Investigate magazine July 08 issue

no onseer >> clo gets

CLIMATE MYTHS

Exposing the errors in global warming doctrine

SPY STORIES

Graeme Hunt on the Bill Sutch file release

MARK STEYN

examines the wreckage of Hilary Clinton

>>

INVESTIGATE July 2008:

K INGMAKERS

Jennifer Beard Murder • Kingmakers • Global Warming • Bill Sutch

or dog-waggers?

The leaders who could hold the balance of power – their fate in your hands

: D E N E P O E R E S A C D L COA new suspect emerges in one of our most

Issue 90

s r e d r u m r e k i h h c t perplexing hi

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26

Contents 44

52

38 FEATURES

26 Cold Case: Jennifer Beard

Thiirty-eight years ago, a 25 year old Tasmanian schoolteacher disappeared while hitchhiking on New Zealand’s rugged West Coast. Now, IAN WISHART has new evidence that may lead to the killer

38 Kingmakers

They’re the kingmakers after every election, but often scorned as the tails that wag the dog, screw the scrum and cause merry mayhem on the political scene. IAN WISHART analyses the records of the minor parties and the impact they could have this election

58 44 A Really Inconvenient Truth

Soaring petrol prices, soaring food prices, and daft ideas masquerading as “saving the planet”. MIKE BUTLER argues the climate change industry will destroy your life

52 Hear No Evil: Bill Sutch

Some media reports suggest alleged spy Bill Sutch has been exonerated by this month’s release of part of his SIS file. GRAEME HUNT takes a very different view

58 Obama vs McCain

Has Barack bitten off more than he can chew? Can McCain do it even once? MARK SILVA reports on the looming presidential campaign

54

Editorial and opinion 06 Focal Point

Volume 8, issue 90, ISSN 1175-1290

Editorial

08 Vox-Populi

The roar of the crowd

18

16 Simply Devine

Miranda Devine on deviant “artists”

18 Straight Talk

Mark Steyn on sex wars

20 Eyes Right

Richard Prosser on politics

22 Line 1

Chris Carter’s grocery list

24

24 Soapbox

Allison Ewing on carbon taxes

Lifestyle 62 Money

Peter Hensley on Kiwisaver for kids

64 Education

Amy Brooke on the Ministry

66 Science The Adam crisis

64

68 Technology computerised cars

70 Sport

Chris Forster on Scott Dixon

72 Health

Anti-bacterial soaps

74 Alt.Health Consumer choice

76 Travel Madagascar

80 Food

66

Bake your own bread

82 Drive

Electric cars are coming

86 Toybox

The latest and greatest

88 Pages

Michael Morrissey’s winter picks

92 Music

Chris Philpott’s CD reviews

94 Movies Prince Caspian

70

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

Contributing Writers: Melody Towns, Selwyn Parker, 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 Design & Layout

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> focal point

Editorial

Abortion on demand

T

he release this month of a major High Court ruling consultants to keep records and report on cases they have conon the legality of abortions performed in New Zealand sidered, for the purpose of performing its statutory functions. should give some serious reasons for most of us to pause Those functions include keeping under review all the provisions and think. of the abortion law, as defined, and their operation and effect in In a case brought by Right to Life against the Abortion practice, reporting to Parliament on the operation of the aborSupervisory Committee, Justice Miller has ruled that many if tion law, keeping the procedure for authorising abortions under not most of the abortions performed each year may be illegal. review, ensuring the administration of the abortion law is conThat’s because the Abortion Supervisory Committee has failed to sistent throughout New Zealand, and appointing and removing do its job properly and enforce the existing laws. consultants. The Committee may form its own opinion about Essentially, the argument boils down to this: when the the lawfulness of consultants’ decisions to the extent necessary to Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act was passed in 1977, perform these functions.”

Parliament voted that abortions should only be permitted where In other words, stop authorising abortion on demand and start there was a serious risk to the mental health of the female seeking taking other factors properly into account. one. The risk had to be greater than the risks already associated with There are some reading this who will assume the kids being pregnancy and childbirth. In other words, it had to be serious. aborted are the flotsam and jetsam of society, so who cares anyway?

It was the Abortion Supervisory Committee’s job to ensure that Apart from the obvious implications of such a Hitlerian mindabortion clinics followed this practice, and it was given the power set (kill the Jews, kill the Gypsies, kill the gays, then start on the to hold clinics and doctors to Catholics), and the failure account if they failed. to recognise that many of The fantasy 30 years ago that the the world’s leading achievIn practice, however, the ASC was soon stacked with pro-aborers have been people whose fetus was magically “not human” tion supporters, and it turned a mothers considered abortblind eye to increasingly more ing, there is also the fact that has been utterly destroyed by lenient rulings by clinics on many of these abortions are “mental health” pleas. in fact to upwardly mobile science and ultrasound images Today, according to the High women who were too lazy Court judgement, upwards of to use contraception and 99% of abortions in some regions are approved on mental health who simply don’t want the “inconvenience” of a child upsetting grounds, for a grand annual total of 18,000 deaths. That’s 18,000 the latte run through Ponsonby of a morning. potential taxpayers, scientists, home-owners, employees, brothers At some point, the reality of the abortion industry needs to hit home. or sisters who are being killed in the womb every year – a massive The fantasy 30 years ago that the fetus was magically “not human” has 270,000 New Zealanders slaughtered since 1980. been utterly destroyed by science and ultrasound images.

In comparison, only around 20,000 New Zealanders have died Forget the religious issues, and simply look at it as a human on the roads in that time. rights one: how can we as a community be so outraged about the In his judgement, Justice Forrest Miller states the bleeding Kahui twins, yet turn a blind eye to a process that rips kids apart obvious: in the womb because they are “inconvenient”. What is the dif“There is reason to doubt the lawfulness of many abortions autho- ference? Either the vulnerable deserve more protection than they rised by certifying consultants. Indeed, the Committee itself has stated are currently getting, or they deserve none at all. It’s time for the that the law is being used more liberally than Parliament intended.” hypocrisy to end.

To that end, Justice Miller has ruled the ASC needs to step up to the plate and do its job properly: “The Committee has misinterpreted its functions and powers under the abortion law, reasoning incorrectly that Wall v Livingston means it may not review or scrutinise the decisions of certifying consultants. I find that it may do so, using its power to require INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM  July 2008 

> vox populi

Communiques The roar of the crowd ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT

ABSOLUTELY OUTRAGED

I picked up your new book Absolute Power by chance last week. I say “by chance” insofar as it will be interesting to see whether it’s reviewed in the print-media, mindful of the fact that books editors are an effete and snobbish lot and your book may be deemed insufficiently boring to justify mention.

Anyway, first my congratulations. There was only a single hyperbolic fault, specifically your reference to our Police Force as the most corrupt in the southern hemisphere. Have a look at the map.

When it comes to Zaire, Zimbabwe, Paraguay et al, and sadly, Chile and Australia, it is far and away the least corrupt.

And one other criticism on reflection, while wearing my pedant’s hat, and that is your references to animal porn films and videos. An animal porn film could be a rooster having it off with a chicken.

You should have referred to bestiality films and videos.

That said I agree with your general thesis regarding this government’s incredible corruption. It is Third World in its moral standards and dishonesty and leaves me despairing.

I despair because your book will make no difference. The government will simply ignore it, and largely, so will the news-media.

In another age, three decades back, or indeed another first world country today, such as the USA or Britain, your book would run to endless reprints and bring down the government.

Consider Nixon’s impeachment over a mere trifle to what you have outlined, or indeed, the near-miss impeachment of Clinton over a petty sexual matter and allegations of a playing-with-words denial.

At heart the problem lies in the depoliticalisation of New Zealanders. Today they simply don’t care, as borne out by the startling revelation that circa 50% of Maoris and Islanders are unaware that this is an election year. Yet most will turn out to vote, oblivious of the issues you raise or indeed any others. People simply don’t read anymore, or at least, not the majority under 40.

Oh for a barn-storming moralist like Muldoon!

I suppose there’s one good thing from your efforts, namely that if ignored by the general public; you nevertheless keep the bastards at bay from even greater outrages; if that is the Electoral Finance Act and theft of public money in the past two elections can be surpassed.

Once again; well done on a great accomplishment.

Bob Jones,Wellington

I have read Ian Wishart’s Absolute Power and found it to be an excellent and revealing book – all New Zealanders should read it including those at secondary school.

The author has kept the most vital and intriguing chapter for last – ‘The Rise of Queen Helen’. I read it twice. It raises a very serious totalitarian matter.

New Zealanders will have to wake up to what’s been going on.

The hot political issue of today is not who will win the next election but is: what is the current underlying system of government in this country?

That current system is all to do with the way in which this country received its independence from Britain and about how the whole system of government here has subsequently become bastardised.

So it’s not so much a question of who has the reins but of what possibilities those reins open up for any government of New Zealand? The answer is ‘Absolute Power’ over the people.

The government can therefore do what it pleases? Sound familiar? How else did we get all those bizarre unwanted legal changes passed in this country over the last decade or so? By voting? By referenda? Yeah right!

What do we think we have? A government serving the people or a government controlling the people?

Surely, it is vital that political power is given back to the people of New Zealand – we haven’t had it for years – and that we get in place instead a true and practical system of workable and transparent democracy. One that no one – especially politicians – can surreptitiously interfere with as has occurred in the past.

Ross Ewing,Christchurch

Editor responds

One of the first books I ever purchased was Letters by one Bob Jones.

The Master has not lost his touch. Appreciate the feedback, and if you’ll forgive me I’ll treat this as a book review in the circumstances.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

ABSOLUTELY FASCINATED I realise you will probably have received hundreds – maybe thousands – of letters and emails in response to Absolute Power, but I sincerely hope you will give my message some attention, as I have a huge personal and professional investment in the topics at hand.

First let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading your book and was extremely impressed & gratified by your ruthless exposé of the corruption & titular state of near-dictatorship that have railroaded over New Zealand’s constitution and half-destroyed her democracy: as a Briton who utterly resents how Tony Blair got away with doing many of the same things to my own country as Clark has done to NZ – i.e. politicising the civil service, assuming total control over almost every aspect of citizens’ private lives,

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setting up Big Brother-style surveillance & social engineering, and contaminating the system with stifling political correctness – and who is very frustrated by most people’s inability to understand that what they believe to these moderate Right-wing policies are actually the epitome of socialism, it was profoundly heartening to see a well-established commentator explaining how they all have their roots in Marxist ideology – with the result that the extreme Left and the extreme Right are to all intents & purposes the same thing. However, the issues I wish to address with you concern your analysis of New Zealand’s constitutional development, and the problems you perceive in it.

To explain my personal investment in the topic: I am an active member of the British monarchist movement, who – during my 8 months in NZ on a Working Holiday (more on that later) was involved with the Monarchist League of New Zealand; I have a great interest in British Imperial history and the post-colonial constitutional development of what are now the Commonwealth Realms (particularly NZ); and I am a keen freelance writer on these topics – I recently published an article in Majesty magazine concerning the controversy over the lack of a royal representative at Sir Edmund Hillary’s state funeral and how this exposes the uncertain relationship between the Crown and its overseas realms (that issue of the magazine is soon to hit the shelves in New Zealand). So, here it goes.

Firstly, I am glad you acknowledge the legality of New Zealand’s former status as a British Colony. I am a long way from being rabidly imperialist, and I recognise how the differences between the English- & Maori-language versions of the Treaty of Waitangi – caused by diverse, strictly defined Maori concepts of authority, sovereignty & chieftainship – resulted in the Maori chiefs not being able to fully understand exactly what they were ceding to Britain; but I believe that many commentators place disproportionate weight on this issue – F.M. Brookfield, whom you quote once in your text, being a prime example, in his book Waitangi & Indigenous Rights.

I also agree with your contention that, although New Zealand’s 1947 ratification of the Statute of Westminster 1931 marked her full independence from Britain in practical terms, in constitutional terms independence was not finalised until the passing of the New Zealand Constitution Act 1986. I would extrapolate on Philip Joseph’s description of the independence of NZ, Australia and Canada as an ‘ongoing gift’ by arguing that the 1931 Statute was nothing more than a personal promise from the British Parliament to her dominions along the lines of, “We will no longer insist on ratifying any of your legislation, or setting any of your foreign policy, if you don’t want us to.” The Statute certainly did not, by that logic, formally renounce Westminster’s power over the dominions; meaning that only when New Zealand voluntarily told Britain, in 1987, that those residual powers were dead, was full independence finally attained. Presumably you will also agree, therefore, that Britain’s having declined to assert those residual powers in response, validated New Zealand’s right to (in your analogy) “pull the plug” and remould herself as an independent sovereign state.

However, it is in the matter of the nation’s need for a new power source, that our views start to diverge.

I continue to share your views up to a certain point – namely the fact that, with New Zealand’s independence having come in several stages over a period of 130 years since responsible self-government was granted in 1857, it was very difficult for the people to understand the significance of what happened in 01 January, 10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

1987. I also agree that it would have been at least a fitting gesture for the Lange administration to call both a snap election and a referendum on how the constitution should be reshaped. But it is with your core assertion – that this was constitutionally essential for the newly independent government to be seen as having a legitimate mandate – that I must take issue.

Let us examine your argument in chronological fashion, beginning with the point in history at which you believe the British Parliament obtained its mandate to rule Britain – the overthrow & execution of Charles I. It is, indeed, true to say that the eventual re-establishment of the monarchy reduced the powers of said institution; but if it was strictly on Parliament’s terms, one is hard-pressed to explain how the new king was able to wreak vengeance on his father’s usurpers and executioners by fast-tracking them through show trials to the grisly death reserved for traitors of the common blood. What’s more, morally if not constitutionally speaking, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for those Parliamentarians since the master they served so loyally – Oliver Cromwell – had simply seized absolute power for himself and, more importantly, waged virtual holocaust in Ireland. To label Cromwell the father of parliamentary democracy is beyond absurd – he was a totalitarian dictator who, if unleashed in modern times, would surely shed as much blood as a Hitler, Stalin or Mao. The 1687 Bill of Rights was what really cemented Parliament’s legislative supremacy over the monarchy. It is then general consensus that the remaining legislative and executive powers of the sovereign had disappeared, in theory, by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne 150 years later, and that if she enjoyed a greater say in government than she was constitutionally entitled to, then her son Edward VII’s role in forging the Entente Cordiale with France was the last time a British monarch could be seen as having a hands-on role in the day-to-day business of government (beyond the constitutional obligation to assent to legislation, approve Orders in Council, sign off other government papers and carry out diplomatic engagements all strictly on ministerial advice). Through this all, however, the Crown has remained an essential part of the constitutional framework of Britain and (formerly) the Empire, as the ultimate source of all power – which would seem to fit with both your ‘tree’ and ‘light bulb’ analogies.

The legislative, executive and judicial powers of the Crown are separated and delegated. Now I completely agree that, in New Zealand as in Britain, the boundaries between those powers have been blurred by the machinations of Clark and Blair respectively; but this should not have any bearing on the notion cherished by all supporters of constitutional monarchy, the notion of sovereign democracy – whereby, in addition to delegating all power to the three branches of government, the Crown delegates to the people the right to democratically choose (to some extent) who will exercise those powers.

Going back to the Bill of Rights, you may – upon consideration of my points regarding the English Civil War and Cromwell’s dictatorship – conclude that it was actually the Glorious Revolution, led by the soon-to-be William III with parliamentary support – which gave the British Parliament its permanent mandate to govern; but I would argue that said mandate was actually conferred by the new king’s signature on the Bill, which gave birth to Britain’s status as – and indeed the concept of – a sovereign democracy. If, for the sake of argument, you are happy to proceed on that assumption, then you will certainly not question the right of the Crown’s emissaries to negotiate the Treaty of Waitangi on the Crown’s behalf,

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nor the right of the British Parliament to exercise supreme power over New Zealand on the same authority, nor its right to set up a subordinate New Zealand Parliament. Indeed, you do not appear to have a problem with any of those rights as it is. Why, then, do you question the right of what has – for 21 years – been a completely autonomous NZ Parliament, to exercise supreme power on behalf of the New Zealand Crown? You argue that the 1986 Act’s recognition of the Crown in Right of New Zealand was a feeble attempt to give the supposed parliamentary ‘coup’ the appearance of legitimacy; yet here you ignore the fact that, in all democratic systems which retain monarchies, the powers of the Crown are – under normal circumstances – exercised exclusively by Ministers of the Crown. Why should NZ be any different? As a staunch monarchist, I do agree that the reserve powers of the Sovereign should be invoked when the fabric of democracy is under threat; therefore, like you, I believe it certainly is regrettable that Anand Satyanand did not exercise these powers to prevent Clark fasttracking the Electoral Finance Act through Parliament. I also agree that the marginalising of Parliament in favour of the Cabinet is a most alarming shift in the balance of power; but when you consider that this has also happened in Britain along with all the other erosions of civil liberty performed in New Zealand by Clark, how can you even begin to justify your assertion that Britain – whether authorised by her Crown or by her people – has given the NZ government more power over the NZ people than Britain’s government has over hers?

Above all, you appear to agree (even if only by default) that constitutional monarchy is (at least on paper) a more democratic form of government than any type of democratic republic: an executive president, even if chosen in a free and fair election, enjoys unlimited executive power and (in the case of the United States) considerable power of legislative veto; while a ceremonial president lacks the historical grounding of a monarch and, whether elected by the people or appointed by the government, cannot serve the people in the same non-partisan fashion as a monarch. Why, then, do you have such overwhelming difficulty with the notion of a mandate to govern deriving from the Crown? Why do you believe it must come from the people and the people alone? No, Mr Wishart, it is not for the people to give legitimacy to their rulers – but it is down to the people to replace their rulers if they believe them to be exhibiting early signs of going above their powers, which are vested in them by the Crown. Indeed, on that basis, one could rightly ask why Satyanand should’ve felt the need to intervene over the EFA, since Clark’s corrupt public service meddling and social engineering programmes were well-known and well-established when the people voted her in for a third consecutive term in 2005. Likewise, why should the Queen herself be expected to step in if Gordon Brown succeeds in pushing through his hugely controversial plans to fur-

ther extend the detention period for terrorism suspects without charge – when the man who had not only created Britain’s surveillance society, but greatly angered the British public by using post-9/11 paranoia to justify supporting America’s ill-advised and ill-planned invasion of Iraq, accomplished the same feat as his Kiwi comrade in the same year?

In short, New Zealand’s constitutional crisis is the result not of some rogue seizure of absolute power by the government that declared final independence from Britain – but of two simple words: public apathy. Thankfully, of course, if opinion polls are anything to go by, the people have now finally seen the light and will boot Labour out in this year’s election (as Britain looks set to do upon going to the polls at some point over the next two years). We must hope, of course, that John Key’s well-publicised sympathy with the “Show us you care, Ma’am!” lobby over the Hillary funeral controversy will not prompt him to push for a republic. If, God forbid, he does that, but thinks that going one better than the 1999 Australian referendum – i.e. offering New Zealanders a choice between different republican frameworks – is sufficient in terms of giving a Republic of New Zealand a public mandate, then he is sorely mistaken. For it is the moment New Zealand cuts herself off from her ultimate source of power – the New Zealand Crown – when she is truly up the creek, without a paddle, and most certainly would require a comprehensive referendum to reshape her constitution.

Matt Showering, Australia

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM VETS On May 28 2008, the prime minister stated in Parliament an Apology to Viet Nam war veterans, giving some emphasis to monetary compensation for exposure to Agent Orange. Previously (December 14 2004) a governmental Apology was presented in Parliament for damage to Viet Nam war veterans by defoliant chemicals.

As the scientists who first (1971) pointed out to the New Zealand public the potential for birth defects caused by the dioxin in the herbicide 2,4,5-T, we would like to draw together main facts at this late stage in the career of a chemical.

Within New Zealand, this particular phenoxy herbicide was for a few decades widely used – to varying effect – on woody weeds e.g. gorse and manuka. The factory in New Plymouth was greatly expanded, and a 1:1 subsidy created for the manufacturer, at a time when the whole USA production of 2,4,5-T was being bought by the Pentagon for chemical warfare which was later stopped under pressure from highly respected American scientists such as Edsall of Harvard. USA armed forces medicos had been reporting strong impressions of birth defect epidemics in the sprayed districts. Some NZ soldiers were also sprayed.

Some farming districts in New Zealand had higher densities INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 13

of dioxin-containing 2,4,5-T aerially sprayed upon them than the total attributable to Agent Orange (50:50 2,4,5-T/2,4-D) in Vietnam. This was done mainly in springtime. Aerial drift onto human dwellings in these sparsely populated areas, as well as into local towns, was unavoidable, given the lax methods of spraying.

Drinking water collected on roofs could, as we pointed out in 1971, contain dangerous doses of dioxin.

A rural GP got in touch with his cousin the medical school deputy dean: “Stop those staff of yours saying 2,4,5-T can cause birth defects! I’ve not noticed any increase in my district.” Such statistics as had been voluntarily sent to the Health Dept from that district did actually show significant increases; and guess who had sent those figures in? This illustrates how what you don’t know can hurt you – considerable increases in harm can go unnoticed. We continued to press for creation of a mandatory system to report birth defects accurately.

A decade after this controversy began, statistics of some reliability were being gathered. One of us (R.E) discovered that the birth defect rates across Northland were correlated with the 2,4,5T spray densities from one coast to the other.

The potential for harm of aerial spraying in New Zealand was always emphatically denied by the Health Dept and their buddies the Agricultural Chemicals Board whose dogged mantra intoned “no scientific evidence from anywhere in the world has yet been presented to the Board to support the contention that 2,4,5-T has adverse effects on human reproduction”. Attempts to purge one of us (R.M) from university employment were defeated only after expressions of resistance by hundreds of colleagues.

New Zealand was the last country to produce 2,4,5-T, and its dioxin content until the last few years of operation of the factory was high. Exposure of the factory’s neighbours has been studied only very sluggishly, but looks high (from the partial results recently trickled out).

It took 18 years of sporadic strife to shut down that last 2,4,5-T factory. The replacement herbicide is one atom different but has, so far, escaped comparable scrutiny.

Three decades into this dishonesty-riddled dispute, it is now recognised that some Vietnam veterans, and some of their children, have suffered and continue to suffer ill health caused by aeriallysprayed dioxin in Vietnam. The same should also be recognised for all those in New Zealand similarly exposed – many with much higher exposure than soldiers in Vietnam who were, after all, voluntarily in harm’s way.

Recent media superficialities have concentrated on cancer caused by dioxin. Many other types of damage, notably birth defects, are also expected from dioxin dosages imposed on New Zealanders.

But let us never forget: the main harm from the USA’s chemical warfare in Vietnam was on Vietnamese people and ecosystems.

Could New Zealand’s foreign aid make at least some gesture to those victims?

Dr Robert Mann, Professor Bob Elliott, Auckland

that surplus Agent Orange was used commercially in New Zealand as a “scrub dessicant” by farmers, although it was not marketed as “Agent Orange”. Thus, not only was 2,4,5-T being used, but the same 50/50 mix as they used in Viet Nam was also being used here by thousands of agricultural workers. I suspect a significant chunk of New Zealand’s high cancer rate can be pinged to this.

SUTCH A SHAME The late Dr. Bill Sutch is again in the news with the release after several decades of part of his Security Intelligence Service (SIS) file.

The NZHerald of June 7th quotes current SIS director Warren Tucker as saying that “while the (SIS) had long regarded Sutch as a security risk it had never considered him to be a Soviet agent” etc.

Soviet agent or not, the indications are that he was a subversive influence in N.Z. for all that. So it would seem that the N.Z. Left owes much to Dr. Sutch, even if, for example, one was to judge only by the testimony of one notable N.Z. leftist activist, Christine Dann.

Dann was interviewed on Radio N.Z. on 18th September 1985 re her new book “Up From Under” where it was disclosed that she was one of the founders of N.Z’s “Women’s Liberation” movement. She recalled there that the seeds for such radicalism were sown through a visit to her school by Dr. Sutch, where he discussed such matters, and how she subsequently became deeply politicised. Nor, presumably, would she have been far from the only young person so radicalised by him.

Just how deeply involved Dann was to become was well spelt out in 1979 with the publication of her highly revealing article Radical Feminism and the N.Z. Political Scene which was published in the July 1979 issue of The Republican.

From the 1970’s onwards, then, she became increasingly influential in left politics. In 1991 she was a Green Party spokesman.

By 7th November 2005, at the death of Green Party Co-Leader Rod Donald, she was heard on Radio N.Z. and described as the Party’s campaign manager.

If Dann’s name seems unfamiliar to some this is probably not surprising as she seems to have conducted dual careers: one as a leftist agitator, but well played down by the media; the other, simply described innocuously as an “amateur gardener...interested in botany...who has written a book on cottage gardens” according to Maggie Barry on Radio N.Z. on 7th November 1989. Similarly

by Kim Hill, also on Radio N.Z., on 3rd December 1993. Also on TV’s “Beauty and the Beast” panel show back in 1986, where, on 29th September, she was described conveniently vaguely simply as a “Dunedin TV researcher”.

So while there may be no hard evidence of Dr. Sutch ever being a Soviet spy, nevertheless we will probably never know the full impact of the negative influence he appears to have exerted upon N.Z. via other nefarious activities, just one being his radicalising of trusting and unsuspecting N.Z. youth to serve the Leftist cause.

Barbara Faithfull, Auckland

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Dr Mann was a biochemistry lecturer, and Professor Elliott the head of paediatrics, in the Auckland medical school. Readers may recall the Investigate stories that finally forced the government to check dioxin levels in New Plymouth near the Dow factory. We spoke to a former senior manager of the company who confirmed 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D were being mixed there for the purposes of producing Agent Orange. More significantly for New Zealanders, however, he and others pointed out 14 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

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

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> simply devine

Miranda Devine Is the art world perverted?

I

t seems that neither the 2020 Summit nor Kevin Rudd’s hospiThe documentary also lingered over a huge photograph of a tal visit to Cate Blanchett’s baby last month served to provide him pubescent girl, legs astride, with menstrual blood smeared over her with any protection from an arts community up in arms about thighs, and another showing a boy, side-on, his penis clear. his candid reaction to photographs of naked adolescents.

‘Why are [the children] naked?” wrote one art critic. “Well, Blanchett and another 43 members of the “creative stream” of truth is naked.” Honestly. The puerile sophistry used over the past the 2020 Summit released an open letter late May calling on the week to justify Henson’s photos is what is embarrassing, not the Aussie Prime Minister to retract his statement that the Bill Henson honest reaction from people derided as philistines. photographs of naked 12- and 13-year-olds briefly on display at the You don’t have to regard Henson’s work as pedophile pornogRoslyn Oxley9 gallery in Sydney were “absolutely revolting”. raphy to hear, in the elaborate defences of his work concocted So artists want the freedom to exploit budding pubescents as in the past few weeks, echoes of the justifications the pedophiles nude models, but they don’t want the Prime Minister to freely Philip Bell and Robert “Dolly” Dunn made in their talk of the express his thoughts? ancient Greek tradition of man-boy love, as if they were simply If the arts community is so creative and “edgy”, why do they all misunderstood by philistines. travel in lockstep on such things? Their single voice suggests not Criticising art does not make you a philistine; condemning critioriginality and boundary-pushing, but a suffocating conformity. cism just might, and comparisons to Caravaggio and Michelangelo Who in the arts community – whether creator, curator or critic miss the point that Henson’s art is photography, which has none of – has come out and said: “This the ambiguity of painting. is wrong,” not just “provocaIt is fear of being called a So artists want the freedom to tive” or “controversial”? They philistine, or, God forbid, say they are happy to have the a “moral conservative” that debate but they have never had exploit budding pubescents as nude has decent people quaking the debate, perhaps for fear of in their boots with fear, models, but they don’t want the being seen as prudish or out of not police jackboots on touch with the in-crowd. the doorstep of their local Prime Minister to freely express This deficit of moral courart gallery. age was most stark last week Still, I was as shocked as his thoughts in people who have since told anyone to see the police friends they felt “uncomfortmove in on the Roslyn able” about the image on the invitation from Roslyn Oxley9 pro- Oxley9 gallery at the end of May; on the one hand, glad to see a moting Henson’s show, but kept their feelings to themselves. It line drawn on behalf of childhood innocence, and on the other might not all be cowardice; through the relentless normalisation sick to the stomach at the cliched image of a police state come of the abnormal, the annihilation of taboos and the persecution to life. of traditional moral guardians, we may have reached a point of We don’t like the police jailing citizens for jaywalking during such communal moral ambiguity that these people don’t quite APEC, any more than we like the omnipresence of speed camtrust their instincts. eras and draconian parking enforcement. No one wants to live in Edmund Capon, the director of the NSW Art Gallery has admit- a police state, least of all the poor police. ted fielding complaints from the public about Henson images he Police are a blunt instrument, a last resort sometimes made displays, including one in which a naked girl is restrained by a necessary by the abdication of responsibility by too many adults, naked boy, with both arms around her throat, while another naked either too cowardly to speak out, addled by alcohol or drugs, or girl takes hold of her legs. too unsure of right and wrong to be judgmental. This is how social “There are images that are close to despoliation and abuse,” norms break down, and when the community fails to enforce Capon said, with a candour absent from today’s debate, in a its own standards, when traditional moral guardians have been 2002 documentary on Henson’s work aired on ABC-TV last demonised and marginalised, the threat of police action looms. month. “But they’re sort of orchestrated with this wonderful senThe ultimate example is in remote Aboriginal communities sual baroque exoticism at the same time.” Oh, that’s OK, then. where the social norms we take for granted, such as the love of 16 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

Henson doesn’t often shoot his teens in bright colour, and this is one of the tamest shots we could find. The darker shot is the next tamest one. It’s all downhill from there.

a mother for her child, have collapsed. So you get the Northern Territory intervention, where basic civil rights have been overruled, with the bipartisan support of Federal Parliament, for the greater good of protecting babies and children from violence, sexual abuse and criminal neglect.

