Investigate magazine Oct 08 issue

no onseer >> clo gets

WEST ON THE BRINK Mark Steyn argues we’re lurching towards collapse

BREAST EXAMS

Does self-examination help or harm?

WILD KIDS

Amy Brooke on overstimulation

>>

INVESTIGATE October 2008: The John Key Interview • The End of MMP • A Wing & A Prayer

Is Key Ready?

the interview you shouldn’t miss MMP Ditched?

This election could be the end of MMP

Sarah Palin

She’s giving Obama nightmares $7.99 October 2008

Issue 93

A Wing & A Prayer

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Contents 50 28 58 36

44

FEATURES

28 Yes, Prime Minister

In a few weeks’ time, National party leader John Key could be Prime Minister. But what would he bring to the role, and can he be trusted more than Helen Clark who bizarrely has named ‘Trust’ her major election issue. IAN WISHART interviews John Key on the battle ahead, and what he’s offering

36 Who’s To Blame For MMP?

It seemed like such a good idea at the time, but as TREVOR LOUDON writes, voters chose MMP back in 1993 because of a slick sales job by groups with a hidden agenda, not because it was the best replacement for FPP

50 A Wing & A Prayer

The coroner has released a second verdict on an air crash investigation re-opened as a result of Investigate magazine’s coverage three years ago. NEILL HUNTER revisits the case and the new evidence

58 The West Is Collapsing

We’ve just seen the US banking system being hammered by its biggest financial crisis since 1929, but if MARK STEYN is correct the prospects for the West are even bleaker than that

44 Hurricane Palin

Last month, Democrat Barrack Obama looked like a shoe-in for the presidency. Now, a stroke of vicepresidential selection genius by John McCain has turned the US election on its head. BILL LAMBRECHT examines the phenomenon that is Sarah Palin

Cover: NZ Herald/Presspix

Editorial and opinion 06 Focal Point

Volume 8, issue 93, ISSN 1175-1290

Editorial

08 Vox-Populi

The roar of the crowd

16 Simply Devine

16

Miranda Devine on Sarah Palin

18 Eyes Right

Richard Prosser on petrodollars

20 Line 1

Chris Carter on ‘news’

22 Soapbox

Lifestyle

Art Direction Design & Layout

64 Money

Peter Hensley on financial turmoil

66 Education

Amy Brooke on overstimulation

68 Science

Commercial secrets

70 Technology

Backing up your hard drive

72 Sport

Chris Forster on the Olympics

74 Health

Claire Morrow on bugs

76 Alt.Health

Breast self exams don’t work

78 Travel

Camel rides in India

82 Food

James Morrow gets piggy

78

84 Drive

Heidi Wishart Bozidar Jokanovic

Tel: +64 9 373 3676 Fax: +64 9 373 3667 Investigate Magazine PO Box 302188, North Harbour North Shore 0751, NEW ZEALAND AUSTRALIAN EDITION Editor Ian Wishart Customer Services Debbie Marcroft Advertising sales@investigatemagazine.com Tel/Fax: 1-800 123 983 SUBSCRIPTIONS Online: www.investigatemagazine.com

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92 Music

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

94 Movies

Investigate magazine Australasia is published by HATM Magazines Ltd

Porsche Cayenne

86 Toybox

The latest and greatest

88 Pages

Michael Morrissey’s spring picks Chris Philpott’s CD reviews Babylon AD, Wall*E,

84

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24 Faith Point

Allison Ewing on God’s plans

66

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

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Editorial

Absolute Power goes to her head

Y

ou’ll forgive me for laughing, but I’m absolutely convinced Prime Minister Helen Clark either has the best sense of humour on the planet, or she’s truly lost it and panicking It’s all about ‘Trust’. This from the woman who lied to the media about the contents of a police file, solely so she could publicly smear the then-Police Commissioner Peter Doone enough to justify his dismissal from the job.

It’s all about ‘Trust’, said the same Helen Clark whose name was registered on two different electoral rolls in the 1975 election, and whose declared address in 1978 appears to have been false as well.

It was Clark who signed paintings she knew she hadn’t painted, and Clark who then appears to have lied to the subsequent police investigation.

The same Miss Clark also told journalists she didn’t realise her Prime Ministerial motorcade was belting through small towns at nearly 160 km/h, forcing mothers and children to dive for safety, because she was busy in the back for the entire trip, reading.

There are many more incidents, most of them spelt out in considerable detail with sources and footnotes in the book Absolute Power.

But you really have to wonder at the Prime Minister’s sheer chutzpah and hubris.

Trust?

She told a TV interviewer just before the 2005 election she did not support a ban on smacking. Then, after the election, Labour MPs were ‘whipped’ into supporting a ban on smacking – on Prime Minister’s orders.

Do we ‘trust’ Helen Clark?

A poll on the Investigate magazine website this month found 81% of respondents trusted John Key, while 19% preferred either Helen Clark or ‘neither’ as trustable.

A similar poll on the Stuff website, with 30,000 votes, found 82% trusted Key and 18% Clark. Do you see a trend here?

If the Prime Minister is brave enough to put her record against John Key’s on ‘trust’, then either she has absolute dynamite waiting to drop on the National leader or, more likely, she has nothing at all and is reverting to the fallback position of smearing her opponents in the hope of creating doubt.

Certainly, she’s been trying that repeatedly in recent weeks.

Faced with the Winston Peters/Owen Glenn problem, and her own deep role in that, Clark talks conspiratorially to journalists about John Key “meeting” Britain’s Lord Ashcroft. Leave aside for a moment that Ashcroft is a prominent Tory, and so is John Key INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

– I mean, surely the Prime Minister who regularly attends meetings of Socialist International is not getting her trousers in a knot about the fact the Key met a fellow conservative?

Ashcroft, unlike Owen Glenn, is prohibited from donating money to National’s campaign, but nonetheless Helen ‘Trust me’ Clark expects the public to get excited about hidden agendas and hollow men.

Labour’s electoral campaign has so far (at the time of writing) been so hollow that Labour has been forced to release National Party policies because it doesn’t have any of its own policies ready. Go figure.

One policy worth fixing is Health, however. A woman, four months pregnant, visits her local GP after recovering from a vicious bout of flu and a subsequent bacterial chest infection. She tells me she had eaten very little for eight days because, quite simply, she couldn’t eat.

Naturally, she was worried about her baby and asked the female GP to check its heartbeat using the handheld monitor that all doctors have.

“Ooh, you’ll have to see your midwife for that, I’m afraid,” intoned said doctor officiously. “I’m not allowed to check your baby.”

“What??” said the naturally irritated mother to be. “I’m here, getting a check up myself. You have the heartbeat monitor right there. I haven’t eaten much and am recovering from the flu. I just want you to check my baby’s heartbeat. How hard is that?”

No can do, said Dr Bureaucrat, it’s not my job. “Talk to the government if you don’t like it.”

Hopeless. Utterly hopeless. Do emergency room doctors faced with an incoming pregnant car crash victim withhold treatment until the midwife arrives from across town?

But apparently the whole farce has its roots in Labour’s funding policy for obstetrics. Whilst the baby is apparently just a lump of cells forming part of a woman’s body for abortion purposes, that same baby is suddenly a unique citizen and future taxpayer, independent of the mother, for the purposes of health care. Doctors can treat the mother, but allegedly they can’t perform the most cursory of health checks on the pregnancy of an ill mother.

Daft, insane political correctness. Do we ‘trust’ Labour to fix it? Not in this century.

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> vox populi

Communiques The roar of the crowd

A PRO-POLYAMORY LETTER I’m often amused at people who rail against the so-called “nanny state”. They complain about every aspect of government policies which somehow interferes with their lives and their ability to do as they wish. The same folk then look to the Nanny State to prevent individuals from living their lives according to their beliefs, because it upsets their delicate sensibilities.

I am referring to your article on polygamy/polyamory, of course.

It’s not enough that we have the so-called evils of the Nanny State in our lives – now magazine editors publish thinly veiled attacks against lifestyles which they consider “immoral” or threatening to the social order.

Here’s an idea, folks-at-Investigate – try to be a bit more tolerant; less judgemental; and mind your own business. If two, three, four, five, a dozen, a hundred, a zillion consenting adults want to co-habit then that’s their business. Keep your editorialising out of their bedroom.

Frank Macskasy, Upper Hutt Editor responds:

This would be all well and good Frank, except for the reality that children get dragged into these adult ‘fantasy’ lifestyles. It would also be well and good, but for the fact that the international push for legal recognition of polygamy/polyamory has been accompanied by pleas for taxpayer welfare handouts. Thus, a poly household wants taxpayer subsidies far in excess of those available to ordinary households.

You can’t have it both ways. If adults want to do their own thing behind closed doors using their own money, that’s their business. But when they want legal recognition from the state and access to taxpayer subsidies for their lifestyle, that makes it the wider public’s business whether polyamorists like it or not.

IN DEFENCE OF TE REO Amy Brooke’s vilification of the Mâori language is unjustified.

First she attacks Mâori for ‘limited vocabulary and consonants’.

Mâori has fewer consonants than English; so does Latin. English isn’t pitch-sensitive like Chinese, nor has it the tongue-clicks of certain African languages. Mâori has two consonants that English doesn’t. What does it matter? How do the sounds of a language dictate its ability to express?

The critique against limited vocabulary only works if one, like Brooke, believes that post-colonial additions are ‘fake’. Additions are made in two ways: 1) a transliteration, modified in pronunciation, e.g. taraka, truck. The English word ‘lieutenant’, originally French, was treated similarly. 2) Something new is described in INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

existing words, with ‘giraffe’ becoming kakî-roa, or ‘long-neck’.

Words like ‘skateboard’ are also formed thus. If new Mâori words are fake, then so are half our English ones.

There is indeed current debate on the development of ‘standard’ Mâori for the purposes of a uniform curriculum, and concerns that it may undermine the alternate vocabulary and/or pronunciation of specific dialects, but Brooke has blown the issue out of proportion.

Yes, Mâori is less compact than English – just like English and Ancient Greek are less compact than Latin. When Mâori deals with some concepts it seems especially long-winded, just as English does when translating some Mâori. The languages are more developed in different areas. When I say ‘our’ (in English or Latin), I imply that more than one person, myself included, owns something(s). Mâori uses sixteen different words for ‘our’, depending on whether that owned is singular or plural, whether one, two, or three-plus people own it, whether the owners include the person addressed, and whether that owned exerts control over the owners. Genealogy in particular is something Mâori is very suited to: there is no English word for tuakana (‘elder sibling of the same gender’), for instance. But to suggest that all genealogy must be studied in Mâori would be absurd; likewise banning Mâori from philosophy. In both instances, it simply requires more words on the part of the less-suited language.

Lastly, unlike Brooke, I support the use of ceremonial Mâori, just as I support the use of ceremonial Latin. Both are not strictly needed, yet by their use we can celebrate our heritage. European culture should not be cast aside, nor pre-European culture romanticised, nor proficiency at English discouraged, but neither should use of Mâori be discouraged. What’s wrong with a growing bilinguality in this nation? No, we don’t need te reo, but there’s more at stake than bare utility.

Miss Heidi Boulter, Dunedin P.S. This is not one of the ‘inevitable cries of outrage from the usual suspects’. I am an English-born right-wing Theology student at Otago University.

KEEP THE SFO If the Serious Fraud Office is truly independent from political interference then how come Winston Peters, Helen Clark and Winston’s Lawyer Peter Williams can declare that “the investigation will be over in a matter of a few days...”. Surely the timeframes involved in such an investigation should be at the discretion of the Serious Fraud Office and them alone. If it takes time through the

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

election campaign then so be it, after all, Helen Clark has known about this since February and if the matter had have been referred then, NZ First voters would not be having to sweat it now.

With this in mind, surely the Serious Fraud Office should remain an independent entity and NOT be merged with Ministry of Police as proposed by the current ruling government!

Sue Reid, Masterton

EMISSIONS TRADING SCAM Helen Clark and her Socialist government have an agenda and it’s not about what is good for our country – it’s more about politics and the upcoming election. It will cost NZ billions plus many lost jobs – even more workers going overseas. Things they have not told us include: 1. The Government will profit by between $6 billion and $22 billion from the tendering of emissions permits. It’s government corruption – raking in huge profits off the backs of the people they are supposed to serve.

2. There’s been no clear analysis of how the scheme will reduce emissions.

3. There’s been no transparency about its effects on already-struggling New Zealand households. Frightening reports have emerged about the likely economic effects of the scheme’s ‘lead the world’ approach to cutting emissions.

4. The scheme has been subject to a large number of significant last-minute changes which the Select Committee have been given no opportunity to analyse. The Electoral Finance Act was also railroaded through Parliament in similar fashion, by a slim majority for purely political reasons. That legislation has turned out to be a shambles. Its time we were rid of this corrupt government.

Denis Shuker, Hibiscus Coast

REMEMBER NANNY’S SMACKING RULES Over the next few months the media and most politicians will, as they do every election, tell us peasants what the election issues are. They’ll say it’s: ‘the economy’, ‘health’, ‘education’, ‘law and order’, or God forbid, ‘global warming’.

But one issue they won’t mention stands above all others. It’s the way 113 members of parliament voted last year to criminalise every parent who corrects their kids. Poll after poll said 80% plus of New Zealanders rejected State intrusion into their families to remove their parental authority, yet Labour, National, and the Greens block voted to bring this iniquitous law into place.

And now that a referendum on this has been confirmed, Helen Clark in true Fascist fashion is denying New Zealanders their say at election time. Why? Because she doesn’t want ordinary Kiwi mums and dads to be reminded – right in election booths – of how they have been abused by her government.

The removal of parental authority by the State is THE most important issue in this election. One party has pledged to repeal this abominable law. The Kiwi Party deserves the party vote of all New Zealand parents for its outspoken stand and activism on their behalf.

Renton Maclachlan, Porirua

THE NOBLE SCIENTIST? The scientist is an honest fellow. Honest and Sincere. Sincere and sympathetic and deserving the heart-felt gratitude of entire mankind for risking his health and life in his endeavour to render atomic energy safe for utility. His views might be erroneous. His hopes might prove false. Yet his right to gratitude could not be denied him. This case of 10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

atomic energy has involved him in a situation most perilous and has thrown on him a responsibility that is heavier than death itself. The consequences of his endeavour in the field of atomic energy might place him in a situation so unpleasant, so irksome, even abominable as may hardly show a precedent in history. He is not all praises for atomic energy. We know. In the heart of hearts he seems to be well aware of the extreme precariousness of this situation. But he is in a fix. He finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. His inner urge to render atomic energy safe for use is irresistible. But more than that he has at present been rendered into a mere servile instrument in the hands of national and international politics. And a mere slave to procure means of gratifying the appetite of mankind. Let humanity therefore help him out of this situation for the sake of his past and present services to mankind in general. How it could be done is the question? That’s easy. It could be done by relieving him from the political and industrial compulsion. Let him be made once more a free man to think by his own mind and to see by his own sight.

How this could be done is the next question? This too is equally easy. Let the knowledge of atomic energy and the nuclear science be disseminated throughout the world. When the people themselves have gained the knowledge of the subject sufficient to weigh for themselves the pros and the cons they can give their opinion for or against it. When once the opinion of the entire public of the world has been moulded, then their political agencies that at present are forced by the circumstances to adopt and develop atomic energy in a compulsory spirit of competition and rivalry will be relived of the tension, and the scientist then in that atmosphere will be able to decide the issue in the true perspective and do what could be deemed safe and good.

Muhammad Yousaf Gabriel, via email Editor responds:

Muhammad, a couple of points. Firstly, the concept behind nuclear power is very simple – gather two slabs of uranium, being careful not to get them close to each other. Nuclear fissile material needs to reach what the boffins call ‘critical mass’, which is when enough of the stuff is present in the one spot that it becomes ‘unstable’ and creates a nuclear explosion. Having gathered your two slabs of uranium, arrange for a stick of dynamite to fire one slab, like a bullet, into the other. Hey presto. The afterlife.

Of course, what I’ve outlined is merely a crude representation of the process, but scientists the world over are familiar with the finer detail and recipes for creating nuclear weapons or even nuclear power plants are readily available, even on the internet.

What limits smaller states is not know-how, but can-do: they cannot access the raw materials necessary to make nuclear devices because of international restrictions. Do we really want to see unstable, undemocratic countries ruled by fanatical dictatorships with the power to push the nuclear button?

The second point is your belief that science can function without oversight, as if scientists are somehow a higher breed of human. Science taken to its ultimate extreme, unfettered by politicians (answerable to voters), would be Hell on earth. Josef Mengele and his Nazis enjoyed some of that freedom to experiment as well. Modern experiments to create chimeras (half human, half animal) are another good example of the immorality of raw science.

THE LITTLEWOOD TREATY COPY Re. Mark Law, June, 08 issue, who made a good point. The Littlewood treaty is not a treaty, It is Governor Hobson’s offi-

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cial English draft and used to translate our one and only official Maori Treaty. He authorised only one person to write it, Scotsman, James Busby.

In international law if there is more than one treaty and one is in the native language, that in the native language takes precedence over any other. Aware of this, Governor Hobson went to great pains to ensure his English draft wasn’t signed. Any draft that is signed is false!

There are many old translations of the Maori version and the Government is in possession of one by Mr T.E. Young, of the Native Department. It is an accurate translation, but wouldn’t fit into the Grievance Industry. For this reason Sir Hugh Kawharu, of the Waitangi Tribunal, retranslated another to make it fit.

The Government have thrown everything at Martin Doutre’s web site, but are unable to disprove as little as one point of www. treatyofwaitangi.net.nz. On the other hand, the government are unable to prove that as little as one point of their official English version of the Treaty, written by a Mr. Freeman, has any historical standing. Government knows they were wrong in using this false document to fabricate the Principles of the Treaty, as they have tried and failed to prove its authenticity on the above web site.

Do enough people write to Government to force the recognition of our true Tiriti? I don’t think so.

A great pity, as it is a beautiful document giving all New Zealanders the same rights as the British. No matter who. It bears no mention of fish, forests, lakes, mountains, rivers, air, foreshore/ seabed, fauna/flora, language and etc. for any particular group.

The greatest confiscations were enacted after the passing of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, by use of Freeman’s false document and the Principles of the Treaty derived thereof.

Shouldn’t we all deserve respect?

G. Graham, via email

ANOTHER TOXIC TIMEBOMB FOR HOMEOWNERS I know you had an article on `P’ some years back. I was wondering if you had plans for an update with the possibility of adding info from a new angle. I’m not an authority on P, I just happened to have the opportunity to work on the fringe of drug and alcohol rehabilitation over the last year and subsequently got to see at first hand the effects ‘P’ had on some clients, I also had the opportunity to talk at some length with P cooks and dealers.

From there I moved to an organisation that specializes in P-Lab detection and monitoring.

In this position it has become apparent that only a small percentage of P-Labs for various reasons get officially identified by authorities. The stats that are available indicate that the majority of P-Labs, 51% in 06, are discovered in rental properties.

This means that many toxic properties must be changing hands, either on sold or rented. The question is what long term effect on health, especially children might this have.

Talking recently to a governing body that over sees property managers, it was suggested that due to the number of concerns coming from members that the Police estimate of p-labs discovered could be high by quite a margin.

They are also aware that Land Lords do not want properties identified as P-Labs because of the possible cost ramifications of rectification and notification on the LIM which may lead to property devaluation, inability to raise a mortgage over the property, lost rental income and or get tenants or reinsure the property.

Some managers have concerns for their own health, this is both from confrontation with possibly criminals and accidental contamination from properties.

I spoke to one property manager who was very concerned that he may become exposed to contamination during site visits. He maintained that a good friend who was a carpet cleaner had become very sick from cleaning a property that he later found out to have been used as a P-Lab. You can understand the anger and frustration this caused.

This raises another issue, the cleaning of Identified P-Labs. It is completely unregulated. City councils, if they have a policy at all, apply different methods of notification and reporting. Some councils have guide lines that may be followed. However most of the guidelines used are from USA reports. It should be noted that Meth cooks in the USA often use different cooking methods and recopies to that used in NZ. This only adds to the confusion of what exactly are they looking to clean up and what methods should be used. Additionally, how often are these methods reviewed in light of new research?

One cleaning company confidently stated that they use a hand held gas detector to determine if a property is safe or not. I have even been told that one city council invested in a similar device for its staff to use. The concern I have is that gas analysis experts in Australia have indicated to me the equipment used would be completely incapable of giving any objective readings, that they are not designed for anything other than identifying generic VOC gases. Such devices are used by sewer workers etc.

The ESR has the equipment and knowledge, but their responsibility is identification of chemicals for prosecution only and nothing else.

The Auckland District Health Board issued a statement some time back that there is no guarantee a P-Lab once cleaned is safe.

This is a very big issue that is only going to get bigger; it could be years before it is fully understood.

Take a look at the website www.allpositiveoptions.com .

Interestingly they specify traces of Meth as the problem, but that’s only one aspect of the toxicity that is left in properties from P –Labs.

There are reports in NZ of even neighbours of P-Labs coming down with chronic mystery illnesses.

Name and address supplied, Auckland

MERCURY TESTING NOW AVAILABLE Regarding your articles on broken CFL energy saver bulbs, and whether mercury testing facilities exist in New Zealand for concerned householders. Our company has brought in the sample media so that we can do testing for mercury, if someone was interested. We have arranged with a lab that can do the analysis and I have updated our website with the following message so people can contact us if they are worried.

“K2 Environmental is now set up to do workplace or testing in the home for mercury. Mercury was recently raised as an issue with long life light bulbs.”

Stuart Keer-Keer, www.k2.co.nz Editor responds:

Thanks Stuart. Anyone with kids in the house who has had a CFL bulb break on their carpet would be well advised to get the air just above floor level tested, and tested again after rubbing the carpet, because all the international studies are showing hazardous levels of mercury INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 13

can remain trapped in carpet fibres and escape into the air when the carpet is agitated, even if the carpet appears to be clean. While vacuuming can remove some of the mercury, the poison then contaminates the vacuum cleaner and the cleaner’s exhaust gas can pump mercury fumes and contamination through the rest of your house.

Investigate checked with a couple of insurance companies about whether mercury contamination to a house would be covered under ordinary policies, and their answer was ‘no’, because people should realise that CFL lights contain mercury and that using them implies an acceptance of that risk.

The whole issue is a really difficult one for homeowners, because the mercury is an unseen poison that doesn’t have immediate effects on people or children. Nonetheless, kids in particular can be slowly poisoned in a way that reduces their mental capacity or causes other medical and health complications long term. While it might be easy to shrug and accept the risk because of the cost of replacing carpet, the longer families are exposed to mercury in the carpet, the worse their health may become long term.

Of course, the simple solution, which the insurance companies are hinting at, is that people should think long and hard before installing mercury CFL bulbs in the first place. As we first reported in our new digital newspaper TGIF Edition on August 15, an alternative energy saving light bulb that does NOT contain mercury has now hit the market: “When Investigate first broke the lightbulb story, there were suggestions that halogen bulbs which can safely be used in ordinary light fittings were available from Bun¬nings. Bunnings unfortunately did not have any, but the halogen bulbs are Osram ES Halogen lamps, and more information on stockists can be obtained from osram@impel.co.nz, or by phoning 0800 432 333. The halogens use 30% less power than ordinary incandescents and, best of all, contain no mercury,” reported TGIF Edition.

For the record, Mitre 10, Placemakers and Bunnings are now carrying the Osram ES Halogen range.

THE UREWERA TERROR CASE The first day of the Solicitor General’s prosecution of the Dominion Post and its editor Tim Pankhurst for contempt in the Wellington High Court brought a moralizing sermon from the S-G himself.

