been constructed, there was no wheel wash facility in use, and that the limestone crusher, which was only to be used when contained within a sound proof building, was being used outdoors.

Enforcement and Mediation In the absence of RDC and ARC facing up to their responsibilities to enforce the conditions of Redvale’s consent to quarry, WEPS applied to the Environment Court for an enforcement order (against Redvale, RDC and ARC) on 22 March 2007. Judge Laurie Newhook was assigned to the case and ordered the four parties to prepare and exchange affidavits during May 2007 and to proceed with mediation at the end of the month.

In the meantime, Redvale continued to

by the end of the 2008 construction season, i.e. March 2008.

However, there was a catch: Redvale would only agree to this timetable if WEPS gave a blanket approval to any amendments of the consent conditions that Redvale saw fit to make. Neighbours were very concerned that this “carte blanche” approval of changes to the conditions of consent would allow Redvale to make changes that could negatively impact on existing amenity values – such as allowing limerock crushing to take place out of doors, or not completing the erection of the acoustic fence, or failing to build the protective bunds around the quarry site. This offer of a “Programme of Works” could not be accepted by WEPS and mediation was temporarily abandoned.

Affidavits were exchanged during August 2007. The arguments presented by WEPS focussed on the continuation of the quarrying operation without consent conditions having been met; the use of the open-to-air

34 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

levels allowed for by the operative District Plan. However, the ARC regarded the temporary wheelwash as inadequate to prevent tracking lime off site and later in September 2007 it issued a directive abatement notice instructing Redvale to install a wheel wash of an approved design, daily clean the access way and Old Pine Valley Road and complete the construction of the access way by the end of October 2007.

On 8th of October 2007 RDC’s legal counsel, Mr James Hassall, proposed a litmus test: by 25 October 2007, Redvale must have the access way to the bridge sealed and the acoustic fences completed. This was not achieved. Instead, quarrying continued, much to the chagrin of surrounding property owners.

The quarrying continued during November 2007. WEPS used the services of a company called “Machine Monitoring Systems” to demonstrate that the noise produced by the quarry operation exceeded

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 35

District Plan noise limits. On 30 November 2007, RDC issued yet another infringement notice followed on 12 December 2007 by two abatement notices. The abatement notices ordered the crushing and processing of limestone to cease, saying that a number of important consent conditions had not been met, and that required monthly noise reports had not been submitted to RDC. Both these abatement notices were appealed by Redvale.

A judicial teleconference in December 2007 resulted in the scheduling of an Environment Court hearing in March 2008.

During early January, Redvale continued using the crusher and on 16 January RDC issued yet another infringement notice for breach of the abatement notice.

To demonstrate that the excavation of the access road went well beyond the authorised plans, WEPS hired an engineer, Phillip Fairgray of Hutchinson Consultants, and a surveyor, Chris Wech of C&R Surveyors, to assess the scale of this work. In addition, a photographer, Tony Monk, was hired to make aerial photographs of the quarry site from a Helitranz helicopter (see photo).

In an important development it came to light that the RDC’s resident Development Engineer, Mr Ray Smith, had approved engineering plans of the new access way that varied greatly from the court approved construction plans.

Mr Smith noted in his affidavit that it was not uncommon for final engineering plans to differ from the plans submitted with an original resource consent application and he did not see it as a problem that the batter width of the road had increased from 18 to 43 metres and that the accessway was over excavated to a depth of 10 metres as shown in Mr Fairgray’s report. Mr Smith maintained that this showed that construction was still “in general accordance” with the original plans.

Environment Court Ruling The Environment Court Hearing took place during May 2008 and resulted in a ruling that was released on 8 August 2008. In his decision Judge Newhook found no fault on the part of the councils. He said “even if the councils could be said to have taken inadequate enforcement steps in the early stages after the commencement of the consents (and it was not clear to us that that was the case) there could be no complaint about their more recent attempts to achieve compliance on the part of Redvale. After consideration of all the relevant evidence we can

find no basis for the making of enforcement orders against the councils ....”

But whereas the councils were not taken to task over this, Redvale and its legal counsel Mr Martin Williams, certainly were. The court agreed that WEPS and the councils were correct in their submissions that Redvale was in breach of a number of conditions and that it took considerable liberties as against the access road works approved in the resource consent. The Environment Court found that the attitude of Redvale toward the issue of the over excavation of the new access way had been “cavalier”. The Court noted that there had been a significant breach of the conditions of consent as there had been deliberate quarrying by Redvale prior to completion of preparatory construction works. The Environment Court accordingly directed WEPS to draft detailed enforcement orders which it did, with the help of RDC’s counsel.

The draft enforcement orders were circulated between the parties and finally gave rise to the Court releasing the final enforcement orders on 15 October 2008. In essence, the orders said that before Redvale could begin quarrying, there were a number of important conditions to be met, among which: bunds were to be built, the accessway with its acoustic walls were to be completed, a wheel wash facility had to be installed and the access way had to be paved and sealed.

In addition, Redvale was ordered to reinstate the over-excavation of the access way to conform to the plans approved by the Environment Court in the consent decision, produce detailed landscape plans in consultation with its neighbours and provide regular noise monitoring reports.

Yet, even with explicit instruction from the court to cease all quarrying, Redvale still persisted: WEPS reported to RDC that on 28th October 2008 three truck and trailer units left the Old Pine Valley Road site fully laden with limerock.

Prosecution and Costs When WEPS complained to RDC yet again about this breach of the enforcement orders, RDC finally took the matter in hand and proceeded with prosecution. Although initially saying it would fight the charge, Redvale finally decided to plead guilty to having breached the enforcement order. On 20 July 2009 the Court convicted and fined Redvale $6,000.

Along with RDC, which made its own submission, WEPS lodged an application for

36 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

costs incurred in the Environment Court on 5 December 2008. WEPS had incurred legal costs of $21,313 and another $9,148 was paid out to third parties such as surveyor and engineering consultants, acoustic experts, aerial photography and traffic consultants. On 27 April 2009 the court issued its decision on court costs: while awarding $14,000 against Redvale in favour of WEPS and $35,000 in favour of RDC, the court also found that WEPS had been “prolix” (too detailed/wordy in its submissions) and awarded $2,000 against WEPS in favour of RDC. Not content with the outcome, Redvale and Mr Paul Hopper appealed the Environment Court’s decision on costs to the High Court on 6 July, arguing that (1) Paul Hopper was never personally a party to the proceedings, (2) RDC was a co-respondent in the proceedings and should therefore not qualify to receive any costs reimbursed, (3) Redvale was acting in substantial compliance with the enforcement orders, (4) Redvale made an offer to settle that was not given due consideration by WEPS and (5) the court has misunderstood Redvale’s “cavalier” attitude.

The decision on costs was made public 29 October 2009. Judge Andrews dismissed the appeal with one notable exception: the cost orders made against Mr Hopper, personally, were quashed which means that any orders made by the Environment Court against Redvale and Mr Hopper jointly and severally are now against Redvale alone.

Seeking costs Having been awarded $14,000 in costs by the Environment Court, WEPS wrote to Redvale on 8 May 2009 and again on 2 December 2009 asking when it might expect payment of the costs. Neither letter produced a response.

Early in December WEPS received an email from Liz Evans, the RDC Debt Recovery Officer, which stated that she had spoken to ASB’s Commercial Manager Peter Lamberton who informed her that the bank had taken ownership of Redvale Lime but as yet had not sold the business. According to Ms Evans, Mr Lamberton had also stated that the chance of receiving any monies as an unsecured creditor were slim.

WEPS considered its options and on 1 March 2010 issued a “Statutory Demand” which is a demand for a company to pay its debt. Once issued, the debtor company must challenge the demand in court within ten days. If it does not do so, the courts

will deem the non-payment of the debt as proof that the company is insolvent. The response from Redvale’s solicitor Carter & Partners was that Redvale could not pay its debt because its bank account had been frozen by its secured creditor, the ASB Bank.

An uncompleted project At present the quarry site lies idle and the owners, having publicly stated in the Rodney Times and in Business to Business that they spent millions of dollars getting resource consent to quarry the land, say they have been forced to sell the property. WEPS has been informed that it will be paid the outstanding $14,000 once the land has been sold – after payment of secured creditors and all costs of sale.

Today, only one side of the unfinished access road has an acoustic wall, bunds that were meant to protect neighbours from noisy machinery have never been constructed and no building has been erected to house the limestone crusher. It is an uncompleted project.

For Redvale or any future consent holder to continue the quarry construction they would need to apply to RDC for variations to both the consent and the requirements of the enforcement orders. These applications would need to be publicly notified and no doubt would provoke the ire of the neighbours. Getting the quarry going would in our view be nearly impossible and does not look like a viable financial option, in particular in today’s difficult economic climate.

What can we learn from this?

It needs to be emphasised that Redvale agreed to the conditions of consent imposed by the Environment Court in order to get the quarry consent. Redvale had the opportunity to tell the Environment Court that they couldn’t meet the conditions or that changes were required. But if Redvale had not agreed to the conditions it was likely that the Environment Court would have declined the consent. Thus, given the very large number of conditions required to mitigate the effects of the quarry, the Councils and the Environment Court should never have allowed this huge project to go ahead in this badly chosen site.

Have we learned anything from this catastrophe?

It is interesting to note that a recent decision made by a RDC Hearing Committee which concerned a proposal to place an enormous cleanfill (involving 1.8 million

“THE COUNCILS AND THE ENVIRONMENT COURT SHOULD NEVER HAVE ALLOWED THIS HUGE PROJECT TO GO AHEAD IN THIS BADLY CHOSEN SITE” cubic metres of uncompacted cleanfill) on a site between Kahikatea Flat Road and White Hills Road, also in the Wainui area, was given the thumbs down.

Perhaps the RDC has finally come to recognise that such huge projects should not be sited in areas populated by lifestyle blocks.

However, the applicant, Kahikatea Land Ltd, has not given up on the landfill project yet. It now has filed an appeal with the Environment Court to overturn the council’s decision.

It is to be hoped that the Environment Court judge who is to rule on the appeal, will have taken note of the Redvale fiasco and similarly and resolutely reject the cleanfill appeal on the basis that the proposed project is inappropriate given the rural residential nature of the existing environment Footnote: The three properties comprising the quarry operation went up for auction in June this year, but the sale agreement failed to go unconditional. It’s understood the Hoppers may now be looking at subdividing the land. q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 37

38 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

ESSAY

Re-Writing History

The Tuhoe tribe’s land confiscations were both inevitable and justified, argues ROSS BAKER

T

he media have published many articles to support the alleged Tuhoe claim with much of it based on selective research by the Waitangi Tribunal, Dr Paul Moon, Bruce Stirling and others.

However, most importantly, as with many of these claims, there is another side to this story that must also be told. While Tuhoe did suffer at the hands of the government troops and their Maori supporters, there is a good case that they brought it upon themselves by protecting the “rebels” that had violated both Maori and European. Below is a brief account of why the confiscated lands were “inevitable and justified”, as fully documented in New Zealand’s archives.

Tuhoe did not sign the treaty largely because they were too isolated for it to be taken to them, read and discussed and for their being given the opportunity to sign.

Unlike Ngapuhi and other northern tribes, Tuhoe had very little contact with the Europeans, the missionaries or the British Crown and remained this way for many years after the treaty was signed when New Zealand was ceded to Britain, which was recognized and accepted by all the major nations of the world.

In December 1864, after his wife, two daughters and sister had been killed, Kereopa Te Rau, who had formerly been baptised a Christian, is believed to have served as a policeman in Auckland in the 1850s, and who had fought in the kingite forces, brought the Pai Marire religion to the East Coast but was told not to interfere with the Europeans.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 39

On the 2 March 1865, a missionary, the Rev C S Volkner was hanged from a willow tree near his church. His body was then decapitated and the head paraded around the village before Kereopa swallowed his eyes.

On the 2 March 1865, a missionary, the Rev C S Volkner was hanged from a willow tree near his church. His body was then decapitated and the head paraded around the village before Kereopa swallowed his eyes, calling one Parliament, and the other the Queen and

British Law. Kereopa instigated the killing of Volkner, as he believed he had been spying for the Government, which caused the death of the members of his family. Although this act outraged the Europeans, such an indignity to the head of an enemy conferred mana

40 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

amongst Tuhoe. If the government was to honour the commitment Britain had made to all the people of New Zealand in 1840, then it was time a stand had to be taken to bring law and order to the people of the East Coast.

After the killing of Völkner, Kereopa

fled to the Ureweras under the protection of Tuhoe. In May 1865, he and a party of Tuhoe attempted to travel to Waikato, but were prevented from reaching the Kaingaroa plains by a force of Te Arawa – but not before they killed two Te Arawa chiefs with Kereopa again eating their eyes. They were forced to turn back when a relief party of Te Arawa, led by Major W. G. Mair, arrived.

Kereopa, under the protection of Tuhoe from the Government troops, returned to hiding in the Ureweras.

Kereopa had much mana in the minds of Tuhoe and thus obtained their continuing protection. The dense bush of the Urewera Mountains offered him protection from the Government troops, as it later would for Te Kooti and the Hauhau. Martial Law had been declared in the Opotiki and Whakatane districts after the killing of Völkner, and a reward was offered for the capture of those responsible.

O

ver the next three years, the people of the Urewera were weakened, and their land devastated by the government’s relentless pursuit of Kereopa for his involvement with Volkner’s killing, and of Te Kooti for his massacres up and down the country. The Hauhau, too, were attacking and killing innocent settlers and their families and destroying their crops and buildings. However, Tuhoe continued to protect these “rebels”. The government troops included Ngati Porou, Ngati Kahungunu and Te Arawa embarking on several campaigns to capture the “rebels”.

During these campaigns Tuhoe’s pa were plundered, crops destroyed, people killed and land confiscated. This in itself is Maori custom – revenge – plundering to avenge a wrong. There is no denying Tuhoe land was devastated, but they were regarded as having brought it upon themselves by protecting the “rebels” from being brought to justice.

By late 1870 several Tuhoe leaders had made their peace with the government, but they would not violate the sanctuary of the Urewera by giving up Kereopa, Te Kooti or the Hauhau. Eventually, however, seeing that their survival was now threatened, they withdrew this protection.

It was agreed amongst Tuhoe that neither European soldiers nor Ngati Porou forces should be allowed to capture the “rebels”: as their protectors, they would themselves deliver Kereopa to the government. Kereopa agreed to give himself up as payment for the Tuhoe blood that had been shed for him.

It must be remembered that it was not only the government that wanted law and order established on the East Coast. Ngati Porou, Ngati Kahungunu and Te Arawa also fought alongside the Government troops, as did many other tribes around New Zealand, to enforce the Queen’s Law. These three iwi were instrumental in the 1870 and 1871 pursuit of the “rebels” that Tuhoe allowed to take refuge in Urewera Mountains after massacres in Poverty Bay. There is no denying that Tūhoe, Te Whakatōhea and Ngāti Awa were out of step with the majority of New Zealand, both Maori and European at the time, which they eventually realised, releasing the “rebels” they had been protecting. By this time the majority of Maori had realised that for the Maori race to survive, there had to be one government, one law for all the people of New Zealand and had put this law in the hands of the Britain Crown.

Due to the isolation of Tuhoe, the “1896 Urewera District Native Act” established some 650,000 acres of their land as a reserve – but never gave them full autonomy. It was no more than a “Maori local government” under the control of the Crown. The Government gained Tuhoe’s recognition of the Queen. All tribal powers had to be within the Law, devolved and approved by the Crown. The Crown intended that in due course it would impose “all the responsibilities, liabilities and privileges” of the other iwi that had signed the Treaty, on the Tuhoe people. The Colonial Government would not have had the authority to give Tuhoe full autonomy. Britain would definitely not have given what would then have been regarded as uncivilized natives a separate autonomy within a British Colony! This “Maori local government” was revoked a few years later.

Over the next 60 years, Tuhoe sold large tracts of their underdeveloped wasteland to the Government. Later the Crown vested most of this land in the Urewera National Park for all the people of New Zealand to enjoy, including the people of the eastern tribes.

The Waitangi Tribunal has stated that Tuhoe had 24,147 hectares of land confiscated, but Government figures show that

in 1866, 181,000 ha (448,000 acres) of land belonging to the tribes of the Bay of Plenty – Tūhoe, Te Whakatōhea and Ngāti Awa – were confiscated by the government. Government documents show this area was subsequently reduced to 85,387 ha (211,000 acres), of which Tūhoe lost 5,700 ha (14,000 acres).

The Waitangi Tribunal also claims Tuhoe were never compensated, but in Richard Hill’s Justice Department report for the Lange Government in 1989, page 11 clause 31, it shows Tuhoe received $200,000 compensation in 1958. Tuhoe is also a party to the Waikaremoana Trust Board that receives $124,000 per year in rental for Lake Waikaremoana.

The alliance of the Tuhoe with Kereopa, Te Kooti and the Hauhau and their resistance to the Crown – which had no choice but to apprehend these “rebels” after their killing many innocent Maori and European – meant military action was inevitable and justified – a fact admitted by the Waitangi Tribunal stating, “The alliance of the Tuhoe people with Te Kooti and the attacks on the Crown’s subjects, Maori and Pakeha that followed, meant military action was inevitable and justified” – as was the confiscations.

If New Zealand was to be civilised as the majority of the chiefs had asked for in 1840, then the action taken by the government of the day was inevitable and justified, especially when the compensated land was reduced to only 5,700 ha and Tuhoe received $200,000 compensation in 1958, as well as the ongoing rental of Lake Waikaremoana– a fact not mentioned by the Waitangi Tribunal.

This “Kangaroo Court” method of determining our country’s future by the Waitangi Tribunal and government departments only must stop. There must be a full public inquiry where all the documented evidence is presented and scrutinised before more land and assets belonging to the people of New Zealand are given away without their knowledge, authority or consent – a state of affairs which takes away their sovereign rights to representation. The lack of quality analysis and superficial reporting by the mainstream media also does the country no service. © Copyright Ross Baker q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 41

The BEAR, the DRAGON & the MAD, BAD MULLAH

Anatoli Zhdanov/ UPI PHOTO

42 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

Russian and Chinese support for the Iranian regime threatens global security, argues GEORGE L. SIMPSON, JR

R

ecent years have witnessed the rise of irregular but frequently intensive opposition to U.S. global pre-eminence by Russia and China. In their own ways, and in pursuit of their own interests, each of these authoritarian governments has established an informal alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran. For its part, the Khamenei regime in Tehran continues to view the United States as the “Great Satan” and works against American interests by engaging in international terrorism,[1] aiding in attacks on U.S. and coalition personnel in Iraq[2] and Afghanistan,[3] working to derail any resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,[4] and most of all by seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

There is a long history of conflict between Russia and Iran, so why is Moscow now warmly regarded by the Islamist regime, and why does Moscow, in turn, court Tehran?

Furthermore, what explains Iran’s new alliance with China? Has a new axis, opposed to the United States and Europe, formed, and if so, what are its roots and ramifications?

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 43

A New Geostrategic Axis?

Russian commentator Andrei Volnov has called the de facto Moscow-Beijing-Tehran alignment “a new geostrategic axis.”[5] While such a characterization is more metaphor than reality, a trilateral combination, based on the common goals of promoting eco-

nomic self-interest and reducing U.S. influence, certainly has been built on the foundations of fairly recent but significant bilateral ties between the two countries and Tehran. Thus, Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, notes that Moscow’s ties with the Iranian regime

Dmitry Astakhov/ ITAR-TASS

“reflect a geopolitical agenda which is at least twenty years old.”[6] Russia is engaged in what might be called “strategic opportunism” as it constantly fishes in troubled waters with the goal of identifying vulnerabilities that its policy makers can exploit.[7] Similarly, one can trace Beijing’s increasing links with Tehran to the first years of the Iran-Iraq war in the early 1980s.[8] For its part, Iran has followed a consistent antiAmerica and anti-Israel path since its 1979 revolution.

Proponents of an informal alliance from the Russian Federation, China, and Iran present it as a reaction to the unilateralism of the United States and alleged U.S. aspirations for global hegemony. They consider the United States a significant rival and a threat to their long-term security.

Consequently, Russia’s goal, according to Cohen, is to engage in a “balancing strategy” that will knock the United States down a notch and thus revise the international status quo. While Cohen makes this point for Moscow’s policy, it is an equally apt characterization of Beijing’s approach as well.[9]

The View from Beijing

“RUSSIA IS ENGAGED IN WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED “STRATEGIC OPPORTUNISM” AS IT CONSTANTLY FISHES IN TROUBLED WATERS WITH THE GOAL OF IDENTIFYING VULNERABILITIES THAT ITS POLICY MAKERS CAN EXPLOIT” 44 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

The leaders of China and Iran feel that they are the proud heirs to two great and ancient civilizations that have been humiliated and made victims of Western imperial aggression. They believe that Washington’s “hegemonism” represents the unjust continuation of long-standing Western efforts to keep them weak and subordinate.[10] Hence, Sino-Iranian relations are bound by what Asia and Middle East analyst John Calabrese calls a “kinship of nationalisms.”[11] Perhaps more importantly, an understanding of economic issues further explains China’s lukewarm support for the United States in its disputes with Iran. China, which has one of the world’s fastest growing economies and which has designs on becoming an economic superpower, is today the world’s second largest consumer of oil.

Nearly 60 percent of its oil is imported from the Middle East. Iran, which possesses about 10 percent of the world’s proven petroleum reserves, replaced Saudi Arabia as the leading supplier of oil to China in May 2009.

Indeed, since reaching an agreement in October 2004, Beijing and Tehran have penned energy deals that purportedly are worth more than US$120 billion.[12] Furthermore, Iran’s oil producing facilities and equipment are in serious need of modernization. Beijing’s willingness to invest in

this vital sector of the Iranian economy (as much as 90 percent of Iran’s export income comes from oil) is crucial to the fiscal wellbeing of the present Islamist regime, which, according to official estimates, faces an 11 percent unemployment rate and inflation exceeding 13 percent.[13] Thus, the China National Petroleum Corporation, China’s largest oil producer and supplier, signed a deal in January 2007 worth $3.6 billion to develop Iranian offshore gas fields. As recently as June 2009, the same company put its name to a $2 billion contract for development of the northern section of Iran’s Azadegan oil field near Ahvaz.[14] Despite U.S. pressure to keep Iran economically isolated, China has leaped into the void created by U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Republic since its 1979 revolution. In 2003, trade between the People’s Republic and Iran reached a record $4 billion, and that figure soared to $16 billion in 2006 and $29 billion in 2008.[15] Crude oil constitutes 80 percent of China’s imports from the Islamic Republic with mineral and chemical products making up most of the remainder. Beijing’s exports are more diver-

sified, with machinery, electrical appliances, textiles, vehicles, and aircraft comprising the most important commodities in demand from Iran.[16] Before 1997, Beijing had, for more than a decade, been Iran’s most important partner in helping the Islamist regime develop its nuclear capability. As China expert John W. Garver writes, China’s cooperation with Iran “was extensive, sustained over a fairly long period, and of crucial importance to Iran’s nuclear effort.”[17] The Chinese have apparently retreated from their policy of direct cooperation with the mullahs on the nuclear front since that time.