There is nothing unique about Aboriginal people that makes

some of their remote communities such unutterable hellholes, but the breakdown of social norms, or community standards, hits the powerless and most vulnerable first, as it has hit the white underclass in every city.

Breaking taboos is easy these days. Upholding them is what is hard, and the public is simply fed up with the sexualised portrayal of children, such as in the recent Australian movie Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger, which featured a scene in which the 13-year-old protagonist appears to be performing oral sex.

As a reader, Nikki, wrote to me last week: “What’s next? Will Sesame Street have ‘young adult’ action soon?”

A randy Cookie Monster sounds preposterous, but so to a previous generation would the idea of a court ruling that a 12-yearold girl was mature enough to embark on a sex change, against the wishes of her father, as was reported last month in the Family Court of Victoria.

In such a charged atmosphere, in which we have a Senate inquiry into the sexualisation of children in the media, Henson and his gallery owners would have to be naive not to know that mailing out an invitation featuring a large photograph of a naked 13-yearold girl would create a storm. devinemiranda@hotmail.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 17

> straight talk

Mark Steyn The sex wars

S

omeone wins, someone doesn’t win, that’s life,” Nancy brought about the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in Kopp, Maryland’s treasurer, told The Washington Post. “But global history, the so-called guang gun – “bare branches.” If you women don’t want to be totally dissed.” She was talking can only have one kid, parents choose to abort girls and wait for about her political candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton. a boy, to the point where in the first generation to grow to adultDemocratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the hood under this policy there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. In Obama campaign. “Healing The Wounds Of Democrats’ Sexism,” practice, a “woman’s right to choose” turns out to mean the right as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine to choose not to have any women.

Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up And what of the Western world? their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at From 2000-05, Indian women in England and Wales gave birth Harvard to determine whether Sen. Clinton’s presidential hopes to 114 boys for every 100 girls. fell victim to party and media sexism.

A similar pattern seems to be emerging among Chinese, Korean How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy and Indian communities in America. “The sex of a firstborn child with a resume you could print on the back of his driver’s license, in these families conformed to the natural pattern of 1.05 boys to a Rolodex apparently limited to neosegregationist race-baiters, every girl, a pattern that continued for other children when the campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical firstborn was a boy,” wrote Colleen Carroll Campbell, of the Ethics surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates. and Public Policy Center and former Bush speechwriter, in the St. “On this Memorial Day,” said Barack Obama, “as our nation hon- Louis Post-Dispatch the other day. “But if the firstborn child was a ours its unbroken line of fallen girl, the likelihood of a boy heroes – and I see many of them coming next was consider In China, the state-enforced “one ably higher than normal at in the audience here today.”

Hey, why not? In Obama’s 1.17-to-1. After two girls, the child” policy has brought about the probability of a boy’s birth Cook County, Illinois, many fallen heroes from the Spanishrose to a decidedly unnatuAmerican War still show up most gender-distorted demographic ral 1.51-to-1.” in the voting booths come By midcentury, when cohort in global history November. It’s not unreasontoday’s millions of surplus able for some of them to turn boys will be entering middle up at an Obama campaign rally, too. age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 But what of the fallen heroine? If it’s any consolation to Sen. percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most Clinton, she’s not the only female to find that social progress is male-heavy societies that have ever existed. strangely accommodating of old-time sexism. There was a frontAs I wrote in my book America Alone, unless China’s planning page story in London last month about a British Indian couple in on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going Birmingham – she’s 59, he’s 72 – who’d had twins through in vitro to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numfertilization and then abandoned the babies at the hospital when bers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are not a recipe for they turned out to be daughters, announcing their plans to fly back societal stability. Unless the Japanese have invented amazingly to India for another round of IVF in hopes of getting a boy. lifelike sex robots by then (think Austin Powers’ “fembots”), we’re In the wake of the media uproar, the parents now claim some- likely to be in a planetwide rape epidemic and a world of globalthing got “lost in translation” and have been back to the hos- ized, industrial-scale sex slavery. pital to visit the wee bairns. But think of Mom and Dad as the And what of the Western world?

Democratic Party and the abandoned daughters as Hillary, and Canada and Europe are in steep demographic decline and depenit all makes sense. dent on immigration to sustain their populations. And – as those There’s a lot of that about. Sex-selective abortion is a fact of Anglo-Welsh statistics suggest – many of the available immigrants are life in India, where the gender ratio has declined to 1,000 boys to already from male-dominated cultures and will eventually be male900 girls nationally, and as low as 1,000 boys to 300 girls in some dominated numbers-wise, too: circa 2020, the personal ads in the Punjabi cities. In China, the state-enforced “one child” policy has Shanghai classifieds seeking “SWF with good sense of humor” will 18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

If the firstborn child was a girl, the likelihood of a boy coming next was considerably higher than normal at 1.17to-1. After two girls, the probability of a boy’s birth rose to a decidedly unnatural 1.51-to-1

be defining “must live locally” as any ZIP code this side of Mars.

Smaller families may mean just a boy or a girl for liberal Democrats, but in other societies it means just a boy. The Indian writer Gita Aravamudan calls this the “female feticide.” Colleen Carroll Campbell writes that abortion, “touted as the key to liberating future generations of women,” has become instead “the preferred means of eradicating them.” And, while it won’t eradicate all of them, Philip Longman, a demographer of impeccably liberal credentials, put the future in a nutshell in the title of his essay: The Return of Patriarchy.

Enlightened progressives take it for granted that social progress is like technological progress – that women’s rights are like the internal combustion engine or the jet airplane: once invented they can’t be uninvented.

But that’s a careless assumption. There was a small, nothing story out of Toronto this month – the York University Federation of Students wants a campuswide ban on any pro-life student clubs.

Henceforth, students would be permitted to debate abortion only “within a pro-choice realm,” as the vice-president Gilary Massa put it.

Nothing unusual there. A distressing number of student groups are inimical to free speech these days. But then I saw a picture of the gung-ho abortion absolutist: Gilary Massa is a young Muslim woman covered in a hijab.

On such internal contradictions is the future being built. By The Return of Patriarchy, Philip Longman doesn’t mean 1950s sitcom dads. No doubt Western feminists will be relieved to hear that. © Mark Steyn, 2007

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 19

> eyes right

Richard Prosser Lest we forget

A

dolph Hitler, apparently, once stated “It is a fortunate by then of Bill English (who will replace John Key), happily forget thing for Governments, that men do not think.” that here is a man who reputedly raised the Viet Cong flag over Herr Schicklgruber, for all his faults (you know, being the Auckland University registry building on the day that Saigon an insane, xenophobic, genocidal psychopath, that sort fell, who held hands with Yasser Arafat, and who advocated legalof thing) may have had a point; but I think, in this case, that it ising sex for twelve-year-olds. Is this really someone who we want would be more correct to say that men do not remember, so much for Prime Minister in 2017? Probably not, but we won’t rememas do not think at all. ber any of this by then.

We’re quite good at forgetting things in New Zealand, and Why did National get dealt such a beating at the polls in 1999? strangely enough, particularly so when an election is imminent. Anyone remember? Was it dissatisfaction with Jenny Shipley which We forget – and forgive – the sins and the slip-ups of the Parties tipped it? Now be honest – how many of you had completely forof Previous Governments, we push their track records to one gotten about Jenny until I reminded you just then? She was our side, cast their past indiscretions from our minds, and happily first woman Prime Minister, you will recall. Did the job for two give them another go. years No, really. It wasn’t Helen Clark. She was second.

On current polling, we’re about to do just exactly this, yet again.

How about 2002, and an even worse drubbing? Can we blame Come October, or November at the latest, Labour are toast. I Bill English for that, and will we remember what it was he did think this is pretty much a foregone conclusion. The nation has wrong, come 2011 when we make him the Prime Minister? had enough of Labour, enough of Helen Clark, enough of the soAnd why did the Nats – admittedly only just – lose again in called “coalition” Government 2005? Was that down to we have suffered these past nine Don Brash? Maybe; but in Now be honest – how many years; this strange amalgam of accepting that, we also have backstabbers and turncoats to remember that it was Don of you had completely forgotten cobbled together out of expediBrash who rescued National ence and foisted upon us withfrom near-oblivion. Labour about Jenny until I reminded you out means of protest or redress. only just squeaked it in ’05, Yep, they’re about to be hoist winning by a mere two perjust then? She was our first woman centage points. from their own petard, and may it serve them right.

If Dr Brash made one Prime Minister, you will recall National will be our savfatal mistake in 2005, it iours now; the real old Natural was to intimate, too pubParty of Government, with their shiny new Leader and the prom- licly and too close to the election, his approval for such things as ise of excitingly different policies to carry us all into the glorious privatisation, and asset sales, and so forth. Really, stunts like walkdawn of the new millennium. ing the plank and clambering awkwardly into speedway cars had Curiously, we seem to have forgotten that this is the very same nothing to do with it. It might have made him look like a bit of National Party which, only six years ago, we similarly toasted, a goose, but we don’t crucify politicians for that in this country, delivering them barely a fifth of the popular vote, and their worst which is just as well for the likes of Pete Hodgson with his funky election placing ever. This year, that result is likely to be stood on its chicken dance, or the Scary Singing Sisters of the last Labour Party head, and it will be Labour which gets chucked out with the gar- “Congress”. No, the only people who really get worked up about bage cans, haemorrhaging low-ranked list members as it goes. that sort of thing are the media.

Uncle Helen has been, probably indisputably, our most popuWe the People (well OK, not me, but you know what I mean), lar Prime Minister of recent times; but come Christmas, it will having become somewhat gun shy where noises about selling be a real struggle finding anyone who can actually remember hav- off the family silver are concerned, ducked for cover behind the ing voted for her.

Labour Government; which is odd in itself, because it showed that Her replacement during Labour’s next few years on the we had forgotten about it being Labour who actually invented the Opposition benches will be Phil Goff; and when, in three, or six, process in the first place. or nine years’ time, he gets his day in the sun, we will, having tired That’s right; Rogernomics was a Labour initiative. Remember?

20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

Roger Douglas? Moustachioed chap, used to be Minister of Finance. Sold everything out from under us. Good Labour man.

Privatised most of the Government, turned whole Departments into dole queues. Got a gong from the Queen for his efforts, and then went off and started the truly Right-wing ACT Party.

Quite why Rodney Hide thinks it’s a good idea to bring him back from the dead escapes this writer; perhaps he has forgotten that most of New Zealand is un-amused with the idea of privatisation. I do hope National remembers this, come the end of the year.

ACT itself may well still make a showing this year, thanks to MMP; a system which, despite its faults, is undoubtedly better than the FPP sham it replaced. Voices in our society continue to clamour for the return of the old ways; we have forgotten, no doubt, the bad days when Labour won more votes than National but still didn’t become the Government, when Social Credit attracted twenty percent of the electorate but occupied just two percent of the seats in Parliament, when the support of fewer than four of every ten voters was enough to ensure one-Party rule. Why have we forgotten this?

For the same reasons, I suppose, that many people also call for the reduction of the size of Parliament from 120 MPs back to 99.

We have forgotten that the original Royal Commission which recommended the adoption of MMP also said quite clearly that the size of the House of Representatives should increase to 120 members whether the voting system was changed or not, simply because electorate and international commitments meant that fewer than 100 available lawmakers were not able to adequately staff Parliament’s Select Committees, which do the real work of the House.

People draw comparisons between the size of the New Zealand Parliament and the Sydney City Council, and ask why, when both are administering a similarly-sized population, does one have to be so much bigger than the other; they forget, perhaps, that the Sydney City Council does not have to concern itself with Health, or Welfare, or Education, or Defence or Foreign Affairs or any of the other matters which are the responsibility of the Government of a Nation State, but not of a local authority.

I know a good many people who will be voting National this year because they are disgusted by what Labour have done to New Zealand’s defence forces. I share their sentiment, but I wonder whether they may have forgotten that it was a National Cabinet which scuttled the Navy’s third and fourth ANZAC Frigates, and which failed to sign off the F-16 lease deal, making it possible for Clark & Co to cancel it altogether. Max Bradford, indeed, is on record as questioning the need for the Air Force’s strike wing, long before Helen Clark got the knives out for it. Remember Max? He was Defence Minister in the last National Government. He was also the Energy Minister who told us all that chopping the country’s electricity generation into bits and selling it off, would mean lower power prices for everyone. Hmm. Well another winter is upon us, and my power bill is twice what it was in 1999, and competition or no, we still don’t have enough power stations, and it’s going to be a cold winter like ’92….but I guess we’ve forgotten 1992, just like we’ve forgotten that privatisation aside, the Government (i.e. us) still owns half the generation capacity and all the national grid, and so why are we paying twice what we were, for our own power, from stations which we had already paid for, when we’re not making any new investment in additional generation? And why – if Labour are so much about looking after the

people as they claim – have they forgotten to do anything about this over the past nine years?

I think what cracks me up most of all is Winston Peters. No matter what happens, or what he gets up to, we keep forgetting what he’s done, and we keep forgiving him. I think it’s hilarious.

I might even vote for the man myself this year. I mean I haven’t done that before, and it’s probably his turn.

Winston backed National when everyone expected him to back Labour, and he got away with it; and for good measure, backed Labour when everyone expected him to back National, and got away with that, too.

As I sit and type, and the Siege of Helengrad has already begun, Winston’s support is on the rise yet again; people are forgiving him already, and forgetting that this increasingly unpopular Government has only been able to stagger on because of his support for it – but they’re forgetting about that even while he’s still doing it!

Long-time chameleon Peter Dunne has had so many changes of flag over the years that, in fairness, people can be forgiven for forgetting what it is that he actually stands for. I do hope they’ll remember, however, that he voted in favour of Sue Bradford’s antismacking Bill. In fact, all but seven of our elected representatives supported this particularly onerous piece of legislation; something we should all remember come the election, and perhaps more importantly, we should all remind them of afterwards – just in case a few of them decide to forget which side of the fence they were on. Perhaps a good time to do this will be when we get our referendum on the matter – when we give them cause to not forget that it is We, not Them, who are actually in charge.

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> line one

Chris Carter

The food sheriff

W

ho does the shopping at your place? OK, I’ll own like corn flakes, baked beans, chocolate, biscuits, Coke or Pepsi, up, I do...well the bulk of the supermarket stuff that ice cream, cat and dog food, etc., appear as regular as clockwork is, mainly because around twenty years back I worked as the Deals of the Week, to the point where smarter shoppers buy nights, whilst my wife worked the normal daily grind, enough when the price is right to carry them through to the next so it seemed pretty sensible for me to buy, and then trundle the cycle and they’re on special again. The fact is of course that very groceries home. Certainly over these last couple of decades I’ve little of the stuff that finds itself into your cavernous shopping learnt a lot, and indeed until I decided to actually write some of trundler is a very good deal at all, the alleged special savings, plus these things down I hadn’t realised what a broad picture of the other supposed bargains are more than compensated for by the New Zealand scene could be gained by the relatively hum-drum small, incremental amounts of price creep on most of the other experience of doing the shopping. stuff you’re about to cart off to the checkout!

Like many other people over a fairly long period, depending You will have noticed how it is now common to show on your on how the finances happened to be at the time, this has mostly checkout receipt how much it is that you have just saved... this dictated where the Carter’s food budget has been spent. Also it would impress me a whole lot more if another total showed the quickly became fairly obvious that apart from leader line specials, amount that price rises over the last week have just cost you as regardless of which big supermarket you currently favoured, buying well. Then of course there is that wonderful fuel discount voucher either meat or vegetables there would also largely guarantee that that varies between 4 cents per litre through to, I noticed a couple your pocket would be picked! of days back, right up to 15 This aside, and let’s face it, not cents a litre no less. Great Just dive into the cupboard or the marketing, I originally everyone has a Mad Butcher or a good roadside veggie shop thought, until I stopped freezer, heaps of quick fire-together to consider the very real handy to gather up those bits and pieces of the weekly buy, likelihood as to how these we mostly appear to give our stuff there absolutely guaranteed to kinds of almost permanent business to the nearest convediscount/marketing comenient supermarket. I should turn an Ethiopian refugee into Fatty ons tend to simply distort, point out here that I’m talkequally permanently in this Arbuckle within three weeks! ing about the average shopper, case, the overall price strucnot so much those that graze ture of petrol at the pumps. on larks’ tongues in aspic or grain-fed zebra steaks or perhaps fol- Well let’s face it, who really is silly enough to believe that the tralow a dietary pattern prescribed by a sandal wearing and bearded ditionally grasping supermarket and oil company folk have all of 55kg guru! a sudden developed a bent towards philanthropy!

People who eat Weetbix, Marmite, Watties Baked Beans, butter, And then we come to the things that we see that really stand cheese, milk, eggs and stuff like that, despite the very best efforts of out, if we’re a bit nosey that is, as we check out the contents of the Government’s Food Police, are by far and away the main stream our fellow shoppers’ carts, as like sheep, we line up to actually pay and are the people that mostly I find myself shopping alongside, for all of the stuff we’ve managed to cram into the mini wheeled and I have to say they have taught me a lot. dumpster so thoughtfully provided. OK, given that observations First up, we have to recognise that essentially there is little real even after many years can only ever give general conclusions, it choice in where we can now do our food shopping. Woollies, still is blindingly obvious that by and large, folk two or three axe Foodtown and Countdown are each a part of the same Ocker- handles across the bum invariably eat enough in a week to feed a owned group. Progressive Enterprises, Pak n Save etc are the Kiwi Mugabe supporter for a year. Ye Gods, when are the nutty Health connection and essentially the other. To all intents and purposes Police going to wake up to the fact, that assuming the figures that each of these conglomerates stock pretty well the same prod- give us to believe that obesity is a major problem amongst poorer ucts, maintaining the illusion of competition by running weekly folk, is quite simply because they spend so much on filling their Specials that usually revolve around two or three dozen popular carcasses! Death by Mouth is keeping people poor, costing the products that appear to enjoy quite reasonable discounts. Things health system a bomb, and is probably a whole lot more addic22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

tive than owning your own personal P lab. But that’s the real fatties. But what about the bulk of us, with the word bulk being very much the operative term.

As a kid, most of my generation grew up with dad going to work and mum, after invariably walking up the road to the local grocers and struggling home with the doings, then set about to make bacon and eggs, snarlers and beans and the like for brekky, some peanut butter or Marmite and lettuce sammies for lunch, with a heap of veggies for dinner to go with meat of some kind or another. Maybe on a Friday a bit of fish, (the Mickey Doolans had a bit of influence here most likely), and then of course, come the weekend it was time to very seriously get the nose bag on with roasts, home made cakes etc and bags of real cream on just about everything. Thing is, that we didn’t just eat well, we ate bloody well, and yet, rich or relatively poor, Kiwis were as fit as a drover’s dog. So what’s changed in say the last thirty or forty years?

Well Mums, having been told to burn their bras and go and get a job, (forgetting that they already worked like hell running a household) did so. More money started to come into the household, Mum now working essentially two jobs and no longer had time to wander up the road to the grocers two or three times a week so she sorted out where she and dad would go, say once a week in the car to get the job done. Can get a whole lot more goodies into a car boot can’t you than you can struggle back with on foot eh! A bit later on mum reckons she should have her own car, or at the least get a driver’s licence, leading to a guy called Mr Ah Chee deciding to open up NZ’s first supermarket in Otahuhu. Well how convenient was this! Every thing you ever wanted or needed in the way of tucker under one roof, no walking, lots of canned and frozen stuff that’s easy cook...hell’s teeth, housewife’s heaven.

Could it be, however that in fact it was these seemingly unrelated social and economic changes that really have led to New Zealanders’ dietary habits literally going to hell in a hand cart, or perhaps more accurately, in a supermarket hand cart! Was it just coincidence, do you think, that it was over this same period of time that cooking classes were largely dropped from most school curriculums. The probable rational? Well, it became pretty sexist expecting only the chicks to be able to cook a decent meal. Let’s compromise, let’s not teach anyone to be able to cook or even understand what it is that goes into a good home cooked fam-

ily feed. Let’s get into chicken, rice and pasta with a bit on the side, (a kind of sauce that tries to make the inedible slightly less so), just takes around ten minutes to sling together and the family can fill up on pre-packaged munchies when the worms begin to wriggle a couple of hours later. Fresh meat and veggies, out of the question. Takes far too long to prepare and cook, the power bill is big enough as it is without switching on the oven, and the chips and Chinese frozen fish bits, complete with their free, bonus pharmaceutical enhancements will be done in the electric deep fryer in just a jiffy. Still feeling hungry? No worries at all. Just dive into the cupboard or the freezer, heaps of quick fire-together stuff there absolutely guaranteed to turn an Ethiopian refugee into Fatty Arbuckle within three weeks! And so it goes on, McDonalds and Burger King tucker being largely made up of ground beef, fresh buns with a bit of fresh lettuce and a couple of tomato slices, or even worse a pastry-clad bit of beef stew called a meat pie, this sort of food, the food police tell us, is the four lane highway to the nearest crematorium.

Just continue, (and most of us are equally guilty of this) filling our supermarket trolleys with stuff that the food police seem to love us to eat and fully approve of. Of course none of this crap really fills us up so we end up buying more and more of it, finally developing eating habits that wouldn’t be out of place at an Animal House pizza eating contest. Costs more, we eat more, we’re getting fat as pigs and the hospitals are so overloaded unless you’re a Cabinet Minister in need of a stomach staple then just forget it.

So where does all of this leave us? Well in deep fertiliser I would think. Ordinary people, who have the time, and who know how to cook properly satisfying and healthy meals, can probably no longer afford to buy the really fresh ingredients. So we’ll probably have to stick with buying the stuff that no self respecting Blue and White, Marriots, or early Four Square grocer would have allowed into his shop. Egged on, of course, by politicians who I suspect have come up with a cunning plan...Convince the most of us that following the advice of their various food police agencies will be the true path to “Wellness”, when in fact the real aim is to balloon us all out so that we turn up our toes a couple of decades sooner, at which point, Superannuation no longer presents any real problem! Bon appetit!

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

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 23

> soapbox

Allison Ewing

Global warming, or global government?

24 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

Contributions to Soapbox may be emailed to editorial@investigatemagazine.com

T

here is much suspicion surrounding the climate change Something very fundamental happens when the powerful are debate of doom. Over the last few years the working titles given an overwhelming amount of money – they get more powhave been altered to combat the evidence of world criti- erful and become entrenched. If money keeps flowing, their sole cism and keep alive the fear factor of a great scheme to goal of power will be reached – that is, they will achieve ultimate produce a world tax. control. Control is absolute dominance along with a belief that Generating a world tax will result in an accumulation of billions ‘our way is best for all mankind’. In reality, the offshoot of this and billions of dollars. Has anyone asked, Where will this money is that the common man loses his freedom of choice to decide go? Who will hold the purse strings? How much money will be his own fate. able to be made by coattail schemers? Is there anybody out there There is always more than one entrant in a race, and it is no discussing this economic phenomenon? How is it that the world different for a race for the seat of world dominance. All entrants has been kept arguing about the same specific subject without pro- are well versed and practiced in political jousting, and in biding gressing to the next level, which focuses on the money angle? their time until the crucial move.

Control of this tax may be headed for the United Nations – a It’s taken successive governments of the world’s nations a long group of unelected people about whom very little is known, least of time to scheme – and longer to make it all come together and all all their agendas, hidden or otherwise. Some describe the UN as a appear convincing. They know that we will believe in anything that weak and ineffectual organisation; some maintain it’s just a global might even remotely harm our planet – so long as it is shrouded in political party. One thing is science, and if we are given for sure – this tax has been meaningful jobs to attend Democracy – that is, the will of invented for a reason, accomto at the coalface. Our panied by a skilfully designed innate desire to defend our the people – is in fact a myth, alive world political ploy. offspring or future generThe reason is the familiar ations will make us come only in voter’s heads. It is what we on board. The other main fear of what might befall the whole world if no one takes convincer is the opportuare told to believe we have control of all nations, and nity to make money – with stops all inhumane behaviour or without any moral code. by regulating thought and speech.

One could say that ‘sure bets’ have been skilfully served up to the Global control by one world body would today be further advanced unsuspecting multitudes. if it weren’t for a lack of money. No world body has ever been able to Change is often slow and insidious. Looking back over past convince the countries of the world to contribute or donate enough years, a series of things have happened that the public did not money to gain that body’s full dominance. Hence, in the case of ‘over­ have a part in or weren’t advised of their true nature or outcome. heating the globe’, the master plan includes the intriguing need and Government representatives and bureaucratic workers continue vital importance of ‘penalties’ for non-compliance, while some can to go overseas for yet another trip and meeting, ad infinitum, and maintain or increase their levels of pollution and not be taxed. another year rolls by.

The thought of a global government doesn’t exist in most peoWorld body committees sanction their control by giving out ple’s minds, mainly because they haven’t thought about it. Or screeds of endless laws known as ‘treaties’. Each treaty is a develthey assume that their government is incompetent, and that they opment based on and developed, its relentless progression being can always control the parliaments of the world by voting them masked by each new treaty, which appears as if it stands alone. in and out of power. The error of this thinking is in not realising Great waffle is written on these numerous new treaties and they that politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats – all hell bent on power spawn research projects, and their aims and reasons given as to – invariably stay in the loop. They have no intention of leaving why they should be ratified in quick succession. As each is signed, their lifestyle of grazing on other people’s paddocks. What a mag- the reality of what-is-to-be is sped up, while at the same time pubnificent stage Al Gore set himself: only a few years back, fame and lic interest wanes and governments are given ample space to get money deserted him, but with the Globe’s climate fluctuations (as on with it. Accumulative knowledge of such events – if it ever is it always has done) world success could be his. accumulated – by the masses, fades along with public awareness

No world body has ever been able to convince the countries of the world to contribute or donate enough money to gain that body’s full dominance

of the on-going process, while at the same time there is a firming up of ultimate government control.

There has for some time been an agenda under way to change New Zealand. Some of the political parties now really do appear all too similar – they beat the same drum. The 1940’s Labour Party has morphed itself into a party designed on the dream of global power.

Governments often have agendas, loyalties, and aspirations that they are reticent to share with the public. Their aims are hidden. So what control does the public have against this? At the same time, what increasing control does the government have over the nation?

Taxpayer money is seldom used to educate the populous on the real happenings of government; it is far more cost effective to keep people in the dark, or to squirt oil at a minority’s squeak.

Maybe the question for New Zealand should be: Why is it that our socialist, centralist, controlling government has been more eager than others to ratify and sign off the various treaties without first prompting honest education and engaging in meaningful open public discussion on each one?

Democracy – that is, the will of the people – is in fact a myth, alive only in voter’s heads. It is what we are told to believe we have. So often the public is given something completely irrelevant to chew on: an erroneous red herring, so that what is surreptitiously underway is not impeded. The public is very good at venting notions, emotions and a few good facts but the outcome is often the same: not much. And, regardless of what it is, it soon blows over and is forgotten by all (except the bureaucrats who rely

on this very outcome). One would think that by now the public should have wised up to the repetition of these games politicians play, but it is obvious that other manipulating moulding schemes of political correctness have taken hold. The decoy of the diet of celebrity icons, sport, violence, sex, and cooking lessons, has us all happily involved in other matters. Our media is a law unto itself and is hardly our watchdog unless – for its own reasons when its space is invaded by interfering government agents – we hear of something. Our police force when necessary is used to protect the government from its people’s physical show of displeasure.

When one revisits past years of governments, it is possible to see a thread of sequences; nothing ever happening by chance. It’s a matter of recognising and understanding what has been woven together and has then been tested (often in a bizarre way) in the public arena. This same line of events will eventually show where our nation is being led. We can be sure it will never be spelt out for us. A telling statement by Brock Chisholm – UN World Health Organisation – is a chilling reminder of things that are planned by others for us: “To achieve world government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individuality, their loyalty to family traditions, and their national identity.”

Throughout all history, the ultimate for man has been to control the entire world and all who live in it. If a scheme, however corrupt, to generate both the finances and the method of control can be laid down and signed off then there is only one question to ask: Who of all the world bodies will take the reins?

Allison Ewing is a Christchurch-based commentator.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 25

New Evidence A Breakthrough In The Jennifer Beard Homicide

26 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

A 38 year old “cold case” is back in the news as new information throws light on a possible suspect in the Jennifer Beard murder back in 1969. IAN WISHART has the exclusive story

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 27

I

n the words of the Bryan Adams song, it was the summer of ’69. Astronaut Neil Armstrong had just walked on the moon, and on the rugged West Coast of New Zealand an Australian schoolteacher was entering the final 24 hours of her life. Tuesday, December 30, 1969 had brought her to the foot of New Zealand’s southern alps. Tomorrow would be New Year’s Eve, 1970 was just over the horizon, and the attractive blonde in what witnesses described as “tight shorts” was preparing her pack for another day of hitch-hiking the following morning.

25 year old Jennifer Beard – born in England but working in Tasmania – had just checked into the Franz Josef Motor Camp.

Around her, the sounds of children playing as other carloads of families checked in for the evening.

But there are two others who arrived in tiny Franz Josef that evening whose movements would come to dominate the later police investigation. One was the man later admitted to be the prime suspect in Jennifer Beard’s murder, a Timaru man named Gordon Bray. The other was an itinerant worker known only as “Dave”.