David Collins decided to personally prosecute the Dominion Post’s editor for publication of excerpts from the Police affidavit used in the ill-advised ‘terrorist’ prosecutions against more than a dozen New Zealand citizens last year because of what he considers the egregiousness of the contempt.

In his opening, Dr Collins claimed that the Post’s publication of Crown terrorist prosecution evidence last November, which the Court had suppressed at the time upon the Solicitor General’s request, constituted the most serious and inexcusable breaches that 14 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

could occur. He was emphatic the publication jeopardized ‘fair trial rights to which all New Zealanders are entitled’.

While the terrorist charges by David Collins’ office were dropped almost a year ago, the ‘evidence’ used to hold those formally accused without bail – and currently being fought over in this trial – is still sequestered by a Court suppression order. A logical person of average intelligence would be hard pressed to give a rationalization as to why. Can ‘evidence’ already relied on by a Court be classified ‘prejudicial’? In fact, the only reason anyone has ever offered is that it is not in the interest of justice or fairness to publicly reveal the so-called ‘evidence’ of terrorism, even when it is now public knowledge that it was not evidence of terrorism at all.

Is transparent justice not a hallmark of our judicial system – particularly in cases where those accused were held in prison on allegations which were never prosecuted let alone proven?

Was the puckish Collins sincere in his opening salvo that what the DomPost published defeated the pursuit of justice and undermined all New Zealanders right to a fair trial?

It is hard to believe he was when one looks at the facts.

When the Crown law office headed by David Collins filed terrorist charges and court suppression of the police evidence which supported these charges last year, we all trusted the Crown and Police got it right. After Judge Bouchier of the Auckland District Court granted bail to one of the first accused, the Crown appealed to the High Court to revoke bail for the ‘terrorists’, again citing the unprecedented danger the country faced. Helen Winkelmann J revoked bail and actually ‘read’ some of the worst bits from the Police affidavit (the only evidence) filed in support of the terrorist charges. Media reported and TV cameras showed the honourable judge reading out quotes from the affidavit such as ‘white men are going to die in this country’ and ‘I am going to go commando’ in support of her decision to overturn Judge Bouchier’s decision and deny bail.

Judge Winkelmann just as quickly ruled that the affidavit which she had just read unprincipled and not-in-context excerpts from should be sealed and public access to it denied ‘in the interests of justice’. The public at large bought it.

Vince Seimer, Auckland (abridged for space reasons)

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

Hypocrisy is spelt with a capital ‘F’

Y

ou would think the prospect of a woman in the White But just because Sarah Palin is a woman doesn’t mean she’s good House as US vice-president – and a working mother to for women.” boot – would be welcomed by feminists. Not one bit.

But being blackballed by the National Organisation for Women and The excoriation of the Alaskan Governor, Sarah Palin, denounced by enraged lefties is a plus for Palin, whose great appeal since John McCain unveiled her as his surprise running mate this is the nose-thumbing ballsiness of her politically incorrect persona. month just goes to show that establishment feminists are only She’s a hunting, shooting former beauty queen/mother of five/career champions of women who subscribe to a narrow set of left-wing woman with a hunky blue-collar husband who not only works on oil positions. They despise conservative women more than any man, rigs and runs a commercial fishing operation but is part Inuit and a and civil wars are always the most vicious. snowmobile racer who has been dubbed Alaska’s First Dude.

Which is why the largest American feminist group, the National Palin is just so good you wonder if she is human or a cyborg Organisation for Women, wasted no time issuing a statement say- created in Republican Party headquarters. ing it did not endorse Palin because she was not the “right woman” The attacks on her expose the elitism, condescension and moral and did not speak “for” women. rootlessness of the feminist establishment. It will serve to shore up Palin is not “for” women because she is pro-life, the organisation support for Palin among those who are not so intolerant. said. Old-school feminists have long seen abortion on demand as Her political life story does not begin in the usual feminist trainan article of faith, even though half of all foetuses are female and ing grounds, not from a desire for power but a desire to help out at the views on abortion among her children’s school. In her women are mixed, with oppofirst speech with McCain Palin is a woman who does seem she paid tribute to her hussition to late-term abortions growing. band and described how to be able to do it all, yet feminists she got into politics. “We Palin calls herself a feminist.

As a member of the “Feminists were busy raising our kids. don’t believe she should. So who is I was serving as the team for Life of America” pro-life group, she’s just the wrong mom and coaching some holding women back from the type. “I believe in the strength basketball on the side. I and the power of women, and got involved in the PTA glass ceiling? the potential of every human [school parents’ group] and life,” she says. then was elected to the city The youngest of her five children, four-month-old son Trig, was council and then elected mayor of my hometown.” born with Down syndrome. The disability was picked up during Her political trajectory will resonate with any “average hockey the pregnancy and her choice to go to term has struck a chord mom”. But anti-Palin forces in the US media have been doing with America’s “faith-based community”. She said of her baby in their best to marginalise her as a dangerous “right-wing extremist” a recent interview: “I’m looking at him right now and I see per- “fanatically anti-abortion”, “hard right”, “global warming-denyfection. Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking: ‘In ing”, a “rabid conservative”, and a “fire-breather”. our world, what is normal and what is perfect?’.”

No evidence is produced. She has been painted as a loopy You might think such a joyous human reaction should be Christian proponent of creationism, hell-bent on having the theory applauded by anyone. But the reaction of left-wing establish- of evolution replaced in schools. But in fact, in what appears to ment feminists to Palin is visceral hatred. be her trademark reasonable style, this is what she said about creIn a column titled, “A feminist appalled by Palin”, The Huffington ationism in 2006 while running for the Alaskan governorship.

Post’s Sarah Seltzer described her reaction when she heard of Palin’s “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it nomination. “I was on the elliptical trainer, and my rage pro- comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum … pelled me to the most furious workout I’ve had in a while … a Don’t be afraid of information.” lot of feminists out there are appalled by the cynicism and conShe is attacked as a homophobe, yet her first veto as Governor descension inherent in this choice … It’s no rare thing for the was to block legislation taking away health benefits from sameright wing to use prominent women to keep the rest of us down. sex partners of public service employees.

16 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

Four-month-old son Trig, was born with Down syndrome. The disability was picked up during the pregnancy and her choice to go to term has struck a chord with America’s “faith-based community / UPI Photo/Brian Kersey

In her first full week on the campaign she was branded a liar, covering up the fact that Trig was the child of her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol. The story wasn’t true but it developed such momentum she was forced to reveal Bristol was pregnant and was planning to marry the father.

It does sound like a soap opera, but busy real lives can get messy, as anyone with one knows.

Then there is the question of Trig, who Palin is reportedly still breast-feeding. “What I’ve had to do … is, in the middle of the night, put down the BlackBerry and pick up the breast pump,” she said.

How can a mother of five with a disabled baby manage to campaign for the vice-presidency while giving adequate attention to her children? Does it expose a selfish ambition? These are ques-

tions being asked most prominently by feminist women, of all people. As The New York Times put it: “Palin has set off a fierce argument among women about whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice-presidency, and whether she is right to try.”

But these questions would not be asked of a man, and in any case Palin’s husband Todd has taken leave from his job to take care of his family. Palin’s family choices are not what every mother wants but they are choices plenty of our most accomplished women have made for at least two generations.

Palin is a woman who does seem to be able to do it all, yet feminists don’t believe she should. So who is holding women back from the glass ceiling? devinemiranda@hotmail.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 17

> eyes right

Richard Prosser Money, oil, petrodollars, and war

U

nited States Democratic Party Presidential candidate which the rest of the world must supply the US with goods in return Barack Obama has made much of his desire and intention for, but which the US itself has only to electronically create. to end the war in Iraq, and bring the troops home. In this The upshot of all this is that at least a part of the United States’ writer’s opinion, in the highly unlikely event that Obama economic supremacy is founded on the innate advantage of being were to beat John McCain in the race for the White House, he the only country able to produce the thing which most other would find this to be an impossible goal to achieve in office. nations most want – the Greenback.

Most international trade is transacted in US dollars. In the If and where things begin to become unpleasant, is when absence of gold as an international trading currency, people and somebody else comes along and puts up an alternative reserve nations naturally gravitate towards an alternative which is equally currency. Imagine that you have the only gold leaf tree in the widely accepted and valued. Until very recently, the US dollar was world, and everyone wants gold leaves. Life is sweet. You can the only unit of currency which fitted this description. enjoy the good things, particularly the lamp oil from the palm Lately, however, the Euro has put itself up to challenge trees in Neverneverland, which everybody needs. The King of this supremacy, and some commodities are now traded in it. Neverneverland wants paid for his lamp oil in gold leaves, and to get In the near future, the Yuan will also come to prominence, which them, everyone else has to deal with you. The lamp oil is so sought is a potential cause for concern to the US; more so than that posed after that countries will do almost anything to get hold of your by the Euro, which is inherently more disparate and unstable. gold leaves, so they can buy it. Trade with you is on terms which The advantage to the nation owning the preferred currency are very favourable to yourself; your economy booms. of trade, is that in order to However, imagine furobtain that currency, nations ther, that the King of The second Iraq war was never are required to trade with the Neverneverland has a nation issuing it; historically, change of heart, and decides about access to oil... It was always in a manner offering a fisthat he wants paid for his cal advantage to the issuing lamp oil in silver leaves about the currency in which that oil instead of gold; and you nation. In layman’s terms, this means that the country which don’t have a silver leaf tree. would be traded. This was the one “makes” the “gold” gets to buy What now? You can’t do what it wants, at prices over without lamp oil, and sudway in which Saddam could very which it has great influence. denly your gold leaves are Conversely, the nation issuworth a whole heap less, tangibly and very seriously hurt the and furthermore, you are ing the reserve currency is under no such obligation to going to have to trade with United States purchase goods or commodisomeone else in order to ties from any other nation in get those same silver leaves, order to obtain trading dollars; it may simply generate them, in on terms which are suddenly going to be as favourthe same way that it does for its own domestic purposes. able to the country which owns the silver leaf tree, as were What this means is that the nation issuing the reserve currency the terms under which everyone else had to trade with you, when may create money at a deficit to itself, knowing that such deficit gold leaves were the flavour of the month. will be countered by the favourable terms of trade which other What to do? Invade the other country and steal the silver leaf nations must offer it. Being in this position provides the US (or tree? Chop it down? No, not feasible. The people who own the whichever nation it may be, at any given point in history) with silver leaf tree are friends of yours. It’s far more effective to invade a line of free credit, which it knows it can pay back and more, Neverneverland and depose the King, installing in his place an because other nations must supply it with goods and commodi- alternative who will go back to trading his lamp oil for gold leaves, ties at favourable prices and profit ratios. rather than silver.

Oil, of course, is the world’s single most traded and valuable comTo do this effectively, and not raise the ire of the international modity, and almost all oil transactions are conducted in dollars – community, you will of course require a credible pretext. Maybe 18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

you could suggest that the King of Neverneverland has Weapons of Mass Destruction, which are capable of posing a threat to his neighbours and the wider world.

The double whammy as far as your gold leaves are concerned is that, as with any currency, they are only worth anything if they can be exchanged for something. Ultimately, their value relies on the issuer undertaking to take them back. On all banknotes you will find a statement to the effect that the issuer “promises to pay the bearer on demand”. This means that the issuing nation will take back their own money, and give you something in exchange.

What all of this means for the US, and their gold leaves, is that if the King of Neverneverland suddenly wants silver leaves instead of gold, the gold leaves are suddenly worth very much less than they were, and people will seek to exchange them for something more valuable. If they can’t find anyone to swap them for silver leaves, or platinum raisins, or tin shells, or whatever, they will come looking to the country which plucked them from the gold leaf tree in the first place. If the owner of the gold leaf tree reneges on his promise to pay the bearer on demand, and says he doesn’t want them, suddenly they are worth nothing at all. And if that happens, the economy of the US falls over, because not only must the US earn the money with which to buy lamp oil, instead of picking it from its own tree, but the gold leaves which US exporters naturally want from foreigners in exchange for their manufactured goods, are no longer worth anything.

So the US must commit to repatriating all and any gold leaves which come its way, or its own domestic system of exchange will falter.

Now the gold leaf will not collapse completely, because it still has the value accorded it by virtue of the trade carried out with foreigners, by US exporters and businesses.

But it no longer has the value accorded to it through everyone else wanting the King of Neverneverland’s lamp oil. So the line of free credit, the ability to issue money at a deficit to yourself, and the business and trading profit advantage, are gone. When your great wealth and prosperity has been built to a large extent on this very advantage, the prospect of losing it is very serious, and you may very well commit substantial military forces to ensure that it comes back.

Iraq was never about Weapons of Mass Destruction, because the intelligence agencies knew very well that there weren’t any. It was never about terrorists, because Iraq wasn’t involved in terrorism.

That was Afghanistan and the Taleban. Iraq under Saddam was a relatively moderate secular state. Yes, people were murdered and tortured and went missing. Yes, people were raped and butchered and had their hands dipped in acid, and so on. That happens all over the Middle East. It’s a horrible brutal place. But within that context, Iraq was relatively moderate. Women were allowed to work, and didn’t have to wear the veil. The streets were relatively safe, the power was on most of the time, and for all the news footage we saw of horrible things happening in Iraqi hospitals, we also saw that there were hospitals, and that they appeared modern and well equipped and clean, which can’t be said about hospitals in all parts of the world.

During the 1980s Iraq fought an eight-year war with Iran, essentially saving the rest of the Arab world from Persian expansionism. Iraq won, but at a cost of a million dead and twenty billion dollars, financed primarily from Kuwait. At the end of hostilities the Kuwaitis wanted their money back. Understandably piqued at this lack of appreciation, on the part of the Kuwaitis, for having their pampered posteriors protected, Saddam elected to take

them over instead. I can’t say that I blame him.

But Saddam’s forces were well and truly kicked out of Kuwait, and life returned to normality; and then Saddam did the unspeakable, and decided he wanted Euros for his oil, rather than Dollars.

I believe that he had got rid of his WMDs, if not sooner, then certainly in time to avoid conflict under that pretext.

The second Iraq war was never about access to oil; less than 20% of America’s oil imports come from the Middle East. Her biggest external suppliers are Nigeria, Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. It was always about the currency in which that oil would be traded.

This was, after all, and as Texas oilman George W knew very well indeed, the one way in which Saddam could very tangibly and very seriously hurt the United States. If OPEC had followed Iraq’s lead, the economic health of the US, and the balance of world power, would have shifted dramatically.

I can’t say I blame the US for her subsequent course of action. It may not be particularly conscionable, but it is difficult to see what other choice may have been open to Dubya – nor will economic and military reality be any different for Obama or McCain. I’d do the same in their shoes – and from a selfish perspective, I for one would far prefer to live in a world dominated by the hegemony of the United States, than that of Europe or China.

This distinction is important, because when China decides that it wants paid for its goods in Yuan, rather than dollars, is when China and the US will go to war. And watch this space, with regards to the progress of the Euro-denominated Iranian oil Bourse, paralleled as it is by increasingly loud noises about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons programme. We live in a world of hard realities, the blunt nature of which will be as inevitable for the next occupant of the Oval Office as it is for the present one.

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> line one

Chris Carter

What passes for ‘news’ these days

T

hese days, on a fairly regular basis, a sports celebrity figment of this writer’s imagination that he may have in the past does something or other that probably in polite circles is shared an illegal, but very necessary pee with various members of considered to be a little bit on the nose. The media is now the fourth estate at a well used spot in St Pat’s Cathedral Square. given to spring upon what they consider to be a juicy little Truth is that most ordinary folk at various times in their life are “news” titbit whereupon the footy player, who typically might well guilty of committing various misdemeanours. Being drunk have planted some yobbo in a pub whilst he was a bit boozed, in a public place, a non-injury scuffle in a bar, singing rude songs overnight becomes a national pariah. That in the violent society in a beery voice or piddling in the park, scarcely qualify a young that New Zealand has recently become, an event of this nature offender for a future life as a patched gang member do they? Which is scarcely unusual, but, as the media nationwide is now wont to is probably why the aforementioned offences almost always are somewhat prissily point out, “This player should remember that handled with either an official warning or a figurative kick in he is a role model”, presumably inferring that he should urgently the backside. But woe and betide the household name caught in consider turning in his man-badge and perhaps the swapping of similar circumstances. Everyone from rape crisis, anger managehis national jersey for a loose fitting big girl’s blouse to properly ment collectives, mentally detached platoons from NZ’s army of councillors various; all will have an opinion or a solution to this qualify as a politically correct role model!

No matter, to the gentle scribes, the tattooed thug who had extraordinarily disgraceful behaviour that we have all learnt about copped a well deserved smack on the snorer, were he not all pissed over our cornflakes. These vital follow up stories will be gathered up and fed to us over the and objectionable in the pub, next several days. This by was very likely out on the The media, particularly the the way is known within the streets in a similar state fightnews industry as being “a ing coppers or snatching litParliamentary Press Gallery appear story that has legs”, purely tle old ladies’ hand-bags. Of and simply because it is far course, the yobbo will never to have a complete inability to easier to flog a dead horse ever rate a single column inch than to go and try to catch or a sound bite anywhere, simrecognise the presence of weasels a live one, or to actually find ply, because he isn’t yet suffia story of real worth. ciently well known to qualify. amongst the parliamentarians Recently though, it To become the unwilling appears that mainly due recipient of front page notoriety in this day and age it is necessary to consider the apparent to the efforts of some very good newspaper journalists, a story inner workings of the average news editor’s mind. What story emerged that has led to a very aggrieved Winston Peters apparently shall grace the lead item electronically or in print? Well for start- deciding that the media are out to get him, an idea of course eagerly ers, anything requiring investigative reporting is out as that costs embraced by a number of his conspiracy obsessed, if somewhat money, which in its turn affects the company’s bottom line. Then, intellectually suspect supporters. I must however, confess having the kids that we are now forced by low pay rates to employ these more than a little sympathy with Mr Peters, who in essence must days are struggling to hand in much more than a press release that be wondering what the heck he ever did to become the number is just in need of a quick re-write. But a tip off that an All Black one candidate for the only available seat on this year’s media duckwas spied having a slash behind an otherwise deserted bus shelter ing stool. That Winston perhaps was more than a little stupid in in Otahuhu is just wonderful. We can prattle on over several col- that he heaped opprobrium and invective on various branches of umns at least as to how this man, a “Role Model” no less, has now the media, when it became more than likely that he was wrong blighted his future playing career, to say nothing of the effect that and that the media was right, could well be an explanation why this heinous behaviour will have on the minds of all the young journos simply doing a good job in ferreting out the facts have now redoubled their efforts. fans that previously looked up to the wretch!

There is a time for conciliatory language rather than rank abuse Being a news editor of course means that one is born with a cast iron bladder, easily able to cope with the stresses of excessive and empty threats, like when mum with strap in hand, caught us beer consumption at the local Press Club, it being perhaps just a up to the elbows in the cookie jar. Not at all clever to read mum’s 20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

horoscope at such times, as the best of mums don’t appreciate Naturally, the weasel friendly system that allows for this sort of being treated as if they were stupid do they? Never the less I can carry on in the House certainly means that the chances of any well understand why Winston might be genuinely mystified as to journalist shaking the answer out of him outside of the house are why he alone has been effectively presented with the Ned Kelly next to none. Similarly the employment of a repetitive mantra-like Award whilst his fellow bush rangers appear to have a regal pardon standard answer to a series of pointed questions has become an art to continue on with their chosen profession of graft and corrup- form to our Prime Minister. Apparently she believes the old diction, not only unhindered, but much more significantly, unre- tum that if you repeat something often enough, then it becomes ported. The media, particularly the Parliamentary Press Gallery the truth. The latest in a series of her answers as to the veracity appear to have a complete inability to recognise the presence of of a then sitting Minister. “He is an honourable gentlemen and I weasels amongst the parliamentarians, even though, such is their must therefore accept his word”. Now this is just fine until a future acquired arrogance that the weasels now openly laugh at the press Minister perhaps states that pigs indeed do fly, so that presumably corps, suggesting that if they really want answers as to what the our Helen will immediately establish a Ministry of Flying Pigs, weasels have been up to they should try asking the right questions! should she in fact, thus far, not already having done so!

Which is all very well and good, excepting that even if the right Well, to follow her current logic she must of necessity believe questions are asked, weasels seem to enjoy an extraordinary ability this sort of nonsense, she plainly having done so with the answers to dissemble, the truth becomshe gave over the last few days ing little more than a victim to of this Parliament re the coninnuendo and naturally, wea How does one put together an voluted Peters/NZ First affair. sel words...

Once again this makes the life Fact of the matter is that informative story of worth when of a Parliamentary journalist there now appears to be no next to impossible. How does pretence at all that within the one put together an informaall you have to work with is a confines of the Parliamentary tive story of worth when all you Debating Chamber truth is series of unanswered questions? have to work with is a series either respected or even welof unanswered questions? The comed. Watched our current embattled journos must feel Health Minister, the urbane bearer of an extraordinary mullet like Tom Cruise and the members of the court marshal in A Few rampant, the very loquacious Mr Cunliffe extradited himself from Good Men, when Jack Nicholson’s character shouted “You can’t answering the simplest of questions in the house the other day. handle the truth”, because this Parliament is certainly right into Asked why it was that New Zealand’s inability to perform ade- denying the Press, and us, the opportunity to hear it. Perhaps quate numbers of heart operations has led to folk literally dying in in this age of “reforms” we have overlooked the dire necessity of the ever increasing queues, the Hon Minister, simply prattled on, reforming Parliament itself. We could begin by appointing non with consummate skill one is bound to observe, as to the money party political retired judges to fill the positions of Speaker and spent and the numbers of Hospitals built or re-furbished by this deputy speakers.

“Labour led Government”.

People who are used to prevarication, half truths and thinly disThe actual question, quite naturally, and now well in keeping guised lies, and who know exactly how to drag the unvarnished with tradition, remained unanswered. The Press Gallery certainly truth from people. Something along these lines could very well would have the greatest difficulty in extracting anything of worth lead to a major rise in confidence and respect for our parliamentary for their readers, listeners or viewers, as any forthcoming debate on system. It would certainly make the Parliamentary Press Gallery this very important question was simply danced around and then happy, that’s for sure! shut down by the man who presumably should have the answers.

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

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> soapbox

Robert Mann Fools rush in

22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

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

A

legal entity branded ‘Crest’ has been granted consents Crest’ concept would be equivalent to “sinking 200 car ferries by the Northland Regional Council to develop a project, with their 2,500hp engines still running”, but noise might turn ultimately 200 turbines each producing one megawatt of out to be a problem if not to that extreme extent, and it would be electricity, underwater near the Kaipara harbour mouth. imprudent to try to build 200 large-scale machines before smallThe general concept of underwater tide-power, without dams, scale testing has given some answers about noise. is a clever idea, well worth investigating. A group at M.I.T. has d) produce estimates of costs v. benefits for commercial begun to develop such machines (intended for the sea off Boston). development.

Until such leading experts come up with some results, It has been reported that the New Zealand government is to Several aspects of the ‘Crest’ proposal invite disapproval. contribute $1.85 million to the ‘Crest’ project if resource consent To spring from recent, tiny prototypes to the large scale is granted – as it now apparently has been. Until procedures like entailed in the Kaipara concept is too much of a gamble. the above have been performed, it would be premature to grant The science of technology assessment is not new; the USA Congress subsidies. started a special agency for that function three decades ago. The Solicitation, on the other hand, of speculative private investment normal procedure would include: would not necessarily be unethical, but ‘let the investor beware’ a) measure the resource, over a long enough time to get sufficient ! Anyone who says an underwater mechanical device will last 35 accuracy in numbers of the available energy at different times. years will have difficulty supporting this claim by experience.