The View from Moscow One might think that the long history of conflict between Russia and Persia would preclude Iran from seeking Russian aid. As far back as Peter the Great (r.1682-1725), tsars and tsarinas have nibbled at Iranian borders in the Caucasus and the Caspian region.

Over time, first the Romanovs, then the communists intervened more and more in Persian affairs, with the latter going so far as to establish short-lived “People’s Republics”

China, which has one of the world’s fastest growing economies is today the world’s second largest consumer of oil. Nearly 60 percent of its oil is imported from the Middle East./ Zhang Mao/CHINAFOTOPRESS

in Kurdish and Azeri regions of Iran. Despite this, the courtship continues.

Russia also has economic reasons to back the Tehran regime. Russia’s trade with Iran is more modest than China’s but nevertheless significant. Total trade between the two countries equaled $3.2 billion in 2008 with analysts predicting even higher numbers within a few years. As both countries are major energy producers, they share a common interest in establishing pricing policies for oil and natural gas as well as manipulating these markets to their advantage.

More significant, however, is Moscow’s role in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. The Russian government has assisted in Iran’s construction of the $800 million Bushehr nuclear power plant and has helped

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 45

the mullahs obtain nuclear knowledge.[18] As a result, Moscow, as well as Beijing, is at odds with Washington over how to deal with Tehran’s efforts to gain a nuclear capability. China and Russia, both of which wield veto power on the United Nations Security Council, have consistently obstructed efforts in the U.N. to halt Tehran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons. While it is true that from time to time, both countries have called on Iran’s regime (which is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty) to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), neither has supported effective sanctions or forceful measures to deal with the problem. Gennady Yevstafyev, a senior adviser at the Center for Policy Studies in Russia, has gone so far as to contend that “Washington closed its eyes to the creation of nuclear weapons by its strategic partner, Pakistan. But now it is threatening a war on its ex-strategic partner Iran for the same crime.”[19]

Moscow continues to talk out of both sides of its mouth. Sergei Kiryienko, the director-general of Rosatom, Russia’s federal atomic energy agency, has stated the official Russian position that “broad access to civilian nuclear power must be guaranteed while at the same time there must be a guarantee that weapons of mass destruction will not proliferate under any circumstances.”[20] As recently as October 2007, then-president Vladimir Putin described a nuclear armed Iran to be a “strategic threat” to Russia when he met with leaders of the European Jewish Congress and with French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Moscow. Yet the Russian leader went on to claim that there was no “objective data” proving that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons so that “we proceed from a position that Iran has no such plans.”[21] What lies behind the inscrutable strongman’s thinking is difficult to say for certain, but one can speculate that Putin’s antipathy towards the United States as well as his desire to concili-

“ACCORDING TO ISRAELI PRESS REPORTS, THE MULLAHS ARE CURRENTLY SUPPLYING IRANIAN-MADE ZELZAL AND UPGRADED FATEH-110 SURFACE-TO-SURFACE MISSILES TO THE RADICAL SHI’I GROUP”

46 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

ate cronies within the Russian Federation’s military-industrial complex goes a long way to explain this gamble.

China, Russia, and Iranian Weaponry Arms sales to Iran by China and Russia, which the three countries insist are lawful, is another source of contention between the latter two and Washington.[22] Russia is Iran’s biggest weapons supplier by a wide margin, though China is also an important source. Russia reportedly supports the Islamic Republic’s development of ballistic missiles, which former Secretary of State Colin Powell warns have been redesigned to enable them to carry nuclear warheads.[23] Currently, the Iranian military is trying to develop the Shahab-6 missile, a variant of the North Korean Taep’o-dong-2C/3, which will have a range of 3,500 miles, putting Europe within its sights. There are unverified reports that the Russians have transferred rocket engine technology for this program and even some speculation that Moscow is helping Tehran with a missile that will have a 6,300-mile range, enabling it to reach the eastern seaboard of the United States.[24] For its part, although the Chinese government denies as “groundless allegation[s]” reports about its role in supplying Iran with

weaponry,[25] it is clear that it has transferred missile components and technology to Iran since the 1980s.[26] For example, Tehran has obtained Chinese-made anti-ship surfaceto-surface C-801 and C-802 missiles, which pose a potential threat to Persian Gulf shipping and U.S. naval vessels in the region.[27].

According to the CIA and experts in the field, Iran is also trying to develop sophisticated biological and chemical weapons.[28] These efforts go back to the Iran-Iraq war when the Iranians were on the receiving end of Iraqi chemical attacks. Although Iran has ratified the Biological Weapons Convention, specialists believe that with the help of Russian experts, it is “in the advanced research and development phase” of weaponizing chemical toxins and living organisms.[29] For its part, China has helped in Iran’s acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by selling precursor and dualuse chemicals, as well as the technology and equipment needed to use them. Thus there is good reason to conclude that “the Iranian leadership intends to maintain a robust CW [chemical weapons] capability.”[30] Washington is concerned not just with Iranian possession of sophisticated weapons but with the prospect of Tehran transferring them to terrorist proxies, such as Lebanesebased Hezbollah. In fact, the group launched an Iranian C-802 missile during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, which hit the Israeli missile frigate Hanit.[31] According to Israeli press reports, the mullahs are currently supplying Iranian-made Zelzal and upgraded Fateh-110 surface-to-surface missiles to the radical Shi’i group.[32] In August 2009, Israeli president Shimon Peres claimed that Hezbollah currently had 80,000 Iraniansupplied missiles.[33] While neither Moscow nor Beijing is directly responsible for these developments, neither appears particularly concerned when the weapons or technologies they transfer to Iran find their way into the hands of terrorist organizations.

Finally, both Moscow and Beijing are aiding the Iranian military as it develops advanced conventional weapons. Despite Washington’s strong objections, by late 2006, the Russia government had sold and begun delivery to Tehran of twenty-nine of its Tor-M1 air defense systems. Moscow argues that the $700 million sale is totally legal and asserts that these are “defensive” weapons.[34] Iran’s acquisition of such a sophisticated and advanced system poses a threat to any potential U.S. or Israeli air attack to take out Tehran’s nuclear facili-

STRINGER/UPI/NEWSCOM

ties.[35] Iran has also acquired at least ten Russian-made Pantsyr-S1E self-propelled short-range gun and missile air defense systems from Syria.[36] In March 2007, the Russian investigative journalist Ivan Safronov died mysteriously after learning that Moscow’s military-industrial complex was planning to transfer S-300VB missiles to Iran via Belarus.[37] These are Russia’s equivalent to the U.S.’s Patriot missiles: The S-300VB is capable of intercepting ballistic missiles and has a range of 150 kilometers.[38] As of this writing, it appears that Iran has not received the weapons, but Iranian officials are eager to do so.[39] There are numerous reports that Russia and China have also covertly sold Iran an array of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), combat aircraft, sophisticated radar systems, and fast-attack missile vessels.[40] Some of the SAMs have apparently made their way to insurgents fighting coalition forces in Iraq.[41] Sources also claim that either China or Kyrgyzstan has sold the Iranians high-speed torpedoes originally produced by the Russians.[42]

Mixed Signals?

Recent events demonstrate the complexities of the evolving relationship between Tehran and its great-power allies. Over the summer of 2009, there were mixed signals coming from Russia and Iran concerning bilateral ties. In June, following the upheavals in Iran over that country’s disputed presidential elections, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev cancelled, because of alleged scheduling conflicts, a planned meeting with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a mutual-security organization comprising China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.[43] Iran has observer status with the multinational group and aspires to become a full member, but the Russians have not gone out of their way to make this happen. In August 2009, Russia joined with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan in a four-party regional summit to which Iran was not invited.[44] At that time, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a journal whose views sometimes reflect those of the

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 47

Kremlin, editorialized, “It appears that the idea that Iran is a regional power, which Russia could use as a trump card in relations with the West, has turned out to be mistaken.”[45] It would appear that at least some in the upper echelons of the Russian government doubted the wisdom of continuing support to Tehran following the disputed election and the international opprobrium directed against the mullahs as they suppressed subsequent dissent.

For their part, at least some Iranians took note of this chilly behavior. An editorial in the “moderate” Iranian newspaper E’temad, which serves as the mouthpiece for Mehdi Karroubi’s oppositional National Trust Party, complained that Moscow had not helped Iran in the United Nations with its “peaceful pursuit” of nuclear energy as much as it could, and that it was dragging its feet in getting the Bushehr nuclear facility up and running. The article concludes, “Russians cheat their allies if it is necessary, and history shows that they have swindled us heavily.”[46] At the same time, other Russian officials have acted as if it were business as usual

between Moscow and Tehran. Moreover, supporters of this approach seem to have had the final say in the Kremlin. Two days after what was viewed by most outside observers as a fraudulent vote, newly “reelected” Iranian president Ahmadinejad made his first foreign trip to Russia. Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov called the visit “symbolic” and added, “This is a signal of successful mutual relations in the future.”[47] Shortly thereafter, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov referred to the Iranian elections as “an exercise in democracy.”[48] In early September 2009, Foreign Minister Lavrov opined, “The most important thing is Iran is ready for a comprehensive discussion of the situation, what positive role it can play in Iraq, Afghanistan and the region.”[49] In fact, he all but ruled out imposing sanctions on Tehran in order to get the regime to come clean on its nuclear program. In light of this, it is doubtful that the Obama administration’s recent lobbying efforts have fundamentally altered Russia’s position on Iran.

Two weeks after Lavrov’s statement, following the revelation that Iran had been covering up the existence of a nuclear facility,

48 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

CNN reported an unidentified senior U.S. official’s claims that Washington’s efforts to bring Russia (and China) on board with new sanctions against Tehran had “already begun to bear fruit.”[50] Yet even after the existence of the secret Iranian nuclear site near Qom became public knowledge,[51] Medvedev told the press, following the Group of Twenty summit in Pittsburgh: I do not believe sanctions are the best way to achieve results. Sanctions were used on a number of occasions against Iran, but we have doubts about the results. Nevertheless, when all instruments have been used and failed, one can use international legal sanctions. … I think we should continue to promote positive incentives for Iran and at the same time push it to make all its programs transparent and open. Should we fail in that case, we’ll consider other options.[52] Medvedev’s statement offers no clear sense of what might prompt the Russians to wield a stick against the mullahs. Moreover, one must still wonder whether former president Putin, the real power behind the throne, would agree to such a policy.

Notwithstanding Moscow’s concurrence

“WHEN THE CHINESE MEDIA ACTUALLY DID REPORT ON THE POSTELECTION DISTURBANCES IN THE STREETS OF TEHRAN, THEY WERE ATTRIBUTED TO “VANDALS” AND “TERRORISTS,” AND CHINESE TELEVISION VIEWERS WERE SHOWN NO IMAGES OF IRANIAN SECURITY FORCES BRUTALIZING PROTESTERS”

with an October 2009 IAEA compromise for Iran to send most of its enriched uranium abroad to be processed into reactor fuel, there seems to have been no Russian reaction to Tehran’s failure to respond to President Obama’s December 31, 2009 deadline regarding the offer. It is hard to imagine that Moscow will support any but modest penalties to be imposed against Tehran.

Indeed, as recently as January 2010, Russian foreign minister Lavrov said that “acting with a logic of punishing Iran … is not a sober approach.”[53] On the surface, the Kremlin has apparently joined with the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany in pursuing the so-called “two track” policy of threatening Iran with sanctions while still dangling the carrot of dialogue. On February 5, 2010, Lavrov met with his German counterpart Guido Westerwelle in Berlin and afterwards told reporters that “if we do not see a constructive answer from Iran, we will have to discuss this in the U.N. Security Council.”

Yet, the Russian foreign minister went on to say that he was still hopeful of a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue.[54] The question remains, however, whether Moscow will let go of the carrot and, even if it does, whether it would ever support more than a slap on Tehran’s wrist.

Basing one’s appraisal of Russian intentions on experience rather than hope, one is inclined to agree with the conclusion of Ray

Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Nicholas Gvosdev, adjunct senior fellow at the Nixon Center: “Russia is not interested in playing an active role in resolving the Iran crisis on terms America will find acceptable.”[55] Tehran’s ties with Beijing appear even stronger than those it has with Moscow.

Chinese president Hu Jintao had even fewer scruples than his Russian counterpart in the wake of the fraudulent Iranian election.

Days after the disputed vote, he shook hands with Ahmadinejad as Xinhua, China’s staterun news agency, reported on the “sound momentum” of bilateral relations.[56] When the Chinese media actually did report on the post-election disturbances in the streets of Tehran, they were attributed to “vandals” and “terrorists,” and Chinese television viewers were shown no images of Iranian security forces brutalizing protesters.[57] Still, Wu Sike, China’s special envoy to the Middle East, maintains that Beijing opposes Iran’s production and possession of nuclear weapons. The problem is that while he avers that China’s policies have not changed on this issue, he and his superiors appear to see no urgency in acting to stop it.[58] China does not, however, offer a strictly one-sided backing for all of Iran’s aspirations.

In 2008, China’s Hu Jintao officially “welcomed Iran’s interest to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), saying an expert committee will be formed to consider the proposal.”[59] Yet little progress has been evident thus far; Iran sent a representative to the SCO secretariat in Beijing in January 2010 to discuss how it might further its interaction with the organization but remains an observer state.[60] On the nuclear issue, Beijing also appears intent on opposing sanctions. Thus, in early September 2009, China’s Foreign Ministry declared that “under current circumstances, we must increase diplomatic efforts and renew talks with Iran.”[61] Although there was some hope that Vice President Joseph Biden’s September 11, 2009 meeting with Wu Bangguo, China’s second most powerful leader, would have changed this response, such has not been the result. Indeed, shortly thereafter, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson gave Beijing’s response to the revelation about Iran’s covert nuclear facility: “We believe that sanctions and exerting pressure are not the way to solve problems and are not conducive for the current diplomatic efforts on the Iran nuclear issue.”[62]

While French prime minister Francois Fillon has since asserted that his country and China “share identical views on how to lead Iran away from its threatening stance and isolation on the nuclear issue,”[63] no such declaration has been forthcoming from Beijing. In fact, the opposite is true.

In January 2010, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States gathered in New York to focus on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. Beijing, however, sent a low-level diplomat to the meeting in what observers considered a snub to the others.[64] The Chinese representative explained that his country was only prepared to begin discussing the possibility of imposing sanctions.[65] At this point, it would seem that optimism regarding China’s coming around to support effective sanctions is reminiscent of Samuel Johnson’s estimation of second marriages as “the triumph of hope over experience.”

Conclusions The most imminent threat to the global order comes from the radical Islamic regime in Iran bent on developing nuclear weapons. Both Russia and China have consistently supported Tehran by their aggressive, opportunist – and shortsighted – policies, and both are in large measure responsible for the threat that the Iranian government poses to the world today.

Should the radicals in Tehran obtain the ability to launch ballistic missiles with warheads on them, there is no guarantee that one day they might not target Russian cities or other objectives. China, too, might ultimately find itself in the sights of an unfriendly regime in Iran. Should a military conflagration occur in the Persian Gulf and curtail the flow of oil from the region, it would surely spell disaster for the Chinese economy. With its vast supplies of oil and natural gas, Moscow might reap windfall profits, but there is no guarantee of where the chain reaction of a Middle East war might stop. A radical Shi’i Iranian regime armed with nuclear weapons would likely lead to proliferation among other states in the area such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt. The stakes are high and getting higher. Indeed, those who have decided to back Tehran should consider how a nuclear Iran will promote their security interests.

The opaqueness of decision-making in the Kremlin makes it difficult to explain fully Moscow’s behaviour in abetting the Iranian regime, but it would seem that the tempta-

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 49

Vahid Reza Alaei/ Iranian Defense Ministry UPI

“IF THE LEADERSHIPS IN MOSCOW AND BEIJING CONTINUE TO SABOTAGE DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS TO HALT THE CLERICAL REGIME’S DRIVE FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS, THEY SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE BY WASHINGTON AND THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY FOR OBSTRUCTING NONVIOLENT REMEDIES TO THE IRANIAN PROBLEM” tion of making a fast ruble and undermining Washington in the bargain is just too much for those in power to resist. Likewise, both China’s economic imperatives and its desire to become the next great superpower on the world stage likely play a decisive role in its behaviour.

Russian and Chinese posturing that they have sought peace and stability in the region through constructive dialogue has been a façade. The occasional snubs from Russia following the 2009 sham election or expressions of discomfort from both countries over Iran’s covert nuclear program seem little more than public relations stunts.

The two authoritarian regimes have consistently undermined the United States in its efforts to contain Iran and have profited by doing so. Indeed, if the leaderships in Moscow and Beijing continue to sabotage diplomatic efforts to halt the clerical regime’s drive for nuclear weapons, they should be held accountable by Washington and the international community for obstructing nonviolent remedies to the Iranian problem. U.S. officials could launch a concerted public relations campaign to demonstrate to the world the depth of the Russian and Chinese culpability in creating a problem that threatens the stability of a vital geo-

50 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

political part of the world. Washington might press the restart button on its plan to provide missile defence systems in central Europe or increase its military cooperation with Taiwan. Additionally, as trade is a twoway proposition, the Russians and Chinese could encounter a host of difficulties in this sphere as well.

Unless they change their course immediately, it is they who will carry the onus for a U.S. or Israeli recourse to military intervention in order to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. It may seem hard to imagine the present administration in Washington taking such action, but it is also unclear what Jerusalem

will do. An Israeli strike against Iran would likely result in a serious setback to Tehran’s nuclear program, but its certainty of success is by no means guaranteed. Moreover, Israel would pay a heavy diplomatic price for what would no doubt be termed its “reckless adventurism.” Thus, it hesitates, and if it does so for too long, one should not be at all surprised if Israel or some other country ends up being the innocent victim of a nuclear power that the Russians and Chinese will have helped to create.

While there may not be a new axis in a formal sense, the combination of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran on a range of issues has undermined the security of the Persian Gulf region and worked against the interests of the United States and its allies. Its potential continuation represents a broader and more fundamental threat to global stability, would likely destroy decades of diplomacy, and sound the death knell of the nonproliferation regime.

George L. Simpson, Jr., is professor and chair of the history department at High Point University. This article first published in Middle East Quarterly Spring 2010, pp.

63-72 http://www.meforum.org/2690/ russian-chinese-support-for-iran

References [1] Ely Karmon, “Counterterrorism Policy: Why Tehran Starts and Stops Terrorism,” Middle East Quarterly, Dec. 1998, pp. 35-44.

[2] Jonathan Schanzer, “Ansar al-Islam: Back in Iraq,” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2004, pp.

41-50.

[3] Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander U.S. Central Command, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the AfghanistanPakistan Strategic Review and the Posture of Central Command, Apr. 1, 2009.

[4] Elihu D. Richter and Alex Barnea, “Tehran’s Genocidal Incitement against Israel,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2009, pp. 45-51.

[5] Rossiiskie Vesti (Moscow), Russian Federation, June 23, 2005.

[6] Ariel Cohen, “The Russian Handicap to U.S. Iran Policy,” Jerusalem Issue Briefs, Apr. 22, 2009.

[7] Steven Rosefielde and Stefan Hedlund, Russia since1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 211-30.

[8] John W. Garver, China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 71-82.

[9] Cohen, “The Russian Handicap to U.S. Iran Policy.”

[10] Garver, China and Iran, p. 5.

[11] John Calabrese, “China and Iran: Partners Perfectly Mismatched,” Middle East Institute, Aug. 18, 2006.

[12] Ilan Berman, “The Logic behind Sino-Iranian Cooperation,” China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, Nov. 2006, pp. 15-23; “Fueling the Dragon: China’s Race into the Oil Market,” Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, Potomac, Md., accessed Dec. 28, 2009.

[13] Tehran Times, Jan. 6, 12, 2010.

[14] United Press International, June 12, 2009.

[15] Asia Times (Hong Kong), Nov. 29, 2004; China Daily (Beijing), Feb. 18, 2008; The Guardian (London), June 22, 2009; Canberra (Aus.) Times, Nov. 12, 2007; Tehran Times, May 11, 2009.

[16] Garver, China and Iran, p. 247.

[17] Ibid., pp. 139, 155.

[18] “Weapons of Mass Destruction: BushehrBackground,” GlobalSecurity.org, accessed Dec. 28, 2009.

[19] United Press International, June 6, 2006.

[20] Barbara Slavin, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S., and the Twisted Path to Confrontation (New York: St. Martins Press, 2006), p. 29.

[21] BBC News, Oct. 10, 2007.

[22] Fars News Agency (Tehran), May 9, 2009.

[23] The Washington Post, Nov. 17, 2004.

[24] Charles P. Vick, “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Shahab-6,” GlobalSecurity.org, Jan. 26, 2009.

[25] Xinhua General News Service, June 16, 2006.

[26] “Unclassified Report to Congress, January– June 2003,” Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C., Apr. 30, 2007; Garver, China and Iran, pp. 182-9, 213-4.

[27] “C-801 YJ-1/YJ-8 (Eagle Strike), CSS-N-4 SARDINE,” Military Analysis Network, Federation of American Scientists, Aug. 10, 1999; Reuters, Jan. 19, 2010.

[28] Agence France-Presse, Sept. 14, 2006.

[29] “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Biological Weapons,” GlobalSecurity.org, Apr. 28, 2005.

[30] “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Chemical Weapons,” GlobalSecurity.org, Oct. 15, 2008; Ronen Bergman, The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle against the World’s Most Dangerous Terrorist Power (New York: Free Press, Sept. 2008), p. 313.

[31] “Din vecheshbon chelki,” HaVaadah Livdikat Eiru’ei haMa’arachah beLevanon 2006 vaadat Winograd, MyNet.co.il, Apr. 2007.

[32] “Zelzal-1/2/3,” MISSILETHREAT.com, Claremont (Calif.) Institute, accessed Jan. 25, 2010; The New York Times, July 9, 2008.

[33] Al-Manar TV (Beirut), Aug. 22, 2009.