Bray, at almost six foot tall with “a powerful build in the mould of a wrestler or a circus strongman”, according to journalist and author Mark Price in his book Getting Away With Murder, was a truck driver by trade and reasonably well known on the West Coast routes. This particular Christmas, his Austin A40 car had broken down at Tekapo and he’d been forced to abandon it along with some of his camping gear and clothes. Returning to Timaru, he purchased a 1954 Vauxhall Velox, blue in colour, and started his summer holiday drive all over again on December 29.

Arriving on the West Coast, Bray did not stop at the Franz itself, choosing instead to camp in the grounds of his regular haunt, a hotel named “The Forks” 18km north of the settlement. In other words, he didn’t spend the night at the same motel, or even the same town, as Jennifer Beard.

“Dave”, on the other hand, was a different kettle of fish. Close to the Franz Josef Motor Camp was a hostel run by Fay Percy, and catering mostly for workers employed by the Papanui Sawmill Company.

On the afternoon of December 30, a rough looking, possibly drunk, character calling himself “Dave” was knocking on the door of the sawmillers’ hostel, looking for a room for the night.

“His speech tended to be a little slurred and I thought he had difficulty standing up,” Percy later told police. “He was about 5 foot 6 inches in height and tended to be fat. His stomach protruded well over the top of his trousers.

“He was bald on top of his head with his hair receding at the sides. His hair was dark coloured with grey streaks. It was greased down to the sides of his head. It was not curly.”

In her police statement, Percy described Dave’s face as “roundish” and “weather-beaten”. There are a couple of other crucial pieces of evidence in Percy’s statement however. One is that “Dave” was driving a 1950s Vauxhall, coloured green.

“A dull green, cabbage green would best describe it. It was covered in dust … I can’t really recall anything else about the car except to sum it up as an old ‘bomb’, you know the sort of car you would expect young louts to run around in.”

Jennifer Beard was last seen alive in a green, 1950s Vauxhall Velox.

The second piece of evidence is that “Dave” had spent time in Invercargill, or so he said. Fay Percy detailed her conversations with him for police: 28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

“He then went on to talk about his having been camping but I can’t remember what exactly he said.

Man: I’m buggered. It seems that I have been driving for days and days. I’ve come up one coast and down the other. How long have you been here?

Me: A couple of months.

Man: Where do you come from?

Me: My parents live in Bluff and we have a house in Invercargill.

Man: I have worked and lived around Invercargill for a few years.

“I am not sure whether he said for years or for a few years,” Percy said in an aside to police. She added that he appeared to be looking for work in a sawmill, and she told him about a mill further south, in Haast. He replied that he’d worked in sawmills since he was 11.

“I must say that by his general appearance I believed him,” Percy is quoted in Mark Price’s book, Getting Away With Murder. The book also records that “Dave” wanted directions to the nearest hotel, and stated a preference for Southland beer to West Coast beer.

That hotel was the “Franz Josef ”, just opposite the motor camp where Jennifer Beard was staying. A man matching Dave’s description, with a “prominent” belly, was seen at the bar that evening, and Fay Percy positively identified him when she arrived to join her husband for a drink.

Dave had paid 60 cents for his room instead of the usual dollar, pleading poverty to Percy. So it was with an innkeeper’s cynical eye that she watched him slugging back drinks. It was the last she saw of him, however. When morning came, his car had gone.

That morning, New Year’s Eve, was to be the last day of Jennifer Beard’s life. At around 8.30am she was seen climbing into a car by Glenys Kindley, one of the women whose families had arrived at the motor camp the previous evening, and who had met Beard there.

“We’d had breakfast,” Kindley is quoted by Mark Price, “and we were all just going out of the camping ground gates and I saw her getting into this, I thought, green car, into a car. I saw her getting into the car with this guy and I said to [husband Don] ‘I don’t like the look of that guy. I don’t want her to get in that car’…It was an old car and I thought it was dark green. Sort of a green colour…It was just a feeling – ‘I don’t want her to get in that car’. And of course I started off on Don: ‘I don’t want her to get in there. I don’t want her to get in there. Look, she’s sitting in that old car over there, y’know. Don’t fancy that much’.”

Was it Dave’s green Vauxhall, the “old bomb” as Percy described it? We don’t know.

Many of the families were taking their kids to see the Fox Glacier, 24 k’s further south. At 10am, the McIlroy family, who’d also been at the camp, pulled into the Fox Glacier carpark. In front of them was what both Peter and Pauline McIlroy described to police as “a dark green” car having trouble starting, and Jennifer Beard was in it.

“I only noticed that it was a green coloured car and it was roughlooking,” Pauline McIlroy told police. McIlroy was also the only police witness to get a good look at the man driving the car, while he stood outside the vehicle.

“I only had a side view of him…His hair was dark and roughly combed. The hair was not short cut. I think that his hair was receding.”

Her statement to police guesstimated a height of 5’6” or 5’7”, and she added that the man had “a very large stomach. That is

the thing that I remember most. It was that noticeable that it took my eye.

He was not broad-shouldered. For a man with that size stomach I would have expected him to have broader shoulders.”

The McIlroys didn’t see the green car leave, but other families on the road south from the Franz Josef Motor Camp that day did catch up and overtake a green, mid 50s Vauxhall Velox with Jennifer Beard inside. Don Kindley described it as “mid green” with a dull finish and a 1954 Velox, when he saw it in the vicinity of Lake Paringa, halfway between Fox and Haast to the south. Pauline McIlroy, not far behind in the convoy, also caught up to the Velox there and made her last sighting of Jennifer Beard.

“She was sitting in the front seat of the car.”

The Vauxhall was only going around 40 mph (70 km/h) according to the witnesses, whose own vehicles were cruising at up to 70 mph (116 km/h).

Both the McIlroys and the Kindleys overtook the Velox, but a few k’s further south they came across a minor car accident and stopped to assist. While they were helping, the Velox lumbered into view and stopped before reaching the accident scene after being waved down by two teenagers who’d been passengers in the car that crashed. Sixteen year old Pamela Wildbore told police “I knew that it was a Vauxhall because my old boyfriend owned one. The colour of the car was dark green. It was in rough condition.”

The other teen, 14 year old Stephen Bailey, also confirmed it was a green Vauxhall, and both claimed to have seen patches of primer paint on the car. Pamela Wildbore saw a man and woman in the car. The driver got out briefly and exchanged a few words, but drove off after hearing no one had been seriously hurt.

Both teens described him as around the 5’11 or six foot mark. Heights are a difficult thing to get right in witness statements, because the heights of the witnesses can add nuances to their own perceptions of other people.

As the Velox drove off, Glenys Kindley recognized Jennifer Beard in the front passenger seat. The Kindleys caught up with the Velox and overtook it further south at Lake Moeraki – the last time Beard was seen alive. Don Kindley told police the driver appeared to be chatting Beard up, and Glenys remembers Beard did not look impressed. She also remarked, again, on “how rough the car was”,

“Jennifer Baird spent New Year’s Eve mostly naked, alone and very dead on the riverbank below the Haast River bridge’s northern end. It would be three summer weeks before her decomposed body was discovered” INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 29

A family pause at Fox Glacier to admire the view, 1970. Jennifer Beard and her killer stopped here as well on December 31st, 1969.

and Don Kindley told police he remembered his wife turning to him and remarking, “What an evil looking bugger he is”.

That was the last any of the Franz Josef camp families saw of the Velox. The story is picked up by a family heading north, who came across the massive Haast River bridge at 1.30pm. When the Crossan family reached the northern end of the bridge (ie, the other side), they saw a green Vauxhall Velox parked in the rest area carpark with its bonnet up, and a man tinkering with the engine. Being good, honest kiwi folk in 1969, the Crossans stopped to offer help.

B

ill Crossan’s police statement says the Vauxhall driver asked if he knew anything about gearboxes. Crossan replied that while he wasn’t a mechanic, he was familiar with cars. A spring in the gearbox linkage had broken and the car was having difficulty changing gears. Crossan and his teenage son Peter assisted, and eventually makeshift repairs were completed.

Another car, driven by the Wadsworth family, arrived on the scene just as the green Vauxhall Velox sped off in a hail of gravel.

Although neither family realized, Jennifer Beard’s body was just metres away from them, directly under the bridge. Both the Crossans and the Wadsworths continued heading north, while the Velox disappeared across the bridge heading south.

Another family stopped in the rest area a little later and their eight year old daughter went to relieve herself on the riverbank. She came 30 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

back up and told her mum there was a woman lying on the gravel with “no clothes on” and she looked “asleep”. The child’s parents, fearing their daughter had interrupted a lover’s tryst, bundled their daughter into the car and drove off. Jennifer Baird spent New Year’s Eve mostly naked, alone and very dead on the riverbank below the Haast River bridge’s northern end. It would be three summer weeks before her decomposed body was discovered.

THE MAIN POLICE SUSPECT Although Jennifer Beard was reported missing on January 9 when she failed to rendezvous with her boyfriend in Milford Sound, her disappearance did not hit the media until Tuesday January 13. That was when Glenys Kindley picked up a paper, saw Beard’s photo, and contacted police. The hunt was on. Police collected separate statements from a number of the witnesses detailed above, and all talked about the green Vauxhall. For their own reasons, police initially chose not to release that information publicly. In turn, this means the initial witness reports are unlikely to have been tainted by later media reports.

Police widened their appeal for anybody who had been on the road between Wanaka in the south to Franz Josef in the north to come forward. One of those to respond to the plea was Timaru man Gordon Bray, who’d been holidaying at The Forks 18 km north of Franz Josef. Bray jumped in his blue Vauxhall Velox and drove to the Timaru police station. According to police records,

Examples of 1954 Vauxhall Veloxes

the initial statement they took suggested he had not seen any hitchhikers on the coast side of the southern alps. When police search inquiry head Emmett Mitten read this it struck him as strange, given the number of hitchhikers on the road, and he flagged Bray as worthy of further attention.

As anyone who has ever given a police statement can testify, however, answers to questions can depend entirely on the direction the police officer is leading them, and how much the transcribing cop edits the answers. He might have asked whether Bray had seen any lone, blonde female hitchhikers, but recorded the question more generally. This indeed seems to have been the case because when asked to give a more detailed statement the following day, Bray wrote that he’d seen a number of hikers, either in

couples or groups, “but I did not see a solitary girl hitchhiker. I gave two lots of hitchhikers a ride.”

Those two included Christchurch man Dave Viney, and a couple of young women. All reached their destinations safely with Bray.

Mitten’s attention was again drawn to Bray when police interviewed management at The Forks Hotel and discovered Bray had stayed there.

On January 19, the country’s newspapers confirmed for the first time that police were looking for a mid 1950s green Vauxhall Velox and its driver. It was that description that tweaked the memory of Bill Crossan and his efforts helping the driver of a green Vauxhall at the Haast river bridge three weeks earlier. He told police, who immediately dispatched a search team to the area. A short time later, the body of schoolteacher Jennifer Beard was found.

The following day, as part of routine inquiries, detectives spoke to mechanic Ian Milner at the Fox Glacier garage. Milner told them of a man driving a “dark blue” 1954 Vauxhall Velox who stopped in on New Year’s Eve at 3pm for repairs to his gear linkage. This was the first time anyone had talked about a “blue” Velox, but it was significant to police because Gordon Bray’s 1954 Velox was coloured blue.

However, Milner, like some of the earlier witnesses, recalls the car being in rough condition with patches of primer paint.

“I remember some aluminium colour being on the car somewhere. This could have been on the wheels or the bumper, or it could have been patches of K16 on the sides of the car.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 31

Another mechanic, at the Whataroa garage about 50 kilometres north of the Fox Glacier, and about 175 kms north of the Haast bridge, told police he recalled working on a 1955 Vauxhall Velox with patches of grey primer paint, and gear linkage problems. He couldn’t recall the car’s main colour, but gave a similar description of the driver to Milner’s: both men recalled he had fairish, greying hair, about 5’8 with a largish stomach.

When police seized Bray’s car for testing, however, they found no patches of primer paint, and no forensic evidence linking it to Jennifer Beard – no hairs, nothing.

As police murder inquiry head Emmett Mitten told journalist Mark Price: “The car we had described to us was very dirty and rough…

When we saw [Bray’s] car it was very clean and polished and shiny and certainly didn’t look like the type of car that had been described to us.”

When police paraded Bray’s Vauxhall in a lineup for the witnesses to choose from, no-one picked the blue Vauxhall as the car they had seen Jennifer Beard in, not even the Crossans who had worked on the mystery Vauxhall for 15 minutes at the Haast bridge.

“The car we saw at Timaru [at the identification parade] was definitely blue – almost a navy blue, royal blue, navy blue colour and the car we saw was definitely green,” eyewitness Peter Crossan told Mark Price for his book.

Could Bray have painted the car? Apparently not. Police found evidence that the Vauxhall had received a new blue paintjob shortly before Bray purchased it on Boxing Day 1969. Therefore it was blue throughout his West Coast trip, not green. And being a new paintjob, there were no primer patches.

But adding to the confusion is that Bray, by his own admission, did experience gear linkage problems with his Vauxhall. For the record, 1950s and 60’s Vauxhalls were notorious for strange mechanical faults – your humble scribe was a passenger in one Velox which suddenly lost one of its front wheels while driving past an Auckland police station in the 80s, and I owned another Vauxhall whose steering rod snapped in rush-hour traffic in downtown Auckland, bringing the car to a screeching halt with the front wheels pointing in different directions.

Is it possible that more than one 1950s Velox had gear linkage problems on the West Coast that summer? Indeed it may be so. Nearly 30,000 Vauxhall Veloxes were registered in NZ in 1969 from the relevant mid 1950s model run. Even a West Coast police officer owned a green Velox that had to be eliminated as a vehicle of interest. When Christchurch police put out a request for mid 50s Velox owners to come forward, more than 1,400 cars were lined up in streets around the Christchurch Central Police Station the next day!

Police put Gordon Bray himself in a lineup parade, but neither Pauline McIlroy or Glenys Kindley – the only two witnesses who definitely saw the suspect with Jennifer Beard – identified Bray as the driver of the green Velox. Nor were Bill or Peter Crossan, who’d been up close to the suspect when they helped fix his car, sure that Bray was the right man. They picked him based on his resemblance to the description, but not because he was definitely the man they remembered helping. For Peter Crossan, the clincher was Bray’s hairy back, because he remembered the man he helped also had a hairy lower back.

Police, after much agonizing, decided they did not have enough evidence to take Bray to trial.

And soHales the case has languished for the past 38 years. Gordon NZPA / Tim 32 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

Bray, the prime suspect, died in 2003, while 2005 saw the publication of Mark Price’s wrap-up of the case against Bray, based on the police files.

But one of the reasons police did not charge Bray with the murder was the existence of the mysterious “Dave”. It was clear Bray and Dave could not be the same man, but police never located Dave. The likelihood of a good defence lawyer being able to punch holes in the prosecution of Bray by pointing to another suspect was a risk police simply were not prepared to take.

Now, however, Investigate has obtained fresh information that may shed light on the possible identity of “Dave” – information that former top cop Emmett Mitten is stunned he was not told about at the time – even though Westport police were advised.

E

nter Gordon Watts. Now retired and living on the West Coast, back in the summer of 69 Watts was the manager of the Hardy and Thompson Sawmill at Westport. In 2005 there was a brief media flurry when Watts advised that one of his sawmill staff, a man identified only as “Ron” might have been Jennifer Beard’s killer. Today, we can take that story even further.

You’ll recall earlier in this article how “Dave” had turned up at a Franz Josef sawmillers’ hostel on December 30, 1969, driving a dusty, rough-looking green Vauxhall and claiming to be an experienced sawmiller. Dave’s description, including his potbelly, and his green car, more closely matched that of the man last seen with Jennifer Beard than Gordon Bray’s did.

In an interview with Investigate, Westport sawmill manager Gordon Watts says he’s personally convinced a sawmill worker now identified as “Ron Hunter” needs to be found and interviewed over his actions and movements around the time of Beard’s disappearance. Ron Hunter, he says, was a “broad, stocky chap, about 5’6 to 5’8, with receding hair at the front, and a pot belly”.

“I was the manager of Hardy and Thompsons Sawmill. He worked for me. I reported this to the police in Westport and they took no notice of me, they said, ‘oh no, it’s not him’. The next thing, the [identikit] photo came out and our mill was the first on the paper run. His photo was on the front page and the next thing he was gone.

“The paper came in, I saw him. You see, when I heard the mill close down in early in the afternoon I thought, ‘that’s bloody funny, what’s wrong?’ I thought maybe there’d been a power failure, so I went out to have a look.”

When he got to the machinery that Ron Hunter had been manning, other staff relayed the sequence of events.

“The guys told me ‘he’s gone, Gordon, he’s vanished!’”

According to the Westport News newspaper, the identikit photo that caused Ron Hunter to flee was published on January 30, 1970.

Somebody else in town had evidently recognized Hunter and contacted police, because four police cars swooped on the mill within an hour of Hunter’s disappearance.

Ron Hunter had fled so fast he didn’t even bother collecting two weeks’ cash wages owed to him – a point mill manager made to Westport Police officers when they arrived. Investigate asked if Watts had rung the police himself on this occasion: “No, they came looking for him. Because I’d told them a week earlier that he worked for me, so they knew where to find him.

“I told them they were too late, he’d gone. They asked ‘where?’ “ ‘Could be anywhere’, I said, because we had huts up in the

bush in different areas, and I said, ‘he could have gone up there because he’s been up there before’, and I said, ‘he could see you coming. We’ve got clothes up there so he could dress up, walk down the road, catch a bloody bus and you’ll never know’.

“It was definitely him, that photo, yeah. And he never got paid his wages. He just buggered off.”

Gordon Watts is angry that police didn’t take him seriously when he first fingered Hunter as a possible suspect in Beard’s murder. This took place a week before the identikit was published, and it was sparked by the fact that Ron Hunter owned a green Vauxhall Velox, and he had earlier remarked [before anyone knew about Beard’s disappearance] about being in the Haast area over New Year.

“I reported him when he first started there,” says Watts, “because he told me at one point he’d been down the Haast, down that area, and we put two and two together, so my employee who’s just died recently went down to the Westport cop station and reported it, and they said, ‘Oh no, you’d be wrong, you’ve got the story wrong’. They said ‘no, it’s not him, this chap in Timaru is the suspect, not him’. So I just dropped it. They didn’t take a statement off us or anything.”

Instead, Gordon Watts and his second in command decided to do some snooping of their own.

“There’s a chappie, the one who’s dead now, one of my staff, but we went round and found him living on the beach a bit further along, and we saw the car parked in by the trees and we

tried to get closer to get the number, but he had a bloody dog and the dog barked, and he yelled out, ‘If you buggers don’t eff off I’ll shoot ya!’

“So what do we do? We had to back off, back away.”

As an itinerant of no fixed abode, Hunter simply hut-hopped.

Surprisingly, there’s no record of these incidents in Mark Price’s book, nor is there any record that Westport Police alerted murder inquiry boss Emmett Mitten about the extremely suspicious behavior of a green Vauxhall Velox-driving itinerant sawmiller doing a runner when the identikit picture was published in January 1970.

“If what you are telling me is true,” Mitten told Investigate from his Christchurch home this month, “I would be stunned and disappointed that this information was investigated by local police but not passed on to me. This is the first I’ve heard of this incident. Ever.”

Of mill manager Gordon Watts’ positive identification of his new employee Ron Hunter as the man in the identikit picture, former Deputy Police Commissioner Emmett Mitten virtually explodes down the phone: “That makes more than just a casual observation, that’s a valid observation!”

And the fact that the man owned a green Velox, had been down in Haast at the relevant time, had done a runner when the photo came out, had failed to collect a fortnight’s wages, and had threatened to shoot anyone who tried to see his car – how does Mitten react to that?

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 33

“Well I tell you what, if we were back in January 1970 and you phoned me and gave me that story, I’d be very, very excited. Like I said, if it’s true, then I’m hugely disappointed if these things happened and nothing was done about it.”

Such information should have come direct to him, immediately.

“With the way that inquiry went, anybody with a green Velox rated more than a cursory glance. Nine times out of ten it would end up close to me, with senior staff coming to talk to me about it. In virtually no case would a possible suspect who had a green Velox have been written off by the local cop without taking it any further.”

And yet, here in June 2008, this former top cop sounds shaken as the realization dawns that Westport Police may have had Jennifer Beard’s killer within their grasp, and failed to tell him or other senior staff about it because they assumed Gordon Bray was the main suspect.

“I’ve got absolutely no knowledge of any of the actors [Hunter or Watts] in this,” laments Mitten. “The hard part now is, who is Ron? There were something like 50,000 people interviewed for that inquiry.”

While the Westport News report in 2005 named the suspect only as “Ron”, former mill staff were quick to confirm his last name was “Hunter”.

“I had a staff of about 20 working for me, and they all knew Ron Hunter,” growls Gordon Watts. “I can say it was him alright!

They saw him looking at the paper, looking at his photograph, bang, he was gone.”

According to Watts, Hunter is believed to have been born on the West Coast. Others we’ve spoken to claim he moved around the South Island taking seasonal work.

Investigate checked birth records for the 1930s. We found a “Ronald Hunter” born in Granity, near Westport, in 1936. We failed to locate him in the electoral rolls for the West Coast between 1956 and 1970, which could mean he was no longer living on the coast during that time, or alternatively that he didn’t bother registering to vote.

T

here is no evidence that this particular Ron Hunter is the one who worked at the mill, but if he is he would have been nearly 34 when Jennifer Beard was murdered.

Although that places him five to 15 years younger than the age estimates of the eyewitnesses, it is entirely possible that a weatherbeaten West Coast outdoorsman could look a decade older. Additionally, many men have already begun to go grey at the temples in their thirties, let alone suffer receding hairlines.

Watts believes Ron Hunter, who would be 72 this year, may still be alive and living in Australia.

“I’ve heard he turned up in Australia.”

Murder inquiry head Emmett Mitten says the new lead should be passed to Dunedin Police (current custodians of the Jennifer Beard “cold case” file), and he urges detectives not to get hung up on Gordon Bray all over again.

In a confusing tangent to the original investigation, detectives had found a singlet and trousers folded in the bush not far from Beard’s body. When they eventually examined the pockets of the trousers, they found a receipt belonging to Gordon Bray.

Slam dunk? Perhaps not. Firstly, the man with gearbox troubles on the Haast River bridge just minutes after Beard was murdered was definitely wearing trousers at the time, and when he 34 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

later popped into service stations. Secondly, if you were the killer, would you leave your clothes behind at the scene with a receipt bearing your name?

Even Crown lawyers, when they reviewed the file for prosecution purposes, felt it was more likely that someone had nicked some of Bray’s clothes from his abandoned vehicle.

“Whoever looks at the Beard murder has to put the Bray thing to one side,” says Mitten. “There were, I think, about four men who we could never establish a) that they existed and b) where they were. The scenario you painted about someone taking some of Bray’s clothing – that’s a point he raised as well, that someone could have taken clothes from the car he abandoned at Tekapo.”

But there’s more on a character named “Ron”, and his possible involvement in Beard’s death. Former West Coast possum trapper Dick Stacey remembers a man named “Ron” who he reported to police as a possible suspect. Ron used to have a green Vauxhall

Velox, but according to Stacey he got rid of it around the time of Beard’s disappearance, citing “gear change problems”. Stacey’s brother Rua has been quoted in a document provided to police on the case as recalling that this particular “Ron” talked about having problems with the Vauxhall down at Haast.

Dick Stacey says the surname “Hunter” doesn’t ring a bell with him, but the name “Ron” definitely does.

For Emmett Mitten, the testimony is tantalizing, but without a surname, not necessarily helpful.

“The other major problem you’re going to be confronted with here,” Mitten warns, “is so many of the witnesses have died.

Even in the police, many of those who worked on the case have passed on.”

A case in point may be the Dick Stacey testimony. While Stacey clearly remembers tipping off police in the company of a fellow possum trapper, he can’t remember the precise identity of

“In a confusing tangent to the original investigation, detectives had found a singlet and trousers folded in the bush not far from Beard’s body. When they eventually examined the pockets of the trousers, they found a receipt belonging to Gordon Bray”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 35

The 700 metre long Haast bridge in 1970. Jennifer Beard’s body was found at the northern end (right of picture), underneath the bridge

the hunting companion he did so with. One hunting buddy, “Boarhide” Templeton, is now deceased. The other, Vic Diack, wonders if Stacey is remembering another of their hunting buddies, Les Houghton from Invercargill, who was also in the Haast area in a green Vauxhall Velox around New Year 1970. Houghton was investigated and cleared by police.

“Les had a Vauxhall,” says Diack. “Les was just up there for the Christmas holidays, but I wasn’t with them when it happened.”

INVESTIGATE: So you didn’t go with Dick Stacey to make a statement to Invercargill police?

“No, no. Although the police did ring me. They wanted to know where Les Houghton was at the time. He had actually been at my house a couple of nights before he left to go up there, and they really questioned me where Houghton had been because it was a similar car to his. And I think Les did say to them, ‘If you want to find the body, look under the Haast Bridge’. It was just one of those things. We all thought that at the time.

“New Year’s Eve, I’m pretty sure Les spent with us down here at Invercargill. That’s what the police wanted to know.”

But there are differences in Diack and Stacey’s stories that suggest they may be talking about two different men. Stacey remembers “Ron” getting rid of his Vauxhall in strange circumstances and replacing it with an old Landrover. This was one of the things that made Stacey suspicious enough to walk into a police station.

Diack, on the other hand, says his mate Les Houghton drove Vauxhalls until the bitter end.

“He never owned a Landrover, no.”

36 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

But Diack adds to the mystery by confirming he remembers the name Ron Hunter: “I’ve heard the name, but I don’t really know the guy. I have heard that name, Ron Hunter. I couldn’t put a face to him, but I have heard the name.”

Diack, Stacey and Houghton all hailed from Invercargill where they had seasonal work at the Alliance Freezing Works. They travelled to the West Coast on the off-seasons.

Police witness Fay Percy – who told of a mystery Vauxhall driver named “Dave” – says her suspect was an experienced sawmiller who’d spent a lot of time around Invercargill. Gordon Watts, the Hardy and Thompson Sawmill manager, says the Ron Hunter he hired was an experienced sawmiller.

The task of locating Ron Hunter now falls with the current police force, but Emmett Mitten agrees it will be a tough job.

“If anybody’s looking at anyone, you’ve got to take 38 years off the person you’re looking at. And as you will well know from interviewing people, witnesses are notorious for having different versions.”

It’s important to remember that locating a Ron Hunter who was on the West Coast in December 1969/January 1970 does not prove that he is definitely involved in Beard’s death. Nonetheless, finding the Ron Hunter who was the spitting image of the identikit photo, and who drove a green Velox, and who fled the area immediately, could be the breakthrough police have waited 38 years for.

If you have any information on the whereabouts of this particular Ron Hunter, please email confidential@investigatemagazine.tv n

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ALONG CAME A SPIDER… Can the small parties survive this election, and do they deserve to?

I

f necessity is the Mother of Invention, then the politics of desperation is the mother of Invention’s evil twin, MMP. At the end of the turbulent 1980s, a shell-shocked electorate booted a Labour government with Helen Clark in the no. 2 spot out of office in a thumping so brutal that leader Mike Moore joked he could hold his caucus meeting in a phone booth.

They were the good old days of First Past the Post, an electoral system that required a political party to win a simple majority of electorate seats if it wanted to form a Government. Although coalitions were possible, generally small parties were unlikely to be popular enough in a single electorate to actually win a seat in parliament. The most recent exception to that rule had been Social Credit, which managed to get leader Bruce Beetham and deputy Gary Knapp into the big house in the 1981 election, leaving Prime Minister Rob Muldoon with an uncomfortable one seat majority.

The experience of Labour’s blitzkrieg years (1984 – 1990) however caused widespread discontent that a party could obtain such power. The actions of Jim Bolger’s National Government, with Ruth Richardson’s black budgets of the early 90s, aggravated the situation so much that when a promised referendum on electoral reform was held in 1993, MMP swept the field as the preferred option.

It was not, actually, the best option, but it was the easiest option for the average voter to understand. But the MMP system had been cunningly designed for post-war Germany, so as to prevent the rise of another Hitler. The idea was to force coalitions that left major parties without sufficient strength to make major changes.

38 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

This election could sound a death knell for New Zealand First and perhaps even the Greens. IAN WISHART looks at the challenges facing the minor parties and their records as they head into the election campaign from Hell

In theory, it could work well, but in practice the NZ experience has shown that a powerful leader can bribe small parties with sufficient lollies to make co-operation with the wider agenda a certainty.

This election, there is a very real danger that a coalition of minor parties could – if Labour is re-elected – entrench themselves virtually forever in parliament at the taxpayers’ expense, by voting in favour of Labour’s plans for taxpayer funding of existing political parties.

It was a similar coalition of self-interest that saw all the minor parties except Act and Maori supporting the government’s Electoral Finance Act. Armed now with regulations that give police the

NZPA

power to prosecute those who criticize politicians in election year, the prospect of those same parties getting taxpayer handouts instead of having to rely on membership donations is, some argue, a serious threat to democracy.

If political parties are no longer accountable to their members, and can survive by imposing extra taxes on voters, and if the rules are rigged so that new political parties get no funding and are not allowed to fundraise themselves, you can see how New Zealand could end up with its current style of parliament for a very long time.

The vulnerability of NZ First and the Greens is that neither

party holds an electorate seat. That means that all party votes cast for them this year will be wasted unless both parties each get more than 5% of the popular vote.

If voters decide they have had enough of MMP this year and throw their party votes behind National and Labour, both NZ First and the Greens could be the casualties.

So where are the minor parties placed, five months out from the election?