Vague statements like ‘nine There are so many unanknots of tidal current’ are not swered questions about the We should never forget that the a sufficient basis for attracting ‘Crest’ caper that it should a subsidy, or private investors, not be allowed to proceed.

Mobil/Bechtel synfuels factory at for ‘commercial’ deployment.

The Northland Regional b) test a prototype machine, a Council should have said Motunui, which was going to make “let us see some facts from small-scale device closely monitored for performance, wear, a small-scale prototype us the ‘blue-eyed Arabs of the effects on fish, etc. Such testbefore we are bothered ing has taken years for a given with proposals for largeS. Pacific’, ceased to produce any windmill (see e.g. www.windscale deployment”. flow.co.nz – not even a first We should never forget synthetic petrol a dozen years ago prototype but in that case a that the Mobil/Bechtel synfirst full-scale test machine fuels factory at Motunui, which was wrecked by a freak gust, leading to valuable improve- which was going to make us the ‘blue-eyed Arabs of the S. Pacific’, ments in international standards for wind turbines). And wind- ceased to produce any synthetic petrol a dozen years ago. This facmills are better understood, and easier to observe & repair, than tory was scaled-up 1400-fold from a lab-bench prototype in New machines in deep sea-water!

Jersey. In the end the NZ Government paid Fletchers hundreds Failures of various types normally occur during prototype test- of millions to take it off our hands. (We had paid a couple of biling, which is the main reason for this phase of development. Full- lions to build it in the first place.) scale machines should not be deployed before at least some of their The chances that the ‘Crest’ caper will produce reliable power are problems have been discovered by real-time testing. too small. Let tide-power be developed with due caution, rather c) engage relevant experts to appraise the various pros & cons. than getting an undeserved bad name from speculative rushes to Effects on ecosystems can be worse than had been imagined at premature attempts at deployment. I’m reminded of the earlyfirst. Enthusiasts for technological development can overlook 1970s solar water-heaters; some were so bad that they got a bad whole classes of harm to wildlife, including commercially-valu- name for a basically good technology. able fish.

Dr Robert Mann recently retired to the seaside at Tarihunga Point.

Noise is unpredictable; I fail to see how anyone can assert at He was senior lecturer in Biochemistry, and then in charge of the this stage that the Environmental Studies course, University of Auckland.

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www.mistralsoftware.co.nz INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 23

> faith point

Allison Ewing

God’s plan for man’s Earth

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fter an in depth exploration of the Christian faith, caring of man’s needs through organised socialism, and not the I have found the courage to print the findings as I per- provisions given by a god. Gone is the eternal salvation that was ceived them.

God’s goal.

The many versions of the Holy Bible infer that God The men of Christian spiritual religions have taken 2,000 years created the Universe and created a world with a specific plan for to create a ‘counterfeit church’, which has many offshoots. They mankind. The plan commenced with the creation of life and it have instructed their followers to celebrate man-made celebrations appears to end with the termination of life. and have adopted the practices of other religions. They have set God’s initial purpose was to create and (over a certain time) up their own numerous structures to govern their congregations. produce a proven people that would take up his offer of salvation Many have ordained themselves as God’s chosen representatives under his eternal reign. and carried out – on behalf of God – the pardon of sin, the makHe set about dealing with man’s delinquent want of self-ideali- ing of saints, and the task of judgement. sation by establishing human behaviour that would in the end be As a person who is genuinely seeking to understand religion and humbled, and made obedient to the one true God – this being an the many perspectives of life on earth, all this looks like a dog’s absolute opposite of man’s own want of supremacy over the earth. breakfast for 6.5 billion people to consume.

Successive generations of men, in the form of prophets, kings, In a nutshell, my summation of the Christian religion is that disciples, and apostles, were given ordained leadership. God also God established life in the Universe, and that he gave directions sent his son. Verbal teachings to his obedient servants went out to the countries of regarding his plan. This was The men of Christian spiritual the world, but at the same in order to ordain a given time man started to scribe the period for man to sort himreligions have taken 2,000 years to thoughts of man. All empires, self out and get the picture, nations and nomadic groups before God came back. create a ‘counterfeit church’, which cultivated religions to their I have now concluded that own likings, and heretics there are around six vital has many offshoots abounded. actions that God will take up Bibles have been interpreted, on his conquering return: up-dated, rearranged, re-interpreted, and changed so as to satisfy 1) Judge the counterfeit church and the leaders. man’s beliefs, wants and new needs and also the demands of gov2) Take back his good name that has been defiled by man ernments in an ever-changing world. They have been compiled throughout all the nations of the world. by groups of religious leaders who practise teachings and instilling 3) Take over his ‘given land’ for his governance of his eternal in the minds of men strange thoughts of many gods. The bibles salvation. of the world today are each a collection of man’s writings – under 4) Destroy living man and that of man’s creation and the global the assumed direction of their gods. This is obvious to anyone who society. reads these bibles, studies the numerous religions of the world and 5) Establish his remnant church, i.e. those who would have counts the many thousands of breakaway churches. survived the onslaught of man’s interference in creating earth’s There has been a climax of growth in the Christian religion, numerous religions. but today’s world (mainly that of the West) has all but forgotten 6) Reinstate his sanctified Sabbath. the God of creation and has turned its back on the teachings of God refers to this conquest of the earth as ‘doing all of his pleaGod’s historic and wise few. sures’. God’s teachings of what he finds abhorrent are found in The secular world is now worldly and powerful enough to cor- most of the religious books held by man. rupt and control, and is looking toward finalizing the establishAnd, lastly, a major understanding that struck me about God’s ment of a global government that will ‘know’ and ‘control’ all of message to earthlings was that he stated that HE was the same mankind. It has also established the ground swell of a new reli- yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that he has every intention gion – that of man’s self realization embodied with the environ- of taking back HIS created earth. ment. The goal of man is now peace and love on earth and the Allison Ewing is a Christchurch writer and occasional contributor 24 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 25

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26 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

INTERVIEW

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28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 29

INVESTIGATE: Labour people are saying you don’t have the experience, but there’s a difference between experience and ‘political’ experience. How do you equate the two?

KEY: Well I don’t judge experience as time spent in parliament in Wellington. I’m comfortable that the six years now that I’ve had in Wellington is enough, and you can couple that with 20 odd years I’ve had in the commercial world, and in the real world, both domestically and internationally. Those experiences will serve me well. And on top of that I bring to the table an enormous amount of economic experience at a time when the NZ economy is in a recession. So from my perspective I’m very happy with the balance of experience that I’ve got and I wouldn’t trade it for a different mixture.

INVESTIGATE: Is there too much focus by Wellington’s ‘beltway’ inhabitants on what they class as experience, and the difference between that and the real world?

KEY: Well in Helen Clark’s case her entire career really has been spent in parliament and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think there is a risk you become institutionalised and increasingly disconnected. From my point of view I think my experiences also reflect modern New Zealand which is a global perspective – I’ve worked both within New Zealand and overseas and I’ve got a good feel for what are likely to be the big issues facing New Zealand in the future. They are based around globalisation and the war for talent as New Zealand increasingly loses more and more of its people overseas – we’re going to have to fight back with a credible plan to keep young and talented people in NZ. I don’t think we can sit back and say that, when we’re leading the OECD as the number one country on a per capita basis that’s lost the most number of skilled people – just under 25% – that that is either acceptable or sustainable.

INVESTIGATE: Let’s look at that, we’re getting horrendous numbers of people, something like a million kiwis live overseas – KEY: Yeah, the diaspora of New Zealand is massive. One of the problems you’ve got is, it’s all very well putting up the argument that New Zealanders go overseas, get some experience and then come back. Yes, some do, but an awful lot are choosing to go back to Australia, if their first port of call is Europe or the US or Asia. So from NZ’s point of view, we are rapidly becoming a giant educational facility for Australia and other parts of the world, and when you have such a significant ageing demographic as New Zealand faces – where we’re going to go from having half a million New Zealanders aged over 65 to over a million people aged over 65 within 25, 30 years – then that should be of great concern to New Zealanders when we’re losing so many talented and skilled individuals.

INVESTIGATE: Is there one thing you can point to – is it the student loans being so onerous that people are going overseas to escape it, or is it a bigger issue?

KEY: I think in part it’s the wage gap and the opportunities that those who are skilled perceive that we currently have in New Zealand. You’ve got a government that’s really in a large part had its decision-making driven by the politics of envy, and I want to drive a government that’s led by the politics of aspiration.

I think NZers are feeling dissatisfaction that the government doesn’t support them in their entrepreneurial efforts, and that the government is not investing in the country in the way we think they should. Subsequently, literally tens of thousands are voting with their feet.

INVESTIGATE: You mention the wage gap and it’s an interest30 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

ing point. There’s a traditional tension between conservative and left wing governments in terms of how you structure the economy and the emphasis you give certain sectors. Employers are looking to lower costs because it’s a difficult climate, they don’t want to pay a lot in terms of wages, but this wage gap problem is nonetheless an issue for our country. How do you reconcile that as a future prime minister?

KEY: Firstly I think we’ve got to acknowledge it’s a big problem.

If you look at that wage gap, between 1990 and 1999 the difference between what the average worker received in NZ, and what the average worker received in Australia for doing the same job, blew out from 16% to 20%.

From 1999 to 2007 it’s gone from 20% to 38%, so that is a massive differential. And in part it reflects that the Australian government has been cutting taxes over the last nine years while the New Zealand government has not. So from National’s point of view there’s no one silver bullet but I think you can address the issue over time by looking at two distinct parts. The first is taxes, and we will have an ongoing programme of personal tax cuts. I think that is of quite major benefit to employers as well as employees. From the employees’ perspective obviously they get more money in the hand, but from the employers’ perspective it will at least help narrow that wage gap without forcing up their wage bill initially.

Secondly, I think we’ve got to tackle the productivity issues and acknowledge that New Zealanders work very long hours – the second longest hours in the OECD on average. So simply asking kiwis to work longer is not going to be a satisfactory response.

Therefore if we want to address that it is about investing in infrastructure – that’s why we’re going to have a programme that invests heavily in gamechanging infrastructure like ultrafast broadband, and our roading and electricity networks.

Thirdly you’ve got to tackle that enormous bureaucracy creep that you’ve seen in the last nine years by a Labour government that’s had a voracious appetite to hire more bureaucrats and pass more rules and regulation.

I think fourthly you just have to tackle the skills shortages and really take a good hard look at why literacy and numeracy is such a problem for well over a hundred thousand young New Zealanders.

INVESTIGATE: Is there an attitudinal change needed by employers towards increasing wages or are employers actually recognising the need to increase them?

KEY: I think by and large employers are responding to the fact that if they don’t increase wages they will lose staff, and that is a big problem. The labour market’s remained tight for employers so they do need to respond.

Wages going up is a good thing. But it’s important that we help it along with productivity gains, and ultimately if they’re not assisted by productivity gains then eventually companies will go broke. So we need those rising wages to be coupled with efficiency gains in the economy, and the government can play a part in that.

INVESTIGATE: Before I leave this whole ‘experience’ issue – you have real life experience in the private sector, but how do you avoid as a possible Prime Minister being ‘captured by bureaucrats’ – the “Sir Humphrey” issue?

KEY: Well I think you have to understand what it is you want to achieve. You have to have a plan and it’s got to be thought through.

And I have that plan, I’ve a very strong sense of things I’m going to focus on and I won’t make them too many in number.

“I think it’s a bizarre statement from a prime minister who was up to her eyeballs in the Winston Peters/Owen Glenn donation scandal. It’s also, I find, a bit ridiculous from a prime minister who promised before the 2005 election that she wouldn’t ban a parent’s right to lightly smack a child for the purposes of correction and then set about to do exactly that” One of the issues with this current government is it’s got a strategy or a taskforce, or an inter-government departmental working paper for almost everything that moves or squeaks, but the upshot of all that is while they take a look at everything, they move forward on very little. From my point of view I’m going to be very focused on some critical areas. One is how to build productivity in the economy, the second is how we improve safety in the community – because I think law and order is out of control in this country even if Helen Clark wants to believe it’s not, and thirdly a crusade on literacy and numeracy and I think if National can achieve those three things in our first term in government then

we will have made some very important steps forward.

INVESTIGATE: Well let’s look at what National can do in its first term. I mean, you’re being criticised fairly frequently for the whole Labour-lite thing – the current media cliché: ‘swallowing dead rats’ – does National have the courage of its convictions, or is it simply about not saying things to avoid spooking the horses before an election?

KEY: Well we certainly have the courage of our convictions, but it’s important to recognise that no potentially-incoming government changes everything that the last administration has done – certainly if they’ve been there for a long period of time. If you go INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 31

back and look at the incoming 1999 Labour government, while they renationalised ACC and changed the Employment Contracts Act to the Employment Relations Act, a lot of what they spent the nineties criticising they actually didn’t change.

So there are some aspects of government policy – particularly if they directly relate to individuals – that are embedded in people’s daily lives, like zero percent loans or Working for Families, where to remove them would result in such enormous disruption that I don’t believe it’s warranted or worth it.

But in my view there are many other aspects that we should be looking at, and we’re spelling those out in our programme.

INVESTIGATE: This is one of the issues of course, you’re hoping for a positive campaign – what are some of the ‘positives’ that National believes people are focusing on?

KEY: Well I think it’s a very traditional campaign actually from our perspective. It’s the economy, law and order, health and education, wrapped up with fresh leadership and a view that says ‘look, we’re not going to take such an ideological perspective that the private sector is locked out of everything, and we’re prepared to back people to back themselves’. Because what you’ve seen in the last nine years is a government that’s increasingly become ‘command and control’, captured by a sense that it’s got to have a rule or regulation for everything that moves!

From our perspective, we’re going to move into a higher trust environment and be quite prepared to be pragmatic about looking for solutions.

INVESTIGATE: Now there is a view within National’s strategy team that perhaps you shouldn’t take the fight to Labour in some areas of the government’s misbehaviour, and that you should just rise above it or ignore it. But the flipside of that is there are those, particularly on the blogs, who claim National’s strategists are too soft, and that this failure to look tough against a tough prime minister could cost big time. What are your thoughts?

KEY: My sense from New Zealanders is they’re not really interested in me talking a lot about Labour and its failed record because they’ve had to live through it and they’re well and truly aware of it. And while it’s important that we point out the ridiculousness of some of the statements made by Helen Clark – for instance she wants to be a world leader in climate change and promised that emissions would fall by 20% under her watch when in fact they’ve risen by 20% and risen faster than pretty much any other developed country (Australia and the United States for instance) – I think New Zealanders are interested in what an incoming National government will do, about what our plan is and what our solutions are.

At the end of the day, while it’s easy to go negative as clearly Labour have indicated they’re going to do and as they are doing, I think it’s robbing kiwis of an opportunity to actually understand what the alternatives are on offer.

I think the reason Labour are going negative is because they don’t want to debate their record and they don’t have solutions for the problems we face. So in the end the only thing left for them is trying to put up a proposition that says the best thing they can say about themselves is that you shouldn’t vote for National – and that’s a pretty lame response I think.

INVESTIGATE: Well they seem to have released more National party policy than they have Labour policy.

KEY: Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know if you’ve caught up with the Google bomb [engineering it so that anyone who typed the word ‘clueless’ into Google was directed to John Key’s website] 32 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

that they’ve launched, where the person who did it told interviewers she wasn’t affiliated to anyone or any political party but it now turns out she was a member of Young Labour.

INVESTIGATE: Well there’s another one, Prog Blog, the blog for Jim Anderton’s Progressive party, has posted a comment you made, “Young people are a group I’m passionate about”, and then directly underneath added their own line saying “so is Gary Glitter” – implying you’re a pedophile.

What do you make of that sort of campaigning from Jim Anderton’s team?

KEY: It’s disgusting and not what I’d expect from a Minister of the Crown and someone that’s been in politics for a long period of time. But I fully expect the campaign to be very dirty. As John Armstrong, one of the most respected political commentators, has pointed out, this is going to be a very dirty campaign by Labour.

That’s fine by me, I’m going to talk about the issues I think are important and I’ll leave them to muck around in the gutter.

INVESTIGATE: It’s all about trust, said Helen Clark when she announced the election date. It’s all about trust. Given her track record she must have known that there were going to be missiles fired at her. Was this a bad decision by the PM, or has she too been reading blogs that suggest National is too gentlemanly to go for her jugular?

KEY: Look, I think it’s a bizarre statement from a prime minister who was up to her eyeballs in the Winston Peters/Owen Glenn donation scandal. It’s also, I find, a bit ridiculous from a prime minister who promised before the 2005 election that she wouldn’t ban a parent’s right to lightly smack a child for the purposes of correction and then set about to do exactly that until I bailed her out with a compromise. So at the end of the day it’s up to Labour to run their own campaign. I’m happy to put my own record of trust up against hers any day of the week.

INVESTIGATE: Can New Zealanders trust Helen Clark?

KEY: In the end that’s for them to decide. They can look at what she’s done and what she’s said, but I’ll leave them to decide.

INVESTIGATE: What kind of feedback are you getting from people on that issue?

KEY: I think a lot of people are just of the view that they want a change, and that the current government has run out of grunt and run out of ideas. That’s one of the strongest things we’re bringing to the table: fresh leadership, a sense of where the debate is going in this country, what the big issues are, and actually a willingness to engage in a pragmatic programme to find solutions and answers to those issues.

INVESTIGATE: Has the Sarah Palin phenomenon in the States given you any comfort?

KEY: It’s going to be a very interesting campaign in the US. It’s hard to pick, and obviously a see-saw event. In the end, whatever the administration is in the US we’ll work with it if we’re the next New Zealand government.

INVESTIGATE: The whole re-energisation of John McCain’s campaign by picking a female running mate, and a conservative at that, has thrown the cat among the pigeons. And it’s interesting to see what it’s done for them. Do you see Bill English as a Sarah Palin?

KEY: Well he holds the same views on abortion! Look, I think the issue is that in America they have low turnout numbers from a voting perspective with only about half the country voting, so one of the really critical things from a US perspective is getting out your base [on election day], and there’s no doubt Sarah Palin is going to energize the conservative base in the US.

“We’re in desperate need of a White Paper on Defence so that we can fully analyse the capability and the future requirements, because this is an area where it’s not just about spending money but it’s about getting it right” INVESTIGATE: You mentioned the anti-smacking laws. With a growing number of referrals to CYFS, which bypass police prosecution and the courts but obviously have a big impact on families – is National in any way tempted to revisit that or at least do an indepth study of the law if it becomes government?

KEY: We’ll closely monitor it. The commitment I’ve given to New Zealanders is that I support the right of parents to lightly smack a child for the purposes of correction and if I see parents being criminalised for that sort of activity then I believe the law isn’t working and I’ll work to change it. At this point I’m comfortable the law is working, but it is something we’ll keep an eye on.

INVESTIGATE: What about those cases where it is not criminalised, where police simply refer it to CYFS who move in like a steamroller and do their thing, but it never goes before the courts.

Is there a need to take an overview of what’s happening there?

KEY: I think there’s a need to keep an eye on all aspects of it.

It’s a very complex area and often these cases are very complex in themselves, so I’m always reluctant to judge them externally when I don’t have all the facts in front of me. But I think New Zealanders should take some comfort that we acknowledge fully their right to hold a referendum – we believe the referendum should be held when the general election is being held – and if there is strong support for the referendum on a proposition that parents should be allowed to lightly smack a child I think it would give a government of the future, or parliament of the future, confidence to know that if the law doesn’t work as it was intended through the compromise then it should be changed. As I said I’m still comfortable that it is and it will, but if it doesn’t then we’ll have to change it.

INVESTIGATE: On another topical issue, the Skyhawks still INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 33

haven’t been sold yet. Your electorate includes the Whenuapai airbase and a recent report by defence chiefs was famously paraphrased as ‘an airforce that can’t fly, a navy that can’t sail and an army that can’t fight’. Australia’s Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has this month announced a big increase in defence spending, particularly a blue water navy, because he says the Asia Pacific region is at the centre of an international arms race and he says Australia would be naïve if it didn’t prepare for possible trouble. You guys can still save the Skyhawks, what’s National’s policy on Defence given the increasing uncertainties that the world is facing?

KEY: Our view is that we’re in desperate need of a White Paper on Defence so that we can fully analyse the capability and the future requirements, because this is an area where it’s not just about spending money but it’s about getting it right – given the huge capital costs involved.

So from our point of view we intend to conduct a White Paper, take a serious look at the capability. We’re not opposed to spending more in this area, if required, and we would acknowledge that there are issues not only in terms of the physical hardware that the military have at their disposal but also significant retention and recruitment issues for personnel. So I don’t want to prejudge that but I acknowledge that it’s an area where we need to do some more work and get a better understanding of where the shortfall might be.

INVESTIGATE: And obviously given your desire for a White Paper you’d want to see the Skyhawks maintained in the interim until such time as a White Paper is finally produced?

KEY: I think it’s unlikely that the Skyhawks capability will come back, but I think there are a number of other aspects where the defence forces might need greater support. One area where I’m

constituencies – the existing members of parliament who are all ranked within the top 50, but at the same time bringing in some very new and exciting candidates. It’s never easy to get that balance right but I think we got it very right and I’m very proud of the team that we’re putting forward to New Zealanders.

If you look at the mixture of different ethnicities that we’ve ranked quite high up in the list, they reflect the face of modern New Zealand. In my view it’s very important that if the National Party wants to have a strong future as a dominant political party then we need to reflect the future of this country. In our case we’ve selected not only candidates from a range of different ethnicities but also very high quality candidates who will make fine members of parliament, and as I say I’m very proud of that list.

INVESTIGATE: What’s your vision, moving forward, for the first three years of National – given all of Labour’s claims of hidden agendas – what do you actually want to achieve in that first three years, what’s the goal?

KEY: To execute the plans that we’re taking to New Zealanders, and that is to lift prosperity and opportunity so that New Zealanders can feel a higher degree of security and comfort and enjoy a better lifestyle. I want to make sure our communities are safer and more secure – I think it’s wrong that so many New Zealanders now are feeling the brunt of a drugs epidemic and an intolerable increase in violent crime. I want to make sure that NZ retains one of its greatest principles, and that is that we’re an egalitarian society where everyone gets an opportunity and a chance in life through a world class education system, that in recent years has failed people. I want to give New Zealanders back the trust that they deserve, and get government out of their lives as much as we

“I want to give New Zealanders back the trust that they deserve, and get government out of their lives as much as we practically can” pretty passionate, and we’ve made this decision without the benefit of a White Paper, and that is that Whenuapai will remain as an air force base under National’s watch. We don’t think it’s right to be moving the air force down in totality to Ohakea, and it misses the point that for a lot of what the air force now do it’s important that they are near the largest population base. I think it’s such an important and strategic asset that it would be stupid to dispose of it and start building houses on it as some people are proposing.

INVESTIGATE: There’s a series of leaked emails floating around from a disgruntled National Party candidate muttering about National violating its constitution in constructing the party list, and a bit of backbiting over the selection process. Are these teething troubles or simply one disgruntled candidate, or are they symptomatic of a wider problem given the policies that have been leaked?

KEY: I don’t think the policies were leaked, that’s the first thing.

I think they were an act of stupidity – someone printed out those files and accidentally left them in the precincts of parliament.

While it’s a stupid thing to do it’s an easy thing to do – David Cunliffe’s done it and others – so it’s one of those things where there’s a lot of pressure on politicians to read a lot of paperwork.

Often they wander around parliament looking for a place to have a coffee and read that documentation.

In terms of the party list, I haven’t seen the emails in question but what I would say is that I think the National Party list ranking committee did a very good job of balancing two important 34 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

practically can. I believe if we can put together that package and deliver that over the next three years, we’ll not only be a wealthier country but also a more confident and self assured nation that can go on to become the greatest little nation on earth.