[34] Jareer Elass and Amy Myers Jaffe, The History and Politics of Russia’s Relations with OPEC (Houston: James A Baker, III, institute for Public

Policy, Rice University, May 6, 2009), p. 31.

[35] Defense Industry Daily (Thetford Ctr., Vt.), Dec. 5, 2005; Pravda (Moscow), Dec. 1, 2007.

[36] Agence France-Presse, May 21, 2007.

[37] The Washington Post, Mar. 6, 2007.

[38] The Times (London), Sept. 19, 2008; The Guardian, Sept. 8, 2009.

[39] Tehran Times, Jan. 18, 2010.

[40] Gill Bates and Evan S. Medeiros, “Foreign and Domestic Influences on China’s Arms Control and Nonproliferation Policies,” The China Quarterly, Mar. 2000, pp. 74-9; Kenneth Katzman, “Iran: Arms and Technology Acquisitions,” Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., Jan. 26, 2001; “Iran Missile Milestones,” IranWatch.org, Jan. 2010, accessed Feb. 7, 2010; “Thondar Fast Attack Missile Boat,” GlobalSecurity.org, accessed Feb. 7, 2010.

[41] Rear Adm. Mark I. Fox, Communications Division chief for Multi-National Force-Iraq, and Brig. Gen. Mark Gurganus, Ground Combat Element commander for Multi-National ForceWest, news briefing, Baghdad, Sept. 30, 2007.

[42] Associated Press Worldstream, Apr. 6, 2006; Bergman, The Secret War with Iran, pp. 294-5.

[43] Interfax News Agency (Moscow), June 16, 2009, in BBC Monitoring Former Soviet UnionPolitical, June 16, 2009.

[44] Siyasat-e Rouz (Tehran), Sept. 12, 2009, in BBC Monitoring Middle East-Political, Sept. 27, 2009.

[45] Los Angeles Times, Aug. 10, 2009.

[46] E’temad (Tehran), Aug. 12, 2009, in BBC Monitoring Middle East-Political, Aug. 29, 2009.

[47] The Christian Science Monitor, June 16, 2009.

[48] Reuters, June 25, 2009.

[49] The New York Times, Sept. 10, 2009.

[50] CNN News, Sept. 25, 2009.

[51] The Guardian, Sept. 26, 2009.

[52] MSNBC, Sept. 25, 2009.

[53] Iran Daily (Tehran), Jan. 23, 2010.

[54] Reuters, Feb. 5, 2010.

[55] Ray Takeyh and Nicholas Gvosdev, “The Russian Riddle II: Russia, the U.S., and Iran,” The New York Times, Sept. 8, 2008.

[56] China View (New York), June 16, 2009.

[57] The Australian (Sydney), June 24, 2009.

[58] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing, Aug. 11, 2009.

[59] Tehran Times, Sept. 7, 2008.

[60] “SCO Secretary-General receives Iran’s Charge d’Affaires to China,” Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Jan. 28, 2010.

[61] National Public Radio, Sept. 8, 2009.

[62] The Guardian, Sept. 24, 2009.

[63] Agence France-Presse, Dec. 22, 2009.

[64] The Times, Jan. 16, 2010.

[65] The Times, Jan. 18, 2010.

q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 51

treachery THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY

With the Australian election now out of the way, HAL G.P. COLEBATCH reports on Labor’s deep communist roots, and their impact on World War II

T

wo days after the outbreak of World War II the Australian Labor Party Executive passed a resolution, endorsed unanimously by Caucus, which was evidently intended to bring Hitler and the Panzer divisions pouring into Poland smartly to heel without the necessity of further exertion. It stated: “The Australian Labor Party affirms its traditional horror of war and its belief that international disputes should be settled by negotiation.”1 Unfortunately, any heartsearching or second thoughts which this ringing declaration caused at Fuhrer Headquarters or the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht seems to have escaped the attention of historians.

The A.L.P. also demanded the immediate nationalisation of all essential raw materials, which presumably included wool, iron ore and coal, and certainly included gold-mines and B.H.P., and of factories and the rigid control of commodity prices. In case this happened to leave any aspect of the economy and defence production unruined, it also demanded the artificial pegging of interest rates and the readjustment of the monetary system so the national debt be kept as low as possible.2 The Australian Worker claimed Australia was at war only by reason of sentimental links to the British Empire and there were no sound reasons for drastic war precautions.3 A fortnight after the outbreak of war, senior Labor MP Eddie Ward moved an amendment to the Defence Act guaranteeing against conscription for service beyond Australia. This was passed 46-41 in Parliament with the support of Government renegades. The Australian Worker, unlike Communist Party publications after 1941, continued to attack the defence-effort throughout the war, and doubtless gave much encouragement to strikers from 1939 to 1945. It has been said that the editor, Henry Boote, deserved the ribbon of one of the higher orders of the Iron Cross round his neck from the Nazi Government and a rope round it from the Australian.

52 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 53

It may have been more than coincidence that the Australian Worker, hostile to the war-effort against Hitler and Nazism, had also long had an anti-Semitic strain – something, as indicated above, also notable in certain radical, Left and pro-Labour writers, politicians and intellectuals such as Henry Lawson, Frank Anstey and Manning Clark. Attacks by these on “moneybags”, “Mr Fatman,” “the money-power,” etc., had anti-Semitic overtones, made obvious in publications such in Anstey’s pamphlet The Kingdom of Shylock.4 Despite this Boote is an icon of Labour history and referred to by some latter-day Labor figures in terms of reverence.

Labor MP Eddie Ward

W

hen the Menzies Government in May-June 1939 passed legislation to introduce a census and national register so that resources and manpower could be used properly, and to make it harder to evade military training, the A.C.T.U. wanted the Parliamentary Labor Party, which had opposed the Bill, to lead the unions in defying the law and refusing to comply. This was, in the circumstances, virtually sedition: had the Parliamentary Party obeyed the A.C.T.U., Australia would have become ungovernable. It could conceivably have led to open civil war, and effectively removed Australia from the fight against Hitler and Fascism altogether. The A.C.T.U. could not have picked an issue with greater practical potential to help Hitlerism. Curtin agreed to support the government’s legislation and in the Labor Caucus strongly condemned the A.C.T.U.’s “policy of revolt to a law,” but in a somewhat bizarre speech in Parliament implied that the national register was a violation of liberties comparable with Nazism itself: “It appears to be a little absurd for us to be asking the people of this country to defend democracy in remote parts of the world, while at the same time, we seek to sacrifice some of the fundamental principles of democracy here at home in the process.”5 When Curtin proposed a voluntary register, sections of the union movement opposed even this. To make this episode even more bewildering, it happened before the NaziSoviet Pact, when Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were still at daggers drawn, so this obstruction does not seem likely to have been the result of Soviet or Communist direction or influence.6 The only possible explanation seems to be a consciousness of trade union identity so narrow, fundamentalist and ideologically rigid, that it still

“A FORTNIGHT AFTER THE OUTBREAK OF WAR, SENIOR LABOR MP EDDIE WARD MOVED AN AMENDMENT TO THE DEFENCE ACT GUARANTEEING AGAINST CONSCRIPTION FOR SERVICE BEYOND AUSTRALIA” saw “the bosses” – perhaps identified with British Capitalism or the perceived proBritish attitudes of people like Menzies and of the U.A.P. – as the supreme enemy, with Hitler the “enemy of my enemy” and even a sort of ally. Labor Left M.P. Maurice Blackburn made a grotesque and seditious speech which might have been written by Dr Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry in Berlin, apparently designed to give aid to Hitler, claiming: “Those who have fresh in their memory things that were done in the years 1914 to 1918 cannot regard this legislation coolly and calmly. It will be used to deprive the people of their liberties.”7 One of John Curtin’s first statements after the outbreak of war, made on 10 September 1939, was that the Labor Party maintained its traditional opposition to conscription of manpower for service and that it opposed “sending troops and the consequent warmaterials to Europe.”8 The Federal President of the A.L.P. wrote on 25 September 1939,

54 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

when the full power and ruthlessness of the Nazi Blitzkrieg had been amply demonstrated (Polish Uhlan cavalry in a gesture of doomed heroism had been charging formations of German armoured reconnaissance vehicles with lances), and Russia had joined in the invasion of Poland from the East, urging all good Australians to refuse to serve overseas and to remain in Australia, and to fight Nazism to the last British soldier, concluding:9 “Every man who leaves Australia to fight in Europe increases our national debt, reduces our capacity to defend Australia against possible foreign aggression, and also of our country to supply Great Britain with materials and goods she needs and which are essential to her success against the curse of Hitlerism.”

On 25 October 1939, the Australian Worker published another attack on conscription for home defence.

Comrade T. Wright of the Communist

Party Central Committee, later a Sydney Alderman, claimed that: “Discussion of the war should lead to a clear declaration of its imperialist character, the danger of it being turned against Soviet Russia and the desire of the workers for immediate peace.” This formula of the war being somehow “switched” or “turned” against Russia was frequently used by communists and has been used since

by Leftist historians such as Russell Ward, its plainly irrational nature notwithstanding. By 4 November 1939, there were about 8,000 men on strike on the Northern New South Wales coal-fields.

On 31 December, 1939, about 200 servicemen attacked a Communist rally in the Sydney Domain. They drowned out the speaker by singing the National Anthem.

The Sydney Morning Herald the following day reported that: “When one of the communist speakers declared that the communists’ message was peace, the soldiers roared their disapproval and asked what the Russians were doing in Finland.” The Sydney Morning Herald published photographs of the incident which showed the soldiers and sailors marching in ranks. Their faces in the photographs are grim and furious. Several were arrested. A letter in the Sydney Morning Herald of 3 January 1940,

by A. de. R. Barclay, Secretary of the Sane Democracy League (a well-respected moderate political group which had published anti-fascist pamphlets before the war) said that he had several times heard Communist speakers abusing and provoking servicemen, calling them “five bob a day murderers,” and “hired assassins”.

There was another fight in the Domain between Communists and servicemen the following week, when the Communists erected banners reading “Oppose Sending Expeditionary Force”. Communist speakers included Jim Healey of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, E. Thornton of the Federated Ironworkers, Lloyd Ross of the Australian Railways Union (later an antiCommunist and biographer of John Curtin) and A. Thompson of the Milk Carters’ Employees’ Union. It was reported that officers in uniform spoke to the servicemen and calmed them.

On 12 February 1940, it was reported that 30 soldiers and 10 sailors attacked a Communist rally at Yarra Bank after Communists had again called them “five bob a day murderers” and had spat on them. The same day there was a report from New Zealand of similar fighting in

Auckland. On 15 February 1940, N.S.W. Miners’ Federation President C. Nelson said: “There will be a complete black-out at the mining fields. Every kind of labour will be withdrawn from the mines.” On 13 March it was forecast that the silver, lead and zinc mines at Mt. Isa might have to close down for lack of coal. On 13 March it was also reported that a New Zealand wharf strike ended instantly when the government there took over the wharves. On 21 March it was reported that the N.S.W. coal-strike was supported by the N.S.W. Labour Council and the A.C.T.U.. On 28 March 200 men were dismissed from the B.H.P. steelworks at Newcastle because there was no coal and it was reported that a further 360 dismissals were expected imminently.

B

y 4 April 1940, about 35,000 men were reported to be idle as a result of coalstrikes. On 5 April 1940, Sydney watersiders at Woolloomooloo loading food for the A.I.F. (Australian Infantry Force) troops in the Middle East went on strike for about a week, demanding extra “smoko” breaks. They remained on strike despite, or because of, the Nazi invasion of Denmark and Norway, marking the end of the so-called “phoney war.”

The unprovoked Nazi invasions of Denmark and Norway shocked the world.

Prime Minister Menzies said on 10 April 1940: “As far as Australia is concerned, this grim … savagery will harden our determination to see this war through and to drive the evil spirit out of Germany.” But

there was another strike threatened at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory. Further fighting was reported between servicemen and Communists at the Domain. At about the same time, on 16 April 1940, the N.S.W. Labor Party held a rally attacking conscription at the Town Hall. The Australian Railways Union was on strike, as were the coalfields and the munitions works at Deer Park. There was heavy fighting going on in Norway, with considerable losses on both sides, especially at sea, and news of the Naval battles at Narvik had reached Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald commented in a leader the next day: “The ‘fellow-patriots’ of the Town Hall rally, as they styled one another, might have paused to reflect that they were able to meet and do verbal battle with the spectre of conscription only because the shield of the British Navy, now battered and blood-spattered, is held between them and the brute enemies of human freedom. It will not have escaped attention that some of the friends of Russia, that land of iron conscription, who were most prominent at the Easter Conference, were also most vocal at the Town Hall meeting” [emphasis added].

In fact, conscription for overseas service was a somewhat purely political and academic issue at that time as there were more volunteers than the training system could cope with.

Communist attacks on morale, defence preparations and national unity in general continued. The Communist Guardian in Melbourne claimed in 1940: “We publish

“ONE OF JOHN CURTIN’S FIRST STATEMENTS AFTER THE OUTBREAK OF WAR, MADE ON 10 SEPTEMBER 1939, WAS THAT THE LABOR PARTY MAINTAINED ITS TRADITIONAL OPPOSITION TO CONSCRIPTION OF MANPOWER FOR SERVICE AND THAT IT OPPOSED “SENDING TROOPS AND THE CONSEQUENT WARMATERIALS TO EUROPE.” INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 55

“THE N.S.W. BRANCH OF THE A.L.P. – THE BIGGEST AND MOST POWERFUL IN AUSTRALIA – VOTED

BY AN OVERWHELMING MAJORITY AGAINST CONSCRIPTION FOR HOME DEFENCE AGAIN AT ITS EASTER 1940 CONFERENCE, AND CLAIMED, “THE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE HAVE NOTHING TO GAIN FROM A CONTINUATION OF THIS WAR”

facts about our troops in Egypt, amongst whom the Australian Communist Party is active and with good results. They, too, are infected with the anti-war spirit … their enemies are not the Italian or German soldiers but the capitalists.”

The Communist national weekly Tribune claimed on 23 January 1940: “Today the Communist International represents a great army of fighters, who fearlessly raise the slogan: ‘The enemy is in your own country’.”

There were many more such publications.

John Curtin and the Labor Party moderates appear to have been culpable in not addressing them, and it is likely they did not even read them. However Curtin would reap the consequences in the most terrible and personal way. The N.S.W. branch of the A.L.P. – the biggest and most powerful in Australia

– voted by an overwhelming majority against conscription for home defence again at its Easter 1940 Conference, and claimed, “The Australian people have nothing to gain from a continuation of this war.” It also adopted a “Hands Off Russia” resolution, indicating the degree of Communist penetration of mainstream A.L.P. policy and the difficulty of telling Communist and A.L.P. Left apart. This was at the time when Stalin, in accord with the treaty with the Nazis, had crushed and massacred the population of the Baltic republics and was trying to do the same to the Finns. The Soviet Union was delivering massive supplies of materials and munitions to Hitler. There were three Labour Parties in New South Wales, with the so-called Industrial Labour Party or State Labour party under very strong Communist influence, the Lang Australian Labor Party

56 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

(Non-Communist) and the A.L.P. The Bulletin, now much more critical of Labor than in its early days, in the edition of 3 April 1940 published a full-page cartoon by Norman Lindsay showing “Red Strikes” and “Hands Off Russia” as a millstone round the neck of Labor as it entered the election campaign. Labor MP Eddie Ward declared in Parliament in April 1940, that anyone who advocated sending Australian troops to fight Hitler was “guilty of a traitorous act”.

Curtin claimed in Parliament on 18 April, 1940 in a statement apparently aimed at Ward and the Stalinist anti-anti-Nazis that “[A]ny man in Australia who professes an allegiance to a nation which is an enemy of Australia should be dealt with as such.” He then, it might be said typically, temporised this with the comment which would in ordinary circumstances have been impeccable but which in this context simply weakened what he had just said: “[But we] must not enable attacks to be made on persons who are not guilty, or put the Government in a position to act like Hitler … No one should be able to say that this man or that man shall be put out of the way merely because someone says that he is a Communist.”

The combined effect of the two statements sounded like P. G. Wodehouse’s Clarence, Lord Emsworth, or perhaps a caricature of Neville Chamberlain at Munich.

About this time, and coinciding with the Corio by-election, Labor wanted a referendum on whether any further volunteers should be sent to reinforce the Australian troops already overseas. This was bizarre: without reinforcements the Australian Infantry Force would be worn away by attrition and casualties and become ineffective and units would go into battle with everdecreasing strength. It was a piece of military nonsense or worse; without reinforcements the A.I.F. Divisions would either have to be recalled or, in an attenuated state, they would eventually be massacred by enemies at full fighting strength. The effect on the morale of the troops could be expected to be quite disastrous – an outcome which those who proposed such a policy either did not care about because they had no empathy with the troops as human beings fighting a desperate, grinding war far from home, or else which they deliberately intended and sought to bring about. Further, any forced withdrawal in the face of an active enemy – such as this policy would have eventually made inevitable – is usually disastrous in terms of casualties.

the first capture of Tobruk, with another 27,000 prisoners with guns and vehicles, and where, when the Italian flag was run down, an Australian slouch hat was hoisted in its place. Of the victory at Benghazi Barrie Pitt, a leading writer on World War II, commented: “Only the Australians … could have covered that awful ground in the time.”

In all this force, led by the British General Richard O’Connor, which never numbered more than 35,000 men and was very short of vehicles and other equipment, advanced 500 miles in 10 weeks, capturing more than 130,000 prisoners, nearly 400 tanks and 845

guns. These victories were a huge shot-inthe-arm of encouragement and hope for the Allies who until then had known nothing but defeat. It is bizarre that some latter-day historians and journalists, sometimes claiming to speak for a “new nationalism,” have claimed or suggested that the achievements of the men of the A.I.F. and their contribution to freeing the world from a genocidal tyranny – when mentioned at all – are shameful evidence of an explicitly or implicitly disloyal government’s readiness to fight “other people’s wars”, or of some pathological aggression in the Australian spirit.

I

n October 1941, for purely political reasons the Government in Canberra had the Australian garrison withdrawn by sea from Tobruk in the midst of fighting and under air-attack, Australian and British lives being lost needlessly in the process. This was little short of the murder of Australian and British soldiers and sailors but no post-war inquiry into the incident was held. Furthermore, of course, to put such a proposal to referendum, whatever the result, would undermine the government’s authority to act decisively and show it to be impotent.

The Australian forces then in the Middle East were in fact of very great importance in the war against Nazism and Fascism, yet, apart from the name of Tobruk (and that in association with its later siege rather than their role in its original capture) they have a notably small place in Australia’s historical memory. After Dunkirk they formed a very significant part of Britain’s only field army at a time – in 1940-41 – when that army was only about 50,000 men.

When Churchill is said to have cried out in desperation: “We must have a victory!” the Australians played the major role in that first victory, the Battle of Bardia, with 40,000 Italian prisoners taken and 400 guns captured.

Australian troops went on to play key roles in a quick succession of victories, including INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 57

W

ith the German attack on Belgium opening the great Blitzkrieg in the West, Curtin stated: “The democratic countries of the world are starkly face to face with a fight for their very existence … democracy stands with its back to the wall … [this is the gravest danger] that Australia has yet faced.” Yet the coal strike continued.

When it finally finished, the day Holland surrendered, it had lasted ten weeks, directly involving about 23,000 mineworkers and countless thousands of others who had been made idle. The harm done to the war-effort was beyond calculation.

The miners had solemnly pledged “Industrial peace during the war.” Their leaders soon showed their attitude to such pledges was similar to Hitler’s. The months from May to September 1940, saw, in quick succession the British retreat to Dunkirk, Mussolini throwing Fascist Italy into the war against the reeling allies, the surrender of France and its partial joining of the Axis cause, the Battle of Britain and the first heavy bombing of London. It appeared Britain, the last hope of democracy’s survival in Europe, was on the verge of invasion and total national destruction. Britain had lost huge quantities of equipment in the retreat to Dunkirk and desperately needed all production. Invasion-beaches were patrolled

by World War I armoured cars and some Army and Home Guard units did not even have rifles.

British planners calculated that by straining every resource Britain might be able to build an Army of 55 divisions as against Germany’s army of about 200 divisions.

In the previous year Britain had produced 13,400,000 tons of steel to Germany’s 22,500,000 tons. In Australia coal, engineering and munitions unions went on strike. Following the fall of France, Menzies offered to confer with the A.C.T.U. to set up a Trade Union Advisory Panel. The A.C.T.U. response was to declare any member of the Advisory Panel persona non grata. In a recent book the anti-British polemicist David Day has actually condemned the Menzies cabinet for having decided, on 14 May 1940, to send Britain small-arms ammunition.

On 18 September 1940, with the invasion of Britain expected, and with Australian pilots fighting and dying in the Battle of Britain, 6,000 metal trades workers stopped work in munitions factories, a donation, one commentator remarked, of “6,000 days for Hitler”. The same day there were strikes at Australian Iron and Steel at Port Kembla, at

“IN A RECENT BOOK THE ANTI-BRITISH POLEMICIST DAVID DAY HAS ACTUALLY CONDEMNED THE MENZIES CABINET FOR HAVING DECIDED, ON 14 MAY 1940, TO SEND BRITAIN SMALLARMS AMMUNITION” Amalgamated Engineering Ltd., and again at the Newcastle Collieries. There was also a threat of another strike at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory by the Explosives and Munitions Workers’ Federation. The following day there was a strike by 6,000 members of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.

This halted all work at Cockatoo Dockyard including naval ship construction. A week later there was a strike by 1,400 workers making Army uniforms at Alexandra Spinning Mills, plus another 4,000 munitions workers.

In October 1940, Fascist Italy invaded Greece. Ironworkers employed on the Australian waterfront refused to do ship repair work and served an ultimatum demanding increased pay and leave. There were also further coal strikes. In November 1940: Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador to Washington, said Britain had spent nearly all its gold and dollars. This spelt catastro-

58 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

phe at least as surely as did any defeat on the battlefield. There was a strike at the Commonwealth Steel Company’s Waratah works at Newcastle, and 4,000 men were idle at Australian dockyards following a strike by 1,000 waterfront engineering union members. There was a strike at Cockatoo Naval Dockyard and at metallurgical works. Enemy mines were sinking ships in Australian waters.

News reached Australia of how the British armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay had engaged the German pocket-battleship Admiral Scheer, to buy time for the convoy it was escorting to escape and how the British ship was sunk with few survivors.

Perhaps inspired by this tale of steadfast heroism in the face of the enemy, crane-drivers at Cockatoo Dockyard voted to continue on strike. Doing his bit for national unity, Labor MP Eddie Ward claimed senior members of the R.S.L. who urged the formation of a national government of all parties were Fifth Columnists.