ACT Founded by Sir Roger Douglas in the mid 1990s, the Act party has INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM  July 2008  39

gone from feast to famine. Its first election, in 1996, saw it gain eight seats in the new MMP parliament. Despite a swing to Labour in 1999, the Act vote increased, giving it nine seats, which it held until the disastrous 2005 poll where it slumped to just two MPs, Rodney Hide and Heather Roy. In that time, party leader Richard Prebble stepped down, handing the reins to Rodney Hide, and Act was being cannibalized by National’s new leader, Don Brash.

As the closest thing to a Libertarian party in parliament, Act has tried to straddle a middle ground between the pure ideology of many of its supporters, and the pragmatic issues of national politics.

Realising the goose was cooked with poll ratings dropping below two percent, Hide made a concerted effort in 2005 to win the electorate seat of Epsom, and thus guarantee his party some representation.

Given the current electoral climate, Hide could hold the Epsom seat for a very long time, meaning no party vote for Act is wasted.

Every vote for Act counts. The reconciliation between Hide and party founder Sir Roger Douglas has seen the former Labour finance minister back on board and likely to get into parliament this election, which would add colour and a voice of experience to the Parliament.

Heather Roy, who famously completed a stint in the Army’s Territorials during this parliamentary term, is also likely to be back if Act’s vote holds up.

40 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

NZ FIRST The first real MMP party, NZ First was born out of leader Winston Peters’ struggle to get an inquiry into the bailout of the BNZ in the early 1990s. Attacked by his own colleagues in the National Government, Peters resigned and forced a by-election in his Tauranga seat, on the back of which his party commenced.

Such was the public anger in 1996 that NZ First gained 13% of the vote and 17 MPs in the House. It was also the popular Peters’ first brush with Black Widow Syndrome – the high probability of electoral doom for minor parties that throw their support behind unpopular governments.

After spending four years bagging National, NZ First ended up in coalition with the Bolger administration. Although he had never ruled out the possibility, Peters’ supporters had thought it highly unlikely that he would join the hated National government. For Peters it was about hammering out the best coalition deal that covered as many of his key policies as possible. It was also a recognition that Labour, whose leader Helen Clark was very unpopular personally, wasn’t in a strong enough position to govern even with NZ First’s support.

The collapse of NZ First’s coalition deal when Jenny Shipley toppled Prime Minister Jim Bolger spelt the end of NZ First’s dream run, and MP numbers were slashed from 17 to only five – and that only because Peters held his Tauranga seat by 63 votes.

During the first six years of Helen Clark’s Labour Government, NZ First stayed out of coalition and held the Government to account in the debating chamber. Ron Mark and then party president Doug Woollerton quickly gained reputations as heavy hitters – Mark’s background as an SAS soldier gave him a high profile on defence and law and order issues.

NZ First rebuilt and jumped back up to a 10% share of the vote in 2002, with 13 seats.

Unfortunately for Peters, Labour was so unpopular in the 2005 election that voters deserted Act and NZ First to help push a resurgent National Party over the line. In the end, Labour and National were locked in a drag race to victory in 2005 which National lost when the media accused it of involvement in the Exclusive Brethren leaflet drop.

Act, as we’ve already seen, was decimated and NZ First nearly halved its support, from 10% down to 5.7% on polling day. It scored only five seats in Parliament, with Peters himself losing his Tauranga electorate seat.

Regardless of the drubbing, NZ First opted to formally coalesce with another highly unpopular major party, promising support to Labour in return for some policy concessions and the Foreign Minister’s role for Peters. History will probably rate this as a major strategic bungle. Although Peters was trying to be pragmatic in the interests of political stability, it was a case of nailing NZ First colours firmly to the mast of a sinking Labour ship.

An analysis of political polls since 2005 by Canterbury political studies lecturer Therese Arsenau has shown Labour fluked its 2005 win in the face of falling support, and its support has continued to bleed away ever since. So too has support for parties associated with Labour.

Although NZ First can work with either of the major parties, its fate now lies entirely in the hands of voters, and given the now massive unpopularity of Labour, tactical voters appear to be likely to give their party votes to either National directly, or Act (because of its electorate seat), in order to ensure a change of government.

In other words, the circumstances that punished NZ First in 2005 have worsened, rather than improved. Peters, however, is an elder statesman on the NZ political scene. No sensible commentator would write off the possibility of a Lazarus-like resurrection and re-branding ahead of polling day.

UNITED FUTURE Like NZ First, Peter Dunne’s United Future party have often been referred to in parliament as “poodles” and “lap-dogs” of the Government. Dunne had already seen Black Widow Syndrome bite when his United party got savaged in the 1996 election after being National’s coalition partner. By virtue of his personal popularity Dunne hung onto his Ohariu electorate seat. It wasn’t until the 2002 election that Dunne got his real break in a televised election debate featuring a giant “worm”.

The worm measured audience reactions to statements by politicians during the debate, so when Dunne effectively told his squabbling colleagues to pull their heads in and start thinking about what voters wanted, naturally the audience gave his comments the thumbs-up and Dunne’s career was brought back from the brink. So much so that he went from zilch to nearly 7% of the vote and brought half a dozen MPs with him on the back of a family values message.

Dunne’s decision to use his newfound electoral power to support

an unpopular government was, like NZ First’s, a major strategic blunder. Public support for Dunne collapsed over the next three years, and he was left with only three MPs, including himself, in the 2005 poll. A further split within United Future over Dunne’s decision to vote in favour of banning smacking saw one of those MPs breakaway in an ill-fated bid to form a new political party.

United Future currently languishes around 1% in the polls and although no party vote is wasted Dunne is likely to suffer from the same anti-Labour backlash as NZ First.

THE GREENS Originally part of the Alliance Party, which collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2002 because of Black Widow Syndrome and its coalition with Labour, the Greens broke away prior to this and carved an independent niche. Although MPs like Sue Kedgley have been mostly motivated by genuine environmental and health issues, some of the Green MPs like Sue Bradford and Keith Locke have extreme left wing backgrounds. The party has made much of its integrity and the need for integrity in the electoral system, but it controversially decided to back Labour’s draconian Electoral Finance Act, and it also supported abolishing the Privy Council in favour of a government-appointed local Supreme Court – without the chance of a public referendum on the issue.

This month, the Greens have again controversially tried to stack the political deck by urging Maori Party voters to give the Greens INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 41

their party vote, which if they did so would create an undemocratic “overhang” in the MMP parliament – effectively giving the Left more seats than the number of party votes entitled them two. If put in practice, this could result in a return to power of a Labour-led coalition under Helen Clark yet again.

Kiwiblog commentator David Farrar slammed the Greens on his blog site for hypocrisy.

The Greens are also expected to support Labour’s plans for taxpayer funding of entrenched political parties, if Labour is reelected to power.

Languishing between four and seven percent in the political polls, the Greens risk annihilation if voters decide they can’t trust them to act democratically. The Greens may also suffer a backlash from parents who resent Sue Bradford’s Nanny State antismacking law.

On environmental issues the Greens have been largely outflanked: National now has its own green tinge, and Labour’s moves on climate change leave the Greens with little to campaign on except the degree of policy initiatives. Given that Labour desperately needs as many party votes as possible this election, Labour supporters who’ve toyed with the Greens in the past may well move their votes back to Labour.

Again, it would be an unwise political commentator who wrote the Greens off at this point of the electoral cycle, but as voters begin to think about how they vote strategically this year, the Greens are, like NZ First, utterly vulnerable because of their lack of an electorate seat. The departure of moderate co-leader Jeanette 42 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

Fitzsimons after this election raises the prospect of more radical voices gaining control after the vote.

THE MAORI PARTY Maori party co-leader Tariana Turia has come a long way since the bad old days of being made to slink past reporters by lying down in the back of a car on Helen Clark’s orders. Never afraid to paddle her own waka, Turia has earned considerable kudos for steering a largely commonsense line. The Maori Party refused to go into coalition with Labour and has avoided the Black Widow Syndrome because of that. By staying true to its principles, the party has earned the respect of Maori and Pakeha voters alike. So much so that some commentators have even speculated on the possibility of an “understanding” between National and the Maori Party.

The Maori Party shares a pro-business (studies have shown Maori people are some of the most effective entrepreneurs in the world) and pro-family worldview, whilst stridently arguing for stronger Treaty rights.

Not strictly an MMP party, Maori’s success has come from winning the Maori electorate seats, and given Labour’s poll collapse Maori is expected to make a clean sweep this election.

Like the Greens, however, the Maori Party suffers from a perception that radical voices may gain the upper hand. MPs like Hone Harawira and Te Ururoa Flavell have been outspoken. On the other hand, many voters and commentators have become used to the Maori Party’s unique position and perspectives, even if somewhat controversially voiced on occasion. n

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ESSAY

Exposing the climate change doomsayers

With all but one political party considering crippling legislation in a bid to avert supposed dire consequences of climate change, politicians and taxpayers alike need to be aware of the shonky science and shady politics used to foist climate alarmism upon the world, argues MIKE BUTLER

44  INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM  July 2008

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 45

W

ith an election looming, and up to 27 points behind in political polls, the Clark government is pushing ahead with the costly Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill.

Reports by forecasters like Infometrics and the Institute of Economic Research predicted the emissions trading scheme will mean 22,000 jobs gone by 2012, wages down by $2.30 an hour by 2025 and a cost to households of $600 a year by 2012, rising to some $3000-$5000 a year by 2025, depending on the international carbon price.

Numerous submissions at select committee level have opposed the climate change bill on the basis of the high costs expected by various sectors of the economy. This article will show that any government effort to change the climate based on the assumptions of human-caused climate change should be opposed because the scientific basis is unproven, unsettled, and arguably wrong.

Disinformation masquerading as science has created a worrying mistaken consensus, as expressed in an editorial in the New Zealand Herald, that “the debate on global warming may have been won at a cerebral level, that “the weight of scientific opinion has to be accepted.” 1 How did the world get to this position? Scare-mongering reports from the United Nations, and former United States vice president Al Gore’s science fiction movie An Inconvenient Truth spring to mind. The beginnings of what may turn out to be the biggestever deception go back to the early 1970s.

The photo that changed the world The environmental movement can be traced to a symbolic event, the famous Whole Earth photograph taken by U.S. Apollo 17 astronaut Ronald Evans part way to the Moon in December, 1972, according to Canadians Dr Tim Ball and Tom Harris. 2 Dr. Ball, an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, and Tom Harris, an Ottawa-based mechanical engineer, both of who belong to the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, had published a series on global warming in the Canada Free Press, from January this year.

The Whole Earth photograph “became symbolic and changed how we viewed our planet and our relation to it,” they wrote. “While previously the idea that the Earth was small and finite and we could run out of resources was a philosophical concept appreciated only by a few, now everyone could see the image of our planet floating in a vast and hostile universe. Ronald Evans’ photo showed up in classrooms, school texts and at environmental conferences everywhere and had massive impact on the average citizen’s perspective of humanity’s place in nature.”

And so a whole new worldview, called “environmentalism”, was born. “Environmental extremists have successfully applied intense emotional pressure – both moral and political – ‘you don’t care about the planet, the children, or the future if you question us’, let alone disagree”, they wrote.

Many politicians are caught between understanding how environmental extremism poses a serious threat to our economies, and not wanting to be accused of not caring about the environment.

Radicals take over The political climate created by environmentalism could be exploited by those seeking a new world order and believe this 46 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

could be achieved by shutting down the industrialized nations.

Canadian oil and gas entrepreneur-turned-politician Maurice Strong is such a person. Born in 1929, in Manitoba, Strong is one of the world’s leading environmentalists. Secretary General of both the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which launched the world environment movement, and the 1992 Earth Summit, and first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Strong has played a critical role in globalizing the environmental movement. 3 Strong said in 1990 “What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?...In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?” 4 The method of this Westdespising radical, to bring about collapse, was to “show how one part of the industrial exhaust is causing catastrophic global warming putting the survival of the planet in jeopardy,” Ball wrote.5 He needed to advance the political agenda and provide the scientific evidence to provide legitimacy. He selected the United Nations as his vehicle to disseminate global warming ideology.

Strong’s links with the United Nations Organization started when he worked as a security officer in 1947, and resumed after 1966 when he returned as a Canadian delegate. He was appointed to convene the first major United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, and became the first Secretary General of the United Nations Environmental Program established in 1972.

A report Strong commissioned for the first UNEP conference and prepared by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos titled, “Only one Earth: The care and maintenance of a small planet”, became the first “state of the environment” report.

UN bodies biased The United Nations Environmental Program provided Strong a political platform. UN structures were designed to prove human CO2 was causing global warming. Out of the environmental

UN structures were designed to prove human CO2 was causing global warming.

program, and in conjunction with the World Meteorological Organization, a UN body established in 1950, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed in 1988 tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity.

Note, this panel focuses solely on climate change caused by human activity. The climate change panel does not carry out research, nor does it monitor climate or related phenomena. A main activity is publishing special reports. This is the group touted as the “consensus” on climate change research.

Like minds link together The United Nations-led environmentalist cause attracted a number of like-minded politicians, scientists, and bureaucrats. One of those was United States journalist turned congressman Al Gore, who held the first congressional hearings on toxic waste in 1978– 79, and hearings on global warming in the 1980s.

In 1990, as senator, Gore presided over a three-day conference with legislators from over 42 countries that sought to create a global Marshall Plan. His best-selling book, Earth in the Balance, published in 1992, advocated this plan, which would require the

wealthy nations to allocate money for transferring environmentally helpful technologies to the Third World and to help impoverished nations achieve a stable population and a new pattern of sustainable economic progress.

It was before one of Senator Gore’s committees in 1988 that the theory of global warming became part of the official record. James Hansen, who was director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and later went on to be Gore’s science adviser, appeared before Gore’s committee and said he was “99 percent” certain the Earth had warmed.

Hansen suggested the cause was likely an enhanced Greenhouse Effect due to human addition of CO2 from industrial activity – what was to become known as the anthropogenic global warming theory, an untested theory that was accepted as fact by the climate change panel.

Hansen has said that a global tipping point will be reached by 2016 if the human population is unable to reduce greenhouse gases.

There is a short clip in Gore’s 2006 sci-fi movie An Inconvenient Truth that shows Hansen being questioned by Gore on May 8, 1989, at what appears to be a Congress meeting. 6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 47

“It was before one of Senator Gore’s committees in 1988 that the theory of global warming became part of the official record. James Hansen, who was director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and later went on to be Gore’s science adviser, appeared before Gore’s committee and said he was “99 percent” certain the Earth had warmed”

The first co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sir John Houghton, who was lead editor of the first three reports, signaled the objectives were political and not scientific. He said, “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” 7 Houghton’s co-chair Bert Bolin, who Gore credits with creating the climate change panel, had a history of involvement in the politics of the environment. Both Bolin and Houghton signed the 1992 warning to humanity, essentially blaming the developed nations.

To establish a world-wide enforceable regime to reduce greenhouse gases that allegedly cause climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, 48 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

an international treaty which binds most developed nations to a cap and trade system, was agreed on December 11, 1997, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Kyoto.

The agreement has an opt-out clause. Under Article 27, any country can withdraw after three years of it coming into force.

Unscientific process “Science creates theories based on assumptions that are then tested by other scientists performing as sceptics,” Ball wrote. “The structure and

as the only credible authority thus further isolating those who raised questions,” Ball wrote.

Politicians control report

mandate of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was in direct contradiction to this scientific method. They set out to prove the theory rather than disprove it.” 8 Strong and his UN associates made sure the focus was on human-caused climate change with CO2 as the culprit.

Climate change was defined as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over considerable time periods.”

“The IPCC is a political organization and yet it is the sole basis of the claim of a scientific consensus on climate change. Consensus is neither a scientific fact nor important in science, but it is very important in politics,” Ball wrote.

There are 2500 members in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change divided between 600 in Working Group I, who examine the actual climate science, and 1900 in Working Groups II and III, who study “impacts, adaptation and vulnerability” and “mitigation of climate change” respectively. Of the 600 in Group I, 308 were independent reviewers, but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report.

“They accept without question the findings of Working Group I and assume warming due to humans is a certainty. In a circular argument typical of so much climate politics the work of the 1900 is listed as ‘proof ’ of human caused global warming. Through this they established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The manipulation of the contents of reports continues. The technical reports of the three working groups are set aside, and another group prepares a Summary for Policy Makers.

“A few scientists prepare a first draft, which is then reviewed by governments and a second draft is produced. Then a final report is hammered out as a compromise between the scientists and the individual government representatives,” Ball wrote. “It is claimed the scientists set the final summary content, but in reality governments set the form.”

The Summary for Policy Makers is released at least three months before the science report. Most of the scientists involved in the technical or science report see the summary for the first time when it is released to the public.

The time between the release of the summary and the release of the technical report is used to ensure it aligns with what the politicians and scientists have concluded. An instruction on climate change panel procedures says: “Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the working group or the panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the overview chapter.”

Ball notes that: “this is like an executive writing a summary and then having employees write a report that agrees with the summary.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and those who were chosen or chose to participate were locked in to a conclusion by the rules, regulations and procedures carefully crafted

by Maurice Strong. These predetermined the outcome – a situation in complete contradiction to the objectives and methods of science,” Ball wrote.

Critics marginalised “Scientists who dared to question the theory were derisively called sceptics and when this epithet didn’t stop them they were called deniers with its holocaust connotations,” Ball wrote. 9 Most of the so-called sceptics were well qualified but excluded.

One sceptic, Richard Lindzen, a Harvard-trained atmospheric physicist and professor of meteorology at MIT, participated hoping to have reasonable scientific input but eventually gave up.

“There’s little doubt, Lindzen said, that the IPCC process has become politicised to the point of uselessness.” 10 Lindzen said the climate change panel process “uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say; uses language that means different things to scientists and laymen; exploits public ignorance over quantitative matters; exploits what scientists can agree on while ignoring disagreements to support the global warming agenda; and exaggerates scientific accuracy and certainty and the authority of undistinguished scientists.” 11 Complaints about the manipulation soon emerged. The Wall Street Journal of June 12, 1996, contained an article by Professor Fredrik Seitz, the former chairman of the American Science Academy, identifying interference to raise the scare level. He pointed the finger at co-chair Bert Bolin over changes to the technical report to make it accommodate the statements and sentiments of the Summary for Policy Makers.

By 2001, when the climate change panel released its Third Assessment Report, an entire climate change industry had develINVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 49

oped round massive funding from government, supporting a large number of academic, political, and bureaucratic careers.

Environmentalists turned up the heat by claiming the 20th century, and especially the last decade of that century, had nine of the 10 warmest years in history. This warming was beyond anything previous, and therefore had to be unnatural.

The problem for these claims was that by that time hundreds of research papers from a wide variety of sources confirmed the existence of a period warmer than today just a thousand years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period. 12 This warm period negated the claims that the 20th century temperatures were unprecedented.

Hockey-stick graph discredited Climate change activists sought to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period by an incorrect graph of temperature readings taken over time that became known as the “hockey stick” graph. The name came from the shape of a graph that showed no temperature increase for 1000 years (the handle of a stick used in ice hockey) with a sudden rise in the 20th century (the blade).

The research that produced the hockey stick graph came from the reconstruction of past climates from tree ring data, known as dendroclimatology, with modern temperature data tacked on for the blade. “They incorrectly assumed tree rings are only a function of temperature and cherry-picked those trees that gave the desired result,” Ball wrote. 13 The hockey stick graph came from a study published in 1998 by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, known as MBH98, and was introduced in Chapter 2 of the Technical Report (produced by Working Group I). With Mann a lead author of the chapter and Bradley and Hughes contributing authors, the blatant conflict of interest was ignored. The hockey stick graph appeared as a major part of the Summary for Policymakers, again with Mann involved.

The graph appeared on the second page of the summary, stole the media limelight, and was reproduced in everything from National Geographic to government web sites.

When other scientists, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick tried, but failed, to reproduce the MBH98 findings, by using the same data and procedures to reproduce the original findings, a debate ensued with claims that McIntyre and McKitrick were wrong or not qualified climate experts. They countered that Mann had refused to disclose all the codes he used to achieve the results.

The US National Academy of Sciences appointed a committee chaired by Professor Edward Wegman, an eminent statistician, to investigate and arbitrate. Wegman found in favour of McIntyre and McKitrick, saying that because of the lack of full documentation of Mann, Bradley and Hughes’ data and computer code, the committee had not been able to reproduce their research, while they did successfully recapture similar results to those of McIntyre and McKitrick.

Wegman also concluded that “in our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.” 14

Temperature-increase claim unsupported A more insidious piece of “human signal” evidence in the 2001 Third Assessment Report was the claim by P.D. Jones, who was 50 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that the global average annual temperature increased 0.6°C ± 0.2°C in 130 years, Ball wrote. 15 Since the increase was beyond any natural increase, it was caused by humans,” Jones claimed.

Ball pointed out that the data is simply not adequate to make this conclusion.

“The first problem is the huge error factor of ± 0.2°C or 66 percent, which essentially makes the number meaningless. Imagine a political poll saying it was accurate plus or minus 33 percent,” he wrote.

In a replay of the hockey stick graph row, Jones’ results cannot be reproduced because Jones refuses to disclose which stations he used and how the data was adjusted, Ball wrote. 16 There are numerous problems with the global data many consider it impossible to calculate the global temperature. There are few records of 130 years. Most weather stations where data was collected are concentrated in eastern North America and Western Europe.

Whole continents were either excluded or represented by a single station. There are no measurements for the oceans, the forests, deserts, mountains, or polar regions. Most of the older stations are affected by the urban heat island effect, an artificial increase in temperatures as a city expands around a weather station. There is disagreement over how much adjustment is necessary.

There is disagreement for the temperature readings of given years. Two US authorities, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies produced different global annual averages for the year 2007. The Goddard Institute claimed it was the second warmest year on record while the latter said it was the seventh warmest year, both ostensibly using the same data, Ball wrote.

Gore’s science fiction movie An Inconvenient Truth incorrectly claimed that 1998 was the warmest year on record. An error was found in Goddard Institute data and when corrected made 1934 hottest year on record; 1921, became the third hottest year on record not 2006; three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940; Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred prior to 90 percent of the growth in human produced greenhouse gas emissions during the last century.

“If it was a genuine error then somebody should be fired, if it wasn’t there are more serious implications. Suspicions are raised by a pattern of ‘adjustments’ that make earlier years cooler thus making more recent years warmer,” Ball wrote.

Disinformation spread Climate doom disinformation was spread around the world with devastating effectiveness, to the point where the New Zealand Herald editorial could conclude that the debate on global warming may have been won at a cerebral level, that “the weight of scientific opinion has to be accepted.”

Although the climate change panel was the main driver of this propaganda, other agencies got on board as governments became more involved. Bureaucrats in each country were carefully selected from weather-related offices to serve on the climate change panel.

Politicians listen if they think there is a consensus, or if the issue can garner votes. But most politicians don’t understand climate science and, therefore, must rely on the hand-picked bureaucrats serving on the climate change panel. An unholy alliance developed between the climate change panel, governments, media, and environmental groups.

United Nations bodies seek to manipulate the policies of member nations in a variety of ways, including rewarding favoured behaviours. For instance, in January of this year, Prime Minister Helen Clark won the United Nations Environment Programme Champions of the Earth award in recognition of the government’s promotion of sustainability initiatives. 17 A further series of alarmist reports, from the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference, that took place in Bali, Indonesia, dominated headlines around the world for a couple of days last December. Negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol dominated that conference.

“Conference the world’s ‘last chance to avoid catastrophic global warming’”, the New Zealand Herald headline screamed. 18 “The WMO’s annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin shows that the amount of carbon dioxide – the main greenhouse gas, responsible for about two-thirds of man-made global warming, mainly released by burning fossil fuels – jumped by some 2 per cent last year, one of its sharpest-ever rises,” said the intro of that article.

The climate change panel’s report predicted that, “if present trends continue, harvests in much of Africa could be halved by 2020, the Amazon rainforest will turn to dry savannah, and the Greenland icecap will completely melt, raising sea levels worldwide by over 30ft.”

“The scientists are telling us that this is the world’s last shot at avoiding the worst consequences of global warming,” the Herald reported.

Expert criticism downplayed Opposition to the climate change panel’s agenda, in a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations signed by 103 eminent persons and released at the Bali conference, gained nowhere near the same level of coverage. 19 The letter said that “it is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages,” that “the IPCC’s conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity,” and that “the summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.”

“Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today’s computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20thcentury period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling,” the letter said.

NZ government position The NZ government position, according to David Parker, who is the Minister Responsible for Climate Change Issues, is that “prevention is cheaper than the cure. Taking no action to address climate change will be much more expensive than the costs of any actions we might be considering. Taking action now is like taking out an insurance policy for the future.” 20 On another page of that website, a coloured diagram of the earth, with New Zealand at the centre, repeats climate change panel propaganda. It shows an atmospheric mantle where “extra heat is kept in the air by greenhouse gases produced from human activity.”

Under the diagram are the assertions that: a. “The more greenhouse gases we emit, the thicker the gas blan-

ket, and the faster the world’s climate heats up. The result is more extreme weather events – floods, storms, cyclones, droughts and slips – and rising sea levels and coastal erosion.” b. “International scientists now agree the global climate is changing. It’s projected the world’s average temperature could rise by 0.2 degrees C per decade over the next two decades.”

If the theory of human-caused global warming remains an unproven hypothesis, and if the world’s average temperature has been shown to have fallen rather than increased, why does the government push the climate doom myth?

The climate-change hysteria is somewhat like the children’s story about the emperor with no clothes. At some stage, some politician has to have the guts to stand up to United Nations radicals, and various acolytes within this country, and declare that since the global warming orthodoxy is unproven, unsettled, and arguably wrong, no New Zealand government is going to waste money or time on it.

A good policy for any effective political party would be to opt out of the Kyoto Protocol and focus on the numerous real problems we have here. n References: 1. “Carbon plan a hostage to politics”. New Zealand Herald, May 21, 2008. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/466/story.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10511431 2. Environmental extremism must be put in its place in the climate debate. Dr Tim Ball & Tom Harris. Wednesday, January 9, 2008 http://canadafreepress.com/index. php/article/1272 3. Maurice Strong. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Strong 4. How the world was misled about global warming and now climate change.

Dr Tim Ball. Monday, April 21, 2008, http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2704 5. Ibid 6. James Hansen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen 7. How UN structures were designed to prove human CO2 was causing global warming. Dr Tim Ball. Wednesday, April 30, 2008 http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2840 8. Ibid 9. Wreaking Havoc on Global Economies. Dr Tim Ball Monday, May 5, 2008 http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2925 10. IPCC report criticized by one of it’s lead authors. Heartland Institute. http://www. heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=1069 11. Wreaking Havoc on Global Economies. Dr Tim Ball. Monday, May 5, 2008 http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2925 12. Soon, W., and S. Baliunas, 2003. Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years. Climate Research, 23, 89–110.

13. Wreaking Havoc on Global Economies. Dr Tim Ball. Monday, May 5, 2008 http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2925 14. Ibid 15. The Unholy Alliance that manufactured Global Warming. Dr Tim Ball Wednesday, May 21, 2008 http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3151 16. Ibid 17. Helen Clark. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Clark 18. Conference the world’s ‘last chance to avoid catastrophic global warming’. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=244&objectid=10479613&pnu m=2 19. Don’t fight, adapt. National Post. http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story. html?id=164002 20. New Zealand Government Climate Change website http://www.climatechange. govt.nz/nz-challenge/nz-challenge.shtml

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Hear No Evil Images courtesy TV3

52 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

“You’re nicked, Guv’nor” – Dr Bill Sutch is arrested in Wellington after a clandestine meeting with a Russian KGB agent

Many journalists were quick to take the word of a lawyer that economist Bill Sutch’s security file contained nothing incriminating.

GRAEME HUNT wasn’t one of them

F

or years British civil libertarians and the old guard of the security establishment howled when people claimed Kim Philby was a Russian spy. Then one day, in early 1963, he defected to the Soviet Union.

The claims that he had warned the debauched Cambridge University traitors Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951 that they were about to be arrested for spying turned out to be true. Yet for 12 years Philby denied he was in the pay of the Russians and went on to do more damage to Western interests.

So it is with Dr Bill Sutch, the arrogant New Zealand economist caught handing a parcel to a Russian KGB officer in a Wellington park on a wet night in 1974.

The Left rallied around him then, and more than a generation later the apologists are still out in force.

The latest squawks of defence come from the Sutch family lawyer, John Edwards, who represents Sutch’s daughter Helen Sutch who, like her mother who died in December, can’t accept the fact that Bill Sutch was a spy.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 53

According to Edwards, there was nothing in Sutch’s partially expurgated security file released this month to suggest he was a spy. End of story. Sutch was right, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service was wrong – the great man’s reputation has at last been restored.

Actually it hasn’t, even though many in the media, including TV3 and Paul Holmes, ran with the Edwards line without bothering to read the SIS papers. It was spin of the worst kind.

In fact, the security file contained 47 distinct documents and there was also a separate report released by chief ombudsman Beverley Wakem – a formerly top-secret report of Sir Guy Powles’ investigation into the prosecution of Sutch.

The documents are riddled with accounts of Sutch’s associations with communists, fellow travellers and Russian officials and his involvement with a number of communist fringe organisations.

He was, according to the SIS, an “agent of influence”.

If specific allegations of spying are absent, the smell of treachery is all pervasive.

Sutch was, and will remain in my view, a Russian spy – prepared like his friend and fellow spy Ian Milner, and like the drunken diplomat Paddy Costello (also a spy), to enjoy the trappings of democratic society while working privately for one that was patently undemocratic.