INVESTIGATE: Finally, then, given Labour’s ongoing claims of hidden agendas, and loose lips within National, can you tell New Zealanders whether they should expect any surprises?

KEY: There’s no secret agenda. There never has been. The only secret agenda is the one the Labour party has had over its donation scandals. From my point of view I’m very proud to have the policies that we’ve got and I’m very happy to campaign and debate them.

We live in a world of MMP politics where for any government three years is not really long enough to implement the policy programme that we might want to have, and if we want to not only earn the right to be the next government but also retain the right to be a long term government, then we need to earn and maintain that trust. That’s something I’m very conscious of and for that reason what we’ve promised and say we will do is exactly what we will do. That’s the basis under which I’ve come into parliament and that’s the basis under which I intend to lead New Zealand.

INVESTIGATE: So in other words, in terms of National’s ideological position, there might be some things you want to do in the long term, but you will put those before the people first?

KEY: We are not going to start implementing policies unless we’ve campaigned on them. It’s as simple as that. n

She says this election will be fought on

TRUST...

Helen Clark is inviting you to test her record, so we’ve put it down in black and white...

ABSOLUTE POWER

By Ian Wishart

Get a copy at your nearest Whitcoulls, Borders, Dymocks, PaperPlus, Take Note or good independent bookstore.

w w w. h e l e n c l a r k b o o k . c o m

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 35

ESSAY

The thorny issue of MMP How Socialists Conned Us Into MMP With National promising a binding referendum on whether to end the MMP electoral system in favour of something fairer, TREVOR LOUDON analyses how we got lumped with MMP in the first place

T

he last several general elections have seen increasing calls to abandon or alter our Mixed Member Parliament (MMP) form of proportional representation. Public dissatisfaction with MMP is growing as people observe minor parties exercising influence far beyond their size.

Recently NZ First leader Winston Peters has thumbed his nose at the country over questions of undisclosed donations to his party.

Peters felt safe because he knew that neither Prime Minister Helen Clark or opposition leader John Key would hold him to account, for fear of losing his support in the next Parliament.

Had it not been for ACT leader Rodney Hide laying a complaint with the Serious Fraud Office, Peters could have used his MMP leverage to stall indefinitely.

36  INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM  October 2008

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 37

ABOVE: National Prime Minister Jim Bolger and RIGHT: Labour leader Mike Moore. Neither man was enamoured at the idea of MMP, but cunning lobbying by groups with their own agendas forced the issue. MMP won the referendum because it was the easiest proportional voting system for people to understand. As history has shown however, arguably it was not the best system – putting too much power in the hands of minor and often radical parties

MMP was sold to the New Zealand voter as a means of making MPs more accountable and Parliament more representative of the electorate. Has that actually happened?

Where did the drive for MMP come from, when so few now admit to having voted for it?

Why, in 1993, did we abandon the “First Past the Post” electoral system and replace it with MMP? Who stood to gain from such a move?

The main group overtly promoting MMP was the Electoral Reform Coalition, founded in 1986 by Wellingtonian, Phil Saxby. A Labour Party activist, Saxby founded the ERC in response to the Labour Government’s 1986 Royal Commission on Electoral Reform.

T

he Royal Commission had received over 800 submissions from the public and produced a report which strongly recommended a move to MMP. These recommendations were largely ignored, as at that time most senior Labour politicians, including Helen Clark, saw Proportional Representation as potentially destabilising and a likely cause of party splits. It was only considerable pressure from lobbyists which caused the Labour Government to eventually agree to a referendum on “electoral reform”.

New Zealand’s minor parties saw Proportional Representation as a chance to gain access to the power long denied them under First Past the Post. Two of these groups, the eco-socialist Values Party and the “social credit” oriented Democrat Party comprised the back-bone of the ERC. 38 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

The ERC remained a comparatively moderate organisation until 1989 when the ERC’s August AGM saw the election of a new and radical executive.

Among them were; Marilyn Tucker: At the time, the acting General Secretary of the pro-Soviet Socialist Unity Party (SUP). Tucker was also the partner of Council of Trade Unions and SUP leader, Ken Douglas. In March 1990 Tucker wrote an article “No Shortcuts to Socialism” in the SUP’s paper, Tribune, concerning decisions made at a recent party Central Committee meeting – “Proportional voting is an important aspect of expanding democracy, and it is why the SUP fully backs the ERC’s campaign to hold an independent referendum.” The SUP’s idea of “democracy was, of course, copied from Erik Honecker’s Socialist Unity Party, which ruled the now defunct communist German ‘Democratic’ Republic.

Phil Todd: At the time secretary of the Wellington Branch of the SUP. Like Tucker he propagandised for PR in Tribune and was also a keen “democrat”. He told the ERC newsletter of December 1989 “Contrary to what people may have been told, socialism is very much about democracy and for people to have a real say in how their country is run” .

Brigitte-Hicks-Willer: Elected President of the ERC, a member of no political party but shortly after became involved in the Vietnam Action/ Information Network.

VAIN was organised to help rebuild socialist Vietnam and was supported by the SUP and other socialist groups.

Rod Donald: Elected Vice President of the ERC, the late Rod Donald became one of the ERC’s most prominent spokesmen. A former Values and Labour Party activist and an “anarchist at heart”, Donald was involved in radical causes since his teens. Donald told the NZ Monthly Review of January 1993, (at the time controlled by a Trotskyist sect named the Revolutionary Communist League) that while MMP had a downside in that the Christian Heritage Party might gain seats , “The flip side is that of the SUP gaining seats under MMP, which I don’t have so much difficulty with”.

In the next few years, more socialists moved into leadership positions in the ERC, including; Dave Arthur: In 1991 Dave Arthur, an Engineer’s Union organiser and SUP Central Committee member was convener of the ERC’s Christchurch branch.

Paul Harris: A Waikato University academic, Harris was a Labour Party member and avowed Marxist, who regularly wrote for the SUP’s “Tribune” newspaper and theoretical journal “Socialist Politics”.

Harris was a leading activist in the ERC’s Hamilton branch.

Dave Munro: A long time pro MMP activist in the Labour Party, David Munro served as ERC Vice Chairman and became one of its main spokesmen. Until 1992 Munro was an organiser for the Retail branch of the Northern Distribution Union. The NDU was then led by SUP Central Committee members Mike Jackson and Bill Anderson.

Most NDU officials were members or supporters of the SUP or,

after 1990, its offshoot the even more radical Socialist Party of Aoteoroa.

The NDU, has been one the main conduits for socialist/trade union influence on Labour Party policy. Munro was in a good position to influence the Labour Party. In 1988 he was appointed to Labour’s justiceelectoral-immigration policy committee. In 1990 he was head of the powerful Auckland Labour Party Affiliates Council, the main “legal” channel for Labour/union communication.

Colin Clark: On his retirement as General Secretary of the Public Service Association (PSA) in 1991, the late Colin Clark, became Chairman of the ERC. In 1950, while a 19 year old Canterbury University student Clark joined the Communist Party and was an active member for several years. Later Clark was active in radical, mainly Maoist dominated groups such as HART and the Committee on Vietnam.

Clark told the June 1991 PSA Journal, “In light of what had happened in the Second World War, it seemed that the move towards socialist economies was irreversible...I was part of wanting to see that happening in New Zealand. I’ve never lost sight of that as a goal as the only fair way that all the community get access to what the community can provide” .

As General Secretary of the PSA Clark played a key role in the formation of the Council of Trade Unions, gaining a place on its SUP/socialist dominated executive.

Though claiming non membership, Clark was on very friendly terms with the SUP. From February 1992 until late 1993 he wrote a fortnightly column for the Party’s newspaper, Tribune on the benefits of the MMP system and the faulty logic of its opponents.

After MMP’s 1993 referendum victory, Tribune showed it’s gratitude to Clark, by naming him it’s “Man of the Year” While others made the speeches, the SUP and friends laboured behind the scenes for MMP.

I

n 1990 activity centred around a proposed referendum on electoral reform which was later delayed. In August 1990 SUP Central Committee member and National Election Coordinator, Alan Ware wrote in Tribune, “The SUP sees the elections as a time to work for democratisation of political and industrial life...Wellington branch is planning their work around the ERC referendum and support for a progressive Labour candidate in their area.”

The next month’s issue stated “Christchurch branch members are actively involved in supporting the ERC’s referendum work in Sydenham and Christchurch North...”

The young propagandists and computer boffins of the SUP’s Wellington based “Gordon Watson Branch” churned out large quantities of pro MMP literature, T-Shirts and bumper stickers. They littered Wellington with slogans such as “Absolutely, Positively, Proportional Representation”, “MMP for ‘93”, and, incredibly for a party which has espoused one party socialism for almost it’s entire existence, “Down With the Two Party State”!

Tribune promoted MMP in nearly every issue for several years and featured regular interviews with several leading ERC activists.

The most important influence however came through the SUP’s dominance of NZ’s major trade union federation, the then 350,000 plus member CTU. SUP leader Ken Douglas doubled as President of the CTU and was a vocal proponent of MMP. CTU Vice-President, Angela Foulkes helped cement the alliance by serving as patron of and propagandist for, the ERC. CTU policy followed the Socialist Unity Party line on virtually every major issue, electoral change being no exception.

Since the late 1980s official CTU electoral policy had read “The Council of Trade Unions opposes an electoral system which allows a minority vote party to hold power and supports the principle of proportional representation being introduced into our electoral system to ensure that Parliament is fully representative”.

The organisation’s executive, paid staff and regional organisations were also dominated by the SUP and other socialist parties, all sympathetic to MMP. The CTU actively propagandised for MMP, in newspaper advertisements, regular articles in trade union journals, seminars and of course helped out financially.

Strangely, few journalists ever questioned the ERC on where it was getting its money from.

By the late 1980s, the Socialist Unity Party and its fellow Marxist parties had long abandoned any idea of winning electoral support under their own banners. Consequently they relied on infiltrating and manipulating larger parties in order to gain leverage and influence.

By that time, the SUP had, for many years, controlled or influenced most of NZ’s major trade unions, such as the National Distribution Union, Service Workers Union, the Engineers Union and the Public Service Association. These were all affiliated to the INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 39

Labour Party and were able to use their block vote at party conferences. This enabled the SUP to elect sympathisers and covert SUP members to Labour’s Executive and Policy Council and to influence policy development.

This helped cement an unofficial, but very real SUP/Labour/ Council of Trade Unions alliance. SUP leader Ken Douglas wrote in the Soviet publication “Problems of Peace and Socialism” in July 1989, “We emphasize that in New Zealand, progress will be impossible without joint action by SUP and Labour Party members” According to the Communist Party’s People’s Voice of the 11th of June 1990, SUP Vice President Alan Ware stated at a March 1990 SUP Central Committee meeting “There remains within the Labour Party membership, party apparatus, caucus and cabinet, people who are our allies”

D

uring the late 1980s, this SUP/CTU/Labour “Triad” caused considerable turmoil in NZ socialist circles. The SUP/CTU was seen by many radicals as “selling out” and muzzling militant trade unionists in order to keep Labour in power. The SUP/CTU’s apparently passive acceptance of the 1984/90 Labour Government’s “free market” economic policies, led to widespread anger in the unions, Labour’s militant wing and within the SUP itself. The SUP was in a bind. Ordered by their Soviet masters to support Labour’s anti-nuclear policies, at any cost, Moscow’s Kiwi minions were forced to keep the unions backing labour, while thousands of workers were sacked from state jobs. The unions who had been lions under Muldoon, were lambs under Labour.

The pressue built through the late ‘80s as more and more workers were laid off and the the SUP/CTU did absolutely nothing to pressure the Labour government.

Something had to give-and it did.

In 1989, Labour MP Jim Anderton, disgusted at his party’s passive acceptance of “Rogernomics” left the Labour Party. He soon linked up with the Workers Communist League, some Trotskyites, Labour militants, some former SUP members and other socialists, to form the breakaway, New Labour Party.

In 1990, many North Island SUP members broke away to form the Socialist Party of Aoteoroa (SPA), under the leadership of Bill Andersen, President of both the powerful Auckland Council of Trade Unions and the National Distribution Union.

In December 1991, Anderton’s NLP joined the Green Party, the Maori nationalist, Mana Motuhake Party and the Democrats to form the Alliance Party.

The majority of NLP leaders and many Greens, came from Marxist-Leninist backgrounds, mainly the Socialist Action League or the Workers Communist League. These socialists effectively dominated the Alliance Party and dictated its policy.

Bill Andersen’s SPA also supported the Alliance, it’s puppet unions providing manpower, office space and material aid. Both the Auckland Alliance and SPA were headquartered in the local CTU building. The People’s Voice of 21 September, 1992 described SPA leader Bill Andersen as an Alliance supporter, though he hasn’t “(yet) signed a membership card”.

In 1989, self proclaimed Marxist, Labour Party member and ERC activist, Paul Harris wrote an article on Proportional Representation for the SUP’s theoretical journal, “Socialist Politics”. In the esoteric world of Marxism-Leninism, theoretical journals are key transmission belts of party policy to the rank and file. Therefore Harris’ ideas can be safely assumed to have party approval.

40 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

According to Harris “If Proportional Representation was used in 1990, we could see a progressive coalition of the Labour Party, NLP, Mana Motuhake and the Greens emerge to form a government, even though National may be the largest single party.

Would that not strengthen our democracy and our society? Surely all socialists should appreciate the need to develop such a broadbased political alliance to unite progressive forces”.

After this insight into what “democracy” means to Marxists, Harris went on to say “..as socialists (both inside and outside the Labour Party or the SUP ) we should be seeking to promote Proportional Representation as a means of achieving a broad coalition which will group together all forces opposed to the worst excesses of ‘Rogernomics’ and the likely extensions of it under a National Government...”

Harris revealed his hopes for MMP;”This coalition will not give us socialism. But it could provide the basis for a radical and progressive transformation of our society...Working together, recognising the validity of each others’ positions, the working class, women’s, Maori and Green movements could collectively reconstruct our society as a decent and humane one. For that to occur, I would argue that Proportional Representation is an essential political precondition.”

In September 1991, just prior to the formation of the Alliance Party, Bill Andersen wrote a widely circulated open letter, from the Socialist Party of Aotearoa, calling for a “people’s coalition to form a government of national salvation” in order to “meet the broad interests of the NZ people”. Andersen said the key was forging an “electoral agreement” between Labour, the NLP and the Greens.

Andersen’s call was soon echoed by fellow Marxist-Leninist, Ken Douglas. As keynote speaker at the 1992 Labour Party conference Douglas urged Labour and the Alliance to get together around an “electoral agreement” to defeat the National Government. Labour’s then president Ruth Dyson (reportedly on friendly terms with Douglas’ partner Marilyn Tucker) backed the appeal.

While rejected by then, Labour leader Mike Moore, it was considered at the time, highly unlikely that Douglas would have spoken without significant support inside the Labour Party.

It is clear that socialist coalitions were considered likely by many pro MMP activists.

Former ERC Vice-President Rod Donald told “Monthly Review” of January 1993 “I tend to think that New Zealand will tend towards centre left coalitions rather than centre right”.

Incoming Labour President Maryan Street (a strong supporter of MMP) told Labour’s 1993 Congress that an important part of her job would be preparing Labour for the post-1996 political landscape. “We cannot predict at this stage what the various players in the field are going to look like, so I don’t know if the Alliance will still exist in it’s current form...It may be a possibility in the future that the Left will have to look quite seriously at representation of a broad coalition of interests...”

In 1984 Maryan Street chaired Auckland Women’s Forum. She later told the SUP’s Tribune of 26th November “Left-wing women, who were many and varied, forgot a lot of their differences. We suddenly realised that it was a case of ‘link arms’ and that, in a sense, the luxury of bickering among ourselves and having lesbian/heterosexual splits, Labour Party/SUP splits, Broadsheet/ Snapdragon splits could no longer be afforded. . . it was encouraging to see the way left-wing women rallied to support each other at the Forum.”

In an interview with Robert Mannion of the Sunday Times of October 24th 1993, SPA leader, Bill Andersen outlined his party’s priorities and plans. According to Mannion, Andersen supported the Alliance and believed “the main issue now is to expand parINVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 41

ticipatory democracy. Beginning with MMP...”

Mannion added that Andersen “would like to have seen Alliance/ Labour accommodations in crucial electorates”. And interestingly “They had a good meeting with Helen Clark and Alliance parliamentary candidate Laila Harre at the Trade Union Centre recently.”

Harre, a former Labour Party official, became General Secretary of the NLP, an Alliance cabinet minister and in 2005 succeeded Bill Andersen as leader of the National Distribution Union.

Clark, of course, shortly after became leader of the Labour Party, in a coup described by Mike Moore as “almost Maoist”.

Why did these two supposed political rivals meet members of NZ’s most militant Marxist-Leninist Party? Was it to discuss their mutual interest in Nicaragua (Clark was there in ‘86, Harre in ‘87)?

Or was it to discuss future “electoral agreements?”

Labour deputy leader Michael Cullen, was interviewed in the SUP’s Tribune of March the 18th 1992. The piece was entitled “Progressive Forces Should Dominate Under MMP”.

“Progressive” of course, in this context, is a code word for prosocialist. In it, Cullen laid out his thoughts on a Labour/Alliance coalition.

The similarities: “The frustrating thing about relations with the Alliance is that if you talk about what we think as a just society, we’re not very far apart at all... The basic instincts of people in Labour, are pretty

even the odd Nat, to the Communist Party, Workers Power and virtually every other socialist sect in the country.

The main thrust came however from the Alliance, the CTU, the ERC and elements of the Labour Party.

Standing behind these organisations were NZ’s two major MarxistLeninist parties, Ken Douglas’ SUP and Bill Andersen’s, SPA. It is clear that these groups intended to influence any likely coalition that arose from combinations of the NLP, Labour, Greens or Mana Motuhake.

Clearly MMP has not yet achieved everything that Douglas and Andersen thought it would.

It did however, produce a Labour/Alliance coalition followed by a Labour/Greens/Progressive Party regime. These governments have moved new Zealand well to the left, just as Ken Douglas and Bill Andersen intended they would.

MMP gave us ex-Socialist Action League member Matt Robson, who as Minister of Justice flatly refused to implement an 80,000 signature petition calling for tougher penalties for violent criminals. MMP gave us former Workers Communist League member Sue Bradford, who forced through, against massive public opposition, a bill to ban parental smacking.

MMP gave us the anti free speech Electoral Finance Act. MMP has given us socialist “democracy”.

On the right, MMP has enabled ACT to gain a foothold, but

“MMP was sold to the public as a means of making politicians more “accountable”. In reality it has given tiny Marxist-Leninist sects, the power to influence the direction of this country” much the same I suspect, as the basic instincts of those who are Alliance activists.”

The barriers: “If we are capable of recognising that simple truth, and if the Alliance is capable of recognising that there is no route backwards....that there are certain fundamental constraints of being part of an international economy that we actually can’t opt out of...once they’ve accepted that, then I think we’ve got an awful lot to talk about.”

The goal: “And we ought to be able to form basically a centre-left coalition which should be the dominant force under MMP for the foreseeable future”.

To achieve this near monopoly, Cullen expected there would be increasing contact between Labour and Alliance people “to establish networks, to establish common ground, establish confidence.”

However the voting public would not know about this coalition government until well after they had cast their votes. “One doubts that we’re going to have formal talks before an election”...”but hopefully the sharp edges will have worn away enough that after an election we’ll be able to talk seriously and quickly in order to be able to form an effective government.”

Michael Cullen’s “progressive” vision was of course realized in the 1999 Labour/Alliance coalition government, which in modified form still rules today.

The drive for MMP came from across the political spectrum.

These ranged from the Christian Heritage Party, NZ First and 42 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

by forcing National to move ever closer to Labour’s positions it has benefited the left far more than the pro freedom forces.

Just as it was intended to?

Labour has effectively absorbed the values and many of the members of the now dissolved SUP. Bill Andersen is dead and the Alliance nearly so. However his SPA is working with the Socialist Workers Organisation and others to form a new leftist movement to replace the Alliance – the several thousand member strong Residents Action Movement (while keeping a few members inside the Alliance just in case). Marxist-Leninists are nothing, if not long term, strategic thinkers.

MMP was sold to the public as a means of making politicians more “accountable”. In reality it has given tiny Marxist-Leninist sects, the power to influence the direction of this country.

The traditional First Past the Post voting system based representation purely on geography. It was designed to enfranchise the political mainstream and keep extremists away from the levers of power.

MMP is based on the Marxist concept that society is divided into competing classes or groups with conflicting interests. It was designed to empower extremists, to divide society into competing power blocs in order to break down social stability. To socialists, MMP is one more step on the road to revolution.

Rather than bringing our country together and making politicians more accountable, we are now a more fractured society than ever and politicians are more arrogant than ever.

Was this the real intention of those who gave us MMP? Was this country suckered by socialists? n

ONTARIO: PROOF IN THE PUDDING

A

year ago, voters in Ontario, Canada, went to the polls to decide whether they should ditch the First Past The Post electoral system in favour of New Zealand’s MMP system. Prime movers in the Canadian MMP debate included the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and the Asian Canadian Labour Alliance. As the names suggest, not only were they traditional hard-left trade unions, but they were also racially-based organisations. Another key player was the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, OCASI, which represented often hardline Islamic migrant demands.

To all these organisations, MMP was a godsend for the same reasons left wing activists were attracted to it in New Zealand: “Racialised people represent over 19% of Ontario’s population and we will have greater leverage to use it to influence and shape a MMP legislature or form a political party to advance our rights,” says a news release from the groups last September.

In other words, instead of integrating the citizens of Ontario, the vision they had was of importing different racial and political agendas and holding the balance of power via MMP. Sound familiar?

“In recent years, OCASI’s work has been dominated by the experience of exclusion, marginalization and discrimination experienced by immigrants, refugees and racialized communities in the wake of post 9/11 security measures, the rising poverty of these communities, and the growing numbers of people without full immigration status,” OCASI stated in a formal report.

In the debate that preceded the Ontario MMP vote, analyst Cameron Holmstrom ran through some of the weaknesses of MMP: “Another concern is how the party lists will be created. Under MMP, it would be very difficult to remove unpopular MPs because those unpopular candidates could be elected through party lists. Under MMP,

the MMP MPs are not directly elected, so you cannot vote out a certain candidate. You can vote for another party, but there is no guarantee that the individual MPP that people want to remove would be.

“The party gets to decide, in what ever method they choose, who gets on their list and where.

This is a problem that we have seen in the MMP system in places like Israel, where politicians that are very unpopular with large amounts of the public are sent back to parliament because they are powerful enough in their parties to keep getting on those lists.”

Holmstrom also picks up on what New Zealand voters have already sussed out: MMP means the political parties have more power and the voters have less.

“Some argue that because of this, these MMP MPs will be beholden to their party, and not the voters. While I don’t completely agree with that point, I can see why they believe it. MMP MPs cannot point to an area that directly voted for them, and therefore, are not directly responsible to any particular group other than their political party.

“Personally, while even though the party that I support will likely benefit from MMP, my home [Ontario] will be hurt, and when left with the choice between the two, I have to choose my home.

I want electoral reform, but I want reform that represents all of Ontario fairly and that is directly responsible to the public. MMP does not pass that smell test, and as a result, I cannot support it.”

Evidently the voters of Ontario agreed. While many were unhappy with First Past the Post, they weren’t prepared to trade one bad system for another, and voted MMP down by a margin of 2 to 1.

New Zealanders meanwhile may get the chance to give MMP the flick in favour of a better system. National has promised a binding referendum on whether to replace MMP with a more democratic system, if it becomes Government in November.