In December 1940, workers making liferafts for troop-ships went on strike at A.C.I. There were also 5,000 miners on the N.S.W. coalfields on strike. In January 1941, possibly to celebrate Australian troops’ key role in Battle of Bardia, the first major Allied victory, Australian merchant seamen went on strike on the ground that ships did not have paravanes, owing to other strikes, and despite an assurance they would proceed only along swept channels. There were also 1,100 men on strike at the Commonwealth Steel works at Waratah. Engineers at 40 metal trades shops in Sydney stopped work. On 7 January 1941, the N.S.W. Metal Trades Industry announced a complete ban on overtime by boilermakers, ironworkers and munitions workers unless the government agreed not to tax overtime wages.

(Had the government given way on this demand, other unions would obviously have demanded the same, leading to the permanent damaging of all war production.) Also in January 1941, Communists and pacifists were reported to be telephoning next-of-kin of casualties to demoralise them. On 19 January 1941 it was reported that the metal trades ban was extended to Victoria. On 25 January 1941 the Secretary of the Queensland Workers’ Union said the Left was breaking John Curtin’s heart. The Engineering strike spread further.

On 1 March 1941 the Miner’s Federation again pledged full coal production in Australia while the war position was criti-

“IN OCTOBER 1940, FASCIST ITALY INVADED GREECE. IRONWORKERS EMPLOYED ON THE AUSTRALIAN WATERFRONT REFUSED TO DO SHIP REPAIR WORK AND SERVED AN ULTIMATUM DEMANDING INCREASED PAY AND LEAVE“ cal. On 4 March 1941, there was a go-slow by workers at the Footscray Munitions Factory which reduced the production of metal for shell and cartridge cases. On 5 March 1941 there were strikes by ironworkers at the munitions annex of Amalgamated Wireless Ltd, and another threatened strike at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory.

On 12 March 1941, John Curtin signed a statement by the bipartisan War Council on the desperate nature of war situation. Eddie Ward claimed in Parliament that it was a lie and a hoax to influence workers into accepting worse conditions and becoming less militant. The Boilermakers’ Federation said it was not interested in the development of a shipbuilding industry in Australia unless it had separate representation on the Shipbuilding Commission.

In April 1941, there were major German advances and victories over British and Australian forces in Greece and North Africa.

Germans recaptured Bardia and Australian and other Imperial forces retreated towards Tobruk. There was plainly disaster for the Allies in Greece. Political leaders spoke of the desperate situation. There were major gas, coke and rail strikes in New South Wales and other States.

Curtin struggled to free himself from his own and his Party’s ideological strait-jacket.

As a member of the Advisory War Council he was meeting Menzies constantly on friendly terms and receiving high-level information on what was actually happening. Speaking in Parliament on 15 May 1940, Curtin paid tribute to Menzies’ work in gearing Australia for war, to his “sensible outlook”, concern for national unity and “high considerations of patriotism”. He also worked to manoeuvre the A.L.P. caucus gradually from its unilateralist anti-war and anti-defence position, though he and the other defence-minded members of the Party’s leadership could only do this in

a stealthy, gradualist way, with vague resolutions and ambiguous forms of words. Menzies would say in tribute to Curtin many years after his death: “He led his party out of a species of pacifism and isolationism which had marked it for many years”.10 Curtin was, however, handicapped both by his own mind-set and his Party’s, the weight of its history including the First World War conscription split, and the isolation and parochialism of Australia in which a petty dispute over some detail of local working conditions or demarcation appeared – to senior party policy-makers and experienced professional politicians – to be more important than military defeat, the future of world civilisation, or the Molochs of the Nazi death-camps.

On 5 February, 1941, Curtin, meeting Menzies at the Advisory War Council, advised him in regard to strikes against the manufacturing of ships and of mine sweep-

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 59

ing equipment, his advice being minuted as follows:11 “If it can be brought vividly home to the members of the unions engaged in such activities that the lack of ships and of degaussing and paravane equipment was causing the loss of lives of fellow-unionists in the Seamen’s Union, they would readily agree to forego their objections and make extreme efforts to remedy the situation to the best of their ability. The general public did not realise the danger that lay at their very doors.

There was an urgent need for the general public to be shocked into a proper realisation of the position” [emphasis added].

T

his is one of the most extraordinary and revealing documents in Australian history. John Curtin, the leader of the Labor Party, a man with probably unparalleled knowledge of the trade union movement and one of Labor’s best brains, was in effect telling the Prime Minister that at least parts of the trade union movement did not care if non-unionists died in the fight against Nazism or if that fight was prosecuted effectively. Only a perceived threat to the lives of “fellow unionists” might be expected to move them. The non-unionists whose lives were evidently regarded as worthless apparently included men and women in the fighting services and refugees, evacuees and other passengers the ships might be carrying, conscripts, members of their own class and perhaps of their own families.

Curtin was pointing to a mind-set that was extremely close to totalitarianism in the moral and intellectual sense in that it categorised perceived enemies – non-union members, including members of the armed forces who could not join unions even if they wanted to – as worthless sub-humans, as well as in the sense that it was militarily aiding the totalitarians. Further, Curtin was claiming the workers refusing to fit anti-mine gear to ships in wartime did not appreciate the consequences of their actions and needed to have them explained. What did he take them for? These were adults in skilled engineering trades, working in a marine environment. Could he or anyone else really have believed they did not know exactly what they were doing? Tens of thousands of Australia’s young men were already away at war and that fact must have touched virtually every family. It appears he was trying to rationalise a situation (“they know not what they do”) which he could not otherwise cope with emotionally or intellectually.

In 1913, already a man of 28, Curtin had made statements to the effect that unionists were “standard-bearers in a holy war”.12 I suggest that by the time of his Prime Ministership Curtin had not fully escaped from this mind-set of fundamentalist union “identity” himself and his mind was stuck half in and half out of a mythology which prevented him fully perceiving what he was saying. For Curtin it would have been a torturing and tragic situation. Failure to escape fully the mind-set of trade union “identity politics” would, when he was Prime Minister, and despite his intelligence and good intentions, prevent him exercising more decisive leadership or supporting Australia’s service-

60 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

men and women more effectively in what I have called Australia’s Secret War. One cannot properly recognise one’s own mythology from the inside.

Curtin, I suggest, while partially – but only partially, when he found himself a national leader – escaping from the fundamentalist “identity politics” of trade unionism in which he had spent his life, was left caught in a state of literally fatal psychic conflict and anguish.

I have mentioned above a few of the innumerable strikes which occurred in the first part of the war. They were so many it is really impossible to cover more than a few.

There was a strike at the Australian Iron

and Steel Works at Port Kembla, the heart of Australia’s war-production, over the fact that all employees were not allowed to take a meal-break at the same time, but rather had to take meal-breaks in shifts. This began in February 1940, and lasted about 10 weeks, taking in the Nazi conquest of Norway and Denmark and the launching of the Blitzkrieg against France. There was another strike involving ironworkers at Port Kembla later in the year over minor alterations to working conditions. The Federated Ironworkers’ Association at that time had Communist leadership.

A

n employee was dismissed at the Lithgow munitions works in November 1940, and 2,450 employees struck for a week. The dismissed employee was finally re-instated. This was after the British Army had lost huge quantities of munitions in the retreat to Dunkirk and the Australian Government was trying to resupply Britain to help it resist Nazi invasion.

Statistics relating to these and almost innumerable other strikes are recorded officially in the Commonwealth Year-Books, though they do not record the indirect consequences in other industries.

On 4 March 1941, it was reported that a goslow by workers at the Footscray Munitions

factory reduced production of metal for shell and cartridge cases by twenty per cent. Next day there was a strike by ironworkers at the Munitions Annex of Amalgamated Wireless Ltd. and threatened strikes at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory. On 7 March 1941 John Curtin said he and the War Council “agreed entirely” with Prime Minister Menzies on the threat to Australia developing with Japan in the Pacific. On 11 March 1941, the Boilermakers’ Federation of Australia said it “will not be interested in the development of shipbuilding in Australia” until represented on the Commonwealth Shipbuilding Commission. This was despite the fact that the Secretary of the Trades and Labour council, A. McAlpine, had already been appointed to the five-man commission to represent labour interests. By way of contrast in patriotic feeling, it was reported on 14 March 1941, that convicts at Bathurst Gaol tailoring department refused to accept overtime payments for making bandages for the army.

One of the worst periods from the point of view of national morale was early 1941, with the Australian and other Allied forces defeated in Greece and Crete and the Germans, recently landed in North Africa, dramatically turning the tide and pushing the allies back from Bardia and other bases that had been captured from the Italians with

much celebration shortly before. The Royal Navy was suffering very heavy losses from air-attack in the Mediterranean. Dunkirk might be explained as an aberration, inevitable with the collapse of the Belgian and France Armies. But now there had been too many German victories, and no significant allied ones against the Germans. It was as if the victories against the Italians had all been for nothing. Also in early April 1941, after a relative lull in air-raids of several weeks the largest ever German air-raids on London and other British cities were launched, with thousands killed each night. At the time it looked as if this was, at last, serious preparation for a German invasion – and with much of the army Britain had been able to rebuild so far, including most of its armour, in the Mediterranean theatres. Reading newspapers of the day gives one a feeling for the spirit of what was going on behind the headlines. Britain had simply been fighting with its back to the wall and without hope for too long. Far more than at the time of the German conquest of Denmark, Norway and the West, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain or the first Blitz on London, there was an atmosphere of desperation and even talk of defeat.

The British Empire was financially reaching the end of its tether and could only be helped by an enormous industrial effort.

General Douglas MacArthur with Prime Minister John Curtin, 1944.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 61

The battle of the Atlantic was in the balance and much of the new wartime Naval shipbuilding was not yet ready.

The Japanese were becoming more bellicose and menacing in the Pacific and war with Japan was being forecast more and more openly by political leaders. John Curtin, Acting Prime Minister Fadden, and Menzies in London all spoke of the desperate situation and the need to give the last ounce of resources to the struggle. But a strike in the coke and gas industries paralysed factories using gas in New South Wales, as well as hospitals which depended on gas for heat to sterilise surgical equipment and operating theatres.

On 7 April 1941, there were two stories side-by-side on the first news page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The first was headlined: “Germany Invades Greece and Yugoslavia.” Australian forces were about to come up, for the first time, not against the poorly-motivated and badly-led and ill-equipped Italian forces, but against the Panzers and Stukas. The second was headlined: “Railway repair shops to strike. 2,000 men affected.” Cross-heads on this second story dealt with gas strikes, rail strikes in New South Wales, and strikes by ironworkers in Victoria “engaged in the manufacture of machinery for ship-building”. As a contribution to national unity, the Brisbane Trades and Labour Council announced that the combination of the colours red, white and blue would be banned from the Labour Day procession of 5 May because they were “Tory colours”.

By 16 April 1941, the whole N.S.W. gas industry was on strike, directly involving about 3,000 men. This also directly affected munitions and iron and steel production.

Gas was of course necessary for all manner of industrial processes. Two days later came the heaviest air-raid of the War on London and there were renewed fears of invasion, with Britain exhausted and rapidly becoming financially destitute. The Germans were advancing again in North Africa, and had captured Belgrade. In Greece the outnumbered Australia and other Imperial forces were being pushed into the sea. All this was being reported in detail in Australia and it was obvious the allies were involved in major military disasters. The N.S.W. Combined Unions Strike Committee had declared black all coke made at the Mortlake North Sydney works, and placed a ban on hospitals using it for sterilisers or to supply hot water for patients. On 22 April there were further

Ironworkers’ Union, at a trade union conference in May 1942. It was, he said, not a true test of union militancy to “have a go” at a Labor Government, and that: “Before Japan came into the war, men went on strike to cut the bosses’ throats. If they go on strike now, they are cutting their own throats.”13 The inference appeared to be that previously the workers had been perfectly entitled morally to strike to damage the war effort against Nazi Germany, and to damage Australia’s efforts at defence and jeopardise the lives of Australian servicemen and women so long as Australia had a non-Labor government.

Ironically, Eddie Ward, who had lobbied so hard against the war effort, became Minister of National Service.

References major German victories reported in Greece.

There was also a threat to extend gas strikes to munitions annexes and general engineering workshops.

O

n 27 April the German forces entered Athens. The last message from the Athens radio station picked up by the British Navy was: “Closing down for the last time, hoping for happier days. God be with you, and for you.” British, Australian and New Zealand troops were withdrawn, under air-attack and with heavy losses, to Crete, where they would face another defeat.

The Wehrmacht seemed all-conquering. The fact that the Imperial forces in North Africa and the Greek Army in Greece had previously defeated greatly superior numbers of Italians seemed only a bitter and futile irony.

Yet there was a strike at war factories around the country in July 1941, over the arrest of two workers, Horace Ratcliffe and Max Thomas, for distributing seditious material. They claimed Communists had a duty not to support war production. In October the Labor Government under Curtin took over. Two months later Pearl Harbour was bombed.

While this immediately exposed Australia to the Japanese threat, the fact that America was in the war changed the long-term prospect from inevitable final defeat (when Britain went broke) to inevitable final victory if the Allies maintained their will and resolution.

Following the German invasion of Russia, labour leader and Curtin’s former mentor Henry Boote in the Australian Worker criticised the Communist Party for suddenly supporting conscription. A revealing comment was made by E. Thornton, Communist General Secretary of the

62 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

1. Lloyd Ross, John Curtin: A Biography (Macmillan Australia, Melbourne, 1977), page 15.

2. Ibid.

3. Australian Worker, 6 September 1939.

4. The last two volumes of Manning Clark’s A History of Australia (Melbourne University Press), while denigrating Menzies and the wareffort against Hitler, are filled with references to “Shylocks,” “people in black,” conspiracies by international financiers and money-lenders, praise for the anti-Semitic writings of F. Anstey and denigration and racial stereotyping of individual Jews such as the First World War Australian Army Commander Sir John Monash, on whom, and on whose Jewishness, he dwells obsessively: See also Hal G. P. Colebatch, letters, Australia-Israel Review, December 1996, and February 1997, and article, “Manning Clark and Anti-Semitism,” The Adelaide Review, February 1997.

5. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 160, 7 June, 1939, page 1381.

6. The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was so abrupt that when Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop arrived in Moscow no Swastika flags were available to bedeck the station. They had to be snatched from the set of the abruptlycancelled anti-Nazi film Dr. Manlock.

7. Jim Hagan, The History of the A.C.T.U. (Longman Cheshire, 1981), page 176.

8. Frank Crowley, ed., Modern Australian History in Documents, Vol. II (Wren, Melbourne, 1973), page 7.

9. Ross, op. cit., page 184.

10. Sir Robert Menzies, Afternoon Light (Cassell, London, 1967), page 127.

11. Advisory War Council Minute No. 130.

12. Ross, op. cit., page 7.

13.“Trade Unionism”, The Australian Encyclopaedia, Vol. IX (The Grolier Society of Australia, Sydney, 1965), page 10. q

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 63

n THINK LIFE

money

Brian Kersey/UPI/NEWSCOM

Understanding the gobbledegook Peter Hensley outlines some explanations of finance terminology

I

won’t be coming to the Tuesday Walking Club this week” said Myrl. “Our next grandie is due to be born any day now and we are on standby” she explained to Moira.

Moira made a mental note to tell the other members of the walking group. They did not actually walk on Tuesday, they only got together when one of them was motivated and needed an opportunity to talk. Which is why Ron and Myrl had dropped in to see their old friends Jim and Moira. Moira knew all about looking after grand children.

Her grandies called her turbo granny, which she considered an honour. Moira suspected that Myrl had the super gran gene and she was thrilled to hear that their daughter had been letting their little girl stay over at nan and pop’s house as a trial run for when the baby arrived.

Moira knew that was not the real reason Ron and Myrl had dropped by. She instructed Jim to put the kettle on and ushered their guests out to the conservatory. It

was a perfect spring day, the recent spate of consistent rain and howling gales had been replaced with a spell of fine settled weather.

The conservatory was just the right spot to enjoy the relaxing ocean view and it wasn’t long before Jim arrived with a tray absolutely brimming with mugs of hot tea and plates of cakes and biscuits. Ron smiled to himself as he knew Jim was partial to Moira’s home baking.

Moira made sure that everyone was issued with their own cake plate and waited patiently for Myrl to indentify the real purpose of their visit. Similar to Jim and Moira, they had been retired for more than several years and relied on their investment income to supplement their NZ Super payments.

The recent implosion of the finance company sector had not only hit their back pocket, it had shattered their confidence as well. They were not sure what to do next.

Prior to the financial crisis they attempted to keep their investments simple and had

64 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

restricted their exposure to term deposits with either a bank or finance company. The finance company sector was all but nonexistent and the interest rate on offer from the banking sector was insufficient to enable them to meet their outgoings. They had heard about bonds and capital note offerings but they had no experience with them and quite frankly they were a little gun shy.

Moira understood their predicament, and much to Jim’s delight they had hosted many similar morning tea parties over the recent months. She had learnt that her guests first had to fully appreciate some basic investment principles. Moira reached for her trusty pencil and blank writing paper.

Rule number one is always spend less than you earn. She knew that Ron and Myrl practiced this law as they had been long term students of Moira’s school of finance. Once all debt had been eliminated then investors should learn about rule number two which is diversification. In order to diversify properly investors should understand the different types of investments that produce income.

Jim thought it was appropriate for him to contribute to the conversation and for some bizarre reason he missed Moira’s sign that he should sit there and keep his mouth shut.

He soon realised his mistake when Moira suggested that he replenish the tea pot, even though there was no tea pot on the table. Jim quickly composed himself and disappeared into the kitchen to boil the jug.

Moira used her pencil and paper to reinforce that corporate fixed interest was an investment sector all on its own and that most mum and dad investors avoided it purely because they did not understand it.

She went on to explain that most companies listed on the stock market borrow money from both institutions and the investing public by issuing bonds and capital notes. There are rigid legal rules and procedures that companies have to follow when doing this.

Prior to sourcing or advertising that they wish to borrow money, companies must first register a prospectus with the Companies Office. This document sets out the terms and conditions surrounding the issue.

Once a prospectus has been registered, a company must publish a second document called an investment statement. The investment statement will summarize the information in the prospectus and will always contain an application form. A company can only accept money from an investor if it is accompanied by a properly completed

and signed application form.

As long as the company operates within the legal framework of the Securities Commission legislation, it can impose its own parameters. Due to the wide number of variables involved each debt raising issue will be unique, however many will have similar characteristics.

A secured bond is money lent to a company and is secured against the company’s assets. Unless the bond is a perpetual bond, it will have a maturity date and in most cases debt will be repaid in cash.

An unsubordinated Bond is when money lent to the company is recognised as a debt obligation. These bonds can also be called senior debt. Unless the bond is a perpetual bond, it will have a maturity date and in all cases debt will be repaid in cash.

A run of the mill bond is money lent to a company and is recognised as a debt obligation. Unless the bond is a perpetual bond, it will have a maturity date and in all cases debt will be repaid in cash.

A subordinated bond is the name used when money lent to a company is recognised as a debt obligation. Unless the bond is a perpetual bond, it will have a maturity date and in all cases the debt will be repaid

in cash. These bonds rank below secured and unsubordinated debt.

A capital note is known as sub-debt or subordinated debt. There are some major differences between a capital note and a bond. The first is that notes have election dates rather than maturity dates. At the election date the issuer can offer new terms and the investor typically has the right to either accept the new terms or to exit by requesting shares instead. The issuer will always retain the overriding right to issue new shares or swap the notes for cash.

A redeemable preference share acts like a share in the debt issuer (company), however investors are paid a dividend at a set rate as per the terms set when issued and have an election date. At the election date the issuer can offer new terms and the investor typically has the right to either accept the new terms or to exit by requesting shares instead. The issuer will always retain the overriding right to issue new shares or swap the notes for cash.

A perpetual preference share is similar to the above, however these have no election date. In most cases the issuer will have the ability to buy the shares back at their discretion.

Moira went on to reinforce that each debt

SUBSCRIBE

issue will have its own unique characteristics. Usually bonds will be recognised as a debt or liability on a company’s balance sheet, whereas capital notes and preference shares are recognised as equity. It is important that investors acknowledge this vital point of difference.

Jim was impressed that Ron and Myrl’s level of concentration had not waned. This suggested that they understood and knew a little more about what to look for. With Moira’s approval Jim added that they should initially restrict themselves to newly issued fixed interest investment products and that they would be on hand to explain the nuances of the next product that came to the market. The reason for this was that the secondary fixed interest market was a lesson all on its own and one they would need at least a lunch to discuss. Ron smiled and chanced a quick look at Jim’s ever expanding waist line. Just then Myrl received a text to say their daughter’s contractions had started.

Similar to their investments, the plan had moved from practice to implementation.

Jim and Moira wished them well.

A copy of Peter Hensley’s disclosure statement is available on request and is free of charge.

Copyright © Peter J Hensley, October 2010.

EVE’S BITE

THE DIVINITY CODE

“…the most politically incorrect book” in New Zealand. He is absolutely right…Prepare to be surprised and shocked.

Wishart may ruffle a few feathers but his arguments are fair as his evidence proves. If you are looking for a stimulating mental challenge, or a cause to fight for, Eve’s Bite will definitely satisfy. – Wairarapa Times-Age

Wishart takes up the gauntlet laid down by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, and in fact, uses Dawkins own logic and methodology to launch a counter-attack against unbelief.

Challenging…thought provoking…compelling – keepingstock.blogspot.com

Discover the truth for yourself. Get these two books today from Whitcoulls, Borders, PaperPlus, Dymocks, Take Note, and all good independent booksellers, or online at

I’m having a cracking good read of another cracking good read – The Divinity Code by Ian Wishart, his follow-up book to Eve’s Bite which was also a cracking good read – comment on “Being Frank”

www.evesbite.com INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 65

n THINK LIFE

education

No, Minister…

The consequences of a destructive education system and its “moral dyspepsia” occupy the attention of Amy Brooke in an open letter to the Education Minister

D

ear Anne Tolley…

Your recent letter set out your views on “national standards” in primary school education. The very fact that you are conscientiously trying to establish these is recognition that the politicised bureaucracy in charge of education in this country has failed our children – something Professor Margaret Dalziell foretold in her 1961 Disaster in the Primary School essay to which I often refer because of its important prophetic significance. What you are proposing will do little to re-establish genuine standards. But that you have even begun to invoke the concept of accountability from our children’s teachers has, of course, enraged the left-dominated teachers’ unions.