The treachery in Sutch, Milner and Costello, and the various Marxists who inhabited the history and economics departments of our university colleges before World War II, is not that they believed in Joseph Stalin or the successes of Soviet constructivism but that they didn’t admit those beliefs.

T

he card-carrying members of the tiny Communist Party of New Zealand might have seemed like nutters (many were) but they were honest nutters who were prepared to suffer ritual humiliation, risk prosecution and even lose their jobs to fly the red flag.

Unlike Sutch and the other fellow travellers, they got their hands dirty. They tended to work on the coal mines, on ships, on the wharves, in the railways or as low-level carpenters and engineers. There was no Cambridge, Oxford of Columbia University for them They were industrial Marxists, excited by the words of Lenin (and sometimes Trotsky), converted to “scientific socialism” and imbued by public symbols of revolution (marches, red flags and the like).

Sutch, on the other hand, was the sort of man Lenin would have had shot on principle – superior and arrogant to the point of being elitist. Communist fellow traveller he might have been but man of the people he was not.

Sutch lived in relative luxury in his architect-designed and antique-filled Wellington house, despite his Marxian piety, long after he was forced to retire as secretary of industries and commerce in 1965. He worked as a highly paid consultant, earning an income several times that of the prime minister of the day but was not especially good at paying taxes. (One account, not as part of his security file, says he filed false tax returns from 1966–74, evading nearly $50,000 in tax – a huge sum for the times.)

But hypocrisy is not itself proof of traitorhood, though it tends to be a common ingredient.

The proof comes usually not from people being caught red-handed giving secrets to a foreign power, though Sutch was, or from confessions to the security services, but from the friends people keep, the organisations they’re involved in and the activities they embrace 54 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

early in the professional or academic lives.

That’s not to say that every student radical becomes a life-long radical – some go the other way – but political attitudes are generally shaped before a person reaches the age of 25.

Based on Sutch’s security file, Sutch’s life follows that pattern.

He was probably converted to the communist cause when he toured Russia in 1932 – a journey that would not have been possible without the approval and protection of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the dictator himself, Joseph Stalin.

In New Zealand, Sutch had many card-carrying communist friends including Rona Bailey, whose husband “Chip” Bailey was a leader in the communistinfluenced New Zealand Carpenters’ & Joiners’ Union and a key player in the 1951 waterfront dispute; Bill McAra, an organiser with the Carpenters’ & Joiners’ Union; the economist Wolfgang Rosenberg; and Jack Lewin, president of the New Zealand Public Service Association, who was a one-time Communist Party member and who became Sutch’s deputy at the Department of Industries and Commerce.

Ian Milner, named as a Russian spy by the Australian Royal Commission on Espionage in 1955, was probably recruited by Sutch to the Russian cause, though his conversion to Marxism came much earlier when he was at Canterbury College.

Sutch and Milner shared a common interest in various communist-influenced organisations such as the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Progressive Publishing Society and the Wellington Co-operative Book Society (Modern Books).

Sutch claimed to be a Fabian socialist but his interests extended to several communist fronts, notably the New Zealand branch of the Society for Closer Relations with Russia (the successor to the New Zealand branch of the Friends of the Soviet Union) and the New Zealand Peace Council.

Soviet KGB agent Dimitri Razgovorov is photographed fleeing a police/SIS sting that netted William Sutch [inset]

On the home front, Sutch’s first wife, teacher Morva Williams (1906–2002), whom he divorced in 1944, was a radical forbidding socialist, if not a communist. His second wife, Shirley Smith (1916–2007), was a lecturer and later barrister who at different times was a member of the communist parties of New Zealand and Great Britain and various communist fringe organisations. (Their daughter Helen is a strong-willed economist living in Wellington married to English-born author Dr Keith Ovenden.)

If Bill Sutch was guilty by association with communists, then the association was a pretty strong one. But his career was pitted with other tell-tale signs of treachery.

Some examples: • He was under “grave suspicion” for leaking secrets to a procommunist newspaper from a meeting in London of the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1937 he was attending with Finance Minister Walter Nash.

• He was active in a communist fringe organisation associated with the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Medical Aid Committee.

• He followed Communist Party of New Zealand line by initially opposing New Zealand’s involvement in World War II, turning a blind eye to the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Act INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 55

that carved up Poland in the first days of the war.

• He is said to have given official information to a prominent member of the Communist Party of New Zealand in 1940 when the party was seen as a potential enemy of the state.

• He was accused of being too close to the Russians when he was appointed secretary-general of the New Zealand delegation to the United Nations in 1948.

• He supported Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, though his wife, Shirley Smith, did not.

• His appointment as secretary of industries and commerce was delayed because of Special Branch concerns that he was a security risk. (It was only confirmed after Prime Minister Walter Nash assured the Americans Sutch would not be handling classified US material.)

• He was forced to retire as secretary of industries and commerce in 1965 because his views were out of step with public policy.

• He maintained close relations with officials at the Russian embassy in Wellington – one of the few non-diplomats to attend functions in the 1950s and 1960s to commemorate the Bolshevik Revolution.

• He attended three clandestine meetings with KGB officer Dimitri Razgovorov before his apprehension and arrest in Wellington in 1974 at a fourth meeting with Razgovorov.

Sutch’s most recent defenders, including Prime Minister Helen Clark, point to Sutch’s acquittal in 1975 as proof of his innocence but this is far from the truth. It was more a case of the Scottish verdict, “not proven”.

S

utch was charged under the 1951 Official Secrets Act with the offence of obtaining information for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state that was calculated, or that might be, or was intended to be, directly or indirectly, useful to an enemy.

The prosecution was approved by Attorney-General Martyn Finlay, who spent a weekend at his bach at Piha, west of Auckland, agonising over the file, including a five-page statement from Sutch, before giving it the green light. It was the first and only criminal prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Sutch was a formidable foe. Not only was his public standing as a retired civil servant unequalled but his wife, Shirley Smith, the daughter of a Supreme Court judge, was a formidable lawyer.

He also had the backing of liberal public opinion that was generally not supportive of the SIS. Sutch was unco-operative with the police –- he did not tell them anything – although his statement to Dr Finlay offered a halfbaked excuse for his actions. He claimed that Razgovorov wanted information about the Zionist movement in New Zealand, knowing Sutch was a member of the New Zealand–Israel Society.

In the statement Sutch stressed he had not been disloyal to New Zealand and realised he had been “naïve and stupid” in meeting the Russians (he claimed to be seeking information for his writings).

This did not sway Dr Finlay from doing his duty; there was a prima facie case to be answered – the view the magistrate at the depositions hearing in October 1974 also came to. Sutch pleaded not guilty to the charge and soon a gaggle of left-wingers from the media and academia were behind him. It was not the retired economist on trial but the SIS. The trial, before Justice David Beattie and an all-male jury, opened at the Supreme Court at Wellington in February 1975.

56 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

The case against Sutch was strong in terms of the law – he would struggle in court to explain his behaviour. In the event, Bill Sutch did not take the stand – he preferred to let the likes of Industries and Commerce Minister Phil Holloway (his political boss) and ombudsman (later chief ombudsman) Sir Guy Powles testify to his loyalty.

The defence case, led by criminal lawyer Mike Bungay, was based on the absence of the information Sutch was said to have passed to Razgovorov (that found its way to a waiting Soviet courier, legation “superintendent” Vitaly Pertsev).

Without the jury knowing what “secrets” Sutch had handed the Russian (or, indeed, whether New Zealand had any secrets to protect), it was unable to convict. Sutch walked out of the five-day trial a free man.

Seven months later he died of liver cancer.

The trial had thrown no light on why Sutch had behaved as he had. Why would a distinguished former public servant, social reformer and author decide to betray his country? It did not make sense – unless, of course, you took into account early blemishes in his career and had a look at some of the company he kept.

National Prime Minister Rob Muldoon had no doubt of Sutch’s guilt when he referred to the matter in his autobiography Muldoon in 1977 – he had reviewed Sutch’s full security file – but that served only to turn Sutch into a latter-day martyr.

So what information did Sutch pass on to Razgovorov? Possibly trade secrets but probably information about politicians, businesspeople, public servants and journalists that could help Soviet agents identify and influence prospective friends and embarrass foes. This is exactly the type of information some Australians had passed to the Russians in the 1950s and which was referred to in the Royal Commission on Espionage.

This information was much harder to obtain after “positive vetting” of New Zealand public servants was introduced in the early 1950s. Known members of the Communist Party were simply too

Because of the difficulties of proving espionage charges, police failed to secure a conviction against Sutch (centre)

risky for Soviet agents to enlist; fellow travellers and others sympathetic to the Soviet Union were better targets. As far as Russia’s enemies were concerned, information on sexual proclivities, hobbies and personal finances could be extremely helpful.

If you take the view that Sutch wasn’t a spy (not my view) but a man with earnestly held socialist convictions who kept company with the wrong people, he should still have not been promoted to high public office.

As secretary of industries and commerce, he was the country’s “economic czar” who locked New Zealand into the command economy when it should have been removing regulations, import controls and opening up the economy to competition. He was an economist, not a businessman, but he directed industrial develop-

ment, international marketing and maintained controls on industries as if he understood business.

These policies turned New Zealand into a country that brewer Douglas Myers once described as (communist) “Poland with sunshine”.

Sutch was not without talent but he should not have been appointed to the top job at the Industries and Commerce Department. His deputy after 1959, fellow Fabian and former communist Jack Lewin, was no better suited for the task.

Graeme Hunt is a freelance journalist and author of Spies and Revolutionaries: A History of New Zealand Subversion, published by Reed last year. It contains a chapter on Sutch and there are accounts of other New Zealand spies. n

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 57

WORLDBRIEF

Obama Vs

McCain the title fight of the decade

58 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

An Obama-McCain election season offers voters unprecedented study in contrasts, argues MARK SILVA

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 59

W

ASHINGTON – In their age, experience, race, faith in the power of government and views of a complex world, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain offer American voters one of the sharpest contrasts in candidates for the presidency in modern times, at least on a par with the Johnson-Goldwater and Reagan-Mondale elections.

The 2008 presidential campaign, without an incumbent president or vice president in the race, will play out against a backdrop of deep restiveness, polling shows, with the public overwhelmingly dismayed about the direction the nation is taking.

The public is clamoring for change, experts say. And both Obama, the Democratic junior senator from Illinois, and McCain, the Republican senior senator from Arizona, will try to capitalize on that appetite for a new course in American government.

Yet while these two contenders are in some ways courting the same voters – independent swing-voters who hold no allegiance to either party – they could hardly be more different. Both Obama and McCain are promising change, and the race may come down simply to whom voters believe and trust.

“I can’t think of anything in our era that comes close to this,” says Andrew Kohut, president of the Washington-based Pew Research Center. “They will bring people back to the fundamentals that ‘I am choosing a person. I am not choosing a party or a philosophy’ ... . It really comes down to the way that independent voters who are the least ideological look at these candidates and say, ‘Which agent of change am I most confident in?’ “ The contrast is stark: 1. Obama is a generation younger. If elected president, at age 47, he will be surpassed in youth only by Bill Clinton, 46 at his election; John Kennedy, who took office at 43; and Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest ever at 42. McCain, in contrast, would be the oldest president ever elected. He will be 72 in November, older than Ronald Reagan, who won in 1980 at age 68.

2. Obama is a first-term senator and relative newcomer on the stage of foreign affairs, McCain a fourth-termer who has taken many congressional tours abroad.

3. Obama, born of an African father and American mother, would be the first African American in the White House. McCain, from a long line of Scottish Presbyterians, is a third-generation graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, with ancestors who served in the Confederacy and one who served on the staff of Gen. George Washington.

4. McCain is a military veteran, with 22 years in the Navy, including 5 as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He is the son and grandson of admirals. Obama was a child during the Vietnam War and has never served in the military.

When it comes to policy, Obama opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq from the start, before election to the Senate in 2004.

McCain, while critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in its early stages, voted for the authorization of military force and supports the president’s strategy today.

Obama is open to negotiation with recalcitrant world leaders, such as the president of Iran, who is pursuing the enrichment of uranium contrary to U.S. insistence that he stop. McCain holds a hard line against negotiation, instead insisting that the U.S. should financially squeeze Iran.

Obama wants to offer universal health care for Americans, and is willing to raise taxes on the wealthiest citizens to help pay for a 60 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

costly new program. McCain, who voted against prescription drug benefits for the elderly under Medicare, warns against the expansion of government health care and vows to avert new taxes.

As citizens of the world, they share an awareness of foreign shores: Obama, son of a Kenyan, was born in Hawaii and raised for a time in Indonesia. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, and his family, he has written, was “rooted not in a location, but in the culture of the Navy.”

Past elections have certainly presented differences as well.

George H.W. Bush’s “read my lips” pledge of no new taxes, later broken, contrasted with Clinton’s vision of an expanding social safety net. Jimmy Carter’s insurgent candidacy confronted institutional Washington’s Gerald Ford. The purist conservatism of Barry Goldwater was on a collision course with Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” John Kennedy’s charisma ran up against Richard Nixon’s made-for-theater persona in a new age of telegenic appeal.

But arguably no race in modern times has presented a contrast as broad as that of the personal profiles of Obama and McCain, combined with their views on government at home and America’s involvement in a treacherous world.

McCain, vowing to restrain government spending, wants to extend the Bush tax cuts. Obama, proposing new spending for health care, wants to boost taxes on wealthier Americans. McCain pledges to prosecute the war in Iraq to a conclusive victory. Obama promises to bring troops home in 16 months.

“These two individuals represent about as stark a choice as we’ve ever had in American politics,” says Darrell West, professor of political science at Brown University. “Voters are going to get what Barry Goldwater long ago promised – ‘a choice instead of an echo.’ “ He added, “The biggest differences are age, race and philosophy ... Those are things that translate into different perspectives on public policy.”

Even their campaign styles seem to come from different worlds.

Obama electrifies large arenas, while McCain is far more comfortable in smaller gatherings. Possibly because of this, McCain challenged Obama to a series of 10 town-hall-style campaign debates.

“What we haven’t seen are these two candidates face-to-face with one another,” says David Lanoue, chairman of the political science department at the University of Alabama and author of “From Camelot to the Teflon President.” “Clearly, Obama is a very inspiring, eloquent speaker.... He is best behind a podium with a prepared speech. McCain is best in a person-to-person situation with no prepared remarks.”

“I think there is another dimension, and that is whether Barack Obama is seen as an elitist candidate,” says Herb Asher, professor of political science at Ohio State University. “McCain will try to wrap himself in the mantle of change, and present Obama as the agent of the wrong kind of change. ... It’s really going to be a chance for Barack Obama to fill in the rest of his biography.”

And the choice arrives at a time when Americans are unified in one thing: Their discontent.

Seven in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the state of the nation, the latest Pew Center survey has found, and 27 percent of those surveyed in mid-May voiced disapproval of the job President George W. Bush is doing.

“The fundamentals are certainly going in a Democratic direction,” Pew’s Kohut says. “But there are rather sharp sets of really well-defined positives and negatives for each of these candidates, which makes it a much closer race.” n

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 61

think life | money

KiwiSaver for the kids Peter Hensley explains why opening a KiwiSaver account for your children is a good thing Jim liked his tea strong and hot with just a dash of milk. Jim also liked Moira’s home baking and he was in for a treat as Moira placed a large plate laden with his favourite delicacies on the dining room table.

He was thrilled that Michael and Janet had called in on the offchance to see if they were home. They were visiting from up north and needed a break from the family and grandchildren. The weather had been against them and they were feeling a little closed in as they were staying with their daughter and son-in-law. The three grandchildren were at school and Janet was fed up as she was not used to the extra cleaning and ironing that an active family of five generated.

Michael knew that if they timed their visit around afternoon tea time that they would not be going home hungry.

Although Janet appreciated Moira’s baking skills, her motivation for visiting their old friends was entirely selfish. She knew that Moira had investigated KiwiSaver thoroughly and had encouraged her own children to sign up the grandchildren and she wanted to know why Moira and Jim had helped open the grandkids’ accounts with 62 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

some of their own retirement savings.

It took a while for Janet to turn the conversation around but when Moira started talking about their grandchildren Janet did not hesitate to bring up the topic. Janet knew that Jim and Moira had four children and each of those had two kids each. They were of varying ages, from six through to sixteen. Moira had always been good with numbers and had learnt from her adviser about the miracle of compound interest.

She had calculated that an investment of $3,000, compounded at 7% pa for 60 years would be worth upwards of $180,000. She thought that would be an excellent legacy for the little tackers.

Initially she was confused, however Moira went on to explain that she and Jim had opened each account for the grandchildren with $2,000 of their own money and the Government contributed $1,000.

As they were all under 18, all they needed were the IRD numbers and copy of their birth certificate. There was no obligation for them to contribute any further funds.

Whilst it had cost them $16,000 of their retirement savings, both Jim and Moira thought it was a different way for them

to be remembered by their grandchildren.

Janet asked Moira if there were any other benefits that the kids could look forward to. That was easy for Moira to answer as her investment adviser was a keen supporter of KiwiSaver and had recently sent out a summary of the scheme. She quickly rummaged around her personal papers and handed it over.

Janet eagerly read the document and found the following items of interest. She knew that the account would be owned by the individual and an individual is only allowed to have one account open at any point in time. She also knew about the obvious incentives like when a new KiwiSaver account is opened, the Government had committed to adding $1,000 to the opening balance. If the person was aged over 18 and in paid employment the Government has agreed to match a member’s contribution up to a maximum of $1042.86 per year.

The technical term is “tax credit” however in reality it is an additional cash deposit to the member’s account.

The Government had also passed legislation compelling employers to contribute to their employees KiwiSaver account.

The rate will be 1% as from 1st April 2008, rising to 4% on 1st April 2011. What Janet did not know was that the Government would effectively pay some of this for the employer by providing them with an employer subsidy (maximum $1,042.86 per employee pa) to assist them to make the compulsory contributions.

Janet was also unaware that the Government would contribute $40 pa per member to assist in payment of account administration fees. This will be paid in two instalments of $20 every six months. This would cover the management account fees charged on the grandchildren’s accounts.

Moira had pointed out that under current arrangements the kids were likely to qualify for assistance under the first homeowner’s grant scheme. This provides that following a minimum of 3 years membership the Government would allow for full withdrawal of members and employers contributions to assist them to purchase their first home. Qualifying members will also be entitled to apply for a separate homeowner’s grant of up to $5,000 ($1,000 per year of membership). The interesting part for Janet was that both partners could qualify, thus providing a potential extra $10,000 towards a deposit on a first home.

For the grown up’s there was also a Mortgage Diversion Option. Following

12 months of contributions members can apply to have half of their personal contributions channelled off to reduce their mortgage. That is if their scheme (and their lender) allows for mortgage diversion.

At this stage Michael had finished his afternoon tea and could see where this conversation was heading. They had six grandchildren who were slightly younger than Jim and Moira’s tribe and he was mentally preparing himself to agree that he and Janet contribute to a similar proposal for their whanau.

He asked Moira how they went about selecting a scheme provider. He had read in a Sunday paper once that there were in excess of 30 registered scheme providers and that some of them were looking to sell out already as it was very difficult for them to make any money as the management fee was so small.

It was at this stage that Jim thought he should contribute to the conversation because he knew something about this.

Albeit the reason Jim knew was that Moira had told him. He said that their adviser had steered them to the ING scheme. They had over 20% of the 600,000 who had signed up already and they were very much a long term serious player in this market.

Their adviser also showed them a special Lifetime Options feature on the ING application form. This allowed ING to assess their risk level solely based on the scheme member’s age. It also allowed for automatic adjustment through the different investment fund risk levels, again based upon age. Sort of like a set and forget feature. This is an excellent method for new investors to introduce themselves to the concept of investing in world wide markets. ING also has (by far) the widest number of investment choices available for the individual. Instead of limiting choice, they started the way they expect to continue with a very well thought out family of five multi-sector funds and seven single-sector funds.

Scheme members are able to mix and match their account, with, maybe the bulk of their savings in a conservative fund and their drip feed savings being directed into a fund with greater growth potential. A young person should consider placing all their funds into the international equities market.

Moira went on to say that whilst it was important to select a good scheme to join in the first place, they should be aware that the legalisation had a provision that allowed members to switch between schemes at no cost and without penalty.

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Jim also added that in his latest book, their adviser used the analogy of sending your money on a road trip. A scheme member gets to choose the tour operator (fund manager) and itinerary (risk level) of the bus their funds are going on. The longer the trip, the more exotic places the bus can visit. Because of the different markets the funds will be exposed to, the costs will vary, however these have been capped by the Government Actuary and this applies to all KiwiSaver scheme managers.

The time came for Michael and Janet to bid their farewells. Janet had achieved her goal of finding out why Jim and Moira had invested some of their retirement funds in their grandchildren’s future and Michael had an opportunity to sample Moira’s home cooking. It was obvious to Jim that Michael had resigned himself to reducing their own retirement savings by a small amount by signing the application forms for the grandchildren.

Just as they drove off, Moira remembered to tell Janet that she could now get the kids parents to get new IRD numbers from their local Post Shop.

Please note that a copy of Peter Hensley’s Disclosure Statement is available on request and is free of charge. © Peter J Hensley June 2008.

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 July 2008 63

think life | EDUCATION

Dereliction of duty and deliberate indoctrination Time for formal charges to be laid against the education politburo, argues Amy Brooke

The ultimate purpose of education, as far as the Western intellectual tradition was concerned, was to make accessible to our young the great discoveries of our past in every field of learning, and to teach us how to discriminate between the first-rate and the third-rate. And as the great English columnist Bernard Levin pointed out, since “the reading of good literature is one of the best means of improving one’s capacity for living, so a diet of the second-rate blunts one’s capacities for genuine thinking, and disables the mind from digesting new and invigorating ideas.”

There is a link between most notions 64 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

peddled by those setting themselves up as today’s arbiters of fashionable thinking.

Many of them, Lenin’s “ useful fools”, buy into it uncritically, aping the clichés supplied for them by les enflés. However, a deeper motivation springs from the long war against the West, aimed at undermining its Judaeo-Christian foundations. There is a link, for example, between visiting English writer Duncan Fallowell’s expressing shock at the trashing and denigrating of our European heritage – and the politically correct favouring of a greatly whitewashed, but far less important minority Polynesian culture – although of special interest in its

own right – particularly considering the continued impact of its traditions of violence on today’s society. However, centrestaging the third-rate can only be at the expense of the first-rate.

When considering the question of “national identity” so beloved by those pushing politicized wheelbarrows, it’s important to identify the philosophy and motivations behind their using, for their own purposes, the political and educational areas – now virtually indistinguishable. Both share the agenda of attempting to persuade New Zealanders to repudiate, rather than respect and be justly be

proud of the thinking and efforts of those British colonists who brought with them pride in their own people – and hope for a new future. Combine this with the attack mounted on the early missionaries – some extraordinarily brave individuals – their setting up of schools for both Maori and European children, and their emphasis on Sunday schools to teach all children those civilizing values of Christianity providing a cohesive background to society throughout the ages.

The ridiculing of our colonial heritage is exemplified in tiresome statements issuing from individuals like Geoffrey Palmer on National Radio referring to the “shackles of colonialism”. What about the shackles of anti-colonialism, the Left’s mindless, or worse still, deliberate attempts not only to represent the thinking and actions of our forebears in the worst possible light, but to undermine – even destroy – so much of what they achieved? We can hardly claim that the rootless, empty-headed, nihilistic, hugely short-changed children from what are meant to be our institutions of learning have been offered something better than what our parents and grandparents and great grandparents were given. There is a parallel in the destroying of much of our splendid colonial architecture, and the erecting of pretentiously ugly buildings in its place which had Fallowell viewing us as “a Philistine hell hole” – and what is now being taught – or deliberately not taught – in our schools.

What is being attacked is the memory of the past. Yet it has been said that without memory, we are nothing – we have no anchoring sense of identity and history, no feeling of connection with what went before. So there are very real social and political, as well as intellectual consequences to the fact that our valuable Western inheritance is being withheld from our children – sidelined as fast as education ideologues can manage. Most school leavers are now almost totally ignorant of our great writers, poets, thinkers, philosophers – of the important questions debated through the ages, of what contributed to the sense of permanence without which, as Kenneth Clark pointed out in his great “Civilization” series, civilizations can’t survive.

Is this, in fact the agenda? If the question seems paranoid, we need to remember the Italian communist’s Gramsci’s message that the destruction of the West depends on “the long march through the institu-

One student, feeling humiliated – as, sadly, so many do, at their own inadequacy – burst into tears when told to read a book. Many of them don’t. They skim the internet and plagiarise material for their essays, where possible

tions” – and that socialists’ loyalty is not primarily to their own country, but to the movement itself.

In an excellent Quadrant article, Philip Ayres points out that in Elizabethan England, which had an excellent system of elementary education, most people could read and write. Universities were merely one source of the culture, and not the most important. Associate Professor Greg Newbold from the University of Canterbury’s Sociology department notes that not only are some of his students now unable to read and write properly, but that they don’t even know what a paragraph is. One student, feeling humiliated – as, sadly, so many do, at their own inadequacy – burst into tears when told to read a book.

Many of them don’t. They skim the internet and plagiarise material for their essays, where possible – (who can blame the ingenuity of the young!). Computer spell and grammar checks can only to a certain degree help those who haven’t been taught even the basics of their own language. And given the desperation of the universities to attract students, and the culpable dumbing down of what is taught, inevitably they now pass students who do not belong in institutes of higher learning, while reducing once rigorous requirements for MAs and PhDs. One of the most important weapons of the Left is misappropriating the word “discrimination”, a critical faculty essential for balanced thinking – and rejecting the third-rate. So discrimination became a Bad Thing, in the political and education areas.

This facilitated the ideological promotion of issues to our young – instead of teaching the art of thinking well. It is safe to say

that any political notion that the Left has thrown up in recent years has been correspondingly peddled to our children. Issues, issues, issues – instead of knowledge; e.g. Al Gore’s self-serving alarmism re global warming; plastic bag usage; “saving the planet”; carbon footprints; fuel costs; nuclear power generation, etc. – complex adult issues oversimplified to indoctrinate.

I was reminded how little things change when noting writer Maurice Gee’s winning again the New Zealand Post Book Awards for teenage children’s writing.

Salt – “ a dark fantasy” shows “a society suffering from the worst aspects of colonialism, and global capitalism”. Surprise, surprise. Ironically Gee, his books for children underpinned by sinister and arguably unpleasant undercurrents, has himself benefited financially from awards generated by the energy of global capitalism.

The left-wing literary politburo advocates politicized issues for children, rather than wholesome (in the best sense ) stories young readers really love. But how refreshing it would be to see our left-wing writers and educationists even begin to acknowledge how culpably short-changed our children have been by the ignoring of the appalling crimes committed by this same Left against humanity in this – and the previous 20th century. And how overdue the time is for the social crime of dereliction of duty and deliberate indoctrination to be finally formally charged against the education politburo. © Amy Brooke www.amybrooke.co.nz www.summersounds..co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/users/brookeonline/

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 65

think life | SCIENCE

The Adam crisis Scientists are puzzling over a declining male birth rate around the world, reports Judith Graham Once there was a kids’ hockey team on the reservation of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Canada just across the border from Michigan. No longer. There aren’t enough boys.

This community, surrounded by dozens of pollution-spewing chemical plants, is an especially extreme example of a puzzling phenomenon playing out across the world, in countries as diverse as the United States, Sweden and Japan.

Though more boys are being born than girls in most places, their numbers are falling. And no one is sure why.

The change is small, but real. In the U.S., the number of baby boys vs. girls has been declining since 1970, translating into 17 fewer males for every 10,000 births or an estimated 135,000 fewer boys born between 1970 and 2002, according to a study last year in Environmental Health Perspectives.

Some experts suggest the shift is part of a naturally occurring, cyclical pattern in population dynamics. But others think 66 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

a notable change is under way, driven by factors such as environmental contaminants and various types of stress, such as economic hardship.

These issues could affect boys more because they’re actually the weaker sex – more vulnerable than girls to illness and death from conception to grave.

Nature’s way of compensating is to produce more males than females, increasing the likelihood that the sexes will survive to reproductive age in equal numbers.

But recent decades have eroded the gap between the sexes.

The difference may seem tiny, but “it’s important to look at the really big picture here, which is that there are global indications that something unusual is going on,” says Devra Davis, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh and lead author of last year’s report.

The sex ratio is an indicator of population health, and unexpected changes could

be an important signal that people are at risk biologically, she says.

Several Latin American nations have reported a similar shift in the sex ratio at birth, as have Finland, Norway, Wales and the Netherlands. Late last year, several Arctic communities documented a startling decline in the number of boys being born.

Studies have shown changing sex ratios in Italian cities and among fish-eating women in the Great Lakes region.

None of these countries or areas has a tradition of sex selection, which in any case usually favors boys.

The puzzling phenomenon has inspired a flurry of research on what could be causing the population shifts. Davis’ hypothesis is that “there is something happening after conception that is making it harder for boys to exist in the maternal fetal environment.”

A growing body of research indicates that could include exposure to pollutants such as pesticides, mercury, lead and

dioxin. More controversial is the idea that synthetic chemicals known as endocrinedisrupters may be damaging male fetuses during critical periods of development or affecting men’s sperm counts and testosterone levels.

That thesis is “very interesting and provocative” but hasn’t been proved, says Dr. Rebecca Sokol, past president of the Society of Male Reproduction and Urology.

The steepest sex ratio declines observed in the world have occurred on the 1,200hectare Aamjiwnaang (AH-jih-nahng) First Nation reservation in Canada.

The number of boys vs. girls there began dropping in the early 1990s, according to data published in 2005 in Environmental Health Perspectives. Between 1999 and 2003, researchers found, only 46 boys were born out of 132 recorded births.