– By Ian Wishart n INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 43

US POLITICS

urricane H hits Sarah Obama campaign hard As the polls show a big boost for the McCain/Palin ticket in the US, social conservatives hope Palin can help alter McCain’s thinking, writes BILL LAMBRECHT

O

verjoyed with the addition of Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket, social conservatives hope now that she can alter John McCain’s thinking on issues dear to them and receive a meaningful role in the White House if he wins the election in November.

Palin’s selection continues to generate excitement in GOP circles, displayed over the weekend at a gathering of more than 2,000 evangelicals and conservatives at the annual Values Voters Summit, sponsored by the Family Research Council.

In an online straw poll at last year’s summit, McCain came in dead last among nine GOP hopefuls – behind Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter and every other Republican presidential aspirant.

Even “undecided” got four times as many votes as McCain.

But the sentiments sounding in this year’s gathering are decidedly different, and the biggest reason was expressed in the pink “I Love Palin” lapel stickers worn by many in the audience.

“She has revitalized the Republican Party,” says Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative icon and one of the featured speakers on the summit’s opening day.

Even so, some participants were wondering what to make of the divergence of opinion between McCain and the Alaska governor on issues important to them, including embryonic stemcell research and drilling for oil and gas in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve.

44 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

Palin also has decidedly more conservative views on gay rights, immigration and many environmental matters, including her unwillingness to attribute global warming to pollution from human activity.

Conservatives at the gathering say they’re banking that Palin can change McCain’s mind on issues they care about.

“He (McCain) does take advice from a close circle, and from what I hear, she is being drawn into that circle,” says Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “She’s not just window-dressing,” McCain is reaping the rewards of Palin’s celebrity and the crowds she turns out. His campaign strategists say they considering more joint appearances in the days ahead, unusual for running mates this late in the campaign.

They are portrayed as one unit, but how much he’ll listen to Palin – or what role she would occupy in the White House – is unknown.

The model of the modern vice-presidency began to shift in the Jimmy Carter presidency when Walter Mondale, his No. 2, received a staff and suite of offices, a seat in key meetings and a list of substantive duties. Since then, vice presidents have functioned more or less as senior advisers and troubleshooters, with the current officeholder, Dick Cheney, perhaps the most powerful.

But Palin’s role surely would be much different than Cheney’s and perhaps others to hold that office recently, says Joel Goldstein, a St. Louis University law professor and authority on the office of vice president.

Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT

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“For one thing, Palin lacks the Washington experience of Cheney, Al Gore and other recent vice presidents. What’s more, Palin and McCain would be separated by a wider ideological gulf than recent partners in the executive office” 46 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

For one thing, Palin lacks the Washington experience of Cheney, Al Gore and other recent vice presidents. What’s more, Palin and McCain would be separated by a wider ideological gulf than recent partners in the executive office.

“It’s hard to imagine President McCain sitting around with Secretary of State Joe Lieberman and Secretary of Defence Tom Ridge, for example, and Sarah Palin having much to say,” argues Goldstein, who is writing his second book on the vice presidency.

On the other hand, Goldstein says, he can envision Palin “applying litmus tests” for judicial appointments and arguing the agenda of social conservatives.

“She would have a voice, because the campaign will have given her a certain amount of status.”

Schlafly says Palin would have an impact on government regardless of what tasks she is assigned.

“McCain is his own man. Believe me, I know that. But she could have influence and bring a lot of people with her who share her views.”

Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs says it would be inappropriate for conservatives to prescribe Palin’s role in Washington “but the fact that he chose her is an indication of his respect for her “I don’t think they have to walk in lockstep on everything.”

The Family Research Council’s Perkins says he envisions Palin handling a portfolio y rse Ke of domestic issues, particularly n ria UPI Photo/B energy.

Perkins hopes that as president, McCain would listen to Palin on issues like climate change and that she would “not be pushed off into the back room.”

Palin’s approach to conservation has been characterized by detractors as anti-environment. In addition to questioning the general scientific consensus on the causes of climate change, Palin has opposed efforts to provide more federal protection for polar bears, wolves, whales and salmon.

Jim DiPeso, policy director for the advocacy group Republicans for Environmental Protection, says he doesn’t believe McCain would be persuaded by Palin to drop his commitment to proposals to curb greenhouse-gas pollution.

“McCain is not a Johnny-come-lately on a lot of these environmental issues. He has expended a lot of political capital, and I just can’t see him throwing all that overboard because his running mate may have different views. He’s the boss.”

Palin’s Democrat Supporters

For now, some Democratic legislators are calling attention to differences on issues such as health care and education, while praising Palin’s efforts to find bi-partisan common ground elsewhere as governor.

“On questions of oil and gas, there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between us,” says Rep. Harry Crawford, D-Anchorage.

“I’m thrilled for the lady. I’ll just leave it at that.”

As governor since 2006, Palin carried the day on her big oil and gas priorities by combining votes of Democratic and moderate Republican legislators. She succeeded, in part, by not pushing hard in other, potentially controversial areas, such as operating budget cuts and anti-abortion measures.

The final House vote this July on granting a gas line “license” to the company TransCanada, promoted by Palin, showed a typical breakdown. The measure was approved 24-16, with 16 Democrats NCHORAGE, Alaska – In Alaska’s small political voting yes along with eight swing-vote Republicans. world, heads are still spinning over Sarah Palin’s ascent Oil companies that drill in Alaska opposed the contract, as they to national stardom – and not just because it hap- did Palin’s boost of oil-production taxes last year. Sensing citizens’ pened overnight. anti-oil mood, Palin used that as an argument in her favour.

Only a few months ago, many leading Republicans here Republican opponents, worried that higher oil taxes would hurt were deriding Palin as a free-spending oil baron in the mold of industry investment in Alaska, call Palin a closet liberal. Critics Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Now most are doing their best to cheer say her gas line plan would fail because she spurned the major oil the governor on as a budget-cutting fiscal conservative running producers. Others objected to her bill giving $1,200 in windfall for vice president. oil revenue to each resident.

Republican legislators may not like it when Today, criticism of Palin’s populism can still she talks in her stump speech about shaking be heard from conservative call-in radio hosts up the good old boy network back home. They in Anchorage. But few Republican politicians grumble that she is once again wielding her are taking broad swipes, and callers are chalbroad brush against innocent and guilty alike. lenging anyone who sounds negative.

But bitter memories of the past two years – in “Sometimes we have our own credibility to John which Palin’s toughest opposition in Alaska came worry about,” conservative talk radio host Rick McCain’s from inside her own political party – appear to Rydell of Anchorage’s KENI-AM says. “All I choice for vice president be glazing over in a new era of good feeling. keep hearing is, ‘Why don’t you toe the line?’ “ “You’re left with no choice. It’s one of those Republicans contacted for this story say there Early years things where you just grin and bear it,” says has been no effort by the McCain campaign to Born 1964, Sandpoint, Idaho; family moved to Alaska when Andrew Halcro, a former Republican state repsuppress critical comments by party members. she was an infant resentative and among Palin’s most relentless But some prominent Republicans have 1984 First runner-up critics back home. “I’ve seen people that have decided on their own to stop complaining. in the Miss Alaska pageant been very critical of her just close ranks.”

One is former House Speaker Gail Phillips, 1987 Graduated from University Democrats in Alaska are also in a tricky who has clashed with Palin in the past. Early of Idaho, journalism major position. on, Phillips spoke to several newspapers, Sports reporter for two Their alliances with Palin led to big legislaincluding the New York Times, about a perAnchorage TV stations tive victories on oil taxes, moving forward on ceived lack of vetting by John McCain’s cama natural gas pipeline and ethics. paign of his running mate. But she is no longer Political career Democratic legislators say they oppose giving interviews, she says.

1996 Elected mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 6,500), after the McCain-Palin ticket, and some object to “It’s best for Alaska,” Phillips says. serving two terms on the city what they see as a new note of sarcasm toward Rep. Jay Ramras, R-Fairbanks, was an outcouncil; re-elected mayor, 1999 Democrats in Palin’s on-the-stump persona. spoken Palin critic during the oil and gas 2006-present Governor But they have their own races to run in Alaska debates. But in a recent interview he veered of Alaska; first woman this fall, and they aren’t eager to stand up away from any criticism. to hold the office against the wave of enthusiasm for Palin.

“Everything that’s flitting through my mind 2008 Selected by GOP “It’s very difficult for critics to know what to right now is better left where it is,” Ramras presidential candidate John McCain as his running mate do in a situation like this,” says Anchorage pollsaid, in answer to a question about Palin as ster and campaign consultant Ivan Moore. He vice presidential candidate. He said it’s time Personal notes that as governor, Palin has had approval to rally around the governor, whom he called Married to North Slope oil ratings of more than 60 percent from registered “the American Idol of politics.” worker who is part Yup’ik Eskimo; they have five children Democrats here (and as high as 80 percent House Speaker John Harris, a Valdez of the broader population here). That could Republican, concedes there were splits in his © 2008 MCT Source: AP; McClatchy Washington Bureau; decline, he adds, if she becomes the “pitbull” majority caucus and splits that remain in the City of Wasilla, Alaska; MCT Photo Service Graphic: Judy Treible of the McCain campaign. state Republican Party.

In Alaska, Palin’s biggest critics as governor have been Republicans, writes Tom Kizzia

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Gov. Sarah Palin

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“How many of us are prepared or ready to be in that kind of lofty position?” Green questions. “Not many of us. And she would join that population?”

Green has given several national interviews in the past few weeks. She says her concerns go back to the way Palin handled herself as a candidate for governor, attacking Republican corruption so broadly that everyone felt accused. As governor, Green says, Palin kept up the barrage, broadly attacking the legislature over any policy disagreement rather than working with lawmakers.

If some Alaska Republicans appear to be forgetting their past objections to Palin, Democrats find themselves forced into even more contorted positions.

They contend that on some of Palin’s biggest issues, including oil taxes and ethics reform, the governor followed their leadership.

“Her timing was so perfect. We’d been working on these issues for ten years,” admits Rep. Beth Kerttula, D-Juneau, the House minority leader. Kerttula says she gets on well personally with the governor, but doesn’t think Palin is ready for such high office.

Rep. Mike Doogan, D-Anchorage, wrote in the Washington Post about how Palin had served a tray of cupcakes for his birthday. She’s very likeable, Doogan wrote, but she’s not the person to have so close to the presidency. He cited several concerns about her reign as governor, including budget growth and high turnover among her aides.

At the same time, it can be risky for Democrats up for re-election to attack the popular governor. berg oger L. Wollen Their bi-partisan cooperation might once have UPI Photo/R been an election plus for Democrats. Now Palin’s presence on the national ballot will increase Republican turnout in November and likely help other Republicans on the state ballot, says Moore, the pollster and consultant.

On the other hand, Palin needs to answer some difficult ques“I’m not one of those who says everything was rosy. There are tions about whether she is supporting the re-election efforts of issues,” Harris says. One lingering sore point involves her claims Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young, both of whom are running surrounding ethics reform, which Harris says tend to paint all under legal clouds, according to Rep. Les Gara, D-Anchorage.

Alaska Republicans in a bad light.

The question seems unavoidable if Palin is running as a reform Even so, Harris says he’s not hesitating to support Palin in the Republican, Gara says. national race. “From my point of view, Alaskans need to be behind Meanwhile, the so-called Troopergate investigation of the Palin the governor and McCain.” administration has become a flashpoint for the governor’s critics One of the party’s chief budget experts, Rep. Mike Hawker, R- and defenders. Because so much is at stake, it’s become a rallying Anchorage, sounds conciliatory as he praises Palin’s administra- point. Yet the cold hard facts of the case remain that the trooper tion for improving the state’s financial management practices. He concerned, Palin’s former brother in law, had – among other ‘missays he still disagrees on some matters, saying Palin doesn’t deserve demeanours’ – tasered his 10 year old stepson: hardly the kind of her tax-cutting reputation. He adds that the Alaska media made person you want on the police force. it harder for her critics by going too easy on Palin.

“Since Aug. 29 (when Palin was picked), the mood has really It was her charisma, Hawker says. changed,” says Halcro, whose own blog and radio show focus “People not only like her, they want to like her. People trust heavily on the investigation. “Now it’s, ‘Don’t talk about it.’ It’s her, and they want to trust her. That’s a rare commodity to find almost like blasphemy.” in politics.”

Conservative radio host Dan Fagan – who said he hopes McCain Palin’s most outspoken critic from the right has been retiring beats Obama in November – expresses frustration every day as Senate President Lyda Green, a Wasilla Republican who was an callers object to his bringing up Troopergate and Palin’s role. He early ideological ally. Green, who dropped her re-election bid ear- accuses the governor’s defenders of trying to sweep things under lier this year in the face of a strong Palin-backed challenger, doesn’t the rug to protect her candidacy. stop at listing specific policy disputes. She says Palin is not ready “I’m hearing from my friends on the right, the truth doesn’t for such high office. matter. It’s about the team.” n 48 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

Kimberly P. Mitchell/Detroit Free Press/MCT

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A Wing &

A Goodnight Prayer

The final verdict on the crash of Zulu-Kilo LTF Three years ago Investigate’s NEILL HUNTER broke the story of a botched official investigation into a topdressing aircrash. That coverage forced a second coroner’s inquest, and the just-released verdict makes sobering reading, as Hunter again reports

50 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

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t the back of Janic Geelen and Ray Deerness’ book The Topdressers 1990 are 24 pages listing “Agricultural Pilots (1941 – 1990)” showing “name, date started, companies worked for, date ceased and comments” and every page includes a death: “killed on ferry flight in Fletcher FU24 (ZK-BVB) at Pukekohe East” is first, next to name number four.

Then on the last page is a separate list titled: “Other persons killed in topdressing aircraft accidents”, bold font, lower case. Four of the fourteen are “Loader-driver on ferry flight…” Then at the bottom of the page: “To all supermen never in the field of modern agriculture was so much achieved by so few.” A Roll of Honour.

Honour for two young men – supermen – loader driver and pilot, who died in a 2003 topdressing plane crash may yet be achieved if the emphatic findings of a coroner’s inquest are acted upon, because in 2008 coroner Dr Wallace Bain as much told our aviation police – the Civil Aviation Authority – the deaths were CAA’s fault. The coroner makes 16 findings and recommendations and in five of them he recommends “there be very significant penalties for breach.” And he found Wanganui Aero Works (WAW) “should have had safe working practices in place in respect of fatigue risk management” telling (recommending) they implement them immediately.

In the 1980’s an American doctor specialising in sleep disorders, key note speaker to an audience of investigators – including one who would much later crash land into journalism, said afternoon naps were okay. They should be for 20 or 90 minutes. He drawled on about things like the mystery of deep sleep and rapid eye movement, the myth of getting a good eight hours in…and coffee – it’s bad for sleep.

Three years ago another myth surfaced when some veterans of New Zealand’s agricultural aviation industry scoffed that fatigue caused the deaths of a pilot and his loader driver, and coffee in the tiny Manawatu township of Sanson is excellent, if time is made for a break. The local barista operating from a trailer won the national award for best coffee – but an invitation to sample it is declined due to busyness and a silly ideological bias against trailer coffee. In another Sanson milestone, it is the place from which – in legal circles, the virtually unheard of originated: a second coroner’s hearing into the death of Stratford topdressing pilot Joe Lourie, 29, and his loader driver and engineer, Sanson’s Richard McRae, 30.

Five years ago the loader driver’s mother, Sanson’s Ann Fullerton (then Ann McRae) began her crusade into bad aviation work place practices, three years ago Investigate picked up her story, uncovered issues of aviation fatigue, a Civil Aviation Authority not doing its job, and an angry coroner. Now a second coroner has cleared the air, and the woman from Sanson rests a little easier. The invalid who loves gardening says there is a mix of satisfaction and pain from the result. “When your child dies, the grief goes undiluted, parents outliving their children is unnatural. But had Joe crashed alone, Frank (her son’s old high school teacher) and I would’ve done nothing. Richard was the reason for OSH Department of Labour getting involved, presenting the coroner their damning investigations.” Her son was an illegal passenger (the plane was spreading its last load – carrying the loader driver home was a breach of rules) but his death has had wide ramifications. “Richard is also the reason the LTSA is investigating work conditions for loader drivers in the topdressing industry,” she says.

Second coronial inquests into deaths are so rare that a TVNZ 52 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

producer told Investigate their lawyers had never heard of a successful application for one. For pilots in the agricultural aviation industry the significance is huge, but as a news item, national media gave it only cursory treatment. The news of coroner Bain’s formal findings fizzled onto mainstage national media last month but, like early morning mist in the valleys of Taranaki’s hinterland, the story quickly drifted away, significance lost.

However, as a public relations exercise for the Civil Aviation Authority it was damage control working just fine, even if they didn’t plan it that way. In PR, get a bad press story released on a Friday afternoon, simultaneous to the 2008 Olympics, hope that it misses national media, muddy the waters with your own quotes…and it’s a good day at the office. The story missed the big papers except for an afternoon Herald online copy with this errant headline: “Pilot blamed for deaths in topdressing crash”, and the news was gone “by lunchtime”.

Those papers who did print the New Zealand Press Association’s story on the verdict and press release did a reasonable job of copying and pasting – which all we scribes and busy news rooms plead guilty to.

Journalism school tutors lecture that it’s forbidden, “research it and write your own angle.” And perhaps CAA were elated that although they were “blamed” for the crash, they were not guilty of allegedly doctoring their own crash report, one of the reasons behind the second inquest, and referred to in a letter from the Solicitor General’s office. But that got missed by media too. Instead, NZPA quoted this wee gem, from the CAA: “The CAA stands by its accident investigation report which was accepted by the coroner that noted that fatigue was one of several factors to the accident and not the sole cause of the accident,” said a nameless, faceless, CAA spokesman to NZPA, disappearing like a load of urea into the bowels of a Fletcher topdresser fuselage. Like a rugby player pushing the off side rule, it was a cynical explanation, but mainstream media swallowed it.

What was the sole cause? Not CAA’s mischievous, fictitious, multiple possible causes, and not the pilot. Cause: death by aviation fatigue. Responsibility: CAA (and to a lesser extent, giant Fertiliser corporate, Ravensdown).

In Australia it’s called “After the Midnight Oil” – not the Peter Garrett rock band but the name of a report published by a Senate

“In PR, get a bad press story released on a Friday afternoon, simultaneous to the 2008 Olympics, hope that it misses national media, muddy the waters with your own quotes…and it’s a good day at the office. The story missed the big papers except for an afternoon Herald online copy”

inquiry eight years ago into pilot fatigue. It recognised this: fatigue kills pilots. So the Aussie politicians implemented flying and duty time management to improve the working environment of pilots.

Now, in New Zealand 2008, using uncommonly emphatic and severe language, a coroner has rounded on our aviation regulatory authority, CAA, for avoiding their statutory responsibility by merely “looking” at the problem.

At the second hearing, CAA’s lawyers and their general manager put on a glowing display, of almost self righteous proportions, that CAA were aware of the issues and their strategies to protect pilots’ health and safety, including fatigue. Coroner Bain however was not having a bar of it. First, the coroner respects CAA’s crash investigator Alistair Buckingham’s credentials and his report, even to the extent of making no negative criticism for wrongly assessing the pilot’s flying hours prior to the accident (CAA would later make an apology to Investigate relating to that assessment).

Then the coroner, like a turbo powered propeller slicing through cold Taranaki evening air, cut to the chase: “CAA were looking

at international developments in fatigue management, including the Australian experience…before embarking on any amendments to the rules (to regulate on pilot fatigue).” If CAA thought “looking” at a problem for eight years (since the Australian fatigue report) – or five years since ZK-LTF’s crash, wasn’t long enough, the coroner was about to enlighten them, with both barrels: “long overdue…addressed now with urgency...but they are not enough (CAA’s steps)…nothing to stop CAA introducing a regulatory scheme immediately.”

Working in the immediate is not something CAA are renowned for when it comes to fatigued topdressing pilots…but they did have a review, which was why, said their investigator at the second hearing, there were no CAA recommendations on fatigue in their crash report. Confused? Read on. CAA said in their report the issue was going to be part of a bigger, forthcoming review.

Was that a mindset, serving to fuel more suspicion: the merits of a proper investigation into fatigue was superfluous? Readers of the first ZK-LTF story will know that the other reason CAA did INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 53

not dwell on fatigue was because they thought the pilot had not flown for a week before the accident, and for their proof they were relying much on documents, and little on enquiries. For example, they thought that because the pilot’s log book was empty for the week prior to the crash, he hadn’t flown. They also relied upon what they were not being told, and even when they were told about fatigue, it wasn’t enough, like pleas by the loader driver’s mother to investigate pilot “burn out”. More about that shortly.

Others, meanwhile, were suspicious about CAA. Frank Cook was Richard McRae’s old high school engineering teacher and when he heard about CAA’s shortfalls in the investigation he joined Ann Fullerton and quietly beavered away behind the scenes helping on the technical issues. He also attended the first hearing and clearly recalls the first coroner asking CAA if they were certain they had the correct flight hours for the previous week. CAA said they were, but Cook also remembers – and CAA confirmed it to the second coroner – they told the first coroner’s inquest that possibly there was some new information about flight hours which they would check and report back to the first coroner. They did check, found their report to the first coroner was wrong but, incredibly, chose not to inform him. More too on that shortly.

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he second coroner may be absolving CAA from guilt over their first report but does that change matters? In any case, the second coroner blew away any notion that CAA were not responsible, or that they did not have the power to act immediately on fatigue, and change rules urgently, to the contrary, he said: “…has the powers to make emergency rules…” and he reminded them that not even the Minister of Transport had that power, yet CAA does. If that left any doubt that CAA had the power, this also from the coroner completely cleared the decks: “I was left with the distinct impression that they had the power to respond and to regulate whenever it was thought necessary…to have a regime in place to ensure there was effective surveillance of operators as regards safe working requirements. This should have been in place at the time of the accidents. It was not…had a responsibility to these two men and in my view they (CAA) failed them.”

If media releases – or if CAA’s attempt at deflecting attention with their quote about other causes, conveyed any doubt, coroner report two doesn’t. From page 18 – of 45 – onwards, the floodgates open spilling the evidence, then: “THIS COURT FINDS (in bold uppercase font) death “…caused by aviation fatigue.”

Much focus has been on the pilot, but the loader driver’s role in this tragedy is significant. Once an airforce engineer, McRae later became a qualified pilot before joining Wanganui Aeroworks as a mechanic and loader driver. That job description has huge importance, here’s why: after our first story, not only was a second inquest triggered but CAA had to move over, as employeehealth-and-safety-heavy-weight, Department of Labour stepped in. They were not involved in the first hearing because Wanganui Aero Works stayed silent, committing an offence by failing to report the workplace death of their loader driver – Richard McRae. Suddenly the standard of investigation just got a lot higher, as their investigators went after evidence of…fatigue, found it, proved it, and presented it at Dr Bain’s coronial court.

Three experts, commended and highly praised by the coroner for their evidence, explained the symptoms, the insidiousness and lethal cocktail of sleep deprivation while flying topdressing aircraft. Two experts including one specifically on aviation fatigue were from the Department of Labour, and a third – also 54 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

with aviation fatigue expertise, from Massey University. They used terms like pilot’s susceptibility to a “Special type of fatigue called “skill fatigue”…considerable sleep debt…cognisant skills could be life threatening… cumulative sleep debt”.

Health and safety expert Margaret Utumapu even went so far as to state: “…neither operator (pilot and loader driver) would have had sufficient sleep or recovery time (from lack of sleep) and would have been in considerable sleep debt at the time of the accident. This would have had a physiological effect on the pilot.” Fatigue in pilots could manifest itself in the form of “timing…and perceptual field disruption”, she said.