We all know the 60s was a watershed in many areas, not the sowing but the poisonous flowering of the far Left’s well-planned move to infiltrate and eventually destroy

the West. The Italian communist Gramsci’s brilliant strategic advice on how to destroy democracy was by targeting Western societies’ underpinned Christian values. His method? – that familiar “long march through the institutions”.

Those who look in bewilderment at the increased corruption, moral confusion and gradual disintegration of our society might find illuminating his more detailed instructions: “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture, by infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media, by transforming the consciousness of society.”

Well, it’s succeeded in its destructive aim, hasn’t it? So very many primary teachers, themselves grossly undereducated, too often Lenin’s “useful” fools, have become “agents of change”. Their lack of knowledge of, and

66 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

incompetence in basic subject areas makes them only too willing to rely on the concept of their young charges providing their own “education” while their teachers select from specified politicised “projects”, focusing on displacement activities and computer access to provide a smokescreen for their own ignorance – and to avoid actually teaching rigorously and well.

The capture of our Western culture has already largely taken place through the stranglehold of political correctness, the laying down of “right thinking” and the encouragement of excessive tolerance for what we should not tolerate – if the truth of issues is important to us. Given today’s accommodation of mental and moral laziness, indifference, even sheer cowardice, it has now become an act of courage to challenge the directions inflicted on us (including in education) by those dominating society with

Equally catastrophic has been dumbing down all subjects taught in state schools. In the malevolent intent of “equality of outcomes” they all become boring when tainted by the Left’s capture of teaching theory to destroy what was once an education of far superior quality.

their bullying name-calling, such as “conservative”, racist”, “xenophobic” or “biblebashing”. Individuals feel overwhelmed by the worryingly amoral, unprincipled policies that today’s ruling class are dumping on us – our self-serving politicians and bureaucrats – aided by cocky ignoramuses from the mainstream media. However , throughout Western society – and by our very own movement here – see www.100days.co.nz – the tide is turning on people’s tolerance of being controlled by an autocracy.

New Zealand’s leftist state bureaucracy has long determined what is taught our young, what not. It has deliberately dumbed-down basic competencies in reading, writing and arithmetic – for the reasons revealed in Gramscsi’s planning. It jettisoned basic vocational courses once taught throughout New Zealand to provide practical skills in cookery, woodwork, metalworking and homemaking. It replaced tuition in the techniques of drawing, of access to our great songs of the past, our literature and poetry, in favour of junk art projects and rubbishy pop music and verse. Even survival skills such as swimming and important physical education classes were slyly sidelined.

In our fellow democracies, parent groups are now demanding the right to do a lot better – with, first of all, the right to be free from politicised over-lordship – to ensure

primary school children get the basic teaching necessary to be well-equipped for secondary school’s more advanced options in the sciences, mathematics, international languages – and in learning what our history can teach us. Commentator Simon Schama, attacking the hopelessness of the (now proletarianised) history curriculum in British schools points out that it has created an appetite for television history…” It’s a terrible thing for schools to make history boring – it’s catastrophic.”

Equally catastrophic has been dumbing down all subjects taught in state schools. In the malevolent intent of “equality of outcomes” they all become boring when tainted by the Left’s capture of teaching theory to destroy what was once an education of far superior quality. The consequences have been the deliberate destruction of the intellectual, moral and spiritual values which must be taught to a country’s children for its survival.

What has been substituted is what columnist Theodore Dalrymple calls “the intellectual and moral Zeitgeist that intellectuals have created.” In a recent visit he commented on this transformation of New Zealand society, noting that in 1950, when we were one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we had “almost no crime whatever, or at least an irreducible minimum…” that now we have “ one of the highest crime rates in the world, including crimes of violence.”

By no means a minimal contribution to the latter has been a deliberately fostered (not least by the education establishment) sense of apartheid and resentment among those of part-Maori descent increasingly encouraged to feel apart and hard-done-by – “victimized” – through unfair, anti-colonist distortions of our co-history. The lavishing of inappropriate special entitlements as of right, the growth in tribal resentments and reinvented claims for politicised advantage, together with the divisiveness and dumbing down of Maori children’s education, have become an explosive mixture.

You state, Mrs Tolley, that you (personally?) have been able to learn from overseas experts “critical of inappropriate use of high-stakes testing and accountability mechanisms”. Your jargonized advice unfortunately appears to be from the usual fellow travellers – as usual, the wrong advice. You are aware that your “national standards” are not genuine, externally-tested national standards – merely the usual pick and mix set of options for “Teachers to use their professional judgment to discern what best

describes a student’s achievement and progress…supported by a range of appropriate assessment activities”.

In a long run, these assurances are meaningless. We’ve heard them all before. Yes good teachers are a national treasure, but you have plenty of evidence of incompetent, selfserving, average and worse teachers and are doing nothing effective about this. Imagine the hysteria from the left-wing unions if you were to attempt what New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s reform package is establishing. Teachers from kindergarten and primary school upwards will be required to pass tests in reading, writing and maths to be certified. His logic is “If you can’t read, write or do basic math, you sure can’t teach it”. His packet of reforms demands quality teaching replace lacklustre performances.

Reforming education won’t come without control of our schools being removed from the education politiburo. A Minister of Education’s role should be to ensure that a worthwhile, academically-focused national curriculum, genuinely and externally tests all primary children – as was once the case when the Proficiency Examination ensured that failing children were not inappropriately forced to cope with secondary school. Overseen by an independent body supported by parents, it would be backed up by schools freed from the destructive ideologies of those who have targeted, politicized, inappropriately sexualized, and dumbed down our children’s learning as part of a much wider agenda.

With respect, I found your well-meant answers regarding sex education in schools and the growing emphasis on computer use underinformed, even naïve, transmitting the familiar bureaucratic theorizing one recognizes from our mis-performing education establishment – to be addressed in a future column.

The latter’s destructive achievements remind me of English writer Colin Wilson’s observation that “ Man was never intended to underwork his brain. It produces a kind of moral dyspepsia”.

We can define this as a state of dysphoria, of mental and moral dis-ease now characterising our times. The disintegrating society we live in shows every sign of how successful has been Gramsci’s aim of capturing Western culture, to destroy it. What genuine culture is now on offer to our children? © Copyright Amy Brooke www.amybrooke.co.nz www.100days.co.nz www.summersounds..co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/users/brookeonline/

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 67

n THINK LIFE

science

The science of CV enhancement The Aussies are looking askance at NZ’s latest CV fantasist

G

etting an interview for the job of managing the 80 staff providing scientific advice to the New Zealand military on weapons, electronic surveillance and ship defence systems would require a cracking curriculum vitae.

Stephen Wilce, the successful candidate, certainly had that: a decorated Royal Marine, a spy with Britain’s MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies and, for good measure, an Olympic Games competitor.

Alas, it was all found to be flummery and Wilce was forced out in September after serving for five years as New Zealand’s chief defence scientist.

The tale of deception and the damage it creates would not surprise Andrew Brushfield, the head of the Australian operations of financial services recruitment firm Robert Half International.

He said employers are vexed by applicants who exaggerate their achievements during the interview process only to be found out after they have been hired.

A Robert Half survey found that 61 per cent of finance, accounting and human

resources professionals had been let down by candidates who made up qualifications and experience.

“While confidence is a good thing, boasting deceives the interviewer and leads to candidates being placed in positions they aren’t qualified for,” Brushfield said. “This then increases staff turnover, both as employees begin to feel overwhelmed and employers realise that they don’t have the right people in the job.”

His recommendation is that, wherever possible, candidates for finance positions be given tasks to do - just as professional footballers are put through their paces for a contract with a club.

As in the case of Wilce, security considerations mean setting a task is not possible.

And for posts that are not so sensitive, a trial might not be possible either.

US doctor Jayant Patel is currently serving a 7-year jail term over the deaths of three of his patients while he was a surgeon in an Australian hospital. Patel, who was hired in 2003, did not disclose citations for negligence in the US states of Oregon and New York at his interview.

68 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

But, as in the case of Wilce, his deception would have been easily exposed with an internet search. In Wilce’s case, just checking who was in the British bobsleigh team in the 1980s would have given the game away.

With Patel, a check with US health authorities would at the very least have put interviewers on their guard.

Deception would have been easily exposed with an internet search. In Wilce’s case, just checking who was in the British bobsleigh team in the 1980s would have given the game away.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 69

n THINK LIFE

technology

Move over iPad...

New iPad challengers more powerful, reports DPA

W

hen it first appeared, the iPad set the standard for tablet computers. But now the first challengers are appearing on the market, offering different sizes and operating systems.

As it turns out, those are exactly the two features consumers who like the keyboardfree devices should be looking at.

Tablet computers seem to have taken the world by storm, probably because they offer such an easy way to access the internet. But the newer models all have their own pros and cons.

“The iPad is great,” says Sophia Kim of Samsung, a Korean-based company. “But our device is different.”

The Galaxy Tab has a 7-inch diagonal screen and weighs in at 380 grams, making it significantly smaller than the iPad’s 9.7-inch

display and 680 grams. As an added bonus, people can telephone with the Galaxy Tab, although that’s best done with a Bluetooth headset.

The features that the Samsung tablet – which comes with Google’s Android operating system (OS) pre-installed – offers as the switching station for a networked home are also interesting. With the right apps, the device can act as a remote control, set the household temperature or control the washing machine or the refrigerator.

At first, mobile providers are supposed to support the Galaxy Tab. Its going price ranges between 700 and 800 euros (975 to 1,115 dollars). For comparison’s sake, the iPad costs between 500 and 800 euros, depending on how it is outfitted.

RIM, the Canadian manufacturer of the

70 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

Blackberry, is also getting into the tablet game. Its Playbook also has a 7-inch display and should, as the name suggests, appeal not just to businessmen, but also to private users.

The company has forged its own path, coming up with its own operating system, and picking up software from recent acquisition QNX. But the Canadians also don’t seem to be in much of a rush. The Playbook is only supposed to hit markets at the start of 2011.

Dell’s Streak is even a little smaller. With it’s 5-inch display, it seems more like a large smartphone. But crammed into that space is a 5-megapixel camera and a camera for video conferencing – and all that packed into only 220 grams. The Streak uses the Android OS and costs 599 euros.

The WeTab, from the German manufac-

turer of the same name, has been available since the end of September. It had a rough start, since not all of its functions operated properly or were even available when first introduced.

But the company has announced plans to continuously improve the system. Weighing 995 grams, its system is based on the Linux MeeGo system, pioneered by Nokia and Intel, and it costs between 449 and 569 euros.

While Samsung, RIM and Dell have focused on mobility with their small displays, the WeTab has decided to go big, or bigger than the iPad at least, with an 11.6inch display and a 16:9 ratio, making it potentially tempting to movie buffs. It also includes a processor that uses an Intel Atom N450 with a 1.66 gigahertz frequency.

The newest development with the WeTab is its handling.

“You hold it flat in your hands and you can operate all the major functions with both thumbs,” explains chief Tore Meyer.

The left thumb can navigate within documents, while the right summons individual programmes like the e-book reader, media player or OpenOffice off the system’s pin-

The duel between Apple and Google should set the tone for the first years of the tablet era. It doesn’t look like it will be a Steve Jobs monopoly

board. However, the system does not support multitouch.

Also with a slightly larger display, measuring 10.1 inches, will be the Folio 100 from Toshiba, putting it in the same size category as the iPad. USB and HDMI connections, along with a webcam, make the device primed for connecting and making friends. Costing 429 euros, it also uses the Android OS. PC manufacturer Hewlett Packard is sticking with Windows 7 for its Slate, due

in the autumn. The device is intended more for corporate use. There are also plans for a tablet computer with a WebOS operating system, says HP spokeswoman Eleonore Koerner. The system premiered last year on the Palm Pre smartphone.

Software developers, at least, have made clear their preference. A survey of 2,400 designers by the marketing institute IDC and software company Appcelerator showed the majority, 72 per cent, thought that Android had the best start in the race to becoming the mobile operating system of the future.

“Apple developed its mobile operating system first for the iPhone and then made it fit for the tablet computer,” explains Christian Woelbert, an editor with German computer industry magazine c’t.

“Google will also probably have to take this step with Android, but no-one knows the results yet.”

Woelbert predicts that Apple will face competition much more quickly than it did with smartphones. “The duel between Apple and Google should set the tone for the first years of the tablet era,” predicts Woelbert. “It doesn’t look like it will be a Steve Jobs monopoly.”

Can’t get the right people for your project or team?

Have you asked us?

• Reliable • Dependable • Affordable Temporary & Permanent staffing solutions 10 years experience in Civil Construction, Timber Processing, Engineering, Manufacturing, Transport and Logistics and Associated Administration Personnel.

We’’ve got the experience and know how to find the right person for you.

HEAD OFFICE: 09 430 8846, Vine Street, Whangarei Our website www.jobsnorth.co.nz or e-mail to admin@jobsnorth.co.nz Alastair Goodland (Managing Director) 0274597433 or 0800JOBSNORTH - 0800 562 766

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 71

n THINK LIFE

online

with Chillisoft

A tale of two hackers The Mouseover and STUXNET attacks provide key lessons

I

nternet security usually stays in the shadows, rarely making the news. But every once in a while a couple of incidents occur which, for various reasons, resonate above the background noise and jump out in the media and blogosphere. Recently two hacks, the innocuous ‘Mouseover’ and the spooky STUXNET, have grabbed the headlines.

While both deal with internet security, they are as different as chalk and cheese.

Mouseover was a harmless prank perpetrated by an Australian schoolboy; no major harm done. STUXNET just could be the first volley in a new wave of state-sponsored cyberwarfare that has the possibility of crippling mission critical systems – power and water plants, transport, medical facilities – and causing death, doom and destruction.

First the ‘mouseover’ hack. According to Aussie-based blog Gizmodo (www.gizmodo. com.au), “A 17-year old Australian is taking responsibility for unwittingly causing the Twitter bug. While the teen didn’t directly bring the flood of spam and porn re-tweets, he burst open the dam. I guess that passes for precociousness these days? The Melbournebased high school student exposed the security flaw that created the havoc when he tweeted the onMouseOver Javascript code.

“It was an experiment, according to the teen, that more unsavoury elements quickly identified as a way to do this to anyone who accessed Twitter.com. You can’t really blame the kid for his idle curiosity; if anything, it forced Twitter to patch a vulnerability before something truly malicious took advantage of it. Let’s hope we’re so lucky next time.”

No harm done, just a bored teen. Ha ha (not). More disturbing is the STUXNET worm. State-sponsored cyber warfare? Can it cause a Chernobyl-type nuclear meltdown?

Who is responsible? Will they be caught and punished? What will their next move be? As usual, the ESET team has, if not the answers, at least a handle on the issue. David Harley, ESET Senior Research Fellow, has this to say.

“The Stuxnet saga rolls on. And while a lot

of talented people have been poring over the code for a while, some questions are still unresolved at this time, despite all the coverage.

• Who is responsible for it? Was it really the work of a nation team rather than hackers? Well, our analysis of the code certainly indicates the participation of someone who knows SCADA, Siemens software, and SQL, not the skills we normally associate with the samurai (hackers for hire) that governments and certain military groups have often used in the past for cyber espionage. In fact, it’s by no means unlikely that this malware project was put together by a team with a range of skills and backgrounds, not unlike the sort of multi-disciplinary tiger team that is often put together to counter attacks.

• What exactly is its purpose? While we now know a great deal about the Stuxnet code, it’s not possible to get the whole picture from code analysis.

• Is it really aimed at Iran? Two sites in particular have been named as likely targets, but the fact that self-replicative malware was used to deliver the payload may have obscured the real targeting. Indeed, it’s been reported that 1/3 of the SCADA sites known to have been affected are in Germany, which, unlike Iran, isn’t indicated by our telemetry as experiencing a high volume of infections on other sites.”

The scary thing about STUXNET is that, like warfare itself, it has caused collateral damage. As a replicating worm, once released, nobody can stop it from spreading far beyond the original target. If indeed it is state-sponsored cyber-warfare, the perpetrators are sloppy, amoral and so blinded by the hate of their intended target that they don’t even care who else is brought down. Now that is one chilling thought.

Hacked together by ESET’s NZ distributor Chillisoft from various sources, blogs and ramblings including David Harley (CITP FBCS CISSP), Senior Research Fellow, ESET LLC (developers of ESET NOD32 antivirus software).

The scary thing about STUXNET is that, like warfare itself, it has caused collateral damage. As a replicating worm, once released, nobody can stop it from spreading far beyond the original target

72 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

GENUINE LONG RANGE PHONE

XDECT R055 + 1

XDECT Technology Cordless Phone System with Integrated Answering Machine & Repeater Station (2 Handsets Included).

XDECT R055 + 2

XDECT Technology Cordless Phone System with Integrated Answering Machine & Repeater Stations (3 Handsets Included).

XDECT R005

Optional Repeater Station & Handset for Uniden XDECT R Series Phones

Uniden’s XDECT R Series Digital Cordless Phones offer Long Range and Outstanding Coverage by utilising a: • Repeater Station built into each additional handset charging base, allowing you to extend the range and coverage from the main base by daisy chaining the signal to each additional repeater station.

• Diversity Antenna System for Optimal Reception and Clarity – by mitigating multi-path errors.

• High Gain Antenna for greater range and to eliminate drop areas in your home.

Visit Uniden at www.uniden.co.nz for full range details or call 09 273 8383 today.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 73

FEEL LIFE SPORT

Heart and soul The snow-driven collapse of the architectural backbone of sport in Invercargill sent shudders through the local community. But there’s nothing like a stirring run with the Ranfurly Shield to lift spirits. Chris Forster taps into the pride that makes Southland punch above its weight

S

aturday the 18th of September was the dreadful day when the roof caved in on Stadium Southland. A record dump of early spring snow proved too much for the 10 year old structure to handle. It had been the base of fanatical support for the region’s successful netball team, jamming in 5,500 fans to cheer on their favourite daughters from the Southern Steel, and their predecessors – the Southern Sting.

It’s been a regular venue for Silver Ferns internationals, and the Tall Blacks as well the base of the Southland Sharks basketball franchise.

Structural weaknesses were cruelly exposed by the sub-Antarctic weather the region is renowned for. With typical resilience the

community has rebounded swiftly, with the catch phrase “Game On – 2012”, and the adjacent ITM Velodrome is being remodelled to accommodate home games for the stranded netball and basketball franchises.

They’re shipping in a flash new portable floor used at the recent Youth Olympics in Singapore, and it’ll be all go for competition in the New Year.

There’s also the small matter of Rugby Park across town from the Surrey Park precinct, which has witnessed a memorable year of provincial rugby from the resurgent Southland Stags – that’s revived national interest in the symbol of provincial parochialism – the Ranfurly Shield – in exotic cities further north like Wellington, and Auckland.

74 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

The 6 match reign ended in typically defiant style with an entertaining 26-16 defeat to perennial holders Canterbury and their wealth of stars, including a certain Sonny Bill Williams.

Robyn Broughton is a netball institution in Invercargill. She’s the highly-respected coach of the Southern Sting franchise, a merger of the best Otago and Southland players in the trans-Tasman showpiece, the ANZ Championship.

She’s a passionate supporter of Southland sport and the way it galvanises one of the most isolated communities in New Zealand.

Broughton collected 7 titles with the old Southern Steel in the National Bank Cup and has the second best performing franchise in the professional version which superseded it. It’ll be a whole new ball game for her next season though.

“The Stadium collapse was a huge devastation to us all – it’s been a massive loss for the community.”

The Steel partners have already sorted out a new training venue for the pre-season, and will be watching the development of the adjacent velodrome, which escaped the damage of the taller Stadium Southland.

Broughton’s pride in all-things Southland naturally includes the Southland Stags.

They’re the ultimate in tight-knit overachievers, whose run with the famed Logo-Wood warmed the cockles of sports fans way beyond the southern province’s borders.

“There’s a lot or interface with the Southland (rugby) team, with the partners and boyfriends the girls have – and the usual social side of things.

Silver Ferns shooter Daneka Wipiiti has made Invercargill her home, with combative Stags lock Joe Tuineau – and they’ve recently started a family.

“They’ve done so well and they’re huge role models with huge worth ethic. They look good – they’re always available for community events. We’re thrilled for them.

I think they’ve picked up the rugby culture here big time.

After the snowstorm and with famers hurting … to get those crowds there has been wonderful.”

She singles out tireless hooker Jason Rutledge for special mention. He’s the hard tackling workaholic son of former All Blacks flanker Lester Rutledge, who just happens to be the manager of the Stags.

The day after the loss of their prized Shield, Broughton was philosophical rather than heartbroken.

“It’s not surprising we lost against a team of stars. Our’s is just a good hard-working team of tradesmen really … playing with a lot of heart.”

You can feel a well of pride in her place of choice, and the sporting heartbeat behind Southland, competing with all the resources and population of the big city folk.

“You get confidence and you believe in your own ability.

Combine that with values – then it’s a biggie in putting teams together. We get huge support from the local community. It’s not negative – it’s always positive” Given the inherent nature of Kiwis and the media to beat up on their sports teams, the Southern resurgence is providing a blueprint for the rest of the country to follow.

DELHI’S LEGACY You’d need a Doctorate in Cultural Understanding to try and encapsulate the confused ball of emotions, success, failure, public indifference and sporting endeavour during October’s Commonwealth Games capital.

Delhi wrestled with the responsibility of hosting the largest international sporting event held in the massively populated country of India, and its underlying problem of poverty.

Bungling officials ran so late they almost missed the start gun. The only time the impressive Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium was filled to capacity was for the two ceremonies to open and close the Games, and those ceremonial events were the undisputed, organisational highlights.

These Games will also be forever remembered for the deserted venues, that only started to fill-up as officials resorted to giving away free tickets to try and attract Delhi-ites away from the grind of their daily existence.

The relentlessly brutal heat and humidity didn’t help the moods of the competitors or the harrumphing media either – evoking memories of the BBC’s spoof comedy set in India “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”.

But the athletes were more forgiving than the weather, and the (mainly British) journalists who were so determined to write the Games off.

There was competition of the highest order, and an inspired display from India produced a record 38 gold in a total of 101 in all.

They even nudged above their former colonial masters, England into second place to add some poignancy to the whole Commonwealth scenario.

The highlight was the exhilaration of a near-full house at the JN Stadium, roaring

their lungs out as their 4 by 400 women’s relayers stormed to an adrenalin-fuelled victory on the final night of track and field. It’s a priceless moment – pure gold no matter which country you are from.

Australia was the benchmark nation again.

Yet their immense vault of 74 gold, 55 silver and 48 bronze medals was expected rather than celebrated.