“You get angry and you get worried, thinking what could be causing this,” says Ada Lockridge, a member of the tribe who compiled the data and has since become an activist. “And then you want to learn more.”

Dozens of petrochemical, polymer and chemical plants surround the reservation on three sides. Mercury and PCBs contaminate the creek that runs through the land, and air-quality studies show the highest toxic releases in all of Canada, says Jim Brophy, executive director of Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers, based in Sarnia, the nearest city.

Several months ago, Brophy and coworker Margaret Keith did additional calculations, finding that boys made up only 42 percent of the 171 babies born from 2001 to 2005 to Aamjiwnaang living on the reserve or nearby.

“A disruption in the sex ratio of this magnitude has to be taken seriously,” Brophy says.

Still, there is no proof that pollution is responsible, and data from surrounding areas don’t show a similar impact. Experts note that other factors might include diet, alcohol use, smoking and occupational exposures.

Indeed, there’s strong evidence from other areas that men exposed in the workplace to pesticides, lead and solvents and in industrial accidents to toxic substances such as dioxin end up fathering fewer boys.

When a July 1976 chemical plant explosion in Seveso, Italy sent a cloud of dioxin over the area, researchers discovered that no boys were born for seven years to parents who had the highest levels of the toxin in their blood.

In another study, men exposed to the pesticide dibromochloropropane

fathered three times as many daughters as expected.

Some evidence also suggests stress can reduce the motility or viability of Y-bearing sperm, reducing the likelihood that boys will be conceived. This may help explain why fewer boys are born after natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods – a finding well documented in the scientific literature.

Mums are thought to have a different set of responses to stress, which also could favor girls over boys.

When pregnant women struggle with adverse circumstances – economic hardship, poor food supply – a biological mechanism that “culls” weak male fetuses may be inadvertently deployed, says Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this would make sense, since boys require more parental effort to raise while also dying at a higher rate, Catalano explained. When times are tough, it’s more advantageous to give birth to a girl, he says.

Among Catalano’s thought-provoking findings: The number of boys born in New York City relative to girls fell significantly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

That result, reported in 2006 in the journal Human Reproduction, applied primarily to women in their second trimester at the time of the attacks. In the paper, Catalano suggests that “fetal response to maternal stressors appears strongest in the second half of gestation” and “mothers may use that response as a test of male fetal robustness.”

Separately, in 2003 Catalano reported that the proportion of boys born in East Germany dropped sharply in 1991, when that nation’s economy collapsed.

The world’s leading expert on the science of sex ratios, William H. James, who spent his career at University College in London, offers another possible explanation: Hormones in both parents at the time of conception affect the sex of offspring.

Higher levels of testosterone and estrogen are associated with the birth of sons, James says, while elevated levels of gonadotropins and progesterone are associated with daughters. These hormones are internally regulated but also are subject to external influences such as alcohol, cigarette smoke, radiation, chemicals, and illnesses in parents.

A spinoff of the theory is the notion that the timing of conception can help determine the sex of offspring because hormone levels

“Some evidence also suggests stress can reduce the motility or viability of Y-bearing sperm, reducing the likelihood that boys will be conceived. This may help explain why fewer boys are born after natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods – a finding well documented in the scientific literature

fluctuate during a woman’s fertile period.

James observes that women who conceive early or late in their fertile periods are more likely to have boys. Couples who have lots of sex have a higher probability of bearing sons, he concluded, because they’re more likely to conceive early on, he concluded.

This ties in to the stress hypothesis: If adults have less sex when enduring adversity, then they’d be less likely to conceive male children.

Another notable finding conforms to James’ research: Women receiving ovarystimulating drugs (including gonadotropins) during assisted reproduction give birth to more girls.

On the Aamjiwnaang reservation, it took people a while to recognize the trend toward fewer boys. Families were more concerned about how many babies they were losing: The miscarriage rate for women on the reservation is about 40 percent, much higher than Ontario’s average.

Even when there were three girls’ baseball teams and only one boys’ team, “people just thought there were girls running in their families,” Lockridge says.

It still isn’t a subject that people talk about much, says Stephanie Stone, 37, who lives on the reservation with her husband, Paul, and three young daughters.

Stone has an 18-year-old son from a previous marriage but says “it hurts my heart” that she hasn’t been able to have another.

“We have tried and tried to have a baby boy,” she says.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 67

think life | TECHNOLOGY

The intelligent car New cars are about to get serious computers, sponsored by in-car advertising. Is this a good thing? Sarah Webster reports on a breakthrough development in the US that will affect cars here Buckle up, tech-hungry consumers. The digital revolution long promised for your car – known in the automotive business as telematics – has arrived. Over the next few model years, drivers will be able to do things such as find a nearby service station with the lowest price, pay bills, order movies, schedule hair appointments.

But here’s what the automotive industry didn’t tell you: Advertisers will be providing the gas on this Information Superhighway.

Getting your door unlocked when you’ve left your keys inside, for example, “might be courtesy of Red Bull,” explains Velle Kolde, senior product manager for Microsoft Auto, which recently released its 3.0 automotive operating system to industry developers.

Phil Magney, an analyst with Telematics Research Group in the US agrees: “There’s no question in my mind that this will be subsidized by advertising.”

The reason for that was crystal clear to participants at the recent Telematics Detroit 2008 conference in Michigan, which was billed as the world’s largest gathering of the wireless automotive and mobile industry.

The event was sold out, with about 1,500 participants from a panoply of tech companies such as Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Continental AG and WirelessCar. “Nobody wants another bill,” Hakan Kostepen, group manager for product planning and strategy at Panasonic, explains during a panel discussion entitled “The Mouth-Watering Future of Infotainment.”

Getting people to pay for a monthly subscription – General Motors Corp.’s OnStar starts at US$18.95 a month – or even a flat fee – Ford Motor Co.’s Sync costs US$395 – is a hurdle that can be lowered by allowing advertisers to sponsor services or parts of the technology.

68 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

That could mean New Zealand drivers, for example, can download online movies for the kids in the minivan courtesy of VideoEzy, book oil-change appointments courtesy of Shell, or handle that outstanding recall on their air bags courtesy of the LTSA. “It’s something that can speed up” the digital revolution in the car, explains Antonino Damiano, product line manager for Magneti Marelli, an Italian company. That firm has taken on a leadership role in this global revolution.

“Ad-supported is the way this can go mass-market,” explains Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association.

In the next few years, for example, Kolde says most new vehicles could have navigation systems that are almost entirely supported through advertising listings tied to the map.

Advertisers would pay for premier placement in the map listings that come up when a driver is searching for a nearby coffee shop or a pharmacy.

Although this advertising could eventually mean big profits for automotive companies and their suppliers, experts say that the advertising revenue is needed more in the short term to pay for the technology and to get it to the consumers who desire it most.

When Ford USA decided to roll out its Sync wireless communications and entertainment technology in a low-priced vehicle – the entry-level Ford Focus – instead of a luxury model, the experts says the automaker made a wise strategic decision because the people who most want this technology are least able to afford it.

That’s because they tend to be young.

A survey of more than 1,100 drivers by the Consumer Electronics Association revealed that only 37 percent of 16- to 24year-olds were willing to spend money

on installed consumer electronics in their vehicles. The average they were willing to spend: a mere $270.

Older survey participants were willing to spend more. However, fewer of them actually wanted to pay for the technology in the first place.

So, to get this technology to the people who most want it, the technology industry has concluded that it needs the support of advertisers. That way, the technology will start getting installed in more affordable vehicles faster.

“It will waterfall up instead of down,” says Ton Steenman, vice president of the digital enterprise group at Intel Corp.

Before you can understand just how sophisticated this in-car advertising will be, you first need to understand how sophisticated these telematics systems are already becoming.

Many vehicles today already have their own personal computer; their own telecommunication system, often their own cell phone; a wireless connection system such as Bluetooth and a display monitor.

Some even come with a keyboard already.

In the US, Ford Works, a productivity telematics suite aimed at people who drive their trucks for work, already offers one, with a touchpad that fits in the console and works with the in-dash computer.

With all of this in-car technology being developed faster and faster, the list of possibilities seems endless.

You will be able to tell your car all about yourself. That includes your blood type, how many kids you have, where you work, what stocks you own, what restaurants you prefer, the type of cell phone you carry, even the temperature you like your seat to be in the morning.

Then, you can tell your car what you want it to do and when. Maybe you want your car to notify your wife automatically if the air bags are deployed. Or send an alert to your cell phone if the alarm goes off. Or alert you whenever you get within a stone’s throw of a Starbucks. Or play a certain track of music when you start the car.

Your car will be so smart that it will be able to tell you how it’s doing, too. It can announce the miles per gallon it’s getting or whether its tyres need some air.

Hughes Telematics, based in Atlanta, which will launch a telematics system in Chrysler products next year, says it will be able to pull 77,000 different types of data out of a vehicle to share with consumers, the automaker and dealerships. The car also

can use the data to diagnose itself. It might, for example, optimize its drivetrain and other automotive systems to suit the environment, be it deserts or snowy roads.

Your car also will know where it is at all times and will automatically get the data it needs to serve you better.

And really, all of this is just the beginning of something that will begin moving much faster now. Product cycles in the technology sector range from six months to a year, much faster than the auto industry, where it takes three years or so for a new car to hit the market. That means a car can get cool new features about as often as a new mobile phone comes out.

“It is evolving rapidly,” Steenman says.

“The car is becoming the next frontier.”

Advertisers are chomping at the bit to elbow their way into the car with all this new technology, experts report.

“It’s the advertisers,” Kolde says, “who will want to take advantage of the PC-type platform in the car.”

The telematics-equipped car offers them sophisticated location-based advertising options like they’ve never seen before.

“McDonald’s wants to capture people when they’re making that decision” about what to eat, Kolde says.

The aspect of this revolution most exciting to advertisers, though, is that they will be able to track whether your car actually went to their store after your saw their advertisement. It might even ask for feedback about what customers did at the store and thought of their experience there.

This will give advertisers a sophisticated tool to measure their return-on-investment – provided drivers give their permission to share this data.

“We could see if they closed the loop and went to Home Depot,” Erik Goldman, president of Hughes Telematics, explained during a recent interview.

Hughes Telematics reports that consumers are surprisingly willing to share this information, especially if there is some-

Your car will be so smart that it will be able to tell you how it’s doing, too. It can announce the miles per gallon it’s getting or whether its tyres need some air

thing in it for them, like a discount.

In his Home Depot example, Goldman made sure to note that consumers would get something in return for sharing this data.

Paul Stephens, a spokesman for America’s Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, says the most important thing about this new technology is that companies make it clear what data they are collecting and how it is being used.

“We’re being tracked in more ways than you can imagine,” he says. “There are some people that are going to be extremely sensitive to this sort of tracking. There are others that will find it desirable, especially if there’s some sort of inducement.”

Goldman says those in the telematics industry recognize the rewards that will come with being honest stewards of this new technology.

“If it’s managed right, it’s a big opportunity,” he says.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 69

feel life | SPORT

Brian Spurlock-ASP, Inc

Great Scott It ranks as one of the stellar sporting achievements by a New Zealander. On a famous day in late May, Scott Dixon landed the INDY 500 – one of American sport’s iconic prizes.Investigate sports columnist Chris Forster finds fame, fortune and marriage sitting very nicely with the 27 year old from the heart of South Auckland It’s the last place you’d expect to feel lonely. Dixon was blazing around the world famous Brickyard at 226 miles an hour in front of 350 thousand motor sport fanatics. He had clear air in front, and some of the world’s fastest Indians nipping at his exhaust pipes. All he had to do was steer his slick, red Target Chip Ginassi car around a few more ridiculously high speed corners and glory was his.

Suddenly he’d realised the responsibility of steering clear of trouble and finishing his high risk job. “You feel quite alone out there. It’s like, ‘oh God it’s actually down to me. I better not mess up because everybody’s given me the tools to do this’. It was pretty special that last lap. There were so many things on my mind. What could go wrong? It was just strange. You want the 70 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

day to be finally over, you can’t wait to get back to the pits – you wanna see the crew, the wife, family and friends who’ve come so far from New Zealand”.

Minutes later sheer apprehension was replaced by relief. Then elation. Then celebration. The life of this quiet, unassuming New Zealander was about to change forever.

The height of his post-race adrenalin rush was captured by a kiss from his new wife Emma. Dixon had just glided into pit lane and climbed out of the cockpit of his car to raise his arms in triumph. It was the moment he was thinking about while careering through those last few laps with the chequered flag at his mercy.

The first and most dramatic of thousands of interviews was just underway in front

of a massive global TV audience. Emma Davies-Dixon had run from the team HQ to the pit lane looking for her hero, one of her high heels had come off. She eventually spotted him and oblivious to the cameras ran across to hug her man. Scott reciprocated with a natural kiss, for all the world to see. It was a sweet moment in stark contrast to the brutal speeds he’d endured for 200 laps.

Marriage sits very nicely with the young man from Manurewa, who’s done good.

According to reports he met his Welsh wifeto-be 9 years ago, just as he was starting his career in the States. No immediate chemistry there. But they stayed in touch and eventually she moved into his lakeside home near Indianapolis, the scene of his glorious victory. In February this year they tied

the knot at a posh ceremony in England.

It followed a very public proposal at the Auckland Airport arrivals lounge, when she first met Scott’s parents. This new official bond in his life may well have inspired him to new levels on the race track.

“She’s a competitor at heart … an 800 metre specialist who ran at the Commonwealth Games (for Wales). Emma knows what racing’s all about. To see so much excitement and emotion from her was fantastic. She’s a great woman and getting married in February was definitely one of the best days of my life”.

Manurewa must feel a million miles away. But that’s where Dixon’s from and he has no hesitation in telling the American media he’s a proud Kiwi. “Most people think New Zealand’s part of Australia, so maybe I can change that”.

He’s now a multi-millionaire with a gorgeous wife, a brilliant career and one of the few New Zealanders with a high profile in the United States. Tiger Woods’ caddy Steve Williams is the other well known Kiwi, and golf loving Americans still remember Michael Campbell’s US Open heroics of three years ago.

It’s worth remembering he was a child prodigy in New Zealand. He made the news back in the early 90s when as a 13 year old racing with a special license at Pukekohe, he rolled an old Nissan. This freckly, plump red head emerged from the car with tears running down his cheeks and a pillow strapped to his backside, so he could see over the steering wheel.

He dominated the Formula V and Formula Ford Classes through till 1997, and then had a crack at Australia.

With business backing from motor enthusiasts in New Zealand, Dixon had con-

“Fame’s unlikely to go to Dixon’s head. He’s just not that sort of guy. Every Christmas he takes time out to fly home to New Zealand, to see his family and old mates in South Auckland. To chat to the media folk who keep his name in the Kiwi spotlight... quered the Formula Holden circuit within two years. A career in the V8 Supercars was on offer but Dixon had his eyes on the bigger prize, the United States.

It was an extremely expensive proposition, but another business venture called Scott Dixon Motorsport helped get him there – investing more than $1 million over the next two years, in return for a share of any profits he made. It’s proved an extremely wise investment.

His first step was the Indy Lights series, which is kind of the development class for the big boys of Indy Racing. Once again within two years Dixon had dominated, scoring six race victories.

Then it was to the cart racing circuit, then a major rival to the Indy Racing League. At barely 20 years of age at the Nazareth Speedway in Pennsylvania, he became the youngest ever winner of an open wheel motor race in the U.S.A. He was starting to make headlines both in the States and back in his homeland.

By 2002 he’d signed up with Target Chip Ginassi and in 2003 they defected to the Indy Racing League.

It was a brilliant career move. Dixon cast aside his reservations about racing on endless oval circuits, and by the end of the year he’d won the championship. More media adulation followed, but he still wasn’t quite

a household name in America.

Two years of frustrations followed – a major reality check as the Target team were left wallowing with a Toyota engine by competitors who had the major advantage of Honda firepower.

After ditching Toyota and hooking up with Honda, Dixon was back on track in 2006, winning three races during the season and finishing a close fourth on the standings.

Last year it all started to come together for the talented Kiwi. He finished second in the rain-shortened Indy 500, and went onto win four events. But with a championship victory within his sights in the season finale he ran out of fuel on the last lap, and had to settle for unlucky runner-up.

You could almost excuse him for thinking something would go wrong in those hair-raising last few circuits of this year’s Indy 500. But this time the gods were on his side. He’d become a great Scott.

Fame’s unlikely to go to Dixon’s head.

He’s just not that sort of guy. Every Christmas he takes time out to fly home to New Zealand, to see his family and old mates in South Auckland. To chat to the media folk who keep his name in the Kiwi spotlight while he’s tearing away at breakneck speeds in the States. This year he’ll have a shiny, silver trophy to show off, and a new wife.

NEW ZEALAND’S GREATEST SPORTING ACHIEVEMENTS EVENT

WHEN

WHO

OLYMPICS, Tokyo

1964

PETER SNELL wins Gold in the 800 and 1500 metres

OLYMPICS, Atlanta

1996

DANYON LOADER wins swimming Gold in the 200 and 400 metres freestyle.

AMERICA’S CUP, San Diego

1995

TEAM NEW ZEALAND beats YOUNG AMERICA 5-nil.

FOOTBALL, Singapore

1982

NEW ZEALAND qualifies for the World Cup finals by beating China 2-1, after a 15 match campaign.

GOLF, Pinehurst – North Carolina

2005

MICHAEL CAMPBELL wins the US OPEN

GOLF, Royal Lytham – England

1964

BOB CHARLES wins the BRITISH OPEN.

RUGBY, Eden Park

1987

The ALL BLACKS beat France 29-9 to lift inaugural WORLD CUP

OLYMPICS, Athens

2004

HAMISH CARTER/BEVAN DOCHERTY win Triathlon Gold and Silver.

OLYMPICS, Berlin

1936

JACK “C’mon Jack” LOVELOCK wins Gold in the 1500 metres

MOTORSPORT, Indianapolis

2008

SCOTT DIXON wins the INDY 500.

FORMULA ONE

1967

DENNY HULME wins the World Championship, after victories in Monte Carlo and Germany.

ROWING, Gifu – Japan

2005

NEW ZEALAND wins four Gold medals in 45 minutes at the World Championships.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 71

feel life | HEALTH

Anti-bacterial soaps To use, or not to use, that’s the question, reports Mary Beth Breckenridge We have the weapons for germ warfare at our disposal. Anti-bacterial products are everywhere. Hand soaps, household cleaners, even socks and countertops promise to kill the stuff we can’t see and make our surroundings more sanitary.

But do we really need to live in an antibacterial bubble?

Even the experts disagree.

Some say we’re overdoing it. They say soap and water are adequate and fear that overuse of anti-bacterial products might harm us in the long run.

Others scoff at that concern. They argue that anti-bacterial products can be beneficial and there’s no proof of long-term consequences.

That makes it tough for consumers to decide what’s best for themselves and their families. But here’s a bright spot: In talking with researchers and industry representatives about the issue, we did discover a couple of areas of consensus: n Washing your hands is the single most important thing you can do to fight the spread of illness. n Sometimes extra attention to germ-killing is warranted. We’ll talk about these areas later. First, let’s look at the controversy.

For starters, it’s important to know what we’re talking about.

The word “germs” is generally applied to two types of microorganisms, bacteria and viruses. Many of the products on the 72 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

market are labeled as anti-bacterial, which means they primarily target bacteria. They have little or no effect on viruses.

The term “anti-microbial” is broader and can apply to various microorganisms, including fungi as well as bacteria and viruses. But a product labeled anti-microbial doesn’t necessarily fight all of them.

Most of the controversy swirls around anti-bacterial products, and that distinction is part of the reason.

The most common illnesses – colds, flu and gastrointestinal upsets – are caused by viruses, notes Marcia Patrick, infection control director at MultiCare Health System and chair of the communications committee of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Antibacterial products don’t kill those common viruses, yet she and other researchers worry that consumers who don’t know that may be lulled into a false sense of security.

They see “anti-bacterial” on a label, and “they immediately think that’s good,” says Julian Davies, emeritus professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of British Columbia.

Davies also is concerned that anti-bacterial products target good bacteria as well as bad. Our bodies need those good bacteria, he says: They help us digest our food, for example, and keep harmful microorganisms from entering our bodies through orifices.

Davies believes marketing has fed a

greater fear of bacteria than is warranted.

While we do need to clean our bodies and our homes to keep bacteria levels under control, he says, we don’t always need to try to eradicate them.

“Look at children. They used to play in the dirt. Nobody worried about them,” he says.

A bigger part of the controversy, however, lies with the active ingredient found in many of these products, triclosan, or its close cousin, triclocarban.

Triclosan is often used as a disinfectant in health-care facilities as well as in the home.

It’s also often used in Microban, the brand for a technology used to embed various types of microbe-fighters in a huge range of products – countertops, paints, towels, computer keyboards, even socks and sandals.

Triclosan has been proved effective in reducing the spread of infection in healthcare facilities. But because triclosan can irritate skin, consumer cleaning products contain lower concentrations of it.

Some researchers say it’s too low to be effective. An analysis of research published in September in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that plain soap and water was just as effective for hand washing as consumer products containing triclosan, says Allison Aiello, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and the review’s lead author.

What’s more, some scientists fear triclosan could cause bacteria to become resistant to control methods. That hasn’t been proved, but laboratory evidence suggests it’s possible, Aiello says.

That contention raises the hackles of Philip M. Tierno, director of clinical microbiology and diagnostic immunology at New York University Medical Center.

“It’s baloney,” Tierno says. The No. 1 cause of resistance is overuse and misuse of antibiotic drugs in medicine and agriculture, he says. “Put the onus where it belongs.”

Brian Sansoni, a spokesman for the Soap and Detergent Association, which represents cleaning-product manufacturers, calls the resistance question “one of the biggest suburban myths out there.”

“There’s been zero cases showing everyday use of these products leads to antibiotic resistance,” he says. “... These headlines should not be giving people pause to reach for these products.”

Aiello and other scientists, however, say questions remain about the resistance issue because it hasn’t been adequately studied.

“We need to be looking at the community setting,” she says.

Even Tierno agrees anti-bacterial products aren’t always necessary. For one thing, only 1 percent to 2 percent of microbes are likely to make us sick, he says; for another, bacteria are so prevalent and reproduce so fast that it’s impossible to eliminate them anyway.

For example, he thinks a Microban cutting board might be a good idea, because its anti-microbial properties would target foods that get embedded in the small knife cuts. But he doesn’t see the point of the Microban pizza cutter handle he spotted recently in a store. You’re going to clean it anyway, he says, so what’s the point?

Unfortunately, not everyone is as fastidious about cleaning as they should be, counters Kathy Hall, Microban’s vice president of marketing. People might not need Microban in their countertops if they disinfected them every day, she says, but that’s not always the case.

Hall insists Microban is not a substitute for cleaning, but more like an insurance policy against our occasional lapses.

But could it be that some of us are looking for easy fixes instead of investing the effort in basic cleanliness?

That brings us back to the hand-washing issue.

Researchers agree on the absolute importance of proper hand washing to prevent the spread of infectious illnesses. The type of soap you use isn’t important; it’s the mechanical action of rubbing the hands together, combined with the surfactant in the soap, that loosens bacteria and viruses so they can be rinsed away.

Doing it right takes time, however – 20 to 30 seconds, or about the time it takes to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to yourself. Scrub all surfaces, including between your fingers and under your nails. It doesn’t hurt to rinse and repeat, Tierno says.

Likewise, the scientists say it’s important to keep your house clean of the stuff that contains a high number of illness-causing germs or can invite bacteria growth, such as food messes. Many advocate disinfecting bathroom surfaces and kitchen areas or implements that come into contact with raw meat, although Patrick says she thinks hot, soapy water and a vigorous scrubbing are adequate for a non-wood cutting board.

There are times when disinfection takes on added importance, they says – specifically, when someone at home is sick or at increased risk of catching an infectious illness.

In those cases, Patrick recommends cleaning surfaces first and then using a bleachwater solution or an alcohol wipe to sanitize them. Wipes need to contain at least 60 percent alcohol to be effective, she says.

On a day-to-day basis, though, Tierno says what’s most important is just good personal and household hygiene.

“If you do that,” he says, “you’ll be relatively safe.”

WHEN TO WASH Wash your hands after: u Using the toilet. u Changing a nappy. u Handling raw meat. u Touching a contaminated surface. u Touching a pet. u Handling a used tissue. u Blowing or touching your nose. u Coming into contact with body fluids.

Wash your hands before: u Preparing food. u Eating. u Feeding someone else.

Source: Allison Aiello, assistant professor of epidemiology, University of Michigan School of Public Health.

HEALTHBRIEFS ORAL SEX CAUSES CANCER u Cancer specialists are bracing themselves for an onslaught of deadly new cancers apparently caused by oral sex. Researchers have confirmed this month that human papilloma virus, HPV, which is the cause of 98% of cervical cancers, is now responsible for an “epidemic” of throat cancers as well. With 6,000 cases per year in the US alone and an annual increase of up to 10 percent in men younger than 60, some researchers say the HPV-linked throat cancers could overtake cervical cancer in the next decade. “It’s almost a new disease, in a sense,” says Dr. Ezra Cohen, an oncologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “It’s now becoming a dominant subtype of the disease that we see in our clinic.” The HPV infections likely took root decades ago as the baby boomers were reaching adulthood and are only now spurring a rise in throat cancer cases, mostly among men and women in their 50s. No one understands the precise reason for the increase, though experts suspect it’s linked to changes in sexual practices that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, oral sex is a known risk factor for HPV-related throat cancers, and studies have shown that people who have come of age since the 1950s are more likely to have engaged in oral sex than those who were born earlier. “Those people were in their teens during the sexual revolution, so they may be leading the wave,” says Dr. Maura Gillison, a professor of oncology and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center who has published numerous studies indicating that HPV-related throat cancer

is a distinct type of disease. The virus targets a specific portion of the upper throat called the oropharynx, which includes the tonsils and base of the tongue. Just a decade ago, doctors believed nearly all such cancers were linked with smoking or extremely heavy drinking.

BRITISH WOMEN SHUNNING MARRIAGE... u Britain’s Office of National Statistics says a growing number of women are choosing to stay single rather than share their lives with others. The latest figures compiled by the office indicate that 8 percent of British women between the ages of 25 and 44 are living alone, The Telegraph reported Monday. Based on current figures, forecasters predict that single-occupancy homes will account for 70 percent of British households by 2026. …MAY HOOK UP WITH ROBOTS u Scientists have met in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht to discuss the possibility that human beings will increasingly engage in personal and even romantic relationships with robots in the coming decades.

The conference, organized by the University of Maastricht, follows the PhD dissertation Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners by Scottish chess player David Levy, 63, completed at the same university in October 2007. A commercial edition of the dissertation, entitled Love and Sex with Robots, was published shortly after the thesis was approved.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 73

feel life | ALT.HEALTH “Then the chemist told me about Tebonin, and that she had had two other people come in in the previous three weeks, to say that it had helped. Of course I was sceptical, but I bought it, why wouldn’t I?

Ringing endorsements Ian Wishart explores a red-tape dust-up across the Tasman over one of the world’s most successful tinnitus remedies, and its implications for consumer choice The battle over the public’s right to access alternative medicines continues to grow, with a number of western nations including Australia, NZ and the US trying to implement a UN-mandated crackdown under the auspices of the “Codex Alimentarius”.

In New Zealand, the government tried to push through laws restricting vitamin and herbal supplements as part of conforming to Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Act, but failed to get enough support in parliament to ram the changes through.

Now, one of the supplement companies that has complied with codex demands, the German manufacturer Schwabe, is enjoying consumer support in the face of ongoing regulatory pressures against one of its products, Tebonin EGB 761 in Australia as part of the new regime.

Tebonin, based on a ginkgo-biloba extract, is designed to improve micro-circulation of blood through the body’s capillaries, and one of the claimed benefits is a reduction in the incidence or severity of tinnitus, or ringing in the ears.

Health bureaucrats are currently arguing over what claims can be made about 74 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

Tebonin, but the debate has spilled out into internet forums where tinnitus sufferers are telling bureaucrats to back off.

“Tebonin worked for me – 9 years of tinnitus, and the volume has now been reduced by about 50- 60 per cent,” posted one commenter on the rnid.org.uk discussion forum in Britain, a 23 year old trainee pilot based in Sydney Australia named “Matt”.

“The only reason I found Tebonin was because I went into my local chemist to buy some fish oil, because I had heard that helped. Then the chemist told me about Tebonin, and that she had had two other people come in in the previous three weeks, to say that it had helped. Of course I was sceptical, but I bought it, why wouldn’t I? On top of that, it is more than 50% cheaper than all the other tinnitus remedies on the net.”

While medical trial results on ginkgo as a tinnitus relief are mixed, with some studies reporting little more benefit than a placebo, commenters on another tinnitus site argue it’s their right as consumers to be allowed to try and see for themselves, rather than having bureaucrats interfere:

“The Journal of Ethnopharmacology concluded that ‘extracts are of little more use in the treatment of tinnitus than a placebo’, noted one tinnitus sufferer, but “personally, I have tried ginkgo for tinnitus several times and observed the benefit (reduced volume). I have also seen tinnitus return when stopping ginkgo. I don’t care if it is placebo, it works for me. Might not work for others.”

A Brisbane woman named “Margy” summed up the views of many who live with ringing in their ears 24/7, and the associated balance and dizziness issues: “I agree we are all trying to ‘live with this condition’ as best we can (there’s nothing else), I hope I wake up one morning and ‘IT’ has disappeared. I woke up 13 weeks ago with ‘IT’, but at the same time I am trying everything available to work through and compensate and retrain my brain if need be.