Joe Lourie and Richard McRae died when their plane hit the side of a Masada-like hill creased with small ridges running down its sides like folds in an old abandoned green horse blanket. CAA says he failed to pull out of a dive. A local farmer first on the scene told Investigate the plane seemed (from what he saw on the ground – he did not see the crash) to have shaved thistles and clipped one of the ridges.

Teacher and physics expert Frank Cook has studied issues of light and darkness to the nth degree, and he was not impressed with CAA. “We even had a CAA expert state under oath ‘there is no twilight at the equator’ after having defined twilight as the time for the sun to move from level with the horizon to 6 degrees below! What it illustrated is that even CAA has very little understanding of light and depth perception inside hilly terrain, being normally concerned only with flying well above ground level.”

Well, that begs the question: if the pilot wasn’t fatigued would he have hit the ground anyway? Lourie was an experienced, highly trained aviator – the future of the industry, we were told by another pilot back in 2004. So isn’t telling someone like that, they need more sleep, go to bed earlier, take a break...isn’t that nannying?

And, what about willpower? Experts at the second hearing quickly put those notions to bed, by showing that fatigue is indiscriminate: it “impairs the performance of even the most highly skilled and motivated individuals and that the effects of fatigue cannot be overcome by willpower, training or experience”, said one.

Then it got serious. Getting over it, beating it, taking charge of our destiny, as adverts for pain killers tells us, might be applicable if you know “it” is happening. This chilling statement: that the

“Fatigue is indiscriminate: it “impairs the performance of even the most highly skilled and motivated individuals and that the effects of fatigue cannot be overcome by willpower, training or experience””

insidious nature of sleep deprivation, say the experts, is such that pilots don’t know it’s happening. Department of Labour fatigue expert Lorraine Earl dispels the toughen-up approach, sheds more daylight on the subject, and it’s scary: “fatigue was insidious and that, despite training and education etc, the pilot may not know it is there. Because of that, it is very difficult for a pilot to monitor his own fatigue.” Ever wondered why drivers fall asleep at the wheel? A car driver told this journalist: he felt fine, he was not experiencing any sign of tiredness when suddenly, all he remembers is looking up and hitting the bank on SH One, 15 minutes from home. If ever there was a reason for having more rules and regulations in place compelling pilots and employers to comply, that is it. The Australians have rules, so too passenger plane pilots, truck drivers have rules, it’s not subjective, there is no choice.

Why were these young men fatigued? For two days prior to the accident their time on duty was 14 hours each day, and for the previous eight straight days, both men worked an average of twelve hours each day with minimal rest breaks. The anatomy of fatigue

includes a sensitive question: the pilot’s personal circumstances.

And here is where the second coroner had information, the first did not: evidence from the pilot’s wife. Before the first hearing, Nicola Lourie fell through the cracks of an imperfect notification system: she wasn’t told. It is a requirement under the Act that family of the deceased be notified of a hearing. That responsibility falls on the police, for example: an already overworked, smothered in files, be-everything-to-everyone, rural policeman. The second coroner finds no blame with Stratford police over the notification issue, or for that matter, the police search for ZK-LTF. But, why the administrative staff of a coroner’s office can’t do the notifying seems strange. The travesty surrounding Mrs Lourie not knowing, and measures to prevent it happening again, are addressed in this ground breaking second coroner’s report.

Back in 2005 Nicola Lourie did not want to be interviewed, we tried through a third party, then respected her wishes. However at a Wanganui coroner’s court in December 2006, she stepped beyond the veil of young widowhood. The woman from Taranaki INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 55

had her day in court at the second hearing where all present heard first hand why her young, healthy pilot husband was fatigued. He was simply working too hard. She gave an account of a husband flying and working 12 hour days, coming home then working on late into the night. This from the horsewoman who went to the Beijing Olympics: “…in the three months prior to the crash he had worked and flew as he had never done before.” It was a defining moment at the hearing. Says Frank Cook, “We all knew the hours were excessive and that the job was really two jobs.” Then this poignant statement from Mrs Lourie: After the accident she told Wanganui Aero Works that her husband should never have been both area manager and a pilot. Enter stage left, Joe Lourie’s employer, Wanganui Aero Works (WAW), now owned

by Ravensdown Fertiliser. Lourie ran their Stratford operation, expected to be all things to all people: manager, salesman and pilot.

The sales job had previously been a separate position, but Lourie’s employers allowed him to take over the role of “sales manager or salesperson” when a vacancy arose, said the coroner. And a farmer told us in 2004, the big pilot was motivated to get more business.

He had to be, that’s how he got paid.

And the coroner condemned Lourie’s job description, formally ruling that a topdressing pilot should be just that: a pilot only. “No agricultural pilot should in effect be covering two jobs. He should be concentrating on flying his aircraft…” And they should not be paid on results e.g. fertiliser on the ground. Months after the crash, Ravensdown implemented a better pay system: a minimum

One pilot from the first story who did not want to be named, eventually came forward through a third party, then later, after much assurance of not naming him – doing the interview on his terms, he agreed. He said the number of take-offs and landings

by Lourie that day was high, and there was an inference, from his answers and in his voice, that he was in disbelief at the circumstances surrounding flight and duty times – circumstances leading up to the time of the crash.

Why the need for a second inquest, why wasn’t all this addressed at the first hearing? Rewind to October 2004, at New Plymouth coroner Roger Mori’s court, where the veteran lawyer is wrapping up his own findings into the crash of ZK-LTF. There wasn’t enough evidence to find a cause of death, or of the crash, and CAA’s crash report was inconclusive. It included veiled reference to pilot error.

However there was enough to suggest possibility of fatigue and Mr Mori made recommendation about that in his findings. The trouble was, back then CAA’s investigator said the pilot had not flown during the days leading to the crash. But in fact he had, for three days, 12 hours a day with one 15 minute break per day. Despite the “bombshell” of CAA’s wrong reporting of flight hours, it must be emphasised again that the second coroner completely exonerates them, instead slapping their investigator Mr Buckingham with a ‘parking ticket’ offence for not telling Mr Mori – the first coroner, that he changed the crash report (after the first hearing). The second coroner also referred to a letter from the solicitor general which indicated CAA had deliberately withheld information from

“One pilot said the number of take-offs and landings by Lourie that day was high, and there was an inference, from his answers and in his voice, that he was in disbelief at the circumstances surrounding flight and duty times – circumstances leading up to the time of the crash” annual income plus commission on sales. The coroner heard that pilots now receive a “steady income throughout the year instead of just at peak times.”

Why isn’t the employer more responsible, in the coroner’s report? They are, but the coroner is saying the organisation driving that responsibility is the enforcer: the CAA. Why? Because, says the coroner, they are in the best position to not only help and advise employers, but to cement and compel appropriate rules into reality.

Rules, rules and more rules. If those affected stay silent when they see fatigue happening, what’s the point? If the coroner has his way on the subject of the great, strong and silent kiwi bloke, he will become even more endangered. Anonymous witnesses are difficult, but in many workplace groups there is a code of brotherhood, of not dobbing in your mates, or saying anything that might reflect negatively on your fellow pilot, especially one lost, with family left behind. Our “Whistle Blower” law already lightly addresses “speaking out”, but for pilots the issue is now reinforced by the coroner. Dr Bain wants systems in place where aviation employees reporting fatigue issues can do it on a “no blame” basis and it must be “compulsory” for them to do so.

This journalist was left with a very clear impression after many interviews, of a macho, can-do, bullet proof mentality fuelled by veterans in the industry standing back to back defiantly denying any possibility that fatigue was the, dominant, proximate cause of this accident. And we also encountered pilots willing to speak out but very reluctantly.

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the first coroner, but the second coroner concluded that the aviation watchdog was innocent, calling their investigator “a truthful and an honest witness.”

There’s a problem with all that. It is not a question of character – honesty and truthfulness. An investigator’s job is to enquire. The pilot’s “office” was at Stratford where he was area manager, not at Wanganui. Surely a quick telephone call at least to the pilot’s wife and or loader driver’s mother would have quickly and easily verified flying hours for that week.

Here’s where the loader driver’s mother’s story gets interesting.

She is adamant CAA knew about the flying hours well before the first hearing, which is partially supported by a letter to CAA. She also sent the flight hours to the Police by courier, before the first hearing. CAA say they didn’t know until the day of the first hearing, when their investigator saw Ann’s own submissions and her son’s time sheets which “surprised” CAA, says the second coroner. Their investigator, Alistair Buckingham says he wanted to follow up on the revelation of increased flight and duty times. “He thought he made that clear to the hearing (first),” says the second coroner. CAA wrote in their report: “…he had not flown on any of the seven days immediately preceding the accident date”. Their explanation was that it was based upon available information. Here is how they got that information – and it might seem thorough, until examined: (1) ZK-LTF’s aircraft log books (we don’t know who completed those but presume it to be Joe Lourie) (2) other flight records supplied by WAW and (3) Lourie’s own pilot log book (supplied by his wife). The flying hours on the day of the

accident were obtained from the wreckage – the onboard Satloc recording system and…notes on the back of an envelope found in the aircraft wreckage. The pilot log book and “notes on an envelope” are significant. We will return to them soon.

H

ow were the correct flying hours discovered? The loader driver’s mother showed CAA her son’s dairy and working hours, at the first hearing (they were assumed to be the same as the pilot’s hours). The investigator decided to check with employer WAW after that hearing. He visited their offices again, a further search by WAW staff now revealed the pilots actual hours in the form of copy dairy records sent to WAW’s Wanganui offices by the pilot’s wife. CAA’s previous sighting (before the first hearing) of the pilot’s log book showed no recorded flying hours for seven days before the accident. The fatigued Joe Lourie it seems was using notes on an envelope, keeping his diary up to date, but not his log book. CAA knew Lourie was not employed on an hourly rate and that there were no time sheets, only a log book. A cynic might say: “gee, there’re no entries in the log book for seven days before the crash, I wonder why?”

It’s a convoluted journey by both CAA and WAW to the correct flying hours and which, to some, might defy credibility, and certainly there are those who allege conspiracy. Or is it simply a case of CAA not doing a proactive investigation into fatigue? CAA relied on documents being supplied, an incomplete or out-of-date log book and people volunteering information. Did CAA proactively investigate fatigue? The answer has to be no, otherwise they would have uncovered the correct, unsafe flying and work hours before the first hearing, not after it. The evidence was there, CAA just failed to find it because their investigative methods prevented it, for example: CAA sent a grieving pilot’s widow a copy of their erroneous (that the pilot did not fly during the week before the crash) draft report, for her comment, she doesn’t respond, so it must be correct. Another example: the loader driver’s mother writes and speaks to CAA while their investigation is in progress, pleading the fatigue case. Ann Fullerton’s letter 17 March ’04: “…work 14 or more days at a stretch without a day off…Richard and Joe were burnt out by… overwork.” But CAA say nobody gave them any documented proof. Instead they reported, in a “catch-all / wriggle-out” conclusion: fatigue might be a cause, but so might pilot error. In fact, even without the evidence, the facts were starring at CAA, from their own report, that the pilot had made “at least 80 take-offs and landings” and worked 12 hours on the day of the crash. Shouldn’t that and the loader driver’s mother’s allegations scream alarm bells? Make no mistake, it was never alleged

by Investigate that CAA’s investigator was dishonest. Unlike others who allege corruption and conflict of interest by CAA in some cases, such as respected aviation expert Ross Ewing whose writings are well published, this journalist is on record and does jot believe CAA’s investigator acted deceitfully. That was conveyed to TVNZ when they asked, for their documentary. The second coroner confirms it, the investigator was trying to be helpful to everyone. And so the second coroner accepted CAA’s report, he just didn’t agree with them.

In the end, allegations of wrong crash reports and shoddy investigations into fatigue are a distraction because the second coroner stamped his findings: “But the deaths of these two men happened and in my opinion were avoidable. CAA had responsibility to them. I ask why it has taken these two deaths for something as basic as sleep deprivation to be shown as not properly addressed.”

He told CAA they had produced no evidence to show they had even implemented their own responsibilities for monitoring “safe working requirements”.

Four old grainy, black and white pictures courtesy of I N Green, R L Ewing and two from the Herald – Tribune in The Topdressers 1990 book paint a tapestry of a pilot’s and loader’s life in the 1960s – 1970s agricultural aviation industry: a topdresser landing, a topdresser and loader, a topdresser sitting crashed in a tree; and pilot Denis Hartly asleep in the cockpit of his topdresser ZK-CVE, legs sprawled out onto a wing while a mechanic fixes the engine.

The caption for the latter describes pilots flying “dawn to dusk” from “February to May”, and the poignant words “ZK-CVE was destroyed…Hartly survived the terrible burns thanks to the hand knitted woollen jersey he was wearing.”

Thanks to the perseverance of a woman living in tiny Sanson, wanting to be known simply as Ann, odds of survival in the risky business of topdressing, for “ag’ pilots” – supermen, their loader drivers and their families looks like getting a little better. Nearby, an old airforce base where the Skyhawks once flew – and Ann’s son once worked before becoming a loader driver, on the Rangitikei plains far removed from the jagged ridges of the Forgotten World, Ann tends her huge flowery pot plants. They are at the front door of her neat, small cottage, made healthy by a recipe: water mixed with the dregs of milk bottles – simple really. And in Wanganui a coroner has expressed his frustration at the simple solution available but not implemented, to the risk of aviation fatigue – the health and safety of pilots: CAA should change the rules immediately .n INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 57

ESSAY

THE LIGHTS ARE GOING OUT The growing rush by Western governments to censor public debate on difficult issues is a death throe of civilization, argues MARK STEYN

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 59

O

n August 3, 1914, on the eve of the First World War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk and observed, “The lamps are going out all over Europe.”Today, the lights are going out on liberty all over the Western world, but in a more subtle and profound way.

Much of the West is far too comfortable with state regulation of speech and expression, which puts freedom itself at risk. Let me cite some examples: The response of the European Union Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security to the crisis over the Danish cartoons that sparked Muslim violence was to propose that newspapers exercise “prudence” on certain controversial subjects involving religions beginning with the letter “I.” At the end of her life, the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci-after writing of the contradiction between Islam and the Western tradition of liberty-was being sued in France, Italy, Switzerland, and most other European jurisdictions by groups who believed her opinions were not merely offensive, but criminal. In France, author Michel Houellebecq was sued by Muslim and other “anti-racist groups” who believed the opinions of a fictional character in one of his novels were likewise criminal.

In Canada, the official complaint about my own so-called “flagrant Islamophobia” – filed by the Canadian Islamic Congressattributes to me the following “assertions”: America will be an Islamic Republic by 2040. There will be a break for Muslim prayers during the Super Bowl. There will be a religious police enforcing Islamic norms.

The USS Ronald Reagan will be renamed after Osama bin Laden.

Females will not be allowed to be cheerleaders. Popular American radio and TV hosts will be replaced by Imams.

In fact, I didn’t “assert” any of these things. They are plot twists I cited in my review of Robert Ferrigno’s novel, Prayers for the Assassin.

It’s customary in reviewing novels to cite aspects of the plot. For example, a review of Moby Dick will usually mention the whale.

These days, apparently, the Canadian Islamic Congress and the government’s human rights investigators (who have taken up the case) believe that describing the plot of a novel should be illegal.

You may recall that Margaret Atwood, some years back, wrote a novel about her own dystopian theocratic fantasy, in which America was a Christian tyranny named the Republic of Gilead. What’s to stop a Christian group from dragging a doting reviewer of Margaret Atwood’s book in front of a Canadian human rights court? As it happens, Christian groups tend not to do that, which is just as well, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a lot to write about.

These are small parts of a very big picture. After the London Tube bombings and the French riots a few years back, commentators lined up behind the idea that Western Muslims are insufficiently assimilated. But in their mastery of legalisms and the language of victimology, they’re superbly assimilated. Since these are the principal means of discourse in multicultural societies, they’ve mastered all they need to know. Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’ve been facing in Canada. Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading “Behead the Enemies of Islam” and promising another 9/11 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen.

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Thus we see that today’s multicultural societies tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, while refusing to tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. It’s been that way for 20 years now, ever since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. A reader in Bradford wrote to me recalling asking a West Yorkshire policeman on the street that day why the various “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to “play it cool.” The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to “Push off” (he expressed the sentiment rather more Anglo-Saxonly, but let that pass) “or I’ll arrest you.” Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace.

Rushdie replied tersely:“There is only one person around here who is in any danger of dying.”

And that’s the way it’s gone ever since. For all the talk about rampant “Islamophobia,” it’s usually only the other party who is “in any danger of dying.”

WAR ON THE HOMEFRONT I wrote my book America Alone because I wanted to reframe how we thought about the War on Terror-an insufficient and evasive designation that has long since outlasted whatever usefulness it may once have had. It remains true that we are good at military campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our tanks and ships are better, and our bombs and soldiers are smarter. But these are not ultimately the most important battlefronts. We do indeed face what the strategists call asymmetric warfare, but it is not in the Sunni triangle or the Hindu Kush. We face it right here in the Western world.

Norman Podhoretz, among others, has argued that we are engaged in a second Cold War. But it might be truer to call it a Cold Civil War, by which I mean a war within the West, a war waged in our major cities. We now have Muslim “honour killings,” for instance, not just in tribal Pakistan and Yemen, but in Germany and the Netherlands, in Toronto and Dallas. And even if there were no battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if no one was flying planes into tall buildings in New York City or blowing up trains, buses, and nightclubs in Madrid, London, and Bali, we would still be in danger of losing this war without a shot being fired.

The British government recently announced that it would be issuing Sharia-compliant Islamic bonds – that is, bonds compliant with Islamic law and practice as prescribed in the Koran. This is another reason to be in favour ����������������������������� of��������������������������� small government: The bigger government gets, the more it must look for funding in some pretty unusual places – in this case wealthy Saudis. As The Mail on Sunday put it, this innovation marks “one of the most significant economic advances of Sharia law in the non-Muslim world.” At about the same time, The Times of London reported that “Knorbert the piglet has been dropped as the mascot of Fortis Bank, after it decided to stopgiving piggy banks to children for fear of offending Muslims.” Now, I’m no Islamic scholar, but Mohammed expressed no view regarding Knorbert the piglet. There’s not a single sura about it. The Koran, an otherwise exhaustive text, is silent on the matter of anthropomorphic porcine representation.

We do indeed face what the strategists call asymmetric warfare, but it is not in the Sunni triangle or the Hindu Kush. We face it right here in the Western world

I started keeping a file on pig controversies a couple of years ago, and you would be surprised at how routine they have become.

Recently, for instance, a local government council prohibited its workers from having knickknacks on their desks representing Winnie the Pooh’s sidekick Piglet. As Pastor Martin Niemoller might have said, “First they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character, and if I was, I’d be more of an Eeyore. Then they came for the Three Little Pigs and Babe, and by the time I realized the Western world had turned into a 24/7 Looney Tunes, it was too late, because there was no Porky Pig to stammer, ‘Th-th-th-that’s all folks!’, and bring the nightmare to an end.” What all these stories have in common is excessive deference to – and in fact fear of – Islam. If the story of the Three Little Pigs is forbidden when Muslims still comprise less than ten percent of Europe’s population, what else will be on the black list when they comprise 20 percent? In small but telling ways, non-Muslim communities are being persuaded that a kind of uber-Islamic law now applies to all. And if you don’t remember the Three Little Pigs, by the way, one builds a house of straw, another of sticks, and both get blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. Western Civilization is a mighty house of bricks, but you don’t need a Big Bad Wolf when the pig is so eager to demolish the house himself.

I would argue that these incremental concessions to Islam are ultimately a bigger threat than terrorism. What matters is not what the lads in the Afghan cave – the “extremists”– believe, but what the non-extremists believe, what people who are for the most part law-abiding taxpayers of functioning democracies believe. For

example, a recent poll found that 36 percent of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 believe that those who convert to another religion should be punished by death. That’s not 36 percent of young Muslims in Waziristan or Yemen or Sudan, but 36 percent of young Muslims in the United Kingdom. Forty percent of British Muslims would like to live under Sharia – in Britain. Twenty percent have sympathy for the July 7 Tube bombers. And, given that Islam is the principal source of population growth in every city down the spine of England from Manchester to Sheffield to Birmingham to London, and in every major Western European city, these statistics are not without significance for the future.

Because I discussed these facts in print, my publisher is now being sued before three Canadian human rights commissions.

The plaintiff in my case is Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, a man who announced on Canadian TV that he approves of the murder of all Israeli civilians over the age of 18. He is thus an objective supporter of terrorism. I don’t begrudge him the right to his opinions, but I wish he felt the same about mine. Far from that, posing as a leader of the “anti-hate” movement in Canada, he is using the squeamishness of a politically correct society to squash freedom.

As the famous saying goes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

What the Canadian Islamic Congress and similar groups in the West are trying to do is criminalize vigilance. They want to use the legal system to circumscribe debate on one of the great questions of the age: the relationship between Islam and the West and the increasing Islamization of much of the Western world, in what the United Nations itself calls the fastest population transformation in history.

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SLIPPERY SLOPE Our democratic governments today preside over multicultural societies that have less and less glue holding them together. They’ve grown comfortable with the idea of the state as the mediator between interest groups. And confronted by growing and restive Muslim populations, they’re increasingly at ease with the idea of regulating freedom in the interests of social harmony.

It’s a different situation in America, which has the First Amendment and a social consensus that increasingly does not exist in Europe. Europe’s consensus seems to be that Danish cartoonists should be able to draw what they like, but not if it sparks Islamic violence. It is certainly odd that the requirement of selfrestraint should only apply to one party.

This year, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of Sharia to the United Kingdom was “inevitable.” Within days of His Grace’s remarks, the British and Ontario governments both confirmed that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions are receiving welfare payments for each of their wives. Kipling wrote that East is East and West is West, and ne’er the twain shall meet. But when the twain do meet, you often wind up with the worst of both worlds. Say what you like about a polygamist in Waziristan or Somalia, but he has to do it on his

with their own sexual identity.” Bingo! Telling young Moroccan men they’re closeted homosexuals seems certain to lessen tensions in the city! While you’re at it, a lot of those Turks seem a bit light in their loafers, don’t you think?

OUR SUICIDAL URGE So don’t worry, nothing’s happening. Just a few gay Muslims frustrated at the lack of gay Muslim nightclubs. Sharia in Britain?

Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you’d suggested such things on September 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn’t seem such a big deal, nor will the next concession, or the one after that.

The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to “hold the line”? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The politically correct bureaucrats at Canada’s Human Rights Commissions? The geniuses who run Harvard, and who’ve just introduced gender-segregated swimming and gym sessions at the behest of Harvard’s Islamic Society? (Would they have done that for Amish or Mennonite students?) The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: Look at what they’re conceding now and then try to figure out what they’ll be conceding in five years’ time. The idea

“A recent poll found that 36 percent of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 believe that those who convert to another religion should be punished by death. That’s not 36 percent of young Muslims in Waziristan or Yemen or Sudan, but 36 percent of young Muslims in the United Kingdom” own dime. To collect a welfare check for each spouse, he has to move to London or Toronto. Government-subsidized polygamy is an innovation of the Western world.

If you need another reason to be opposed to socialized health care, one reason is because it fosters the insouciant attitude to basic hygiene procedures that has led to the rise of deadly “superbugs.”

I see British Muslim nurses in public hospitals riddled with C. difficile are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Which is a thought to ponder just before you go under the anaesthetic. I mentioned to some of Hillsdale’s students in class that gay-bashing is on the rise in the most famously “tolerant” cities in Europe. As Der Spiegel reported, “With the number of homophobic attacks rising in the Dutch metropolis, Amsterdam officials are commissioning a study to determine why Moroccan men are targeting the city’s gays.” Gee, whiz. That’s a toughie.