Their men’s hockey team trounced hosts India 8-nil to clinch the Commonwealth title, but it was barely mentioned in despatches back in their homeland.

For Australia – anything other than gold was treated with indifference and by inference labelled as failure, which must be incredibly hard d to handle for the athletes

Given the inherent nature of Kiwis and the media to beat up on their sports teams, the Southern resurgence is providing a blueprint for the rest of the country to follow who train and work so hard for the second biggest meet, behind the Olympics.

But in New Zealand every one of the 6 gold medals, 22 silver and 8 bronze was cherished and celebrated, often with a sense of relief.

The Silver Ferns knuckle-gnawing double overtime triumph over Australia in the netball final, was the undisputed highlight so close to the Closing Ceremony.

The Kiwis’ haul is seen as a qualified success, despite the lack of gold – only matching the performance from Melbourne in 2006, which was labelled as a failure.

Cycling’s hotshots were left to bask in the glow of Alison Shanks’ domination of the Individual Pursuit, which has been stripped from the programme in London in 2012.

Jesse Sergent was tipped for a golden ride, but narrowly missed out in his pursuit final as the Australians dominated at the velodrome.

Funding for cycling from the New Zealand government funding agency SPARC was set at $3,235,000 for Delhi. but that’s funnelled towards world championships and the Olympics.

It also includes the road cycling programme which included two gutsy silver medals, from trialist Linda Villumsen (a Danish import to the Kiwi cause) and Hayden Roulston in the savage road race, set-up by a superb team effort.

The swimmers dipped in with 6 medals but no gold, under the programme of worldclass coach Mark Regan, showing enough promise to justify their funding pool of $1,300,000 going into the Games in Delhi.

The lower profile sports of boxing, lawn bowls, wrestling and archery could only muster solitary silver between them, although their funding in total is only just over $550,000.

The biggest and slightly surprising success was the track and field programme, spearheaded by Valerie Adams’ domination of the women’s shot put, and three medals in the glamour middle distance races.

Nick Willis ran a typically-smart race for bronze, unable to match his gold from the last Games after getting shut-out by the Kenyans.

The 27 year old’s already hinting at a switch to the 5000 metres.

The standout individual performer was Nikki Hamblin. She’s a 22 year old English woman who moved to New Zealand in 2006, and only got her citizenship stamped in July last year.

She matched expectations with a silver medal run in the 1500 final, then exceeded them by mowing down everyone in the 800 metres with the exception of Kenya’s Olympic champion, Nancy Langat.

Her achievements and switch in loyalty are worth their price in gold, or the core investment from SPARC of $1,300,000, with bigger conquests waiting in her homeland in 2012.

Hamblin chose the difficult stage of Delhi to become a household name in her adopted country.

The Games themselves switch to the distilled waters of Glasgow in four years time.

Perversely the belated triumph over adversity and the risk of taking the event to India’s Capital – could save the Commonwealth Games from extinction.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 75

FEEL LIFE HEALTH

Studies have shown that men who eat cooked tomato products two to three times a week reduce their prostate cancer risk by about 50 percent

Eat to beat cancer Enlist fruits and vegetables in the fight against cancer, write Drs. Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden

M

any of us have heard that healthy nutrition plays an important role in preventing a number of types of cancer, and may help to reduce the spread of cancer once it has started.

Populations that consume less animal food and more plant food have a lower risk of cancer. In fact, the risk of cancer in vege-

tarians is about 50 percent lower than among people who eat meat on a regular basis.

A diet high in animal foods, especially meat and dairy products, may fuel cancer in a number of ways. The fat in animal foods can increase hormone levels in the blood, and the pesticides and hormones found in some of these foods may also fuel can-

76 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

cer growth. Animal foods are also devoid of fibre, and low-fibre diets are associated with a higher risk of cancer.

So it makes sense that eating less animal food might lead to less cancer.

But what about plants themselves – might they contain preventive ingredients? Plant foods are high in antioxidants, and antioxidants can protect DNA from damage that can lead to malignant transformation.

However, some intriguing newer research suggests plants may protect us from cancer in a far more novel way – they may block a cancer’s ability to grow via a process known as angiogenesis.

What is angiogenesis? The term refers to a tissue’s ability to grow new blood vessels.

For example, if you cut your skin, new vessels are formed under the scab to help the tissue heal; when a woman becomes pregnant, angiogenesis leads to the formation of blood vessels that become the placenta.

In a healthy person, angiogenesis is finely regulated; it starts when new blood vessels are needed and stops when that new growth is complete. If the process of angiogenesis goes awry, however, new blood vessels don’t form when they are needed, or blood vessel formation continues out of control.

Cancer can be thought of as angiogenesis gone wild. All cancers begin as a single abnormal cell, and we all harbour these microscopic cancers, but most of them remain dormant – they cannot grow unless they have a blood supply to bring them oxygen and nutrients.

To multiply, cancer cells begin producing chemicals that initiate angiogenesis – in

HEALTHBRIEFS

other words, they learn to feed themselves by creating their own blood supply. Cut off the blood supply to a cancer and you stop the cancer.

Researchers have developed some drugs that can help to shrink tumor growth or even reduce the spread of cancer by inhibiting angiogenesis, and while some of these have shown impressive results, they don’t always work.

But now scientists like Dr. William Li, a researcher who heads the Angiogenesis Foundation in Cambridge, Mass., are looking at the power of certain foods to block angiogenesis. These foods include fruits like apples, oranges, blackberries, blueberries and raspberries; vegetables like kale, bok choy, tomatoes, artichokes, pumpkins and maitake mushrooms; legumes like soybeans; spices and herbs like turmeric, nutmeg, garlic and parsley; fish such as tuna; and finally red wine and chocolate (yay!).

The plant chemicals in these foods seem to be able to inhibit angiogenesis so that a single cancer cell or cluster of cancer cells is never able to grow enough to cause any mischief. Some plants also contain tumorsuppressor proteins, which help to curb the growth of cancer cells.

With the drop in fruit and veggie intake in the American diet, and the regular consumption of burgers and fries, many of us subject ourselves to the double-whammy of too much animal fat and too few cancerfighting foods.

Might some cancer prevention be as simple as eating more of these healthy foods?

We already have some precedent for this.

For example, studies have shown that men who eat cooked tomato products two to three times a week reduce their prostate cancer risk by about 50 percent.

Up to 35 percent of cancers may be caused by poor diet, and cancer risk is also much higher among people who are obese.

Our bottom line? Fight cancer with food: Eat a wide variety of fruits and veggies every day, throw in some spices like turmeric and garlic, trade in your steak for a veggie burger, and enjoy a glass of red wine now and then.

And if you need another reason to eat more produce, consider this: Fat cells also depend on angiogenesis to grow, so eating more fruits and veggies may help protect you from that spare tire as you get older!

If you’d like to watch a fascinating talk on this subject by Li, go to www.ted.com/talks/ william-li.html.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 77

FEEL LIFE ALT.HEALTH

Get sunshine vitamin

What’s the best source of vitamin D, asks Erin Allday

A

s recently as a decade ago, vitamin D was mostly thought of as a helpernutrient – it allowed the body to absorb and use calcium for strong bones. With a diet of fortified foods and a little bit of sunshine every day, most people got plenty of it.

But that was years ago. Today, research suggests that vitamin D does much more than help build strong bones, and the findings come at a time when a high number of people are no longer getting enough of the nutrient, doctors say.

“We’ve become a culture that shuns the sunshine and doesn’t drink milk,” said Dr. Donald Abrams, chief of haematologyoncology at San Francisco General Hospital.

As a result, doctors are seeing a small resurgence of rickets and are concerned about osteoporosis in adults over age 50, especially as baby boomers get older.

Known for causing bowed legs, fractured bones and poor growth primarily in children, rickets all but disappeared decades ago as diets improved and vitamin D was added to certain dairy products like milk.

To remedy the low vitamin D levels they are seeing, doctors are beginning to recommend supplements to patients, and more of the vitamin than recommended by national guidelines. That is largely because research over the past decade has increasingly suggested that vitamin D plays a far bigger role in overall health than previously believed.

Aside from its well-known reputation for building and maintaining strong bones, vitamin D could be tied to cancer prevention and cardiovascular health, and some researchers are looking into a connection between vitamin D deficiency and gum disease, said Dr. Mark Ryder, chair of the division of periodontology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Dentistry.

“It helps boost your ability to fight infection, and it also reduces some destructive inflammation in your body, including inflammation with periodontal disease,” Ryder said. “Every five or 10 years, a new vitamin becomes the vitamin of the moment. The hot one right now is probably vitamin D, and so far all of the evidence looks encouraging.”

National guidelines recommend between 200 and 600 international units of vitamin D a day. Doctors say it’s unclear exactly how much vitamin D people should be getting, but 1,000 international units a day is a good place to start. It is possible, but unlikely, to get too much vitamin D – some studies say people can safely take 10,000 units a day and suffer no ill effects.

“I recommend to my patients who are older that they take between 800 and 1,200 units a day, unless they have certain diseases that cause poor absorption, and then they may need more,” said Dr. Jerry Minkoff, an endocrinologist with Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa, Calif. “I don’t own stock in Nature’s Blend, but yes, people should just take a supplement. It’s very cheap, and it’s very safe.”

National studies suggest that about twothirds of Americans currently meet vitamin D recommendations, but many doctors say those guidelines are outdated. Abrams, the haematology-oncology expert at San Francisco General, said vitamin D deficiency has become so common in his patients that he routinely recommends a supplement, even without a test to confirm whether they’re getting enough of the nutrient.

There often are no symptoms from low vitamin D levels except in cases where the

78 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

deficiency is so great that rickets or osteoporosis result. Some people may feel tired or sluggish and find they have more energy when they take a vitamin D supplement, but there are no clinical trials to prove those effects.

The supplement typically comes in pill form, but people can get vitamin D naturally from sun exposure and by eating certain foods. Both of those options are problematic, however.

It might only take a few minutes of sun exposure every day to create enough vitamin D, but doctors are wary to recommend spending too much time in the sun because of the risk of skin cancer. Wearing sunblock prevents vitamin D production. New recommendations are focusing on 10-15 minutes a day of unprotected exposure to the sun, before slapping sunblock on.

Cod liver oil is the best source of vitamin D – it has 1,360 units in a tablespoon. But it tastes awful.

Most other foods with vitamin D just don’t have enough of it to be practical sources. Salmon and some other fish have a few hundred units of vitamin D per serving, but most people don’t eat enough fish to reliably get the nutrients they need every day. Two cups of fortified milk a day would meet the current vitamin D recommendations – but few people drink that much.

Kaloba® EPs® 7630 ADVERTORIAL

Family and children’s health is always a concern over winter Worldwide Authorities are concerned about the overuse of antibiotics, development of resistant strains of bugs and the appropriateness of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals for children.

Kaloba® the plant-based solution for helping the whole family feel better. Naturally! ● Scientifically shown as suitable for children one year and over ● Natural support of the body’s defences against attack of winter ills & chills ● Supports the immune system ● Assists in maintaining optimum health & supports normal recovery ● Naturally soothes the throat, airways and sinuses ● Helps to keep the airways clear and healthy ● Is a TGA listable product in over 20 countries ● Sales in Europe last year exceeded 6,000,000 units

Why Is Kaloba® Effective?

1. It is a natural plant-based solution 2. It is grown naturally under GAP, not chemically manufactured.

3. Supports the body’s defences and does not merely mask the discomfort.

4. Made under pharmaceutical GMP. Efficacy, stability and safety profile assurances on each batch.

5. Contains the active ingredients in a scientifically tested and established solution.

6. Helps adults and children over one year old feel better naturally.

Kaloba®’s History Pelargonium sidoides (PS) grows naturally in various areas of South Africa. Its use for helping clear airways and assist healthy breathing originated in various cultures administering it in traditional preparations. In 1897 an Englishman Charles Henry

Stevens was in South Africa where a local gave him daily doses of a boiled root preparation of PS. He found it beneficial and on returning to England he introduced the extract to Europe.

With an interesting history it maintained a presence in Europe until Schwabe Pharmaceuticals analysed the product in the late 20th century and were able to isolate the active ingredients and launch the extract as Umckaloabo in Germany.

Kaloba® Today In recent years, Kaloba®, an alcohol extract made from P. sidoides, has become a highly popular product in Germany and Europe for winter ailments, helping to support normal and healthy airways function. In Germany Kaloba now ranks as the most popular formulation for winter ailments and its sales are just behind aspirin.

Kaloba® has been available in New Zealand since May 2008.

Available from Pharmacies and selected Health Stores.

For more information phone 0800 657 876 Mon-Fri 9am-5pm or email info@phealth.co.nz Distributed by Pharma Health NZ Ltd Your Health. Nature’s Power.

PO Box 15 185, Auckland 0640. www.pharmahealth.co.nz Supplementary to and not a replacement for a balanced diet. Use only as directed and if symptoms persist, see your health professional.

TAPS NZ6898

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 79

TASTE LIFE TRAVEL

Paul Souders/DanitaDelimont.com/NEWSCOM

Pachy’ yer bags

Thailand’s elephants offer visitors unique experience

T

he best of luck is to be found on the back of an elephant! Well this certainly applies to northern Thailand, where an increasing number of eco-conscious “farangs,” as western visitors with white skin are known here, come for a relaxing break among the pachyderms.

Under expert local guidance they learn to ride the majestic beasts through the jungle, while at the same time discovering more about their habitat and the indigenous locals who inhabit it. Farang is a term of gentle mockery. But the abundance of cash they bring is very welcome.

As it turns out though, one of the farangs, a former keeper at the zoo in the Friedrichsfelde district of Berlin, has become one of the most respected elephant trainers in Thailand.

The animals here need all the help they can get, since the number of elephants in Asia is dwindling and their existence in many places is becoming more precarious.

The Mae Sapok elephant camp, which Bodo Jens Foerster, 46, has set up with his Thai partner Chai Nam Tsetang, lies on the end of the village of Doi Inthanon national park, around 60 minutes by car from the large city of Chiang Mai. Its popularity is based on trekking into the surrounding jungle territory and a 14-day course on how to “learn to drive” an elephant.

Foerster travelled to Thailand only a year after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989

and learned his skills from the mahouts, the name given to elephant trainers by the hilldwelling Karen people. He gradually came to understand the creatures and their ways and decided to stay on for good.

Learning to guide the creatures along sometimes narrow paths, accompanying them during baths in rivers and finding out how to saddle them with a howdah chair are all part of the 14-day course.

“It’s not all that hard, especially since I seem to have established a rapport with my animal,” says one tourist.

A 25-year-old mahout by the name of Doe is always on hand to help the visitors and take care of the elephants. His duties include helping the elephants to find fresh grazing areas. Naturally he sleeps alongside the creatures too.

As the tourists amble along on their relaxed journey, another Karen man, 20-year-old Tam, coaxes the elephant forward, balancing perfectly on the creature’s neck and using his thighs to steer. The elephant treads so obediently that he hardly ever needs to use the pointed metal hook called an ankus, used to guide the elephant and to correct poor behaviour. The elephant’s 17-monthold baby runs around beside her.

It will be some time before the young elephant has reached the full weight of its mother, a stately 2.5 tons. “Young animals should spend at least four years with the mother,” explained Foerster. At many

80 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

camps, mother and offspring are separated far too soon.The German is proud that the elephants live contentedly at his camp. The facility can boast eight fully-grown pachyderms, one of them a bull. Five young animals have been born here. Apart from one elephant, all of the creatures for the tourists have been hired from their owners, who live in a village on the border with Burma.

Both the government, the media and animal protection organizations are keen to ensure the future of elephants living in the wild, in parks and in various reserves.

Phairat Chaiyakham, 65, head of the Pattay Elephant Village, located 800 kilometres south of Chiang Mai, has been campaigning on behalf of the animals for many decades.

Phairat laments that, even today, too many elephants are forced to trudge through the traffic-clogged Thai metropolises on begging tours, dependent on morsels from local traders. These animals often suffer from malnutrition and are prone to illness of various kinds.

Such begging has officially been outlawed in Thailand, but the practice continues.

In his view it is better for the elephants to entertain tourists than having to beg for their existence. There are now more than 100 elephant parks in the south-east Asian country – ten alone around Pattaty, and 20 in the Chiang Mai vicinity.

Sadly, many visitors see elephants performing silly tricks or playing football rather than simply enjoying their natural habitat and many suffer badly at the hands of their impoverished keepers.

Some also fall victim to landmines or are involved in road accidents.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the Asian Elephant Hospital run by Soraida Salwala in the north of the country. The 53-year old Thai attends lovingly to injured pachyderms, a passion triggered by the sight of a young elephant badly hurt after a collision with a lorry.

Elephant enthusiasts can learn a lot about the animals here.

Around 100 years ago there were 100,000 of them in Thailand, but their number has shrunk dramatically since then.

According to the Asian Elephant Foundation of Thailand, there are only around 5,000 left and their future is uncertain. Idealists like Foerster and Soraida Salwala try to alleviate their plight, along with the tourists who pay to spend their time with the gentle giants. www.elephant-soraida.com, www.asian-elephant.org

GUTHRIES

Deal direct, Quality Diamonds at Exceptional Prices Guthries Manufacturing Jewellers 3rd floor Dingwall Building 87 Queen Street Auckland Ph 09 3098491 Fax 09 3096049

Botany Town Centre Botany Downs Auckland Ph 09 2745559 Fax 09 2745553

W W W. G U T H R I E S . C O . N Z INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 81

TASTE LIFE TRAVEL

Copenhagen’s culinary climate

Forget global warming, just try Copenhagen’s food, writes Betty Hallock

B

y 10 o’clock on a summer night in Copenhagen the nearly 4,000 lights that cover the Nimb Hotel in the Tivoli Gardens are aglow, but the sky is still a turquoise blue as the sun begins to set. I have a view of it from the restaurant Herman overlooking the gardens, where an appetizer arrives as a savoury aebleskiver – a small sphere of a doughnut-like pancake – dusted with vinegar powder and served with pickled cucumber marmalade.

Its filling is a mixture of creamy potatoes, onion and bacon – chef Thomas Herman’s modern interpretation of a traditional dish the Danish call “burning love.” I’m already swooning.

Dinner at Herman, immediately after arriving from the airport, is my introduction to a cuisine particular to Copenhagen, the city that has captivated the food world.

Hello, pine needle granita, dried algae powder, tiny new potatoes farmed an hour outside of Copenhagen. Hello, North Sea langoustine, birch-smoked marrow and a wild parade of such herbs as ramson buds, salsify flowers and cicely. A big hello to the Nimb’s inhouse dairy, Logismose, which makes some of Herman’s cheeses, and the butter too – mine at 4 a.m. that day, a server tells me.

Here in Denmark’s tiny capital a cadre of pioneering chefs has embraced local ingredients under the banner New Nordic Cuisine,

turning Copenhagen into an unlikely culinary mecca. The celebration of rediscovered ingredients (birch sap, bulrushes, puffin eggs) and new approaches to traditional techniques (salting, marinating, smoking) has reverberated throughout the city, from Michelin-starred restaurants to casual spots in edgy neighbourhoods.

In four July days in Copenhagen, I meet upstart chefs; restaurateurs making wine on the tiny isle of Lilleo; cutting-edge coffee roasters; sourdough-obsessed bakers; a mad brewer; and my first Nordic shrimp – live and face to face.

The bastion of the New Nordic movement is Noma, helmed by chef Rene Redzepi and housed in an 18th century waterfront building in the Christianshavn quarter across the harbour from the city’s centre. It is now No. 1 on the list of “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants,” according to a poll released in the spring by Italian water company S. Pellegrino. It has unseated Spain’s El Bulli, causing a food media stir and sparking more than 100,000 reservation requests within days.

“It’s important for the food to show where in the world you are,” says Redzepi, whose cookbook, to be published in December in the U.S., is aptly titled “Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine.” “The great thing about Copenhagen is it’s a big city, a capital, but you can get in a car and in 30 minutes

82 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

be at a field, forest or shoreline.”

During lunch Redzepi delivers to the table diminutive live crustaceans from the cold depths of a fiord. The wriggling whole shrimp sit atop a pile of crushed ice, served with a brown butter emulsion. “You can dip them into the sauce, but I like to eat them plain,” Redzepi says. And so that’s how I eat them, picking them up with my fingers and pausing for a second to ponder their ... aliveness. (They stop squirming when you start chewing.)

It’s high season for more than just live shellfish. “This is the season of everything,” Redzepi says of Denmark’s summer, when it’s light nearly 17 hours a day and foragers (a new cottage profession) are supplying hawthorne berries, ramson shoots, chamomile and elderflowers. Wild sorrel tops a classic Noma dish of beef tartar served with crushed juniper and a tarragon emulsion. A single fresh pine bud garnishes a cookie layered with veal speck and dried currant.

A generation of young chefs is already eager to tweak some of the themes of the New Nordic movement. “More important for us than finding different herbs are colours, temperatures and flavour combinations,” says Michael Munk at restaurant AOC, which debuted last summer. He and Ronny Emborg, both in their 20s, are the fresh-faced chefs who scored a Michelin star this spring.

In a vaulted cellar in a more-than-300-yearold mansion on Dronningens Tvaergade, the chefs bring out course after course – curls of raw, bright-red semi-frozen veal; mussels with buttermilk and green strawberries; a blueberry mousse with lemon foam.

Chef Christian Puglisi, formerly of Noma, has just opened restaurant Relae in the gentrifying Norrebro neighbourhood on upand-coming Jaegersborggade, a street lively with cafes and bars. He’s serving fourcourse menus for about US$56 – a deal in Copenhagen – in a more casual restaurant.

Says Puglisi: “I think now it’s important for me not to be looked at as one trying to do what Noma does. ... The greatest success that Noma has had comes from not doing what everyone else does and going its own way.”

The rethinking of Nordic cuisine has circulated. Kodbyens Fiskebar opened late last

year in the hip meatpacking/red light district of Vesterbro, a fashionable restaurant in a former slaughterhouse focusing on pristine Nordic seafood. Aamanns, a sprightly cafe in residential Osterbro, is making not-your(Danish)-grandmother’s smorrebrod, with organic or free-range ingredients such as pink-centred roast beef with fresh horseradish. You can’t walk down this stretch of Oster Farimagsgade, aswarm with bicycle commuters, without seeing an Aamanns takeout bag dangling from someone’s handlebars.

Even the street food polser – the Danish version of a hot dog – gets a makeover. In the Latin Quarter, look for the DOP (an abbreviation for “organic sausage man”) cart next to the Round Tower, Europe’s oldest functioning observatory. Here the traditional dyed-bright-red polser and fluffy white bun have been replaced with organic sausages and a sourdough roll made with whole wheat, rye and linseed.