If that means ‘balance rehab’ 2 full days a week, at physio doing the Dix hall pike maneuver, looking stupid doing eye movements and jumping up and down, 5 times a day, I will. I am improving. I have had 2 full days, 95% well. I only use a stick when I am out (just in case!) and after a week on Tebonin I actually drove my car yesterday (1st time in 13 weeks).”

There are many medicines, including well-known pharmaceutical drugs, that work for some people and not others. The real issue, according to the supplements industry, is having rules to ensure that products are safe, but letting the consumers ultimately decide whether a product is working for them or not, rather than rely on bureaucrats’ decrees.

Tebonin is simply the latest pharma supplement to fly into a red-tape firestorm, but for now, in New Zealand at least, consumers still have the freedom to choose.

Depression is very disabling - but there is hope!

Depression - Recovery & Prevention Seminar Seminar led by

Dr. Grant Mullen, M.D.

Medical Doctor from Ontario Canada who specialises in Mood Disorders

Topics covered include • Causes and symptoms of depression • difference between discouragement and depression • Post Natal Depression • Youth Depression • ADD/ADHD, Manic and Bipolar

August 2008 Seminar Venues: Auckland:

10.30am to 5pm Sat. 2nd Aug. Greenlane Christian Centre, 17 Marewa Rd., Greenlane,

Dunedin:

2.00pm to 9.00pm Tues. 5th Aug. SouthLife Church, 24 Union St.,

Christchurch: 2.00pm to 9.00pm Thurs.7th Aug. City Church Christchurch, 336 Manchester St., Central City

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words.

The presentation of them here is not intended to diminish the seriousness of the issues concerned, BUT help us see the real need and to work to make a difference.

Wellington:

10.30am to 5.00pm Sat. 9th Aug. Assembly of God Church, 22 Marsden St., Lower Hutt

Venues hired for their access, parking, comfort and proximity to lunch places.

Many adults are still wounded children inside.

Registration information on the website www.jubilee.org.nz/flyers Hosted by Jubilee Resources International Inc.

Samples of Dr. Mullens Resources - Books, DVDs and CDs

More resources on

www.jubilee.org.nz/shop INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 75

taste life travel

The land that time forgot Beautiful but isolated island’s habitats face a fight for survival, writes Georgia Tasker ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar – Here are snapshots of Madagascar: On a night hike at the Perinet Reserve, an eastern rain forest, the sky was so full of stars it seemed as if we were transported away from earth and into them.

In the port city of Tamatave, a group of little boys maybe 5 or 6 years old were playing what seemed to be marbles using a seed and bottle caps. Nearby, four little girls were jumping rope, which was made of shoestrings tied together.

On a brutal straight-up climb on Nosy Mangabe, a rainforested island in the Bay of Antongil, we saw “Angraecum” and “Bulbophyllum” orchids, bird’s-nest 76 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

ferns everywhere, leaftail geckos, poison “Mantella” frogs with yellow backs, fullgrown brown frogs of an inch long, black and white swallowtail butterflies and paradise flycatchers. Black and white lemurs came to our picnic of mangosteens and pineapples.

Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island, is home to some of the most beautifully bizarre animals and plants on Earth that evolved during 160 million years of isolation in the Indian Ocean.

It also is one of the places where conservationists are working feverishly to help save what remains on the island the size of Texas. Forests have been decimated by

slash and burn agriculture and cattle pastures; rice paddies have replaced savannahs on the high plateau, leading to plant and animal extinctions.

After 1,500 years of kings, queens and conquest among clans, the French claimed the island in the 19th century. Independence came in 1960, but by 1975, a policy of isolation and socialism caused the economy to collapse, leaving it one of the world’s most impoverished nations.

Despite this, the surviving ecosystems are enormously attractive to ecotourists because of their diversity and the creatures they contain. We dozen travelers had signed on to a natural history tour hoping

to see as many of these Malagasy specialties as we could in 16 days.

We used the Hotel Colbert in the capital city of Antananarivo as a staging site, staying there three different times and flying to various parts of the 1,000-mile-long island. Our accommodations ranged from the nicely-appointed Colbert, with marble bathrooms, to sparely furnished rooms with mosquito netting over the beds and lights that went out when the generators were turned off.

Getting anywhere in Madagascar is a mixture of misery and marvel. It took, for example, four hours to travel just 55 miles from Fort Dauphin on the southeastern coast to Berenty Reserve, the bestknown lemur destination in the country.

Over Highway 6 with potholes four feet in diameter, our van rose and fell like a ship in rough seas.

Along the way, we stopped briefly at quintessentially Malagasy sites. One was an Antanosy graveyard where wooden carvings portray images of the deceased’s life and cattle skulls attest to wealth as well as offerings made to ancestors. (Clansmen too poor to have enough cattle to sacrifice convert to Christianity on their deathbed.)

On this drive inland, Madagascar’s landscape did what it’s so famous for: It magically turned from green to brown, from humid to arid as we crossed small mountains that took us from rainforest to spiny forest. There are so many varied ecosystems packed onto this island that it’s often called the Eighth Continent.

The spiny forest is home to such weird plants as pachypodiums, with their swollen, spine-covered trunks and topknots of leaves, and alluaudias or octopus trees, with long skinny “arms” and cactus-like plants with spines and funny little round leaves – a family of plants unique to this single area on this single island.

When finally we arrived at Berenty, we found simple bungalows with screenless porches, “en-suite” bathrooms, and a Welcome Wagon of small primates with orange eyes and black-and-white ringed tails.

Ringtail lemurs with raccoon-like face masks hopped on the porch, walked shamelessly into our room to investigate our luggage, lingered until they had to be shooed outside, then sat and watched us.

They walk on all fours, their rears higher than their fronts, their tails held straight up or sometimes in a jaunty question mark.

We were interlopers, but these ringtails have been studied for 40 years and

are habituated to having humans around, so digital cameras smoked as the lemurs nonchalantly played among us.

We were in ecotourism heaven.

Lemurs are the main draw for many tourists. But there are other splendors in the dramatic landscapes.

Chamaeleons here are the colors of gemstones and have eyes that swivel 180 degrees.

A tomato frog is the color of guess what. Baobab trees look as if they are upside down with their roots in the air. There’s a small beetle with a red body and a long neck like a giraffe, and a gecko with a fanciful leaflike tail, the better not to see Chamaeleons here are the colors of gemstones me, my dear. and have eyes that swivel 180 degrees.

Tree boas drape themPhotography: Christopher J. Raxworthy selves in the crotches of trees. And the island is home to an orchid with a 30-centimetre hilly landscape of the north to grow crops. nectar spur called “Angraecum sesquiped- It is the world’s 12th poorest country. ale.” Charles Darwin correctly predicted, Because of that, our pre-trip informabut did not live to see, that a moth would tion warned that things frequently do not be found with a proboscis long enough to follow the itinerary in Madagascar, and we reach the nectar reward at the bottom of found that true when the Air Madagascar the spur and pollinate the flower in the pilots went on strike. process.

Within a day, we chartered a plane (our We saw another enormous moth one travel insurance covered the extra expense), morning at the Vakona Lodge at the arrived at Berenty, then were awakened at Perinet Reserve. Someone had placed him 5:30 a.m. the next morning to catch a difin a flower arrangement, where he was con- ferent plane after Air Mad pilots settled. tent to snooze, his long comet-like tail restWe also revolted once as a group when ing on petals of a torch ginger. Brilliant the company tried to house us in a monyellow with four reddish-brown eyespots astery where we’d share a bathroom. Our on his wings, the comet is the largest of guide got us quickly settled in the nearby all luna moths.

Nature Lodge with individual bungalows The splendid isolation that produced all and handsome restaurant. of this diversity ended about 2,000 years Hiking in the preserves and parks can be ago. Arriving from Indonesia, Polynesia tough, as they are often confined to mounand Africa, humans began felling the for- tainous regions (that can’t be used for agriests to plant rice and graze cattle, and habi- culture) with steep, slippery, muddy trails. tat began to disappear.

Not everyone in our group could handle Half a dozen lemur species no longer the trails, and one man broke his arm. exist. The elephant bird no longer exists.

One of the toughest hikes was in the The pygmy hippo no longer exists. And tsingy limestone formation, with a trail the island bleeds its iron-red soil through going straight up an outcrop of sharp its rivers to the oceans because most of the ragged pinnacles. It was enormously satnative trees, shrubs and grasses no longer isfying to reach the top. exist. Islanders still cut the thicket-like One of our most luxurious hotels was spiny forests to make charcoal, graze their again not on the itinerary, but we lucked cattle among the rare spiny plants, and out on the island of Nosy Be off the northuntil just last year, regularly burned the west corner of the country. We lodged at INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 77

On the central plateau, Antananarivo is 4,000 feet high and cool, but down at the heels and in need of spit and polish.

Photography: José A. Warletta

Hotel Vanila – a five-star resort with three restaurants and four pools, frequented by vacationing French who come to sun and swim. On this tiny island, vanilla and ylang-ylang, flowers that are used in Chanel No. 5, are grown for export.

We hiked through Nosy Be’s last remaining forest and learned that a species of dracaena is used to stop hemorrhaging; the roots of the traveler’s tree make a pain killer and tea made from the flowers soothes a sore throat; bromeliad roots are used to cure worms; peas inside pods as large as baseball bats called Borico are made into soup.

In the northeast, around Diego Suarez, where the rare baobab “Adansonia suarezensis” is coppery red, fiber from the fruit of exotic kapok trees is stuffed into pillows.

Cassava, sweet potatoes, cattle called zebu and chickens are mainstays of villages.

Raffia palms, when they grow in water, are protected from cutting. Raffia is used to weave baskets, mats and the hats that villagers love.

On the central plateau, Antananarivo is 4,000 feet high and cool, but down at the heels and in need of spit and polish.

Its buildings rise up hillsides, and, surprisingly, rice fields can be found in and around the city.

In every small town, weathered buildings sag, tin roofs rust, and trash is ubiq78 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

uitous. Slash and burn agriculture still is practiced, mainly to plant rice fields that become unproductive after a few years.

Zebu pulling carts full of charcoal made from the dwindling supply of trees are regularly seen on the roads.

Yet at a Sunday market in Maroantsetra, men and women wear colorful hats, artfully display their fish or utensils or vegetables on cloth on the ground or in wooden booths, and carry bright raffia bags.

Conservation organizations have been working for years to keep the remaining bits of this country from slipping into oblivion. Only 17 percent of the original vegetation remains (about 10 percent of the forests) and the population is growing at 3 percent a year. The good news is that in 2003, Marc Ravolomanana, Madagascar’s president, pledged to triple the amount of land in conservation areas by 2008, from 3 percent to 10 percent. A fund was set up to help manage the parks and preserves.

Last year, 2.5 million acres were added to the system.

If any place might benefit from ecotourism, it is Madagascar. It was an arduous trip, but I have a reminder of the value of the experience pinned above my desk: it’s a photo I took of a ringtail lemur leaning against the bungalow porch, hands clasped in front of him, looking directly at me.

IF YOU GO When u We went during the dry winter season, which runs April through September. October to April is the rainy season. Cyclones are likely to occur from January to March.

More baby lemurs are seen in September and October, and the weather is not too hot. Birding is good in November. Orchids are more abundant in the rainy month of February.

Whales can be seen in Antongil Bay year-round.

What to Take u A passport and visa are required. http://madagascarembassy.com Cash u Credit cards and travelers cheques are not widely accepted. U.S. dollars are easily exchanged at the international airport in Antananarivo and at the Hotel Colbert.

Medicines u Fill all prescriptions, and take a First Aid kit that includes anti-diarrhea medicine, bandaids, tweezers (to remove plant spines), iodine, sun screen, headache medicine, anti-itch medicine; mosquito repellent.

Malaria prophylaxis is needed.

Electricity u 220 Volt, so take the correct European round-plug adapters for those recharging batteries and hair dryers

Madagascar Join us on our unique 18 day guided wildlife tour

Madagascar, with its truly unique natural wonders, offers the visitor scenery that is rich in diversity, a variety of climatic and floral zones and truly amazing animals to be found nowhere else in the world.

It is the island’s fabulous array of endemic plants and animals which is the largest attraction for travellers, the best-known being the tree-dwelling lemurs, of which there are 23 species. Other visitor favourites are the astonishing chameleons, with their independently swivelling eyes and ability to change colour.

There are some astonishingly colourful species of endemic birds, including ground-rollers, oxylabes, newtonias, fish eagles, vanga and couas. Visitors will also note the many species of insects, spiders and butterflies.

Travel with us on our 18 day expedition to Madagascar’s fabulously varied landscapes; from the northern tropical rainforests, through its rolling mountain ranges, to the famous spiny deserts of the south.

This expedition is limited in fifteen people to maximise your chance of intimate encounters with the surrounding wildlife, while minimising disturbance.

Dates: 20th September - 7th October 2009.

Price: $6,989.00 USD pp (Price Includes: all accommodation/meals/guides/domestic transportation)

w:

www.wildearth-travel.com e: info@wildearth-travel.com t: 0800 262 8873

Other Wild Earth Travel Destinations: Antarctica India

Galapagos

Spitsbergen

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 79

taste life FOOD

Winter baking There’s more than one way to bake your own loaf of bread, writes Sharon Thompson

On a cold winter weekend, nothing seems as homey and smells as delicious as baking a loaf of bread. Besides, it’s a perfect excuse not to venture out. Just say you can’t leave the house because you’re waiting for dough to rise.

In the January issue of Martha Stewart Living, Jonathan Hayes writes, “Making your own bread brings a particular satisfaction, like that of crafting your own pottery or building your own house.”

Often, though, making bread is intimidating, and sometimes you’re disappointed in the results. And, as with anything worthwhile, it takes practice.

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A lot can go wrong. Yeast is not easy to handle. It’s alive, and you can kill it. But when it’s handled properly, it thrives in the dough with the proper moisture and temperature. A bread recipe that cookbook author Mark Bittman printed in the New York Times in 2006 has made recipeexchange lists all over the world.

Bittman’s story began in September 2006, when Jim Lahey invited him to attend a class at Lahey’s ­Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan. Lahey said he was teaching a “truly minimalist breadmaking technique that allows people to make ­excellent bread at home with very little effort.”

The method requires no kneading, no special ingredients, no equipment or special techniques. You simply need 24 hours to create a loaf. Time is the secret, Lahey promised.

The recipe uses just ¼ teaspoon of yeast.

It’s a wet dough, and you ­couldn’t knead it if you wanted to. It is mixed in less than a minute, then sits undisturbed in a covered bowl for about 18 hours. It is then turned out onto a floured board for 15 minutes, quickly shaped and allowed to rise again for a couple of hours. Then it’s baked in a cast-iron Dutch oven.

Harold McGee, author of On Food

and Cooking, told Bittman: “The long, slow rise does, over hours, what intensive kneading does in minutes: it brings the gluten ­molecules into side-by-side alignment to maximize their opportunity to bind to each other and produce a strong, elastic network.

“The wetness of the dough is an important piece of this because the gluten molecules are more mobile in a high proportion of water, and so can move into alignment easier and faster than if the dough were stiff.”

I tried Lahey’s method and failed. The dough did not rise as it should have. This incredibly simple recipe has turned out beautifully crafted loaves of bread all over the country, according to Internet sites. I had to try it again. Maybe it failed because my kitchen was too cold, the flour too old, or maybe I had bad yeast.

The second time I tried, it worked – sort of. The dough rose a little but not as much

“Often, though, making bread is intimidating, and sometimes you’re disappointed in the results. And, as with anything worthwhile, it takes practice as is shown in the New York Times video.

Lahey puts his dough into a preheated, heavy, ­covered pot.

“The pot is, in effect, the oven, and that oven has plenty of steam in it. Once uncovered, a half-hour later, the crust has time to harden and brown, still in the pot, and the bread is done,” Bittman said.

The dough I made did not rise enough. I baked it in the heavy pot and it did brown nicely, but it was flat.

So, going back to the only bread recipe that works for me, I made three loaves of French bread. For some ­reason, this simple recipe, calling for 7-1/2 cups flour, 2 packets of quick yeast, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 ­tablespoon salt and 3 cups warm ­water, never fails.

It’s called Howard’s French bread, and the instructions aren’t precise.

Place flour and yeast in a large mixing bowl. Mix sugar and salt into warm

water, and pour into another mixing bowl.

Pour flour mixture on top of water mixture. Using an electric mixer with a dough hook, mix for 4 minutes. Place dough into a greased bowl and turn over to coat dough with oil. Set aside and let rise for 1 hour, or until doubled.

Place dough onto a floured surface and knead until elastic, about 2 minutes, adding more flour if necessary. Divide dough into half (or thirds for three round loaves) and place in French bread pans. Baste with egg white and let rise another hour, ­covered, until doubled. Baste again with egg white. Make a slit down the center of each loaf. Bake at 190 degrees for 20 minutes. Remove from oven and baste again with egg white. Return to oven and bake 15 minutes.

For me, two or three minutes of kneading produces a much better loaf of bread than the no-knead method.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 81

touch life > drive

Plug it again, Sam

US and Japanese automakers are pledging electric cars for the mass market, in two years’ time, reports Kevin Hall

Rising oil and petrol prices have put a spring in the steps of the engineers at General Electric’s global research headquarters, who’re developing new battery technologies to power everything from hybrid cars to tugboats, city buses and diesel locomotives.

“The price of gasoline is going up dramatically, so we’re looking more seriously at this,” says Robert King, a senior hybrid engineer who has researched hybrid technologies for more than three decades. “The cost is still one challenge, but I think as we see the price of gasoline going up, more effort is going into the development of technology.”

The silver lining in high oil prices is that they may hasten the arrival of energy alternatives that should bring a number of benefits.

Oil historian Daniel Yergin calls today’s high prices a “tipping point” that will lead to alternatives to oil. New battery technologies could leave the West less reliant on Middle East oil while reducing harmful carbon dioxide emissions.

Sound like a pipe dream?

General Motors’ chairman and chief executive officer, Rick Wagoner, announced this month that his board has given the green light to begin manufacturing the Chevy Volt, an extendedrange electric vehicle.

“The Chevy Volt is a go. We believe this is the biggest step yet in our industry’s move away from our historic, virtually complete reliance on petroleum to power vehicles,” Wagoner said in a statement, pledging to get the Volt into US dealerships in the first instance by late 2010.

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That would be earlier than the timetable announced by Nissan Motor Co.’s CEO, Carlos Ghosn, who in mid-May said that Nissan would sell large numbers of electric vehicles to U.S. consumers by 2012 and would offer electric cars for corporate fleets in 2010.

“We’re going to bring a vehicle that we think will be ready for prime time and a mass market,” Mark Perry, the director of product planning for Nissan North America, said in an interview. “It is new. It is something that people will have to get their mindset shifted on a little bit, but not a lot. A little bit.”

Whether it’s Nissan, GE, U.S. carmakers or Toyota - the maker of the popular hybrid Prius - a race is under way across industries and borders to wean motorists from gasoline. With roughly 70 million cars produced globally every year, the stakes are high.

For GE, the race to build an electric car is deja vu. During the nation’s last energy crisis - in the late 1970s and early 1980s General Electric developed a hybrid automobile that worked very much like today’s popular Toyota Prius. It contained an internal combustion engine and an electric drive system.

“We proved the concept, but it wasn’t quite ready for commercialization. Lead-acid batteries were quite heavy,” King said. “In comparison, today’s batteries are a factor of three to four (better) in energy density,” making them more powerful and capable of holding their charges longer.

The problem for electric and hybrid vehicles has always been a chicken-and-egg thing. Because these cars have been limited in production, they’re expensive and buyers have been few. If there

were more buyers, prices could come down.

With oil hovering around $130 a barrel and few analysts expecting it go back under $100 in coming years, the time for a serious change in powering automobiles seems to have arrived.

“It’s a paradigm shift, and you are seeing that the technology is coming to bear,” says Robert King, who expected this shift in the 1980s only to see oil prices collapse to record lows, leaving innovation to wilt on the vine. “I’m optimistic that we’re moving ahead.”

Across GE’s production line, work is under way to use new battery technologies to help propel tugboats, power delivery trucks and heavy machinery and even support diesel locomotives.

Next year, GE will begin field-testing hybrid locomotives, which get their electric power from batteries, not from overhead electrical wires.

They use large sodium batteries that allow energy to drain slowly, reducing fuel consumption and allowing locomotives to operate on quieter battery power when they’re crossing through towns.

“A lot of nonbelievers will tell you, `You’ve been working on these batteries for 100 years and we still don’t have a solution,’ “ says Vlatko Vlatkovic, a team leader on GE’s hybrid research efforts. “Steadily the performance is improving, the cost is coming down. When you look . . . you can clearly have line of sight to where this is going to make sense economically very shortly. With us, we are practically there with locomotives.”

Manufacturing breakthroughs that are improving the storage of energy in batteries and the quantity of power stored are bringing success within reach.

Lithium ion batteries, which revolutionized consumer electronics, are being developed to power cars. Not only do they store more energy in smaller spaces, but they also lose their charges slowly. Several carmakers and GE are racing to develop new kinds of lithium ion batteries for autos.

Think of lithium ion batteries as a bottle with a wide lip that allows energy in or out rapidly, allowing for quick dispersion of energy to accelerate and quick recharging. That’s the opposite of what’s needed to power a locomotive, which gathers speed over long distances because of the heavy load it’s hauling.

The sodium batteries being perfected for locomotives are like a taller bottle with a narrow lip, allowing energy to drain out more slowly in order to maintain steady performance. Hybrid locomotives convert energy from the working diesel engines into electricity, which is then converted back into engine power and energy storage. This allows for 10 to 15 percent fuel savings, which adds up to a lot of money given the kinds of miles locomotives log on an annual basis.

“In principal, our locomotive is just a 6,000-horsepower Prius on rails,” Vlatkovic joked during a tour of battery research operations.

Although breakthroughs are common now, challenges remain.

“There’s a ways to go yet. Most of the guys who are talking about

launching products are starting in 2010, so we’ve still got a couple of years to go to really get the technology ready,” says Ed Kjaer, the director of electric transportation for Southern California Edison, a utility that provides electricity for 11 California counties and counts more than 300 electric cars in its fleet.

To date, there’s no national manufacturing and supplier base in the United States for advanced batteries to run automotive applications, he says, and the technology hasn’t yet jumped from the lab to the manufacturing chain.

“We’re talking not about a guy in a lab coat with a wrench . . . but production processes where every single cell in every single battery is at the same quality level,” Kjaer says.

Kjaer has driven an electric car 190 kilometres a day for 12 years, and believes in their potential. For widespread use, he says, a greater government-led effort is needed.

“When I portray a cautious note, it’s to say let’s not make the same mistake we made with hydrogen and fuel cells. The impression was they were just around the corner, and the realities are they are still 20 years away. I don’t think we’re (like) that with electric (cars). I do think you are not going to go from zero products to hundreds of thousands of products overnight. This is not like a light switch where it’s just on or off.”

Still, new prototypes suggest promise. The vehicles that GE successfully tested in the 1980s were plug-in hybrids whose batteries were charged by electricity. These cars were about twice as heavy as today’s Toyota Prius, weighing 4,600 to 5,000 pounds. Yet they still got the equivalent of 101 miles per gallon.

Today’s prototypes are lighter, go even farther and hold their charges longer.

High oil prices are driving change beyond just autos.

Mary Andriga, the CEO of an agricultural equipment maker in the US, says her customers are asking for new models that can be recharged electrically to reduce their diesel fuel costs.

“It’s important for us to be looking at all these things,” she says, noting that a new five-year plan envisions incorporating new battery technologies.

HOW CARS THAT RUN ON ALTERNATIVE ENERGY DIFFER: Hybrids u These cars, such as Toyota’s Prius, combine small

internal-combustion engines with electric motors. Electric motors kick in to help in accelerating and during low-speed situations in which gasoline engines are less efficient. These vehicles are designed to recharge nickel-metal hydride batteries internally while in use.

They can get almost 50 mpg.

Plug-in hybrids u They work like hybrids but their batteries can be charged externally with an extension cord and a 240volt outlet. For urban motorists, with more stopping and starting, these can virtually eliminate the need to use the gasoline motor, which is still there in case battery power is depleted.

Electric cars u The internal combustion engine is replaced with an electric motor that’s fed by a controller, which gets its power from rechargeable lithium ion batteries. Nissan promises to sell these to consumers by 2012. Like the hybrids, they plug into wall-sockets to recharge.

Electric cars with range extenders u They work like electric cars but with shorter range. They operate on full battery power for 70 kilometres, within the range of most commuters, then a small gasoline engine kicks in to power a generator that recharges the lithium ion batteries and extends the range to 1000 kilometres. General Motors plans to sell these cars to consumers by late 2010.

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touch life > toybox New Olympus E-510 A new and improved version of the E-510 digital SLR camera (released in June 2007), the E-520 features a powerful built-in image stabilisation mechanism that shifts the image sensor to compensate for camera shake.

Combined with an impressive array of versatile functions, the E-520 now makes it easier than ever for photographers to take the exact photographs they intended.

The image stabilisation system incorporated in the E-520 uses Supersonic Wave Drive (SWD) actuators to shift the image sensor and compensate for camera shake by up 4 EV steps. Compatible with any Four Thirds System standard lens, the E-520 delivers image stabilised shooting at up to 33x magnification across a wide range of focusing distances: from 18mm (35mm camera equivalent) super-wide-angle to 600mm (35mm camera equivalent) super telephoto. The E-520 also incorporates the same High-Speed Imager AF initially unveiled on the E-420 (released in March 2008). This sophisticated auto focus system uses contrast detection to deliver fast, accurate focusing to improve the ease and comfort of Live View shooting. In addition, the E-520 boasts Olympus’s sophisticated new Face Detect & Shadow Adjust Technology that can detect up to eight separate faces and optimise the exposure of both faces and background simultaneously. With the new 10-megapixel Live MOS Sensor with improved dynamic range, and the TruePic III image processing engine, the E-520 offers the same outstanding quality as the E-3, Olympus’ widely praised flagship model. Visit www.olympus.com.au

Toshiba Satellite A300 Designed specifically for the most discerning, style-conscious user, Toshiba’s Satellite series includes the all-new Satellite L300 and A300 series. The standout Satellite is the sleek A300 series, featuring a new slim-line latchless black, high-gloss design ID with grey pinstripes and stylised white, orange and blue LED front panel lights. New features include a Sleep-andCharge USB port for charging mobile devices while the notebook is hibernating or turned off, and a webcam with 3D facial recognition to provide users with a new way to logon securely.

RRP from NZ$1479 – NZ$1799 incl. GST plus $100 Cashback Visit www.isd.toshiba.co.nz Features: - Available in two models with Intel Core 2 Duo - 15.4 inch WXGA Widescreen - Harman/Kardon stereo speakers for rich sound quality - New look and feel: Mercury Silver gloss and lash gloss keyboard - Feather-touch, quick-launch multimedia pad for instant access to entertainment - FM Radio tuner - Integrated facial recognition and fingerprint reader

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Epson Perfection V500 Epson is leading the way with another world first, releasing the Perfection V500 Photo scanner with energy efficient ReadyScan LED (Light Emitting Diode) technology designed for professional photo scanning – a first in CCD scanners. The Perfection V500 Photo is a versatile scanner providing the ideal solution for scanning documents, 35mm strip film and slides and medium format film. It features an integrated Transparency Unit (TPU) and two film holders that can process 12 frames of 35mm strip film, 4 frames of 35mm mounted slides and 1 frame of 6x12 centimetre medium format film. With a USB 2.0 port interface compatible with Windows and Mac, the Perfection V500 also comes with an array of bundled software including the newest version of Epson Scan 3.2 that restores faded photos and automatically corrects any defects, Adobe Photoshop Elements; an advanced photo editing program that allows consumers the flexibility to transform their images and ABBYY Fine Reader Sprint Plus that converts scanned documents into editable text. RRP $599 ex GST. Visit www.epson.co.nz for further details

Canon LV-7585 projector The LV-7585 is Canon’s brightest projector yet – utilising highly efficient optics to deliver an incredible 6500 lumens. Designed especially for large venues, the native XGA resolution ensures sharp images of any size – right up to 400” diagonal. Four optional interchangeable lenses are available for the LV-7585. The lenses – ranging from ultra-wide angle to ultra long focus zoom - enable the unit to be used in a wide range of settings; from rear projection at short distance, to front projection at up to 25m from the screen.

Canon’s optional LV-NI02 Network Imager provides extensive remote control and alerting capabilities. Images can even be delivered directly to the projector from any computer on the same network, using the supplied software. www.canon.co.uk

Sony Ericsson Z780 The Z780, a sister product to the recently announced Z770, is set to broaden the range of web-enabled phones into more markets across the globe. It packs tri-band 3G and HSDPA into its stylish clamshell frame, letting you receive email or browse the web at high speed in countries across the world. It also introduces built-in a GPS, giving users the opportunity to carry their navigation solution with them on their phone. The Z780 comes with the latest version of Google Maps for Mobile. This application allows you to view high quality maps that give you a satellite view of the local area and view listings of the restaurants and hotels, complete with any reviews or ratings available. Accessing your emails on the Z780 couldn’t be more straightforward. An easy-to-follow ‘set-up wizard’ guides you through a series of very easy steps so that your existing webmail account can be directed to your phone. Or if it is push email that you need, then the Z780 also supports Exchange ActiveSync for your security and complete mobility. The Z780 is a UMTS/HSDPA 850/1900/2100 and GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 phone that will be available in Grand Onyx and Amethyst Silver in selected markets from Q2 2008. www.sonyericsson.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 87

see life / pages

Just another manic Monday A new book gets behind the mad genius of Howard Hughes, writes Michael Morrissey GOD OF SPEED

By Luke Davies Allen & Unwin, $38 When I first read Candy, Davies’s first novel a few years ago, I was gripped by its immediacy and its chillingly authentic portrayal of heroin addiction. Prior to Candy, I remember reflecting that when a classic appears on a certain subject – say Dracula on vampires – that other authors can get the sinking feeling that the topic is “written out”- that nothing more significant can be added. Then along came Interview with a Vampire by Ann Rice which added new life, as it were, to the undead. In other words, no subject, however welltrammeled by earlier geniuses, is ever completely exhausted. Thus The Naked Lunch or Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi may have appeared to have gutted the dark subject of heroin addiction – but Davies’s work proves the fallacy of this assumption. Luke Davies has given us not only the acutely accurate Candy (filmed with the gifted and tragically departed actor Heath Ledger) but now God of Speed, a wonderfully memorable portrayal of the life and ultimately sad times of Howard Hughes. Ironically, Davies himself has been accused of being addicted to writing about addiction but of course it is really writing itself that is the addiction.