Wonder what the reason could be. But don’t worry, the brain trust at the University of Amsterdam is on top of things: “Half of the crimes were committed by men of Moroccan origin and researchers believe they felt stigmatized by society and responded by attacking people they felt were lower on the social ladder.

Another working theory is that the attackers may be struggling 62 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

that the West’s multicultural establishment can hold the line would be more plausible if it was clear they had any idea where the line is, or even gave any indication of believing in one.

My book, supposedly Islamaphobic, isn’t even really about Islam.

The single most important line in it is the profound observation, by historian Arnold Toynbee, that “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” One manifestation of that suicidal urge is illiberal notions harnessed in the cause of liberalism. In calling for the introduction of Sharia, the Archbishop of Canterbury joins a long list of Western appeasers, including a Dutch cabinet minister who said if the country were to vote to introduce Islamic law that would be fine by him, and the Swedish cabinet minister who said we should be nice to Muslims now so that Muslims will be nice to us when they’re in the majority.

Ultimately, our crisis is not about Islam. It’s not about firebreathing Imams or polygamists whooping it up on welfare. It’s not about them. It’s about us. And by us I mean the culture that shaped the modern world, and established the global networks, legal systems, and trading relationships on which the planet depends.

To reprise Sir Edward Grey, the lamps are going out all over the world, and an awful lot of the map will look an awful lot darker by the time many Americans realize the scale of this struggle. n

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think life | money

Now is not the time to have a hissy fit Peter Hensley reckons the finance sector shakeout needs a cool heads approach from investors Moira brought in the morning paper and made of point of having it open at page five where the headline read “New Zealand financial system is sound and functioning well”. She said empathically, “That proves it, the NZ Reserve Bank says that we are not all going to hell in a hand cart”.

Jim had had trouble sleeping and was noticeably concerned about the state of the country’s general financial well being. He had seen some of their investments frozen and the associated stress was manifesting itself physically. He was not sleeping well and was actually worrying himself sick.

Moira gave him little sympathy, telling him to get over himself. She had given up trying to logically explain the situation to him. They had diversified their holdings.

They had been careful not to over expose themselves to any one financial institution.

Every one of their friends had been affected 64 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

in some form and they had counted themselves as being more fortunate than most.

Anyway she said, “There is nothing we can do about it. All we can do is keep ourselves informed about the progress of the various schemes of arrangement that we are involved in”. As much as she was annoyed with her partner of 40 plus years, she thought she would sit and go through the list with him one more time.

South Canterbury Finance was at the head of the list. They had recently received a nice letter from the second richest man in New Zealand, Mr Alan Hubbard who owns SCF. He acknowledged that times were tough, but he said they were managing their cash flows and business risks and they were focused on providing his shareholders and investors an excellent return on their investment. With Jim’s acknowledgment she gave SCF a tick of approval.

They had a small deposit with UDC which had a Standard and Poors AA credit rating and they both knew that it was owned by the ANZ Bank. The interest rate was not great but slightly better than the bank deposit rate. That got another tick.

With the encouragement of their adviser they had brought into the recent bond issue with Marac Finance. Because it was a secured bond, it ranked alongside secured debentures and meant they would be paid 10.5% for the next five years. Jim reluctantly agreed with Moira and put a tick beside that one as well.

He could see where this was going and he quickly pointed out that they had invested in the likes of St Laurence and Strategic Finance on the advice of their adviser and it looked like that money had gone south.

Moira took a deep breath and pointed out that in both cases the companies’ lists

of assets comfortably exceeded the amount that investors held in debenture stock. That may be so, said Jim, but then there was that article in the Sunday paper where the journalist said that investors would be stupid to agree with a moratorium with Strategic Finance because they would be foregoing a back up guarantee from their current owner AllcoHit in Australia.

Moira said that was an unfortunate piece of media misinformation. Strategic Finance is pretty much the only asset AllcoHit’s has left and if left unsold, the value of both entities would rapidly decline and the implied guarantee for the preferential shareholders would go down the gurgler with them. She thought that the proposed deal of receiving their capital and interest back over time sounded pretty good. They would have access to small amounts of cash along the way and still receive interest whilst the 100% return of their capital was better than investors who were invested with Bridgecorp or Capital & Merchant.

She went on to remind Jim that they had gone along to listen to that nice man Kevin Podmore who said that he was going to tip in a significant amount of his personal assets so that investors would not miss out on the return of their capital. She had heard that this

would add a further $30m to the asset base of St Laurence and the scheme of arrangement was currently being assessed by the company’s trustees. At least he made the effort to go around the country to tell those people who had invested with him what was happening and what he intended doing about it.

So Strategic and St Laurence received half a tick each. Jim did acknowledge that it looked OK so far but his main concern was with Hanover. The media had given them a mauling, questioning their dividend policy and also implying that some of the company’s loans may not stack up when compared to real market valuations.

They had a small amount with them and Moira pointed out to Jim that Mr Watson and Mr Hotchin had both committed to putting in more money to ensure that the company would survive. Jim said that he did not trust them and would believe it when it happened. Jim recalled that he had heard somewhere that if they were forced to settle up then investors would only receive about 60 cents in the dollar.

Moira said that even so, they would be a damm sight better off than those invested with Nathan’s, Lombard and Five Star. She told Jim that one of her best friends had confided in her that she had invested with

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eight different companies that had gone into receivership and she looked like losing over 70% of her funds. Moira pointed out that her attitude was much better than Jim’s who only had a question mark on 7% of their investments.

While the details of several of the moratoriums and schemes of arrangements are still to be announced, Moira pointed out to Jim that the prognosis from the Reserve Bank suggested that the economy was well placed to weather the perfect financial storm.

Moira said to Jim, “What does it matter if we lose access to some of our funds.

As long as we are receiving interest and the capital will very likely be paid back over time, then I don’t believe that we are that badly done by. By comparison we are a lot better off than many of our friends and neighbours. We avoided being invested in the companies whose receivers are struggling to return a large part of their original investment”.

Jim acknowledged that Moira was right again, as always. He knew he had to get over himself and look on the bright side.

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

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”

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think life | EDUCATION

Where now are childhood’s quiet, innocent places?

Amy Brooke argues children are being overstimulated, in every way

No, it wasn’t funny. And no, it wasn’t “cute”- preschool toddlers, babies and kindergarten children making so much noise on a recent Friday evening “grooving” to pop music that noise control officers were called in.

Head teacher Lisa Gordon, at One Tree Hill Kindergarten, Auckland, thought neighbours objecting to the noise was “pretty absurd”. It could probably be heard outside, she admitted, but was “quiet enough for babies and young children”.

Oh really? My advice to parents of any 66 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

little ones would be to remove their child from this kindergarten. I’d also remove any daughter from a local school where eight to ten-year-olds are given a disco with “a real DJ”, wear off-the-shoulder frocks with token thin straps and talk excitedly about their boyfriends. Eight-year-olds?

What have they done to children? And heaven help the mothers of young daughters now preyed upon by the whole pop music, celebrity-cult thing and drenched in sex education classes from school entry age onwards. Never has there been a time

when so many “expert” educators, swarming like locusts over the whole field of childhood education have so intrusively dominated, intruding on the lives of young New Zealanders to such an extent that respected commentators like Brian Lochore can point out that political correctness is destroying New Zealand. Who among the sane would disagree?

Rules, regulations, impositions: children are now effectively captives of the State, the whims and theories of its politicised employees imposed on them. Departmental edicts

and essentially crazed thinking drive agendadriven theories implemented in schools.

There, like a growing national plague, increasingly disturbed children, correspondingly, increasingly misbehave. We don’t have to look hard to find reasons why.

What right for example, had Trevor Mallard, parliament’s crudely-behaved bovver boy – unfathomably appointed Minister of Education – have to impose compulsory sex education classes on New Zealanders’ children? Why are they presided over by Helen Clark, patron of the damaging Family Planning Association, one of a number of areas in which she is supremely unqualified – not that this ever halts Miss Clark’s un-ending pronouncements? Compulsory sex education? Since when have New Zealanders had to submit to having their children preyed upon by state employees ignoring all the actual evidence that sex education classes in schools make more, not less fraught, those teen, now pre-teen years for children walking a hormonal and emotional tightrope during this vulnerable time?

The British, now faced with their own problem of the rampant sexualisation of their young, with its inevitable consequences, point out New Zealand and the US are even worse. So we are, but the education ministry’s Mary Chamberlain, who extraordinarily enough, fills a position open to question – given her mediocre school academic record (but then, perhaps she fills it because of this?) – is apparently a typical “expert”. Although the evidence is undeniably that premature exposure of children to sexual “education” removes the innocence of the young, and their defences, the ministry’s predictable, obdurate and culpable response – as usual – is that even more sex education is needed. More facile instructions in using contraceptives and obtaining damaging abortions…? – although learning how to fit condoms has apparently progressed from using bananas to a wooden penis. Do embarrassed girls really want this?

Moreover, what is never taken into account is the arousal factor. Good teachers know any subject arousing the interest of the young leads to increased experimentation. As a British Medical Journal study of 26 trials predictably revealed, sex education classes not only don’t delay the onset of sexual experimentation – they do considerable harm by encouraging it, and lead to increased teen pregnancies.

Trevor Mallard has a lot to answer for.

“Since when have New Zealanders had to submit to having their children preyed upon by state employees ignoring all the actual evidence that sex education classes in schools make more, not less fraught, those teen, now pre-teen years for children walking a hormonal and emotional tightrope during this vulnerable time?

But the big question is: why are parents putting up with being told they have no choice over areas of state schooling that have nothing whatever to do with imparting , in both academic and vocational areas, the quality education our young need – and that this disturbed generation is not getting? Why, in fact, is it binge-drinking, adrift and rootless?

A clue, ironically, is in the words of the mountain guide Gottlieb Braun Elwert – ironically, because although a personal guide to a Prime Minister presiding over our increasingly totalitarian State of petticoat government and patsy males – which has arguably inflicted more rules and regulations on fed-up New Zealanders than any previously – he pointed out in a recent interview that in mountaineering one is free from all this – one takes responsibility for oneself: “You make your own rules”.

Most importantly, he campaigned to have natural quiet regarded as a resource.

Natural quiet? The last thing now supplied to our children – from babies in infancy, to toddlers in homes and preschools unable to escape from constant background noise – TVs, radios, CDs in car systems – almost incessantly inflicted on the young from morning to night, together with high levels induced by group learning in our classrooms – constant chatter to the extent where, ridiculously, teachers are employing microphones to be heard. But what protection is there for these children?

Thought-provoking papers by Massey University’s Dr Stuart McLaren highlight this problem: the effect of constant, ubiquitous noise on children, not only those who need a quiet environment for full understanding and reflection, whose learning is impeded in a noisy or exuberant environment. Not only autistic children, or those classified as ADD and ADHD, but interestingly, highly intelligent and gifted children are disturbed by noise. McLaren points out very little attention has been paid to the constant inflicting of noise.

Pop or junk music, ambient background noise, together with noisy classrooms and preschool noise all adversely affect children – let alone damaging hearing. Childcare centres must be torture for some when noise at resting time-out is above the recommended level.

Little wonder that thousands of young New Zealanders are now being prescribed Ritalin for ADHD, glammed up as a neurological condition when it is more likely the result of disturbed, hyped-up, underexercised children denied these days both the quiet time and discipline they need. As an experienced family doctor has observed, he now regularly encounters over-stimulated children, ostensibly classified as ADD or ADHD. Finding it impossible to distinguish between them and badly behaved others, he has come to the conclusion they are the same thing. “ ‘Experts’ maintain some have ADD or ADHD; that others are behaving badly: that there’s a difference. But who can pinpoint it? Children need quietening down. It’s perturbing that there’s such a readiness to use drugs to do it.”

The promotion of a disorder needing drug treatment gives poorly behaving children more respectability. It also gives educationists an opportunity for special funding and research grants, for treating growing signs of the alienation of our young as a disease. Who really believes this – one unknown to our parents’ generation?

The real dis-ease rampant is an agendadriven, dictatorial establishment’s stranglehold on good teachers, and its usurping of parental authority. It neglects to face up to the real problems affecting our children: inappropriate over-stimulation, overregulation, excessive and ubiquitous noise – and an almost total neglect of the life of the mind – one of the greatest gifts you can give a child – that, and the quiet places. © Amy Brooke www.amybrooke.co.nz www.summersounds..co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/users/brookeonline/

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 67

think life | SCIENCE

The Pentagon this past spring launched its so-called Minerva initiative – a hunt for more information on the Chinese military, ways to marginalize al-Qa’ida, new antiterror strategies.

Thirty years ago, it might have been topsecret stuff. Today, the military is asking everyone for help – and will post the results in full public view.

It’s another example of a new world of problem-solving that seeks answers in the public square.

Defence Secretary Robert Gates calculates that the transparency of Minerva is also its strength, that by looking to everyone for advice and letting the crowd weigh in on the results, the communal know-how will be that much richer.

“There will be no room for ‘sensitive but unclassified,’ “ Gates said in an April speech to university presidents about the project.

If it were cloaked in secrecy, he warned, “you could end up with mediocre, uninventive results.”

Scientific or commercial, civilian or military, business or hobby, there is a new emphasis on sharing problems and ideas in ever more public ways in hopes on hitting on more brilliant solutions.

Self-styled inventors are weighing in – for cash and intrinsic satisfaction – to solve puzzles vexing industry and government.

Aspiring entrepreneurs are seeking fortune not by hoarding ideas but by sharing them.

Spurred both by the endless interactivity made simple by the Internet and the allideas-welcome culture it has nurtured, an explosion of what one author calls “crowdsourcing” is offering new ways to get things done.

When former tennis pro Steve Timperley learned of a budding new system for handicapping tennis players – a method clubs could use to better match players of similar abilities – he chose not to hold the idea close to the vest.

Rather, he put it to a team in the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s New Venture Challenge Competition to work out the kinks and develop a business plan that might bring his Tencap Tennis to market. In turn, that team opened its strategy to other business people for critique.

Now Timperley has about 3,000 players in the Kansas City area entered into 68 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

Commercial secrets?

Not anymore Software’s open-source model provides inspiration in other arenas, writes Scott Canon the handicapping database and is set to use Facebook-like social networking elements to spread the tennis match-up gospel. Soon, he hopes to sell to tennis clubs across the country.

“The ultimate goal is that everybody makes more money,” he said.

While Tencap keeps private the clever algorithms that give players a strong idea about who might make good competition – an advance on an old system that relies on subjective scores by tennis pros – the firm’s development in some ways takes a cue from the idea of open-source software and its reliance on interactivity.

The mother of the open-source world is the Linux computer operating system fathered by Linus Torvalds in 1991 with help from developers around the world.

Linux source code is open to anyone, and people fiddle with it all the time. They then share their improvements with other computer programmers and, by and large, the most elegant improvements take hold.

“In the open-source world,” said Rice University computer scientist Dan Wallach, “respect is earned, not assigned.”

He recently collaborated on open-source software designed for voting machines. It’s technology that Wallach believes will instil more trust in the elections by providing transparency to ballot counting.

Such open-source models have already driven commerce. Take Internet search giant Yahoo, which runs atop a Linux operating system. The company continually has its programmers working to remove bugs from Linux and shares those fixes with the rest of the world. Because Yahoo’s refining of the computer code continues to improve the operating system, more people outside the company stay on the same Linux path. And because many of them improve the system as well, Yahoo gets use of those upgrades for free.

Software is ideally suited for the ongoing collaboration. The 1s and 0s of binary calculations form an international language.

“In Kansas City, computer consultant Brian Turner heads the KC Space Pirates group angling for a $2 million NASA prize. The money will go to the first group to make a device climb a cable one kilometre high in 100 seconds without an onboard energy supply The problems can be massive, and they can be broken down into bits for programmers – both professional and self-styled – to ponder. It has also inspired an opensource model to other arenas.

To improve its capabilities at sending unmanned firepower into combat, the Pentagon has sponsored off-road competitions for full-sized remote-controlled vehicles. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is offering $1 million for the invention of artificial meat. Google’s stillincubating “Android” cell phone system will work on an open-source software operating system. The company hopes that will generate enough spin-off applications to make the iPhone look antique.

Politicians have even gotten in on the act. Barack Obama’s primary race got a boost when will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas put his rousing “Yes We Can” speech to music in a video that became a YouTube sensation one week last fall. John McCain wants the government to offer $300 mil-

lion a lure to anyone who can create a battery robust enough to replace the internal combustion engine.

The National Research Council recently suggested the National Science Foundation make its resources stretch further by using prize money to untangle riddles rather than just farming out work to one researcher at a time.

In Kansas City, computer consultant Brian Turner heads the KC Space Pirates group angling for a $2 million NASA prize.

The money will go to the first group to make a device climb a cable one kilometre high in 100 seconds without an onboard energy supply. (The space agency awarded $200,000 earlier this summer to a school bus driver in Maine for designing a more flexible glove for astronauts.)

Turner’s group has been working on the challenge for nearly three years, as have other self-recruited groups across the country.

“You’ve got to figure lots of people have dropped hundreds of thousands already in

money and labour” without NASA handing out a grant, Turner said. “It’s an interesting challenge. ... but I’m in it for the money.”

Massachusetts-based InnoCentive has made a business of matching companies and tinkerers, or what it calls “seekers” and “solvers.” Companies post their dilemmas – mostly anonymously – on the InnoCentive Web site and dangle prize money to people who come up with fixes. The tasks run from highly technical chemistry problems to queries about how best to sort big potato chips from little ones.

Physicist David Tracy has attempted to be a “solver” six times, succeeded twice and pocketed about $40,000.

“What I have to do now is decide if it’s a fluke that I won that money and whether it’s worth my time to keep trying,” he said. “But the psychic rewards are just as important.”

At Fort Leavenworth, the Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Centre is experimenting with blogs as a way for troops to share tips more freely, and is soliciting papers from anyone with some deep thinking about topics ranging from how the U.N. can cope with insurgency in Colombia to the Albanians immigrating illegally into Kosovo.

“Most of what we do with counterinsurgency is not classified,” said Maj. Niel Smith.

“The enemy wouldn’t gain an advantage from understanding how we understand what’s going on. ... Sharing information just leverages what we know.”

But in business it may be that process of sharing that is the biggest burden to opensource problem solving. Randy Knipp, a product innovation manager at Hallmark Cards, took a still-to-be-launched version of the company’s musical greeting cards for development to a university New Venture class. While the process helped the company refine its product – and Knipp said the results were impressive both in their Generation X insight and in speed – it meant drafting precise legal language to protect against theft of the concept.

“We had to be careful,” he said.

And that caution can pose a hurdle. In developing his DigiRace Inc., which aims to give fans of short-track auto racing a way to follow their sport in real time on the Internet, Seth Meinzen said he’s only moved forward by asking scores of people for advice.

“People are mostly too busy to steal your idea,” said the aspiring entrepreneur from Kansas. “They’re more likely to help.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 69

think life | TECHNOLOGY

Not enough space Troy Wolverton backgrounds the dicey game of storing, backing up files About five years ago, a technical disaster struck Fernando Santos: His computer hard drive failed. He lost everything on it and had to reformat his drive.

“I lost a lot of nice pictures,” says Santos, 20.

Wade Mengel, an amateur photographer, has taken steps to make sure the same fate doesn’t happen to him. He backs up his digital photo collection on an external hard drive and on duplicate DVDs. But Mengel has his own digital storage issue. His photo collection is massive – about 1 terabyte worth. And with his new camera taking pictures that are about 5 megabytes each, there’s no room left on his computer’s hard drive to store them all.

“It really adds up quick,” says Mengel, 32.

The experiences of Mengel and Santos point to the problems and perils of the digital age. As consumers replace CDs, videotapes and film with digital files, they must wrestle with managing potentially massive amounts of data. Most store that data and media on hard drives, which can be a risky choice, as Santos found out.

70 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets any better. More people are creating or buying increasing amounts of digital media without any ideal solution on the horizon for safely housing all that data for the long term.

“There is a big question of, ‘Where are you going to put this stuff?’ and ‘What’s the fault tolerance (of the device you store it on)?’” says Randall Giusto, an analyst who covers consumer technology for research firm IDC. Consumers have a number of choices for storing and backing up their digital files, but none of them are ideal. Backing information up to external hard drives can be difficult and prone to the same failure rates as internal hard drives. Flash memorybased drives are considered to be more reliable, but are far more expensive.

Optical discs such as DVDs and CDs are cheap, but they hold relatively little data and can be ruined by scratches. Online backup can protect against local disasters, such as a fire, but Internet transfer rates

tend to be dauntingly slow for large files.

Mengel’s not alone in needing everincreasing amounts of space to store his digital files. Parks Associates expects that by 2012, tech-savvy consumers with broadband connections in their homes will be storing some 900 gigabytes worth of data – whether that’s television shows on their DVR, movies they’ve downloaded from the Internet, photos they’ve taken or digital songs they’ve bought. That’s up from 180 gigabytes last year and just 50 gigabytes in 2005. That’s up from 263 million drives with an average capacity of 58 gigabytes in 2003.

Consumers have turned to hard drives because the prices have fallen sharply over time and they are now relatively inexpensive. You can find a terabyte drive these days for only $329 at Dick Smith Electronics.

Just a few years ago, that drive would have easily been $1,000 or more.

A hard drive “is the cheapest place to put stuff, but it’s far from the safest,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, a technology consulting firm.

Indeed, while the hard-drive industry has touted the device’s reliability, recent studies indicate that, on average, 2 percent to 4 percent of hard drives fail in a given year and some batches may be much less reliable than that.

“You’re talking about an imperfect device that you’re keeping your precious memories on,” says Josh Martin, a senior analyst at the Yankee Group, a technology research and consulting firm. “It’s like playing Russian roulette with your memories.”

That risk threatens even the most conscientious users, those who back up their files regularly. And there aren’t many of those.

Parks Associates found that just 10 percent of households regularly back up their digital files. While Apple has incorporated backup software into its Mac OS and many external hard drive makers include the software with their drives, backing up data is still too complex a task for most consumers, analysts say.

That’s a problem, because that data could be fried by any kind of disaster, from a spilled Coke to an earthquake.

“Somebody needs to address this solution,” says Giusto. “Consumers want to know that it’s being backed up and want to forget about it.”

But don’t expect the situation to improve anytime soon. “I don’t think there’s a silver bullet that happens in the next year or two,” says Mike McGuire, an analyst who covers digital media for Gartner.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM  October 2008  71

feel life | SPORT

Kosecki/Imago/Icon SMI

A great call from China The Beijing Olympics will go down as the most spectacular and the most calculated Games in history. No expense was spared to show the rest of the world how the Chinese state can throw a global party. The $US40 billion bill was matched by some incredible athleticism. It also brought home the stark reality of how much it costs to get a slice of the medal action. Sports columnist Chris Forster analyses how far the New Zealand and Australian dollars are keeping pace with the world’s most lavish spending spree Three Gold, a solitary Silver and 5 Bronze is a pretty good medal haul for New Zealand – the best since Barcelona in 1992. Although they cost taxpayers a pretty packet. The estimated figure quoted the day of the Closing Ceremony was around $80 million for Olympic sports.

That’s a shade under $10 million for each of those nine podium moments, or around $3 per medal/per taxpayer.

On a per capita basis – New Zealand rates fifth behind the Caribbean nations of the Bahamas and Jamaica (both buoyed by unprecedented track and field success) 72 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

east European stronghold Slovenia and our nearest and dearest neighbours.

Yes Australia produced a late gold rush to an inspired haul of 14 Gold, 15 Silver and 17 Bronze promoting the vast country of 20point-2 million folk to an impressive sixth overall on the medal table, behind the powerhouse nations of China, the United States, Russia, Great Britain and Germany.