One afternoon I stop at Meyers Deli in posh Frederiksberg – its own municipality in the middle of Copenhagen – to check out the gourmet cafe and market from gastronomic personality and Noma business partner Claus Meyer. The shelves are stacked with row after row of Meyer’s line of preserves, juices and barrel-aged vinegars, produced from plum, pear and apple orchards on Lilleo island in southern Denmark.

He’s making wine too, growing grapes on the warmest part of Lilleo – Gruner Veltliner, Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Sauvignon Blanc and Solaris. Some of these, Meyer says, have never been planted commercially in winterdominated Denmark.

And bread. “We have started a bakery working solely with organic cold-climate grain from the Nordic region, most of it ancient Nordic varieties,” Meyer says. “There seems to be a lot of karma around this baking thing.”

I don’t know if it’s karma, but there’s definitely a frisson when I walk into chef Bo Bech’s bakery on Store Kongensgade, a street lined with chic design shops and restaurants.

Bo Bech Bageri, airy and whitewashed, is like an atelier for exquisite bread. The bakery sells one thing only: sourdough bread from a recipe Bech says he developed over several years. “I fell in love with making something with just flour, salt and water and that’s it,” he says. I have no knife, I have no butter, so I tear into a loaf with my bare hands.

Copenhagen is blowing past all the expected milestones of a burgeoning food scene: artisanal food products, winemaking, bread baking, coffee roasting. On an

I started brewing 20 gallons at a time, and figured if nobody liked it I’d drink it myself.

I wasn’t willing to compromise. For too long we put up with cheap product

unusually hot day that feels more L.A. than Scandinavia, a walk through the Assistens cemetery (where Soren Kierkegaard is buried) leads to the Coffee Collective in Norrebro, on the same street as Puglisi’s

Relae. Co-owner Klaus Thomsen is holding court while his colleague Linus Torsater is calibrating a roaster right in the store. I have a cup of espresso, bright and citrusy. “We roast especially light without it being underroasted,” says Thomsen, whose conversations about coffee are peppered with descriptors such as rose hips and gooseberries.

Meanwhile, beer obsessives are celebrating the debut of Mikkeller, a small, semisubterranean bar in Vesterbro opened four months ago by cult Danish brewer Mikkel Borg Bjergso. He has 15 taps, 10 of them dedicated to a revolving roster of nearly 100 of Mikkeller’s wild beers. Some are available only here or released here first, such as Beer Geek Bacon, an elegantly smoky follow-up to Bjergso’s Beer Geek Breakfast (an oatmeal stout made with coffee and his bestselling beer in the U.S.). Mikkeller’s has so much hygge (the Danish concept of hospitality – pronounced hooga, I’m told) that bar manager Jannick Sahlholdt is here at the six-seat bar drinking a beer – on his day off. Bjergso is sitting outside on the chairs that face this pretty crook of Viktoriagade, around the corner from a part of Vesterbrogade occasioned by a hooker or two.

His foray into extreme beer making might parallel the rise of Nordic cuisine.

“I started brewing 20 gallons at a time,” he says, “and figured if nobody liked it I’d drink it myself. I wasn’t willing to compromise. For too long we put up with cheap product.” Mikkeller bar is an extension of his vision. “I wanted a place to present beer in the way I wanted it to be presented.”

Along with his beers he serves Danish cheeses, such as one from a small dairy in Jutland. The dried sausages are made for him by a local butcher, using porter, hops or malt extract. But the chips are English.

“Our potato chip culture,” Bjergso says with a shrug, “is bad.”

IF YOU GO Telephones: To call the numbers below from NZ, dial 00 (international dialling

code), 45 (the country code) and the local number.

Where to stay: WakeUp Copenhagen, 11 Carsten Niebuhrs Gade, Copenhagen; 4480-0000 ; www.wakeupcopenhagen.com. Doubles from US$150.

Nimb Hotel, 5 Bernstorffsgade, Copenhagen; 8870-0000, www.nimb.dk. Doubles from US$436.

Where to eat: Herman, 5 Bernstorffsgade, Copenhagen; 8870-0020, www.nimb.dk.

Noma, 93 Strandgade, Copenhagen; 3296-3297, www.noma.dk.

AOC, 2 Dronningens Tvaergade, Copenhagen; 3311-1145, www.restaurantaoc.dk.

Relae, 41 Jaegersborggade, Copenhagen; 3696-6609, www.restaurant-relae.dk.

Kodbyens Fiskebar, 100 Flaesketorvet, Copenhagen; 3215-5656, www.fiskebaren.dk.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 83

TASTE LIFE FOOD

/CLASSIC/

For our own good?

James Morrow looks at our overzealous food regulation – but sees a glimmer of hope

A

s anyone who has ever flown into Australia knows, the rules for what can and cannot be brought into the country are pretty strict. The official obsession with food and drink and animals and anything that can pass the lips may have valid reasons in science, biology, and economics, but the seemingly-arbitrary nature of what is and isn’t OK sometimes looks more like an application of a secular state religion, always seeking purity and to keep out the unclean.

(Once after returning from an extended holiday in the United States, I found myself at a quarantine desk in an otherwise deserted Sydney Airport arrivals hall waiting for my golf clubs to be cleaned, lest a North American grass seed wedged in my 7-iron throw off the entire Australian ecosystem. I chatted to the young woman manning the station as I waited, and quizzed her about different nationalities and what they’re notorious for smuggling. Japanese? ‘So honest they declare a stick of chewing gum’.

84 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

Koreans? ‘They try and bring enough food for their entire trip’. Americans? ‘Usually pretty good, but for some reason American girls always try and smuggle a bottle of fat-free salad dressing in their backpacks’, much like Australian backpackers who can be found nursing hangovers from Thailand to Turkey with their own personal jar of Vegemite).

But while some bans make sense – the impending bird flu crisis has customs officers around the world working hard to keep out any potentially-infected poultry products – plenty of others do not.

Which is why food lovers down under rejoiced last month when Food Standards Australia New Zealand finally lifted its ban on that marvelously stinky French export, Roquefort cheese. The ban, which represented an unholy alliance between protectionist farmers and the for-your-owngood food police, was an affront to both common sense and good taste. The problem was that it Roquefort cheese is made with unpasteurized ewe’s milk (shock, horror), and yet was considered a great delicacy. Thus banning it was an easy call, satisfying both the nanny staters and the competition-shy domestic cheese industry.

Australia’s Federal Parliamentary Secretary for Health Christopher Pyne MP explained the issue recently on ABC Radio: ‘Before 1994, FSANZ had never done an investigation into how the cheese was put together, the circumstances, the production of it. In that intervening time that has gone on, and it’s been determined that the way the French make their cheese, of course, after many hundreds of years of making this cheese, is safe and good for consumers and the Trade Commissioner assures me this morning that there’d be no cases of Roquefort cheese causing illness in France in recorded history... after many years of investigation, FSANZ has decided under the right circumstances and with the right warnings to consumers, that Australians can make their own decisions about what cheeses they eat. They’re grown up enough to determine the risks they like to take and that we don’t believe it is dangerous to Australian consumers.’

Amen to that. Now if only the Australian government – never shy about sticking its nose into the citizenry’s kitchen cupboards, among other places – could take such an enlightened attitude about other food products. For one thing, while unpasteurized Roquefort is now OK, it’s pretty clear that other cheesemakers, both foreign and domes-

tic, will still not be allowed to make or sell similar products on the Australian market.

There are plenty of other bans that make little or nosense and which seem to exist only to give local producers a leg-up. Prosciutto and other fantastic cured meats are generally not permitted; Aussies have to make do with local substitutes. Less-celebrated delicacies – tinned American corned beef hash (trust me on this), for example – are also barred from Australian soil. According to the rules, any product that contains more than 10 per cent dairy or 5 per cent meat requires a special permit, applied for by the manufacturer in the home country. It’s a time-consuming process, and one with which smaller makers overseas simply won’t bother, even if large corporations will. Thus local production is protected, local palates denied.

All this isn’t to say that there aren’t some great Australian cheesemakers, ham-curers, and so on – there are. But as Christopher Pyne says, shouldn’t we be adult enough to make our own decisions? The same thing goes for many products that aren’t available to Australian consumers thanks to one or another regulation. While French foie gras – the liver of specially-fattened geese or ducks – is banned due to bird flu and other concerns (fair enough), the production of the stuff locally is also illegal, thanks to the radical animal rights lobby. Which is a shame, since farmers in the United States have proved that the French hardly have a monopoly on this delicacy. The ban also denies chefs the pleasure of magret de canard, the especially-flavourful breasts from these specially fattened ducks. Instead, we have to make do with the semi-cooked tinned stuff.

Similarly, hanging game for a week or two in the European manner is forbidden, despite the fact that bacteria are killed at 60 degrees C, and no game goes in the oven at under 200 degrees C. Real salami? Also a no-no; authorities require a ‘starter culture’ be used which adversely affects the taste of artisinal salamis.

All this calls for a radical re-think in how we think about freedom and food. What is more personal and intimate than what we put in our bodies to feed ourselves, or give to our families? No wonder dietary regulations are such a big part of so many religions, especially those that emerged from the desert where preservation is such an issue. Warning labels are one thing, but not allowing consumers the freedom to make up their own minds is quite another. As Pyne says, we’re all adults; let’s eat like it.

Roquefort Terrine In celebration of the lifting of the Roquefort ban, why not get cooking with it? Make a Roquefort dressing or mayonnaise for salads or burgers on the grill; use it in sauces, or just enjoy it on its own. Or try this Roquefort terrine, adapted from The Palms restaurant in South Carolina.

You’ll need: 250 grams Roquefort, crumbled 125 grams unsalted butter,softened 1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon coarsely

chopped walnuts, toasted 2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper.

To make: Purée half of cheese with butter in a food processor. Transfer purée to a bowl and fold in remaining cheese, 1/4 cup nuts, and pepper. Spoon into a small crock and smooth top. Chill, covered, at least 2 hours to allow flavors to blend.

Before serving, let terrine soften about 30 minutes, then sprinkle top with remaining tablespoon nuts.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 85

TOUCH LIFE TOYBOX

EPSON WORKFORCE RANGE Epson has launched its WorkForce range of multifunction printers with superior performance features that deliver fast, efficient, high quality, affordable printing, scanning, copying and faxing for home office and small business users. For those who print, scan, copy or fax occasionally, the entry level Epson Workforce 320 offers an automatic document feeder (ADF) and the choice of either Standard or High capacity individual ink cartridges to match printing needs. The Epson WorkForce 325 features Wi-Fi connectivity for shared printing via a wireless network, an automatic document feeder, Standard or High capacity individual ink cartridges, a print speed up to 34ppm, and supports printing directly from Apple’s iPhone, iPad. Busy home offices and small businesses benefit from the High or Extra High capacity individual ink cartridges in the Epson WorkForce 630 for high volume, continuous printing. Boasting print speeds up to 38ppm, the WorkForce 630 has fax, Wi-Fi connectivity, a 2.5 inch LCD viewer, card slots and PictBridge, and supports printing directly from Apple’s iPhone, iPad. The Epson WorkForce 633, replacing the highly popular TX610FW, has a 250 A4 page capacity paper tray, Auto Duplexer and ADF for advanced document management, fax, card slots, PictBridge, 2.5 inch LCD viewer, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, and supports printing directly from Apple’s iPhone, iPad. Epson WorkForce 325 - $179 RRP; and Epson WorkForce 633 - $299 RRP. The Epson WorkForce 320 is available exclusively from Warehouse Stationery for $129 RRP. www.epson.co.nz

SAMSUNG WAVE S8500 The Samsung Wave offers a Super AMOLED 3.3” display that makes the screen truly come alive, a Social Hub to bring you closer to your contacts and connections, and TouchWiz 3.0 for an intuitive and hugely customizable user interface. The Wave’s highspeed CPU ensures swift, smooth application experiences and multi-tasking, making the device an always-on mobile multimedia companion. The Samsung Wave provides superior levels of choice to all users via its fully customizable menus and home-page.

For those who demand access to their social networking sites at all times, the device allows users to change the layout of the home-page to allow instant access to Twitter, Facebook and a host of other social networking services. The Samsung Wave benefits from a superb 1 GHz processor which offers users the best graphic performance available today. Its speed makes the touch screen user interface incredibly responsive and intuitive and, more importantly, means that the 3D and memory-intensive graphic and video performance is unsurpassed. www. samsung.com

CANON EOS 60D With an 18 Megapixel APS-C sensor, the EOS 60D offers high levels of detail and a magnification of 1.6x the focal length of the lens to capture postersize images in a variety of aspect ratios. A standard ISO range of 100-6400 is extendable to 12800, providing smooth images with minimal noise in low light conditions. A 9-point, all cross-type autofocus (AF) system also provides swift and accurate focusing, with an extra-sensitive centre point for lenses faster than f/2.8, allowing photographers to artistically employ a shallow depth of field during portraiture or for more atmospheric shooting. The EOS 60D features Canon’s iFCL metering system, first introduced with the acclaimed EOS 7D, with a 63-zone Dual-Layer sensor. The Vari-angle wide LCD helps frame shots from difficult angles, and can be positioned with Live View enabled to achieve the desired composition if shooting isn’t possible using the viewfinder. www.canon.co.uk

SONY INTERNET TV The latest home cinema systems from Sony give you an immersive picture and sound experience and more. Get an all-in-one kit with a new Wi-Fi enabled Blu-ray Disc Player and you’ll have access to Sony internet TV, direct through your television screen. BRAVIA Internet Video brings the best of the Internet straight to your television screen by seamlessly streaming online content through your broadband connection. With no need for a PC, you can access a world of online video entertainment direct from the comfort of your sofa via your BRAVIA TV’s XrossMediaBar. Catch up on any TV programmes you’ve missed with BBC iPlayer, enjoy the greatest football matches of all time with the exclusive FIFA World Cup Collection, or view Europe’s leading sports entertainment platform, Eurosport. Plus, get the best of video sharing sites like YouTube and DailyMotion. Finding and watching what you want, when you want it has never been easier – and with new video channels being added all the time, the entertainment possibilities are endless. www.sony.com

THE NEW COOLPIX S5100 Sporting a fast start-up time, a short shutter-release time and one-touch HD 720p movie recording at 30 fps, the S5100 helps to ensure memories are captured as soon as they happen. Features including 12.2-megapixel resolution, a bright 2.7-inch LCD display, 5x Optical Zoom and a 4-way VR Image Stabilization System with ISO settings to 3200 at full resolution. The stylish design and vivid color options of the COOLPIX S5100 make the camera a perfect outlet to express one’s personality, while user-friendly features like 18 scene modes, Scene Auto Selector, Subject Tracking and Nikon’s Smart Portrait System make the S5100 an easy-to-use tool for capturing remarkable photos virtually anywhere. www.nikon.com

SEE LIFE / PAGES

Of spies and madness Michael Morrissey is on leave this month, so into the breach step reviewers from our affiliate newspapers in the US Our Kind of Traitor

By John le Carre Viking, $40

Every serious reader knows the exquisite thrill of discovering that a writer whose work you both esteem and enjoy has returned to top form.

With his 22nd novel, Our Kind of Traitor, John le Carre – our greatest living master of espionage fiction – definitely is back at the top of his form, which is a heady place to be, indeed. The author, who turns 79 this month, is actually David Cornwell; Le Carre – in literal French, “the square” – is a wry pseudonym, since there are no true right angles in his fiction, even when there seem to be. It’s convenient to classify him as a writer of espionage fiction, because most of his protagonists are spies or people whose lives somehow have been redirected by contact with the secret world. In fact, he is one of our great writers of moral ambiguity, a tireless explorer of that darkly contradictory no-man’s land that spread out during the last phase of the Cold War – when both sides had surrendered their illusions about themselves – and of the inchoate, fragmented

geography created by the East Bloc’s sudden implosion.

Though intelligence professionals tend to rate Le Carre as a favourite novelist because they find his descriptions of their “tradecraft” so true to life, in recent years he has been quick to minimize the scope, if not the influence, of the time he spent spying for both Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5 – while a student at Oxford – or for MI6 abroad in Bonn and Hamburg during the most frigid years of the Cold War. “In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer,” he has written. “I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British intelligence.”

Cornwell/Le Carre also had the triumphant good fortune to be one of those writers who – like Conan Doyle with Holmes – created a character who remains immovably lodged in his readers’ imaginations and against whom all his future characters are bound to be compared. His conflicted, self-doubting but preternaturally skilled British master spy, George Smiley, is one of late-20th century English fiction’s most memorable characters.

88 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

Our Kind of Traitor brims with deftly drawn characters navigating a treacherously uncertain landscape that seems ripped from yesterday’s papers and re-created with an absolutely certain hand. Perry Makepiece is an Oxford don bored with his field, English literature, who also happens to be a topnotch sportsman: tennis, mountain climbing, running. His girlfriend, Gail Perkins, is a quick-witted, rising young barrister, as the British call their trial lawyers. While enjoying a resort holiday in Antigua, the hotel tennis pro arranges a match between Perry and a local Russian emigre, Dima, who has a great serve and is “a muscular, erect, hugechested, completely bald man wearing a diamond encrusted gold Rolex wristwatch ...”

The on-court match soon blossoms into a social invitation and Makepiece and Gail soon meet Dima’s wife Tamara, their twin sons and a beautiful teenage daughter, as well as two young girls who are the daughters of one of Dima’s associates killed a week before in a mysterious “car smash.” It soon emerges that Dima isn’t just a rich man with ties to several dubious Caribbean banks: He’s the money launderer par excellence for the Russian mob. More than that, he is a survi-

There’s a lot to be said for using a piece of furniture to evoke the inner life of not just characters but also families – not least because it allows the novel to exist, a bit, outside of time

vor of more than a decade in the old Soviet gulag, but tied to the “Seven Brothers,” who are oath-bound to preside over the murderously turbulent Russian underworld and its international tentacles.

He also wants to defect to British intelligence and passes a note to Perry: “Dmitri Vladimirovich Krasnov, the one they call Dima, European director of Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate of Nicosia, Cyprus, is willing to negotiate through intermediary Professor Perry Makepiece and lawyer Madam Gail Perkins mutually profitable arrangement with authority of Great Britain regarding permanent residence all family in exchange for certain informations very important, very urgent, very critical for Great Britain of Her Majesty.”

Perry and Gail soon find themselves working with Hector Meredith, a senior intelligence operative, and his field operative Luke, who is one of Le Carre’s wonderfully realized spies. Meredith, it begins to emerge, may have his own reasons for wanting to engage Dima, and it just may be that this potential defector’s secret is too big for anybody to comfortably or safely handle. Perry and Gail, meanwhile, are enthralled by the secret world, but perhaps are in over their heads.

As one official tells them, “Catch the minnows, but leave the sharks in the water. A chap’s laundering a couple of million? He’s a bloody crook. Call in the regulators, put him in irons. But a few billion? Now you’re talking. Billions are a statistic.”

The breakneck pace of Le Carre’s narrative in the race to see whether Dima and his family will find safe haven never falters nor does the author’s evocation of the contemporary immorality of international finance.

Reviewed by Tim Rutten Los Angeles Times

Great House

By Nicole Krauss W.W. Norton, $40

Maybe it’s because I am a father, but to me the most resonant sections of Nicole Krauss’ widely anticipated third novel, Great House, are those narrated by Aaron, an aging Israeli who still hasn’t figured out how to relate to one of his adult sons. Aaron is bitter, loving, angry, complicated – “full of passionate intensity,” to borrow a line from Yeats.

He is, in other words, a real person, marked by pride, regret and secret longings, which make him the most three-dimensional presence in the book. The two chapters he narrates pulse with his hot-blooded heartbeat; the drama of his family rises to the level of the epic because he makes it so. As for the rest of the novel, it’s well done enough, nicely written and full of cogent insights, but compared with Aaron, it feels as if it’s taking place behind a sheet of glass.

That’s unfortunate, for Great House – much like Krauss’ exquisite and widely acclaimed The History of Love before it – is an exercise in kaleidoscopic storytelling,

a novel that seeks to weave four groups of characters into a larger meditation on memory and loss. There is Nadia, a middle-aged novelist transfigured by a youthful interaction with a martyred Chilean poet named Daniel Varsky; for a quarter century, she has written at his desk. Paralleling her experience is Lotte Berg, a generation older and herself the author of elliptical short stories, who also worked at the desk for many years. For Leah and Yoav Weisz, children of an Israeli furniture dealer who specializes in heirlooms pillaged by the Nazis, the desk offers a different reference point, becoming a talisman in both their ongoing struggle with their father and his inability to come to terms with history. Only Aaron – who, after the death of his wife, is brought back in contact with his long-estranged son, Dov – does not have anything to do with the desk.

There’s a lot to be said for using a piece of furniture to evoke the inner life of not just characters but also families – not least because it allows the novel to exist, a bit, outside of time. “Unlike people,” Krauss writes, “... the inanimate doesn’t simply disappear,” and as Great House progresses, she establishes the desk as a trace or imago, an echo of the past that reverberates into the present day. And yet, for all the import of this object, it never really sticks to anyone. Nadia may have written all her books while sitting at the desk, but when the time comes, she gives it up without much struggle, “because saying yes felt inevitable.” Lotte parts with

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 89

it in similar fashion, bestowing it upon the young Varsky because, she explains, “He admired it.”

To be fair, this is part of the narrative momentum of the novel, to shift the desk from one character to another, so it will take on the necessary psychic weight. Still, the ease with which it moves among them only undermines its metaphoric power, reminding us that, whatever it may stir in us, the inanimate remains inanimate, which means, on the most fundamental level, that it can never be enough. During one particularly trying moment, Lotte’s husband reflects on this, thinking about how, in his marriage, “everything ... was designed to give a sense of permanence ... though in truth it was all just an illusion, just as solid matter is an illusion, just as our bodies are an illusion, pretending to be one thing when really they are millions upon millions of atoms coming and going.” That recognition, that sense of our infinitesimal insignificance, is part of what Krauss is after in this novel, but too often she leaves us with the sense that Great House is just a story, in which, as Nadia argues, “the writer should not be cramped by the consequences of her work.”

The exception to all of this is Aaron, who exists as if he were in a different book. Not for him, these illusions about memory or traces: “The dead are dead,” he insists, “if I want to visit them I have my memories....

But even the memories I kept at bay.” Nor does he believe in reconciliation, except of the most unforgiving sort.