Howard Hughes was arguably the world’s most colourful billionaire though, of late, Sir Richard Branson has been giving him a good run for his money (unwitting pun?). Hughes, of course, had a flying start (alas, another unwitting pun) because his father invented the world’s most efficient drilling bit (and refused to sell it) just as the oil industry was taking off. In 1912, Hughes senior was leasing out 40,000 drill bits worldwide at US $30,000 a pop yielding a fat return of $1.2 billion, making him – if Davies’ fig88 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

ures are correct – one of the richest men in the world without having to lift a finger.

Appearances to the contrary, Hughes was no mere socialite playboy but also a tough if capricious business man. Apart from being filthy rich, he was tall, lean, handsome, suave and intelligent though, alas, like so many contemporary Americans, totally self indulgent to the point of self destruction. When are these sad folk going to grow up or say a few prayers to save their apparently doomed souls? It was therefore de riguer for Hughes to buy the world’s fifth largest “yacht” – gin palace doesn’t quite say it – this was the kind of vessel that people like arms dealer Khashoggi or the Queen of England might and did own. Hughes is quoted as saying as soon as young women stepped on board they dropped their underwear. So while Hughes, like Hugh Hefner, is not exactly “good father material” (a wonderful line from Once Were Warriors), he was certainly a fascinating figure.

Women found him irresistible. At various times, Hughes had serious affairs with Fay Wray, Faith Domergue, Ginger Rogers, Bette Davies, Olivia de Havilland, Katherine Hepburn, Carol Lombard, Jean Harlow, and this doesn’t exhaust the list. Fiercest spirited of all was Ava Gardner. The arrogant and over-confident Hughes couldn’t understand what a “classy lady” like Gardner could see in a “greaseball” like Sinatra or a runt like Rooney. When the jealous Hughes broke into her apartment one night looking for Rooney (not present), Gardner was so angry she belted him as hard as she could with a heavy bronze bell. Hughes lost two teeth and fell unconscious.

When he came to she was nursing his wounds.

Despite his wanton life style, Hughes – who speaks to us in the first person – often confesses to being in love with some of these extraordinary women and writer Davies compels us to believe

THE OLYMPICS’ STRANGEST MOMENTS

By Geoff Tibbalis Robson Books, $24.99

his feelings were authentic, not just pose. But alas, Hughes was a compulsive Don Juan who could not make a commitment – at least not for very long.

Hughes was also obsessed with flying and one of aviation’s major figures – the most significant (his own view naturally). This was not entirely manic grandiosity, for Hughes flew around the world in a record time of three days and nineteen hours in1938. Afterward, he was warmly rewarded with a cheering crowd of over one million, as he paraded in triumph through the streets of New York.

He also designed the “Spruce Goose”, which only ever flew once and travelled a mere 70 feet. Even now, no aeroplane has exceeded its 320-feet wingspan.

Eventually, there will be aeroplanes – or at least flying devices – as large or larger. Indeed, there already have been – the German Zeppelins (copied by other major Western nations) but sadly long since banned, because of frequent explosions caused by the highly flammable hydrogen that ballooned out their massive shapes – as long as ocean-going liners.

Just incidentally, Davies has a wonderfully poetic image which links the action of drilling the earth for oil with “drilling” his skin with a heroin-loaded needle for blood. Oil=Blood. When on stage in Auckland’s recent Writers and Readers Week, he said that he was a poet above all else. He also wryly observed that he was dismayed when he heard that a film (second rate as it turned out) was coming out almost simultaneously with this book. Like the true professional he is, Davies did not allow himself to view the movie until his book was at its final proof stage.

It is highly significant that the book is entitled God of Speed and the last word in the book is God: “In a cockpit one is naked before God”. In fact, on his last aeroplane ride Hughes was naked – of course this was a sign of more than eccentricity – he was probably manic depressive, crazy if you will, but not so crazy as to not be able to pilot a plane.

Though Hughes’ exuberant lifestyle would now be viewed as a feminist nightmare, his succumbing to all the temptations that successive wealth placed in his path, is a human failing that is not limited to Americans alone and Davies’ acutely perceptive novel shows that in the end, there is a reckoning.

The Olympics always seem like humanity’s best hope for overnight world unity. The pity of it is, they only last a couple of weeks. And as recent events continue to unfold, politics and the Olympics continue to become enmeshed. During World War Two, they were suspended. I am torn between a desire to see the magnificent pageantry of virtually the entire world united in sporting glory and the anger at China’s continuing dominance over Tibet.

Of course, if we were to be consistent about the political line, many other nations might have to be disqualified.

This book tells the story of numerous touching moments of this100 year-old plus Odyssey. What better place to start with than the astonishing first marathon, then as now, the culminating event of this athletic fest. Naturally, the Greeks were keen to win and practiced fiercely. Also the prizes were to be more than a mere cup and the playing of the national anthem. The winner was to receive a barrel of sweet wine, plus free clothing and free haircuts for life. Not to mention a ton (2000 lbs) of chocolate.

Presumably one could be sozzled and sweet-toothed for months at a time, all the while happy in the knowledge that you would be smartly clad and have your hair cut as you fell into a chocolate-sweetened stupor. There was just one small hitch – you had to come first.

A Frenchman set a cracking pace that no one, including himself, could maintain. Spiridon Louis was the local favourite and he even stopped for a celebratory glass of wine en route. Edwin Flack, an Australian, who had never even run more than 10 miles, became so confident of victory he sent a bicycle message forward to announce his victory but nonetheless he also dropped out and the gallant little Louis eventually won in sizzling sub three hours time. Thereafter, he sportingly declined the free clothes, meals and even the haircuts!

Fair play was not always the characteristics of early meets.

American runners had the reputation of nudging, pushing and blocking – every dastardly tactic in the book except actual tripping.

How differently things have changed was shown by the stripping of Donovan Bailey’s Olympic 100-metre gold because of using steroids. Few would know the later-to-be-notorious General Patton came fifth in the 1912 pentathlon. The concept of the Olympic Village began at the Los Angeles 1932 Olympics which at that time had the largest stadium in the world. There’s a gold medal’s worth of interesting tales in this book – so grab a glass of red wine, take a free haircut and browse though these athletic yarns beside a warm fire, knowing that you don’t have to lift a leg to take part.

YOUNG STALIN

By Simon Seabag Montefiore Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $75 (HB); $35 (PB) Young Stalin – the phrase sounds bizarre. The photograph on the cover of this wonderful study is almost like a science fiction experience – who is the owner of this handsome moustachioed and bearded face? Yes Stalin, indeed – whose youthful visage millions may never have seen before. It’s like seeing a picture of Hitler as a baby. And some might suppose that if it could be known that that innocent little babe would one day grow up to be a murdering monster responsible for the death of millions – would it somehow INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 89

be justifiable to do away with the baby? And the simple answer is no – such a decision would involve performing evil first to bring about good later which is never morally justified though in reality it happens all the time.

Unlike Hitler, whose portrait is available in a thousand variant forms, Stalin seems to look the same – a man of indeterminate height – somehow never short nor tall – aged between 40 and 60 , virtually expressionless, yet nonetheless conveying an impression of steely firmness – the Man of Steel is alas Stalin rather than Superman. And as Orwell once famously remarked dictators are usually short. Presumably, Orwell had in mind Stalin who was indeed short – around 5’ 5’’ boosted by built up shoes. To rub the point home as it were, Orwell was six feet three.

It has often been suggested that Hitler was “mad” but the word is never (or very seldom) bestowed on Stalin – he embodies the cold ruthless political killer. This psychopath on a grand scale, always had others to do his “dirty work” though Montefiore tells us Stalin would inquire as to how the victim had faced death. In short, Stalin was a sadist.

It is ironic to reflect that the young Stalin once studied for the priesthood. But in young manhood he became a nomadic bandit robbing banks – though, unlike a Western movie bad guy, his holdups were not for personal gain, but to swell the coffers of the burgeoning Communist party.

Stalin was beaten by his father and in Gori, the town in which he grew up, violence was rife. Of course, environment does not explain why a person becomes vicious and vengeful but it must surely play a part. Though holdups and extortion, were central to

ROOSTERS I HAVE KNOWN

By Steve Braunias Awa Press, $30

Steve Braunias is one of our wittiest journalists and this collection of interviews with 27 New Zealanders of varying degrees of fame shows off his diverse skills to advantage. His irreverent versatility is also deployed as a contributing writer to Eating Media Lunch and the outrageously politically incorrect The Unauthorised History of New Zealand. Here his talents are displayed in a more gentle and captivating mode.

One of the most interesting aspects of this intriguing collection is the extraordinarily diverse line up. To be honest, I was at first a little baffled by the extremity of the mix though this may be due to my ignorance or perhaps an initial misunderstanding of the collection’s presumed intent which is to blend the truly well known with the not quite so well known. For instance – no doubt to my eternal social shame – I confess to never having heard of Chester Borrows, Cindy Kiro, Ryan Nelson, Wayne Idour, Garth McVicar, Richard Faull, Adam Ricker or Glynn Cardy – but then they’ve probably never heard of me either. Even I haven’t heard of me unless I yodel in a bathroom with an impressively reverberant echo.

For a still young cynic with an occasional foray into undergraduate humour, Braunias shows a surprisingly tender side. In Colin Meads, he detects the quality of “goodness”; Peta Sharples is “lovely”. At this rate, by the time he hits menopause (many years to go yet), Braunias may be a contributing writer to Woman’s Day – but then a guy has to eat, doesn’t he? “ It has often been suggested that Hitler was “mad” but the word What Braunias has mastered more is never (or very seldom) bestowed on Stalin – he embodies the cold than any other New ruthless political killer. This psychopath on a grand scale, always had Zealand journalist is the apparently nonothers to do his “dirty work” though Montefiore tells us Stalin would beginning inquire as to how the victim had faced death. In short, Stalin was a sadist sequiter which then either quickly – or subtly – their party fund raising, nobles sympathetic to their cause would segues into the subject of the interview. For instance, his opener also donate. With his black fedora, and a Mauser in his belt, Stalin on the intolerably smooth and uncharismatic John Key –” Each was a dashing figure, a Georgian Jesse James. of the eighteen rooms in The County – a terribly romantic hotel, Russia has long had the reputation of being the most paranoid the flashiest in Napier, five star, built as the county council chamculture on the planet – double agents, police spies and informers bers in 1908, which means it’s not, blessedly, another example of were rife. Stalin quickly became ruthless, though Trotsky and oth- Hawke’s Bay Art Deco – are named after native birds. John Key ers made the mistake of thinking the boorish peasant-like Stalin stayed there on Wednesday night.” In other words, the décor of was less dangerous than he actually was. In 1905, Stalin met and the hotel is considerably more colourful than the wan Mr Key impressed Lenin with his ruthlessness as well as his ability to raise – but who knows when (likely as not) he becomes our next PM, money by whatever means. His biggest robbery of all, in the town he may develop a personality. They have pills for it. of Tiflis, resulted in 40 deaths but yielded heaps of cash. Though A critique of this collection is that the interviews are far too the rival Communist faction, the Mensheviks, condemned bank short. It would have been more attractive to have 10 or 12 celebs robberies, and the heist was an embarrassment to the Bolsheviks with 20 pages each rather than 27 (a third of which are half to which Stalin belonged, in Lenin’s eyes Stalin was just the sort knowns) at five a pop. This may be Braunias’ concession to the of man the party needed. When a group of Bolsheviks discussed cellphone text generation to whom the thought of reading (say) their favourite pastime, some opted for seduction but for Stalin a 1000-page novel is as unthinkable as crossing the Sahara Desert revenge was the fantasy of choice – “There’s nothing sweeter in on their hands and knees (though Sir Ranulph Fiennes would be the world”. Paradoxically, this cruel man was a reader of Plato in up for it). The time-worn formula of a book offering a more in the original Greek and a poet of some ability. depth interview than a newspaper or magazine pieces still has my Montefiore writes with a novelist’s verve and indeed he has just vote (though John Key won’t). Graham Reid’s otherwise excelpublished his first novel in which Stalin (unsurprisingly) appears lent recent travel book showed a similar conceptual flaw in the a character. I can’t wait to read it. length department. It may also be the publisher fear that the buy90 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

FROM AFTERWIT TO ZEMBLANITY

By Simon Hertnon New Holland, $25 Words, words, words, famously said Hamlet. When, as a child, I discovered a new word, it would provide the thrill of finding a piece of money left unnoticed on the pavement: fresh coinage. In the fourth form, when we came across a word unbeknown to us and asked the teacher, Mr Coyle would raise his arms in an impetuous sweep and cry, “Get out your dictionaries!”

When I first read Mike Johnson’s highly original novel Lear (now sadly out of print), I discovered on the first page two previously unknown words: ormulu and patchouli. Since then, patchouli has become a familiar friend but ormulu remains a rare bird.

Whenever I read Umberto Eco, I stagger through a fortress of unknown words – write them on a piece of paper, plan to look them up, and then never do. Perhaps because I sense I will be unlikely to use them.

Author Simon Hertnon, described on the dust jacket, as an “inveterate thinker” has assembled this collection of golden oldies in order – as the subtitle bravely claims – to restore life to their mummified corpses. It almost sounds like the linguistic equivalent of saving a doomed species of whale. Perhaps these rare minnows will once again swim in the rich briny sea of our ever-changing language.

The book has a pleasing organisation with multiple meanings, which century when current, etymology, why Hertnon liked it, a quotation and a note on any current usage. The book also has a pleasing elegance. I guess it won’t be a best seller but would make an excellent gift to anyone who likes words or browsing dictionaries, a past time alas that the Internet has seduced young readers away from.

So let’s dive in: Afterwit really means more less what you might guess it to mean; wisdom after the event. I agree with Hertnon – this is a word that badly needs revival – especially when looking back on my numerous social mistakes. Handsel sounds like Gretel’s boyfriend or selling something from your hand but is a nineteenth century word (among other meanings) the initial experience of anything (Handsel walking with Gretel in the woods?).

Imbroglio, ambrosial and noosphere were a paltry few of the words that I was familiar with. When it came to foundroyant, curglaff, ballicatter, anacampserote, logodaedalus and the sonorous plesiosynchronous (which sounds like a handy description of a school of plesiosauruses [plesiosaurii? – Ed.] doing synchronised swimming), I was lost. And when I looked them up in my 1975 Chambers Dictionary they were not there. My computer thesaurus isn’t too happy with them either. Perhaps I better pick up a copy of the 13 volume Oxford when I’m next at the supermarket.

In the meantime, Hertnon’s delightful collection can be an excellent guide to that obscure word.

Ready When You Are! IN THE TABLOID WORLD It seems enough just to go into rehab.

Spend a little time and a lot of money and presto!

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IN THE REAL WORLD It’s quite different It needs a special ingredient, YOU. We need your personal commitment and motivation to make it all work.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 91

Cre8ive 4220C

ing reading public, infected with the text virus, can’t handle more than 2000-3000 word document on any subject. They could be immunised by reading Dostoyevsky. Fyodor who?

One thing I still can’t figure out is – even though Braunias tries to explain in his (as always) witty introduction – why this almost bizarre mix of New Zealand’s famous and not so famous are called roosters? Is it because they crow too loudly before dawn or walk with a bantam’s proud strut? Or because – like all of us kiwis – we have at some time been on a farm and felt a right chook?

see life / music

The ‘new’ Winehouse Chris Philpott checks out an Aussie 16 year old, books a Conchord flight and gets home before dark Gabriella Cilmi Lessons To Be Learned

Let me start by saying this: the first thing I heard about 16 year old Aussie prodigy Gabriella Cilmi was that she was “the new Amy Winehouse”, and ordinarily I would have been calling a bomb disposal unit for any album which drew that comparison.

Listening through Lessons to be Learned for the first time, its fair to say that the comparisons to Winehouse are not completely unfounded – first single “Sweet About Me” is oozing with the Brit’s trademark jazz-pop style – but listening a little deeper and the differences become clearer.

One need go no further than third track “Sanctuary” or highlight “Don’t Want To Go To Bed Now” to see that Cilmi sings with a range and variety that stretches far beyond her years.

That said, Lessons comes across as really no more than a pop record designed to fit the current trend, and therein lies the problem, as track after acoustic soul-infused track inexplicably starts to melt into each other, becoming inane and repetitive by the time it reaches its conclusion.

I wasn’t exactly calling a bomb disposal unit by the time I was done, but after starting out with a hiss and a roar, Lessons ultimately disappointed this reviewer.

Flight of the Conchords Flight Of The Conchords Billing yourself as New Zealand’s “fourth most popular comedy-folk duo” might seem like a strange way to introduce yourself to a picky American market, but for Flight of the Conchords – the infamous Kiwi combo featuring comedian Jermaine Clement and former Black Seeds singer Bret McKenzie – it has proven a surprising path to success – and after winning a comedy Grammy award for their debut EP The Distant Future, the stage was set for the Conchords to release their debut full length album.

92 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

It would be fair to say it was one of the most anticipated Kiwi releases of the year, both here and internationally.

Yet, despite my initial concerns, the Conchords have managed to add an element of catchiness to their catalogue of humourous tracks, and this album features both live performance staples like “Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenoceros”, the groups’ riotous rap parody, and “Think About It”, alongside a number of tracks that featured on their well-received TV series, including my personal favourites “Bowie” and “Business Time”.

Flight of the Conchords is hilarious from start to finish, but is also legitimately enjoyable on a musical level, making it one of the finest Kiwi albums of 2008. Make sure you don’t miss this one.

Neil Diamond Home Before Dark With over 25 studio albums to his credit, it seems like Neil Diamond has been around literally forever. But surprisingly enough, it seems like The Basher is producing some of his finest work.

With a back catalogue that includes classics like “Cherry Cherry”, “Song Sung Blue” and “Sweet Caroline”, combined with a signature style and sound, one could imagine it would be hard to keep your work fresh and contemporary. Yet with this latest release, Diamond has done just that.

Maintaining the acoustic sound that has become synonymous with his work, any new Diamond record feels like pulling on a familiar and comfortable pair of blue jeans (pun intended), and Home Before Dark is no exception, kicking off with the slow, soulful “If I Don’t See You Again” and working through an hour’s worth of work that is right up there with his best.

Not only that, but each song is tinged with a kind of reflective feel, bringing back memories of some of Johnny Cash’s later, introspective work with American Recordings, and making Home Before Dark ring true for all listeners, appealing even to those who might otherwise miss out on Diamond’s genius. This is an album that is definitely worth checking out.

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www.mistralsoftware.co.nz INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 93

see life / movies

Return of the Prince Caspian a winner, and even Adam Sandler has a watchable movie The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Starring: Ben Barnes, Georgie Henley, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Skandar Keynes, Peter Dinklage and Sergio Castellito Directed by: Andrew Adamson Rated: M (for violence) 137 minutes If you squint, the Narnian ruins resemble Middle Earth’s Helms Deep after battle. The gallant Pevensie siblings recall the Harry Potter crew. And Reepicheep, a swashbuckling mouse, possesses a giant ego in inverse proportion to his tiny frame – just like Shrek’s rakish Puss’n’Boots.

Directed by Shrek’s Andrew Adamson, who also made the one about The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is an elaborately-presented feast that will taste familiar to the `tween and teen audience for whom it is served. The four courses are love, war, faith and humor, served in no canonical order, and sometimes, simultaneously.

Visually, Adamson borrows heavily from the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter recipe books.

Because Narnia author C.S. Lewis and LOTR scribe J.R.R. Tolkien were longtime friends and Oxford dons who wrote their allegories at roughly the same time (Lewis’ were published first), there are obvious commonalities. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter’s mother, who uses initials instead of a first name like the dons who so deeply influenced her, has acknowledged her debt to both.

Still, for Prince Caspian’s first half hour, I wished that Adamson 94 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

had framed his story so that it didn’t look so derivative of LOTR, Harry Potter and his own Shrek.

As it goes along, Adamson’s longish film (137 minutes) overcomes an awkward start, finding its own visual language and rhythms.

In earth years it is 1941, a year after the Pevensies fell through the wardrobe into an enchanted parallel universe. While they’re standing in the London Underground in their school uniforms, the sound of a ram’s horn beckons them to Narnia where 1300 years have elapsed since Aslan the lion king was sacrificed and resurrected.

Thus, the Pevensies go from the frying pan of the German blitz on London to the fire of battle between Narnians and King Miraz who effectively has deposed Prince Caspian (destined-to-be-nexttween heartthrob, Ben Barnes), rightful heir to the throne. Where Lion, Witch and Wardrobe was primarily an adventure movie, this one is definitely a war movie.

While the acting is a vast improvement over the first installment, the supremely talented Sergio Castellito as King Miraz and the wryly funny Peter Dinklage as Trumpkin the Red Dwarf steal the show so often they could be booked for felony. Eddie Izzard, who supplies the voice of Reebicheep, is their able co-conspirator.

Despite postcard-lovely landscapes (shot variously in New Zealand, Slovenia, Poland and the Czech Republic), Adamson’s film really comes to life when a menagerie of griffins and centaurs are loosed, suggesting an invasion of Maurice Sendak’s wild things.

While the more mature actors and creatures and CGI effects tend to upstage the younger performers, nothing could be sweeter than Georgie Henley as Lucy Pevensie, the youngest sibling, whose poise and pluck carry the day.

Reviewed by Carrie Rickey

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan Starring: Adam Sandler, John Turturro, Rob Schnieder Directed by: Dennis Dugan Rated: PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language and nudity 113 minutes There’s a spirit of avant-garde goofiness to the new Adam Sandler movie that sets it apart from his usual sophomoric work.

Sprung from the fertile comic imaginations of Robert Smigel (Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog) and Judd Apatow (the grand vizier of film comedy), it exists in a slap-happy parallel universe. In You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Israeli commandos dream of styling mousse and blow driers, hummus is a dip served with eyeglasses, and Mariah Carey asks terrorists to explain Bluetooth technology.

Zohan is a top Israeli counterspy who bops down the boulevard like Borat imitating a disco-era Travolta snapping Chuck Norris moves. He is the master of almost any situation, from a hacky sack challenge to outswimming a jihadist on a jet ski. He leaps across rooftops with an agility that would make Spider-Man weep, and he never overcooks grilled fish. He is also a sex god (Sandler, buffed to perfection, sports a codpiece the size of a cantaloupe). His greatest drawback is his consonant-gargling accent, which sounds like a collection of Scrabble tiles swirled in a blender.

But Zohan is unfulfilled. He dreams of leaving the endless conflict of the Middle East for a peaceful life as a New York hairdresser.

While pursuing the extra-dastardly-evil terrorist known as The Phantom (John Turturro), he fakes his own death, stows away on a trans-Atlantic jet and wrangles an entry-level job at a rundown salon, his new mission in life to make the world “silky smooth.” He’s great with a clipper and comb, but Zohan’s real appeal is the additional services he gives his elderly clients in the stockroom love pad.

As in last year’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, homosexual anxiety underpins many of the film’s jokes. This time it’s turned inside out: Rather than a red-blooded firefighter pretending to be gay, Sandler’s now a lady-killer stud in a gay man’s profession. Zohan is a macho dynamo: He’s so exuberantly proud of his body that he can’t help doing a bump and grind with every rinse and fluff, and it must be said that Sandler’s campy body language is hilarious.

Naturally, the Happy Madison films stock company is on hand with extended cameos. Rob Schneider pops up as an Arab taxi driver who recognizes Zohan and endangers his new life, Kevin Nealon appears as a timid neighborhood watch captain, and Nick Swardson plays a nerd who’s appalled by Zohan’s nonstop lovemaking with his mommie dearest (Lanie Kazan). John McEnroe, George Takai and Bruce Vilanch show up just for the hell of it.

Full marks go to longtime Sandler collaborator Dennis Dugan (of Chuck & Larry and The Benchwarmers), whose direction has never been better. The film has a disorienting, daffy feel, swinging easily between the comic romance of Zohan and the pretty Palestinian owner of his salon (Emmanuelle Chriqui), and farcical action scenes that demolish half of Brooklyn. The dialogue is full of left-field weirdness: When Zohan explains his accent by insisting he’s Australian, someone comments that it’s much nicer there since they ended apartheid.

And for fans of physical humor, Sandler performs impossible deeds of athletic prowess with the aid of computer animation and prosthetic feet. (Don’t ask.) Best of all, his character’s accent keeps Sandler from drifting into the adenoidal whine that made many of his characters physically painful to listen to.

Zohan tries for a message of social relevance with a nod to America as the land of multicultural coexistence, but its real value is in air-fluffing our cares away for a couple of hours.

Reviewed by Colin Covert INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008 95

see life / dvds

The Russians are coming Two very different wars against Russians, in this month’s DVD crop We Own the Night Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Robert Duvall, Eva Mendes Directed by: James Gray.

Rated: R (for strong violence, drug material, language, some sexual content and brief nudity) 110 minutes We Own the Night is a tug-of-war tale about a son being pulled in different directions by his cop-heavy family and his Russian mob-connected employers, his “second family.”

It would be nothing more than sturdy entertainment were it not for the presence of Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, playing brothers and reunited with their director from The Yards, James Gray.

Wahlberg is Joe, “the good son,” the cop – a New York police captain in charge of a unit looking into the power-grabs by Russian expats, new to America’s drug wars.

Phoenix is Bobby, the “bad seed” and the focus of the film. He’s the guy who ran away from his family’s ethnic surname, the one who turned his back on the Force and became a bartender who is now manager of El Caribe, a converted church that is one of the city’s hottest nightspots.

Bobby works hard, parties hard and loves hard (Eva Mendes is his lady). He uses a little coke, drinks a little booze, keeps the peace in the club and steers clear of the shadier relatives of the kindly old Russian fur merchant who owns the joint.

But The Family wants the son to take sides.

Writer-director James Gray returns to his Little Odessa roots for this period piece about the rise of the Russian mob in New York’s Brighton Beach and the efforts of New York’s finest to fight this new and ruthless threat. He ratchets up the suspense and stages a masterful car chase in the rain with the water-muted sounds of 96 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM July 2008

tires and gunfire and the tunnel-vision of death seen through the wiper-blades.

Gray does a weak job of throwing Bobby into a tug-of-war between families even as he surprises us with the places he takes us in the third act. Though he fills the police ranks with veteran actors who look the part (a grizzled Tony Musante turns up) and even got ‘80s New York mayor Ed Koch to pretend he was still the mayor, Gray didn’t cast a villain (Alex Veadov) with enough weight to balance the story.

Wahlberg’s role is a shell of the one he got to play in The Departed, but Phoenix is firing on all cylinders as a man overwhelmed by the situation he finds himself and his girlfriend in. Phoenix strips away the pose and makes Bobby a guy whose nerves are right on the surface of the performance. He holds his own with the great Duvall, creates a real heat and warmth in his scenes with Mendes, and he and Wahlberg play as if their real history was not unlike the fictional one played out here.

Reviewed by Roger Moore Charlie Wilson’s War Starring: Tom Hanks, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julia Roberts Directed by: Mike Nichols Rated: R (for language, nudity, war violence) 100 minutes When we first meet U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) he’s sipping bourbon in a Las Vegas hot tub, surrounded by naked strippers while a few feet away more nude beauties snort lines of cocaine.

This film is about how Charlie Wilson, a party animal whose greatest legislative achievement in six terms was getting re-elected five times, became the key player in dealing the mighty Red Army its most humiliating defeat. You might even say good ol’ boy Charlie was largely responsible for the fall of Communism.

Charlie Wilson is divorced, perennially broke and almost certainly alcoholic. He’s a party animal who staffs his Congressional office with sexy young women. His press aide is affectionately known as “Jail Bait.”

On a trip back home Wilson falls under the sexual spell of Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), the sixth-wealthiest woman in Texas and a right-wing warrior who twists his arm into visiting refugee camps along the Pakistan/Afghan border. There Good Time Charlie has his faced rubbed in the horrors of war and the routine atrocities of the Soviets. He returns primed to launch a covert operation that will funnel millions in American aide to the Afghan freedom fighters. Along the way he’ll wrangle huge secret appropriations out of Congress and forge an unlikely alliance of Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to deliver weapons to the rebels.

He’ll team up with a bull-in-a-china-shop CIA spook (a brilliantly funny Philip Seymour Hoffman) and convert the head of the appropriations committee (Ned Beatty) to the cause.

Before long, bearded guys in turbans are using ground-to-air missiles to blow the previously invulnerable Soviet helicopters out of the sky.

What Charlie can’t do is retain funding for Afghanistan after the war is won and the Soviets vanquished. So he watches hopelessly as American influence in that country evaporates, opening the door for the Taliban and today’s messy situation.

Reviewed by Robert W. Butler