For Aaron, life is struggle – with the elements, with his family, with the limitations of the world. “I don’t comfort myself,” he says about his wife, “by imagining that she is sprinkled around me in the atmosphere, or has come back in the form of the crow who arrived in the garden days after her death and stays on, strangely, without its mate. I don’t cheapen her death with little fabrications.”

That’s a relentless point of view, hard-nosed nearly to the point of alienation, although alienation too is a position for which Aaron has little use. “Sitting in the garden wrapped in a shawl,” he recalls, thinking of Dov, “... you read books on the alienation of modern man. What does modern man have on the Jews? I demanded, passing you with the garden hose. The Jews have been living in alienation for thousands of years. For modern man it’s a hobby.”

Here we come face to face with the larger theme of Krauss’ novel, to get beneath the surface of contemporary alienation and find

our way to a more sustaining truth. That this is impossible, in literature or in life, is part of the point: What redeems the effort is that it is doomed to fail. “No matter how bleak or tragic her stories were,” Krauss writes of Lotte, “their effort, their creation, could only ever be a form of hope, a denial of death or a howl of life in the face of it.” The irony is that, in Great House, it is not Lotte, nor Nadia, nor even Leah and Yoav, but only Aaron who brings such an understanding to full-throated life.

Reviewed by David L. Ulin Los Angeles Times

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So

By Mark Vonnegut Delacorte Press, $47.95

In his second memoir, Mark Vonnegut neither minimizes nor attributes special meaning to his struggles with mental illness. He treats his four psychotic breaks, and the reconstructions that followed, with sardonic acceptance – the same way he appears to treat his relationship with his father, the late writer Kurt Vonnegut.

In his first book, The Eden Express (1975), Vonnegut wrote about the breakdowns he experienced while living at a British Columbia commune and his efforts to regain his health. Remarkably, he recovered enough to be accepted into Harvard Medical School, which he says most likely couldn’t happen today for someone with a history like his. “Harvard took some flack for admitting me, which probably had something to do with why I shut up and didn’t write much for thirty years.”

Fortunately for us, Vonnegut did write again. He also became an unusual thing for a Harvard Med School grad: a practicing paediatrician in Massachusetts. He wanted nothing more than to keep treating kids. But ...

“When the voices came back, it was like they’d never gone. Fourteen and a half years, and it was like we picked up in the middle of a conversation just a few minutes earlier,” he writes in Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So. The problem, Vonnegut writes, isn’t hearing voices. “The problems come when you try to do something about the voices or mention them to others.”

After trying, unsuccessfully, to jump through a closed third-floor window, Vonnegut finds himself on a gurney in restraints in a hospital where he trained

90 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

and still works. “It’s probably possible to gain humility by means other than repeated humiliation, but repeated humiliation works very well.”

He recovers, gives up alcohol and returns to family practice. “I’ve had the bad luck to get sick four times and the remarkable good luck to get better again each time,” he writes.

“None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick. At my best I have islands of being sick. At my worst I have islands of being well.”

Vonnegut shares with his late father a knack for throwing down sentences – many sentences – of such naked wit and intelligence they make a reader stop for an extra beat: “Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.”

“A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.”

“If I’d been raised by wolves, I would have known a little less, but not much less, about how normal people did things.”

He also offers a devastating critique of what the American health care system has become: not as a patient, but as a longtime family doctor. “A dispassionate look at all the many innovations of the insurance industry, from HMOs and managed care to co-pays and prior authorizations, would show that each innovation was a way for insurers to make money at the expense of the family good. If these innovations were studied like a new drug or medical device, they would be taken off the market.”

Despite everything, and as jaundiced as he may now be, Vonnegut hangs on to a nourishing kernel of idealism inside: “Of course I’m trying to save the world.

What else would a bipolar manic-depressive hippie with a BA in religion practicing primary-care paediatrics be up to? If the saving-the-world stuff doesn’t work out, I have steady work and a decent income.”

Reviewed by Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry

By Gal Beckerman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $53

The first public face of Soviet Jewry was a 30-year-old radio engineer from outside Kiev. After Boris Kochubievsky was arrested in 1967 for publicly supporting Israel, his face adorned “Free Kochubievsky!” but-

tons and posters distributed by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, a New York student group founded by Yaakov Birnbaum, a British spiritual seeker.

He and Kochubievsky are two of the nearly 90 people interviewed by Gal Beckerman for his comprehensive and readable book When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.

Beckerman’s narrative shifts primarily between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, from 1963 until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

We see Birnbaum’s Washington Heights bedroom office, crowded with stacks of books, newspaper-stuffed manila folders and one malfunctioning typewriter. We hear “the screams from the electroshock rooms” in the mental hospital where Kochubievsky was sent between his arrest and trial in 1969. We enter the prison cell of human rights activist Natan Scharansky, as he weeps “out of hopelessness and grief ” on the floor after learning of his father’s death. His prison neighbour, another Jew, waits three days for the opportunity to toss him a crumpled scrap of paper containing the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, over the barbedwire-topped wall.

The Soviet Union was “schizophrenic” in its handling of Jews, writes Beckerman, a reporter at the Forward. The socialist ideal was to eliminate all religious, national and ethnic differences. Yet Jews were labeled differently on identification cards, effectively barring them from certain universities and professions. During the post-Stalin “thaw” of the 1960s, Jews who began applying in large numbers for exit visas to immigrate to Israel were even further stigmatized. The majority were rejected, earning them the nickname “refuseniks.”

To escape, some Leningrad and Riga Jews plotted to hijack a plane in June 1970.

Beckerman uses recently declassified Soviet documents to show exactly what the KGB knew about the plot and when. Details were still sketchy in April; KGB head Yuri Andropov wrote that something was discussed at a Leningrad meeting, “the nature of which is being kept in strictest confidence and for the implementation of which Jewish nationalists living in Riga are being enlisted.”

When the KGB ultimately figured it out, two of the plot’s leaders, Eduard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshits [Paul Henry, don’t say it!], were sentenced to death.

The verdicts triggered global protests, drawing unprecedented attention to the movement. In New York, Birnbaum’s

group demonstrated peacefully, while Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League took to the streets, charging police barricades in front of the Soviet mission to the United Nations and smashing the building’s glass front doors with a can of red paint. The Soviets bowed to the pressure and commuted the death sentences, a major victory for the movement.

The genius of Lou Rosenblum, a Cleveland scientist and activist, was making known the less dramatic plight of hundreds of other refuseniks by providing phone numbers and addresses where American Jews could contact them. Lynn Singer of East Meadow ran the Long Island branch of Rosenblum’s grassroots network and called Moscow and Leningrad daily. The self-admitted loudmouth organized rallies, pestered local politicians and offered up her couch to Soviet Jews passing through New York.

Beckerman documents the gradual ascension of these and other grassroots groups and their increasing political clout. During Gerald Ford’s presidency, the movement scored its first major domestic triumph, with passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, granting the Soviet Union most-favoured nation status in exchange for issuing at least 60,000 exit visas for Jews annually. The

amendment was never actually enforced, but the legislative groundwork empowered young congressional staffers with ties to the movement. The amendment’s key driver, Richard Perle, was named assistant secretary of defence in Ronald Reagan’s administration, while Morris Amitay, another supportive staffer, took over the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 1974 and transformed it into one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington.

The inner workings of the Israeli government remain the only mystery in Beckerman’s otherwise thorough account.

We learn about Israeli agents and influence abroad but never go beyond public speeches and secondhand accounts of top Israeli brass. The movement continues to shape politics in Israel, where Soviet Jews, more than a million strong, compose the largest immigrant group.

But it’s our intimate knowledge of the U.S. and Soviet leaders that makes us care about the relative outsiders in both countries who successfully made their struggle central to the decades-long showdown between the superpowers.

Reviewed by Ben Wieder Newsday

Comfort is...

simply another name for Stressless® There is no comparison to the ultimate comfort of a Stressless® recliner from Norway. Take our word for it and try one. Because feeling is believing.

100% MADE IN NORWAY

Stressless® Taurus

STRESSLESS® STUDIOS DANSKE MØBLER: AUCKLAND • HAMILTON • TAUPO • WELLINGTON STOCKISTS NATIONWIDE

NZ DISTRIBUTOR

www.stressless.co.nz

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 91

SEE LIFE / MUSIC

Same ol’, not same ol’ Chris Philpott finds KT Tunstall repetitive, and Neil Young original KT Tunstall

Neil Young

Soundgarden

KT Tunstall, the diminutive Scottish songstress behind catchy single “Suddenly I See”, hit the big time back in 2005 and 2006 following the release of Eye To The Telescope, her acoustic based solo album that spawned a number of great singles (and managed a 4 out of 5 from me in our April 2006 issue).

She followed up her earlier success with second album Drastic Fantastic in 2007.

For third offering Tiger Suit, Tunstall has drifted further away from her roots, sailing smoothly toward more mainstream waters.

Where earlier tracks like “Black Horse And The Cherry Tree” featured a distinct acoustic jam-band sound, the opening tracks here sound far more pop-centric and far more generic than her earlier work.

From the dull synth sounds of opener “Uummannaq Song” to the plain beats of “Glamour Puss” and relentless pace of “Push That Knot Away”, the whole album invokes comparison to the likes of pop contemporaries Marina & The Diamonds or Little Boots – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that they don’t sound like KT Tunstall songs anymore.

Tiger Suit isn’t a bad album, and it does have a few interesting moments, but it certainly doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

Neil Young is one of those peculiar artists who never seems to age.

At nearly 65 years old, Young is still one of the most prolific songwriters around, with nine original studio albums to his name since the turn of the century – and every single one of them sounds as authentic as anything Young did during his peak back in the 1970s.

Le Noise is a perfect example – a true solo album, the songs are made up of Neil Young and his guitar.

I’m not even kidding: musically, Young has worked with producer Daniel Lanois (the man behind U2’s The Joshua Tree, among much else) to record several guitar tracks, overlaying them in post-production, then adding some of his trademark vocal work to add a few finishing touches.

The result is an album that feels completely honest and finds Young sounding remarkably vulnerable. For example, as he repeats the titular line of “Somone’s Gonna Rescue You” during the songs outro, it’s a pure moment that seems akin to staring into Young’s soul, before moving onto the tender sound of “Love And War”, its acoustic guitar providing the perfect come-down from the electric sounds that kick off the album. It’s almost spooky to listen to.

Highly recommended.

I’ve spoken before about the trend of older, defunct bands reforming, and how they very rarely offer any new insight as to how or why they became famous in the first place, while arguably damaging their future legacy by turning up to concerts and playing the “old stuff” in a lower key so the singer can still hit the high notes.

Of course, I wasn’t thinking about one of my all-time favourite bands when I said that.

I was heart-broken when Soundgarden split back in 1997, after several hit albums brought them worldwide success as part of the grunge movement of the mid-1990s. You may remember their smash hit single “Black Hole Sun”. It was on every radio and television station.

It’s also on Telephantasm, this compilation of some of the bands’ greatest hits, mixed with a few B-sides and rare tracks, that has been released to commemorate the group reforming in January this year. As a documentation of the groups career, Telephantasm works – it features all their biggest songs dating back to 1986, and the rareties are good quality and prove the bands talent.

Telephantasm is a decent listen, but don’t go in expecting to learn anything new about Soundgarden.

Tiger Suit 2.5 stars

Le Noise 4.5 stars

92 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

Telephantasm 4 stars

OUT NOW

Exclusively from tgifedition.com

SEE LIFE / MOVIES

Urban heat effect Kiwi actor shines in Red, writes Randy Myers Red

Starring: Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Karl Urban, Helen Mirren, Brian Cox Directed by: Robert Schwentke Rated: PG-13 (for intense sequences of action violence and brief strong language) Running time: 116 minutes 3 stars Red is everything we’d hoped Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables would be but wasn’t.

It’s kooky, brawny, brainy (OK, maybe we didn’t expect that from Sly) and outfitted with a geezer-ish cast of the highest order.

Best of all, it features one of 2010’s funniest scenes: Oscar winner Helen Mirren – in elegant gown and clunky combat boots – commandeering an enormous automatic machine gun and mowing down a garagefull of government goons. Angelina, better watch your back – a new action “Queen” could take your crown.

Speaking of Angie, Red makes her cockamamie Salt and that other summer CIAagent-on-the-lam failure, Knight and Day, look like amateur night.

Red pulls off the silly spy antics with snap and style, thanks to a zinger of a screenplay from Erich and Jon Hoeber – brothers

who previously inflicted a terrible case of brain freeze upon us with Kate Beckinsale’s Whiteout – and A-list actors in sync with the material’s irreverence. Heck, Red even summons Ernest Borgnine – yes, the Borgnine!

– out of semiretirement for a nifty cameo as a CIA records keeper.

Quirky casting like that turns Red into a massive sandbox for veteran actors to romp in. But unlike the similarly star-stuffed Oceans series, director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan) never allows his crisply plotted film, loosely based on a graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, to descend into an out-of-control actors’ frat party.

Credit for keeping the Hollywood selfinvolvement at a minimum belongs to lead Bruce Willis, too. Willis has been in dire need of a serious hit, and here he creates a likable guy, not a goof-off who regularly mugs for the camera.

As lonely and retired ex-CIA agent Frank Moses (biblical reference executed well), Willis is puppy-eyed charming and tough.

The role plays to Willis’ strong suit – a macho guy with a hunger for love and gunplay. It benefits the actor that the object of Frank’s affection is played by Mary-Louise Parker.

Unfortunately, the Weeds actress is saddled with the thankless role of the annoying love interest who is first kidnapped by Frank and

94 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

later participates in the mayhem. As she has done in the past, Parker does the least obvious thing with a most obvious character.

Both go on the run after the CIA targets Frank for assassination.

Red gets cooking when Frank re-teams with his put-out-to-pasture spy cronies. They include: Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman), exiled to an assisted living home; Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich), who remains paranoid and trigger-happy from the LSD testing he underwent years ago; perfectly coifed Victoria (Mirren), who runs a B&B and takes the occasional assassin gig; and Ivan (Brian Cox), a Russian who carries a torch for Victoria.

All are hilarious, but Malkovich and Mirren are the scene-stealers. Malkovich has become the MVP for goofy supporting characters with this role – his scene involving a pink stuffed bunny and a realtor will have you in tears – and his colorful turn in “Secretariat.”

Mirren, in a smaller part, is his equal as a Martha Stewart type (she based her performance on Stewart) with a license to kill.

Her deadpan delivery is priceless.

Another standout is Karl Urban (Lord of the Rings) as Frank’s hotshot, tech-savvy CIA nemesis William Cooper. The New Zealand actor brings depth along with bristling intensity and sexiness to the role.

– By Randy Myers

Nowhere Boy

Starring: Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, David Threlfall, Josh Bolt Directed by: Sam Taylor-Wood Rated: R (for language and a scene of sexuality) Running time: 98 minutes 2 stars There are so many ways in which Nowhere Boy, an emotionally raw and yet raucous, rockin’ riff on John Lennon’s turbulent teenage years, is such an entertaining piece of nostalgia.

As we mark what would have been the seminal artist’s 70th birthday, it takes us back to a time when rock ‘n’ roll was still finding its way and its warriors; before reality TV would begin minting rock stars like shiny new pennies and before Lennon or anyone else had any idea just how salient and strikingly original all those thoughts churning around in his young head would prove to be.

Lennon’s is by now a much-examined life – still, most of the attention has been on his years with the Beatles, then as a solo artist and finally his murder at 40 and the unfinished musical legacy left behind. Instead, director Sam Taylor-Wood has concentrated her focus on a relatively obscure time beginning in 1955 when a series of personal losses, layered on top of typical 15-year-old rebellion, conspired to reshape a boy who, without those twists of fate, might have grown into an ordinary man.

This is Taylor-Wood’s first full-length fea-

ture, a project she says she fought hard to get, and that passion is palpable in nearly every frame of this skillfully crafted musical mystery tour. Even so, she is hardly a novice, having spent years as an artist before her first narrative film, the impressive 2008 short Love You More, screened in competition at Cannes.

In Nowhere Boy, that artistic eye is clearly at work, and there is a growing confidence that gives the film the swagger it needs to take on such an iconic figure, head unbowed.

The movie opens with John (Aaron Johnson) roughhousing with his beloved uncle George (David Threlfall), who with John’s tight prig of an aunt, Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), took him in as a child and raised him as their own. Where George easily doles out affection and, as significantly, John’s first musical instrument, a harmonica, Scott Thomas’s Mimi has mastered the art of looking down her nose at the world and everyone in it as if they were giving off a slightly bad smell. For now, Lennon’s mother is little more than random scraps of childhood memories.

George’s fatal heart attack changes all that, reconnecting John with Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), the mother who deserted him, and setting up a tug of war between the estranged sisters that will forever shift his bearings and long influence his music. Where Mimi is a keep-the-windows-locked kind of influence in his life, Julia is a throw-them-openand-let-the-sun-shine-in sort. She’s also a fragile flower, beautifully and seductively played by Duff.

Julia takes John into her life, introducing him to the emerging underground sounds of blues, rock and Elvis; she will teach him to play the banjo. But it is Mimi who bends to buy him his first guitar, only to sell it when his grades falter. Meanwhile for us, it’s moving and telling to watch Duff and Scott Thomas in pitch-perfect performances as the women who battle for John’s heart and mind.

Their struggle would have no traction without a compelling presence in the center of the storm. In this the filmmakers got lucky with Johnson. He infuses his character with a winning blend of teenage uncertainty and cocksure charisma and manages to handle the singing and playing as if he were not doing it for the first time. That Johnson bears an uncanny resemblance to the singer-songwriter only helps. Yet it is a needle-threading task to evoke someone so deeply etched in the public consciousness

without ever letting it drift into caricature, which the actor, who starred this year in the comic book farce Kick-Ass, does exceptionally well.

The filmmaker, a protege of the late Anthony Minghella to whom the film is dedicated, is helped greatly by screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, who shows a real feel for the Liverpool scene, circa 1955, and an ear for the music that was beginning to shake, rattle and roll the world. Through cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s lens, John’s teen years are framed by tidy suburban row houses with their clipped hedges, tree-lined streets where boys bike to school, and the grittier urban sprawl of the city is kept at bay.

There is a sort of wrapped-in-gauze quality that borders on surreal, which, considering everything that happened to Lennon, makes for an apt choice.

As Lennon takes shape in the film, so does the band that will eventually become the Beatles, and the movie captures most of these firsts: The initial group being formed over cigarettes in the boys bathroom at Quarry Bank High, which will give Lennon’s first band, the Quarrymen, its name. His introduction to Paul McCartney, played as a thin boyish wisp of musical ardor by Thomas Brodie Sangster. George Harrison (Sam Bell) barely makes it onto the scene before the boys are off to Hamburg, Germany, with John promising to call Mimi every week so she won’t worry, which he did until the week he died.

The film is careful in not overplaying its emotional punches. But when it comes to the tragedy of Julia’s death, it’s a scene designed to stun and sting as it must have back then. Not surprisingly, everywhere there is music, a melting pot of sounds running through the film, more that influenced John rather than ones he, Paul and George would later write: Jerry Lee Lewis, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly.

After seeing an early cut of the film, Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, let them use his recording of “Mother” over the end credits, and McCartney gave permission for an early song he wrote with Harrison, “In Spite of All the Danger,” to be used at a pivotal point in the film when the band begins to coalesce.

In doing so, they have given Nowhere Boy their blessing.

It’s a nice touch, but the talented TaylorWood has created such a poignantly authentic telling of a life that the film stands just fine on its own.

– By Betsy Sharkey

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010 95

SEE LIFE / THE CUTTING ROOM

A crash waiting to happen Kenneth Turan examines the new documentary on the world financial collapse What happened? What hit us? How did things go so horribly wrong?

You have questions, Inside Job has answers.

After watching Charles Ferguson’s powerhouse documentary about the global economic crisis, you will more than understand what went down – you will be thunderstruck and boiling with rage.

For this smart and confident film, thick with useful information conveyed with cinematic verve, lays out in comprehensive but always understandable detail the argument that the meltdown of 2008 was no unfortunate accident. Rather, the film posits, it was the result of an out-of-control finance industry that took unethical advantage of decades of deregulation. It’s enough to make you want to keep your money in a mattress.

Ferguson, who wrote and directed the excellent Oscar-nominated No End in Sight, about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, is ideally positioned to deliver the kind of persuasive analysis that Inside Job provides.

Neither a film school graduate nor an ideologue, Ferguson is rather a well-connected academic who has a doctorate in political science from MIT, was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and has been a consultant for high-tech companies such as Apple, Intel and Xerox.

Those connections give the film assets many documentaries lack. For one thing, it has given Ferguson access to the kind of authoritative insiders who usually don’t appear on camera, including International Monetary Fund head Dominique StraussKahn, French Minister of Finance Christine Lagarde and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

Ferguson’s credentials, and his sense of outrage, give him the intelligence to ask the tough questions. More than one of Inside Job’s talking heads look seriously disconcerted when the filmmaker says things such as “You can’t be serious” and “Forgive me, that’s clearly not true.” Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia University business school, is so flustered he snaps, “You have three more minutes. Give it your best shot.”

The director may come from academia, but that doesn’t mean he has a weakness for

jargon. The language and the thinking are crystal clear (editors Chad Beck and Adam Bolt co-wrote with Ferguson), the quotes are pungent, the vivid graphics by Bigstar clarify the points and Matt Damon pulls it all together with his narration.

In the United States, Ferguson explains, after more than 30 years without a financial crisis, things began to change in 1981. A group including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and both Republican and Democratic Treasury secretaries including Donald T. Regan, Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers made deregulation the way things were going to be.

When complex, potentially dangerous financial instruments called derivatives came into vogue, unsung heroes, such as government official Brooksley Born, pushed strenuously for their regulation, but the powers that be were opposed.

Derivatives made it possible for banks that made housing loans to minimize their risk if there was a failure to repay, which helped fuel the boom in subprime mortgages. Then financial institutions combined

96 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM November 2010

these risky loans and made them seem as reliable as government securities, which of course they were not. Using the notorious credit default swaps, these firms were able to both sell those unreliable securities to gullible clients and also bet that they were going to fail. It was, as Laurel and Hardy might have said, a fine mess.

Inside Job conveys more information than it is possible to succinctly recap, but it is always both easy to follow and alarming in its portrait of a system run frighteningly amok.

Given the financial industry’s fierce opposition to reform and the fact that, as Inside Job demonstrates, the deregulation ideology has found a comfortable home in academia, Ferguson is not exactly optimistic about our being able to avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future. Which is why he made this film.

“It is my hope,” he writes in a director’s statement, “that after seeing this film we can all agree on the importance of restoring honesty and stability to our financial system ...” It’s a statement that, like this exceptional film, is hard to argue with.