The medals included sports as diverse as the men’s pole vault, women’s basketball, white water kayaking and the 50 kilometre walk, as well as their power base of women’s swimming.

With Australia’s dedication to high performance and its huge sporting ethic the estimated bill for each gold medal’s estimated at $17 million.

Yet across the Tasman there are already calls to up the estimated spending to keep pace with the rest of the world at the London Games in 2012.

New Zealand simply can’t afford to cut any corners if it wants to keep pace with our more successful cousins.

But are medals everything? Of New Zealand’s 182 strong contingent there were also five near misses – the dreaded fourth

Kosecki/Imago/Icon SMI

“Who can forget Mahe Drysdale’s heroic row for bronze, after battling a bout of severe food poisoning through the week. He dominated the opening three quarters of the race and would have romped to gold if he was close to full fitness place finish – and 23 top ten performances, as well as a string of personal bests and national records. The pre-Games criteria from Government funding agency SPARC (Sport and Recreation New Zealand) was a top 16 performance or better, and most of the record 182 Kiwi Olympians delivered.

The significant failures were the women’s hockey team, dead last and winless in their competition and the hapless equestrians.

Even the admirable comeback of double gold medallist Mark Todd failed to get the horses and their riders over the hurdles in the sticky heat and humidity of Hong Kong.

High profile BMX rider Sarah Walker – with the smile to win the hearts of a nation – was reduced to tears when she finished a luckless fourth in her medal race. Her male counterpart Marc Willers crashed out of contention epitomising the nature of this brand new X-treme sport.

The powerful rowing contingent may have failed to deliver the haul of medals everyone was hoping for, but who can forget Mahe Drysdale’s heroic row for bronze, after battling a bout of severe food poisoning through the week. He dominated the opening three quarters of the race and would have romped to gold if he was close to full fitness. In the end he had to hang on for grim life for third place and be treated for severe dehydration after the final.

Rob Waddell and Nathan Cohen’s promising double sculls partnership could only take another one of those fourth places, but the Evers-Swindell twins surge to gold

beating the Germans by a coat of paint was the stuff of Kiwi legends. Typically the Australians trumped the effort by claiming two golds with their male rowing crews, then rubbed salt into the fibreglass with an unexpected gold to kayaker Ken Wallace, in the same race the Kiwi fans were praying for a last hurrah from Stephen Ferguson on the last full night of competition.

Two medals to gutsy track cyclist Hayden Roulston caught many Kiwi fans by surprise – and gave an extra degree of joy when he joined the team pursuiters who outstripped former world champs Australia for the bronze.

But it was the two stunning track and field moments inside the incredible Bird’s Nest Stadium that will linger longest in the memory banks.

Late on Super Saturday – long after the rowers had stashed their haul of three medals and Roulston snatched silver in the individual pursuit – Valerie Vili produced a near perfect display of power, precision and poise to soar to gold in the shot put.

The highly focussed young lady left her highly rated Belarussian opponents squabbling over the lesser medals. Then there was the delightful bonus from Nick Willis for the fans who stayed up to watch the 15hundred metres glamour race at 10 to 3 on Wednesday morning. Willis ran a smart, immaculate line to steal bronze with a tasty sprint to the finish line, evoking memories of the black singlet’s affinity with middle distance greatness from a previous age.

Usain Bolt became the star of the whole show at the same magnificent stadium, over far shorter and more dynamic distances.

At barely 22 years old the Jamaican sensation smashed the 100 metres world record and had the sheer audacity to show off and glance sideways while crossing the finish line. That feat was matched by topping the seemingly unbeatable 200 metres record held by incomparable American Michael Johnson since Atlanta in 1996.

“Lightning” Bolt added the gloss with the third of his world record gold medals as part of the 4 by 100 metres Jamaican relay team.

The United States will claim the eight swimming gold medals from Michael Phelps in the Water Cube swimming pool were the individual highlight, with a couple of world records of his own.

They’re both freaks of nature. Phelps has this incredible albatross-like wing span and athletic legs to propel him ahead of his rivals in the freestyle, butterfly, medley and relay events he’s dominated for the last two Olympics.

But it’s the almost nonchalant ease with which 2-metre tall Bolt exercises his unnaturally quick sprinting abilities that puts him on a pedestal. The fact he’s from a poor Caribbean nation – rich in acceleration genes – decides the issue.

It’s finding that blend of talent and commerce that New Zealand will again need to harness at the 2012 Games in London.

Many of the best-known rowing crews may be nearing retirement. Four years of 6 am starts, daily pain and fatigue is a hard burden to endure, when medals are so hard to come by.

You wouldn’t bet against Drysdale extending his career into his early 30s though, to have another crack at the gold medal that was cruelly denied him in Beijing by a severe bout of illness.

At a still youthful 23, Valerie Vili is sure to be back and more determined than ever to defend that shot putting crown.

BMX star Sarah Walker will only be 24.

Nick Willis will be in his late 20s and probably in his prime. Windsurfer Tom Ashley’s the sort of driven guy who’d love the chance to make it back-to-back golds. Hayden Roulston and the young track cycling team could be better than ever in four years time.

But so will the rest of the world.

Heavy investment in the right sport and the right talent is the only way to keep pace.

In history $10 million dollars per medal is a small price to pay.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 73

feel life | HEALTH

The battle of the bugs Claire Morrow gets inside the risk of infection and the body’s response It’s the time of year that everyone talks about being sick. Winter colds and flus and chest infection are rampant, we make more trips to the doctor, take antibiotics, take time off work, complain. We invent explanations for our illness to make ourselves feel better; it’s the hot air, the cold air, not enough sleep, we haven’t been taking vitamins. That’s why we get sick. We don’t like to be sick. We certainly don’t like to think about the inevitability of infection: we 74 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

get sick, because “germs” are everywhere.

Humans in all their biological brilliance still wade through a mist of smaller organisms. Although the pinnacle of the Earth’s living system, we’re still part of a well balanced dynamic which often seeks to eliminate the sick and the injured.

Bacteria are such a common cause of illness and disease. A form of insentient life that just wants to reproduce and prosper.

Simultaneously the top and the bottom

of the food chain these living creatures are often a vital link in the biosphere; being consumed by the smallest multi-cellular life forms while breaking down even the higher order mammals after their death.

However, the problem (for the higher order mammals) is that a lot of them like to get started a lot earlier than that.

The human body is a fortress against antagonistic foreign bodies and has a specialty in combating living invaders. Skin, like razor wire and tank traps, cover almost the entire surface while sticky tongues and hairy noses and runny noses and sneezes attempt to keep out the rest. But when those frontline defences are breached, perhaps by a simple break in the skin, the battle becomes a little more complicated.

The biggest risk factor common to all surgical procedures is infection. Any puncture of the skin presents an immediate risk of early infection. The human skin naturally contains Staphlycoccus and Streptococcus (often abbreviated Staph and Strep). So the moment a surgeon takes out his scalpel these organisms become a danger to the wound. Disinfectant procedures are a serious undertaking, but ultimately only a handful of bacteria need to survive in order to cause infection.

One of the most important breakthroughs in modern medicine was the ability to prevent infections after surgery.

In one sense the body is like a machine.

It has parts which all function together in order to make the whole contraption work. However, changing defective parts in a machine is easy; you just turn it off, install, and away you go. The human body is not plug and play because always – even while the pre-surgical checklists are being filled out, or the anaesthetic mask is in place – a vigilant army of tiny organisms are just waiting for a chance to invade. They hide on virtually every surface, lurk within droplets of moisture and even float in the air. A surgeon’s nightmare. Modern surgeries are layered in preventative measures: The body is disinfected with anti-bacterial agents such as Iodine, the operating theatre is kept under sterile conditions and patients undergo a rigorous course of antibiotics.

Because the big risk with even minor surgery is always infection. No matter how perfectly the surgical team can reconnect arteries or sew muscle tissue, all can be for bunk if the patient dies from infection.

An even greater medical challenge is combating infections associated with the implantation of permanent foreign bod-

ies such as pacemakers and artificial joints.

These devices are made from very different materials to that of the body. And one of the biggest differences is the nature of their surface. The metallic surface of the femoral component of an artificial hip will look smooth and pristine to the naked eye.

A perfectly smooth, shiny metal surface.

But in reality it will contain vast caverns and ridges. All metals do if you look close enough. And to a battalion of bacteria,

claustrophobic environments where they can protect themselves from poisonous chemicals, namely antibiotics. They huddle together like penguins in the frigid wind in order to reduce their surface area and immediately begin to construct a powerful shield against counterattack. By a process known as quorum-sensing the bacterial cells are able to communicate with each other.

They produce and detect signalling molecules which allow them to coordinate their

“Skin, like razor wire and tank traps, cover almost the entire surface while sticky tongues and hairy noses and runny noses and sneezes attempt to keep out the rest like a guerrilla militia, there are plenty of places to hide.

Once an artificial device has been successfully implanted, and even if early infection is avoided, a risk of late infection still lingers. Common and natural infections ride on the blood and circulate the body at all times. Usually they find no safe haven and are destroyed by the body’s immune system. But if they are able to identify a fresh metal surface and attach to it, it’s a huge blow to the body’s defences. All cells just love attaching to surfaces and immediately upon sticking they enact an extremely elaborate defence mechanism.

Bacteria like to form colonies; close and

efforts and immediately they begin to cooperatively construct... The Megastructure! (the extra-cellular matrix). Woven from supermolecular polymer-like components, it functions as a communal bullet-proof vest for bacteria; a barrier against antibiotics. The colony combined with the defensive matrix is called a biofilm.

Strategies to prevent the formation of biofilms on new implants are in constant development. Most revolve around the use of advanced materials coated on the metal surfaces in advance. The premise of this strategy is to form a repulsive surface layer that effectively makes the implant ‘non-stick’ just like frying pans of the same description.

Often this is a two component system whereby a super adhesive component (similar to that used by oysters to stick to rocks) is used to cement an anti-fouling polymer to the surface. However the design of such systems can be problematic. Common antifouling polymers like PEG (Polyethylene glycol) can be vulnerable to general biological processes. They must not invoke an immune response by the body as well as being resistant to enzymes designed to break-down large molecules as part of the body’s natural rhythms. In addition to protecting from later infection, such research is also valuable in giving implants a longer lifespan as currently natural degradation is a predictable limitation to the implant scheme. In future, anti-biofilm materials could become even more potent. Recent research suggests that anti-bacterial agents may even be chemically attached to the surface. Connected by ‘spacer’ molecules they may actively deform and destroy bacterial landing-parties to produce an almost perfect microbial defence.

Humans have always struggled to protect their fragile bodies from the dangers of the world, and now with technology as our guardian we have a new hope. Perhaps new bacteria-repelling molecules will at keep us safe from the tiny armies of biological decay.

In other news, there is still no cure for the common cold. [well, you could try Kaloba for that. I did, and it’s very good! – Ed.]

HEALTHBRIEFS Bipolar disorder linked with hibernation u German scientists say they’ve found bipolar disorder resembles the phenomenon of hibernation.The discovery came after a 16-year study of a woman suffering rapid-cycling bipolar illness – an illness characterized by four or more episodes of depression and/or mania within a 12-month period. Dr. Martin Begemann and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Germany drew blood from the patient for two consecutive days during two episodes of depression and two episodes of mania. Blood was again collected years later to validate the original findings. They found that during depressive episodes there was an elevation of chemicals known to be linked with the seasons of hibernation in some species, the researchers said. Based on the finding, they treated the patient with celecoxib (Celebrex) – a drug used to treat arthritis and other conditions. They found five-months of treatment resulted in a reduction of the severity of her depression and also seemed to alter the severity of her manic episodes. The scientists concluded that rapid cycling bipolar affective disorders resemble hibernation and that prostaglandins play a role in mediating the biological response.The study is reported in the journal Molecular Medicine.

Milk may help bacteria survive antibiotics u Portuguese scientists say they’ve learned milk may help protect potentially dangerous bacteria from being killed by antibiotics used to treat animals. The researchers from Portugal’s Technical University of Lisbon said bacteria sometimes form structures called biofilms that protect them against antibiotics and the body’s natural defenses. Now the scientists have discovered one of the most important micro-organisms that causes mastitis in cows and sheep, called staphylococcus, can evade the animal’s defenses by forming such biofilms. Mastitis is an infection of the udder in cattle and sheep. The researchers, led by Manuela Oliveira of the university’s veterinary medicine department, found that when the staphylococci produce a biofilm, that structure protects them against host defenses and antibiotic treatment, allowing the bacteria to persist in the udder. The researchers said they also determined low concentrations of antibiotics such as penicillin, gentamicin and sulphamethoxazole, combined with trimethoprim, were less effective against staphylococcus when compared with the same experiment performed in the absence of milk. The research was presented Monday at Dublin, Ireland’s Trinity College during the fall meeting of the Society for General Microbiology.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 75

feel life | ALT.HEALTH Every health magazine on the supermarket checkout aisle touts it. Women’s health activists have long championed its practice.

And most cancer doctors strongly maintain that it belongs as a standard of care.

So why is it that studies keep coming to the conclusion that breast self-exams are highly unlikely to reduce breast cancer deaths and, in fact, might do more harm than good to healthy women?

This disconnect between recommendation and research cropped up again in early August, when a review by the Cochrane Collaborative – an international group that evaluates medical science – agreed with two earlier studies showing no evidence that screening reduces deaths.

In saying that breast self-exams “cannot be recommended,” the organization’s statement warns that research “suggests harm in terms of increased numbers of benign lesions identified and an increased number of biopsies performed.”

Two earlier studies involving Russian and Chinese women came to similar conclusions.

Dr. David B. Thomas, who headed Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s 2002 study of 250,000 Chinese women, told MSNBC.com: “Our study shows that (a self-exam) is probably a waste of time. You’re not going to get women sufficiently motivated to practice it well enough and frequently enough to make that big of a difference.”

Also now weighing in against self-exams: the American Cancer Society; the U.S. Preventative Service Task Force, an expert panel that issues the federal government’s official advice on preventive medicine; the National Breast Cancer Coalition; and the Journal for the National Cancer Institute.

And yet, there are just as many healthcare providers who maintain that not having women do monthly breast self-exams is even more risky.

One vocal advocate is Dr. Balazs (“Ernie”) Bodai, the director of Kaiser Permanente’s breast surgical services in Sacramento, Calif., who gained renown for creating the breast-cancer awareness stamp.

“Talk to any busy breast cancer surgeon, and they’ll tell you 30 percent of the diagnoses are made by the patient – not that they have cancer but they found their own lumps,” Bodai says. “Just this morning, I saw a 37-year-old woman with a normal mammogram, but she found a lump and 76 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

Breast self exams: a touch of uncertainty Sam McManis reports on the growing doubts about self-checks

was proactive about it. And it turned out to be cancer.”

Even more vocal is Dr. Marisa Weiss, a breast oncologist and founder of Breastcancer.org, who says the Cochrane guidelines are ill-advised.

“The world of early detection of breast cancer is imperfect,” Weiss says in a statement. “(But) this report robs women of one of the key tools in what is already a limited arsenal for detection. ... It sends the wrong message to women about their role in their own health care.”

Susan Stone, chief of certified nurse midwives for Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento, deals with women daily. She stresses self-exams.

“The midwifery model of care is based on empowering women to be the experts on their own bodies and health,” she says. “I encourage women to check their own breasts once in a while so they can know what’s normal for them, and then they would be able

to tell if something changes.”

That scenario helped Patricia Barrow.

In 2003, at age 66, she found a lump in her breast a few months after her yearly mammogram showed nothing untoward.

It turned out to be cancerous, and she had a mastectomy. She says that, because she caught it early, she avoided radiation and chemotherapy.

“I tell everybody I know to do it,” Barrow says. “Some will tell me, ‘I can’t tell the difference between what might be a (benign) fibroid cyst or a cancerous lump.’ They just need to be familiar with their breasts.”

Kaiser’s Bodai says he’s irritated by the self-exam controversy.

“Everybody’s hemming and hawing on this thing,” he says. “Listen, we’re not looking for a patient to diagnose herself. We’re looking to teach them what their normal breast feels like so if they notice a change they can contact the appropriate caregiver for evaluation.”

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 77

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taste life travel

One of India’s many faces Carol Pucci takes a bumpy safari by camel through India’s Thar Desert Somewhere in the Thar Desert, India – Ummed Singh, 12, piled blankets on Camu’s burlap saddle and motioned for me to climb aboard. I swung my leg around and held on. “Lean back,” he told me. The camel stood up, and I lurched forward.

Ummed, in long-sleeved blue shirt, rolled-up pants and flip-flops, looked up at me with a cool, take-charge expression.

78 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

“Everything OK?” I nodded. Then he took hold of a rope attached to a piece of wood piercing the camel’s nose, and led the way into the desert.

Ummed; his father, Bura; his uncle, Absay; and another man whom we came to know as the “Turban Man” for his orange headpiece live in a village of mud huts in Western India, 40 miles from the Pakistan border.

Their ancestors used camels to carry silk and spices as they travelled in caravans on the trade route that linked India to Central Asia. Today, the villagers make their living guiding tourists who pay US$30 or $40 for the chance to spend the night sleeping on the sand dunes under the stars.

These are not the luxury tent camps you see in travel brochures, the ones that prom-

ise toilets, showers and gourmet meals. Our camels carried piles of wool blankets that became our beds for the night. Strapped to their backs were a few pots and plastic sacks of vegetables for a dinner Bura and Absay cooked over a campfire.

The sand was our table, bed and latrine.

Absay, his long white shirt and tattered white pants flapping in the wind, sang and told stories, and our two German travelling companions ran up and down the dunes in their bare feet, calling out when they spotted shooting stars.

Even for someone like me who’d sooner eat grass than camp in the sand, it was a magical night.

I’d heard stories about riding camels – that the bobbing up and down would make me queasy and that my thighs would ache.

None of this turned out to be true.

More gentle than a horse, 3-year-old Camu ambled with a rhythmic gait. When he slowed down to snack on desert grass, Ummed nudged him along, steering him away from crevices and cactus needles.

Every hotel in Jaisalmer sets up camel safaris for its guests. The camels are owned by villagers, and the best outfitters arrange for you to be taken by Jeep to start your ride in remote areas where there are few other tourists.

The riding time is usually short – a few

hours in the late afternoon before the sun sets and a couple more early the next morning. Two hours on a camel is enough for most first-timers, but for those who can take the sun and heat, two- or three-day treks offer the chance to travel deeper into the desert.

We started out around 3 p.m. after a 45-minute Jeep ride from Jaisalmer to the Singh family’s village. Border police patrol the main road, and it remained in sight for the first part of the ride. As the terrain changed from desert brush to hills of rolling sand, the lights and cars disappeared, creating the illusion, at least, that we were alone in a remote part of the desert, when, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 79

IF YOU GO Information u Almost everyone who comes to Jaisalmer goes on a camel safari. Any hotel can book a trip, but the quality of ride, accommodations and food varies, and some do a better job than others of getting away from areas crowded with other tourists.

I booked through the Shai Palace hotel, where the Mali family makes arrangements with camel drivers in a nearby village. Prices range from US$20 to $40 per person, depending on food, drinks and whether you order a tent or sleep under the stars. See www.shahipalacehotel.com, or www.jaisalmertourism.com.

Traveler’s tip u Outfitters provide bottled water, warm blankets and bedding for sleeping. The daytime sun is intense, and it can be cold at night in the desert. Bring something warm, and wear long sleeves, a hat and sunscreen.

in reality, we were not all that far away from civilization.

“Welcome to my desert,” Absay shouted, waving his arms like white flags as we approached. He’d gone ahead to set up camp, and had the fire started when we arrived.

“Sit down. Relax.” He handed us metal cups of chai, milky tea spiced with cardamom. “Watch the sunset. Tonight, we’re going to have a party.”

Ummed and Turban Man tended to the camels, tying their feet together with a loose rope so the camels could graze without going too far.

Bura and Absay set up their kitchen on a patch of sand and cooked appetizers. There were vegetable chips fried in hot oil and crunchy deep-fried pakora, a snack made from dal flour, coriander, chili, cumin and onion.

We sat down on blankets, and met some neighbours – thumb-size black beetles that feed on camel dung.

80 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

“No problem,” said Absay. “Beetles like friends.”

Perhaps, but Ummed sensed our squeamishness and collected as many as he could in plastic water bottles.

We opened beers and toasted our crew.

Bura served Indian chapati (bread) and a dish of stir-fried vegetables. We ate by flashlight as the sky filled with stars.

While Ummed and Bura “washed” the metal dishes, using the sand as scrub brushes, Absay led us to the top of a dune and spread out the blankets.

The hotel offered tents, and with wind in the forecast, we took one. Absay began to sing as we lay on our backs looking up at the sky.

“Camel man will be right here,” he whispered, spreading his blanket on the sand.

The wind kept us awake much of the night, and when we crawled out of the tent at sunrise, we saw that the gusts had reshaped the dunes into fresh mounds.

I looked around and saw that Absay’s blankets were gone. Then I spotted a camp fire burning down below, and saw Turban Man and Absay climbing toward us with cups of hot chai.

While we sat on blankets and breakfasted on instant noodles and fruit, our drivers rounded up the camels for the morning ride back to their village.

Ummed led the way out of the dunes into the flat desert spotted with patches of green after the recent monsoons. He goes to a school where the tuition is $2 per month, but today was a holiday, and I wondered how he felt about spending it working.

His older brother is a shepherd. What was in his future? Perhaps he and his father will expand their camel business and he’ll handle sales and marketing, I thought as he looked up at me.

“How you like camel, lady? You want to sign up for longer ride?”

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taste life FOOD

The nature of the beast James Morrow gets all ‘Sarah Palin’ with a piggy Regular readers of this column know that I have no aversion to eating things that look like, well, the things they are. That may sound like a funny thing to say, but think about the number of people – you yourself may be one – whose ethics and aesthetics lead them into that gray area between vegetarianism and omnivorousness, and who jump through the most Jesuitical of hoops to reconcile the yearnings of their stomachs with the sentimentalities of their hearts.

These are folk who won’t eat lamb chops because the bones (or what my children dub “handles”) remind them too much of the thing in its pre-cooked, fully assembled form, but have no trouble hoeing into a chicken breast or a cheeseburger. Or people for whom the sanctity of life ends at the water line and will eat anything that swims but nothing that walks, bringing up the thorny question of whether or not axolotls are fair game. Indeed, I recently met a woman who told me in all seriousness that she only ate fish and duck, because she only eats things that swim, and well, 82 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

duck is really, really tasty.

In any case, if you are one of these people who are squeamish about eating insufficiently camouflaged animals, you might find this month’s column – to use the therapeutic language of our age – too “confronting”. For this month we are cooking an entire pig on a spit which, short of deepfrying turkeys, is one of the most entertaining ways to feed a summer crowd, especially for those who have been wondering how to take their barbeques to the next level. The only caveats are that this is a method that required a bit of money and a bit of time, and which of course has greater potential for disaster. Especially, if like one hapless individual whose account I found on the internet, you decide to venture into the world of spit-roasting by teeing up a 150kg hog by one’s self on jerry rigged equipment over a roaring fire. The end result: an exploding, spitting, fatty mess as fun to extinguish and clean up as an unsuccessful suicide bombing attempt

by Michael Moore.

There are many ways to spit-roast a pig,

but for the beginner the easiest thing to do is buy or rent a spit-roasting set up from a party hire firm. Prices will vary wildly, but don’t necessarily go for the lowest cost option: although I paid twice as much to rent a spit as the cheapest quote I was given, mine came with free pick-up and delivery and a 30kg sack of real wood charcoal, two serious advantages given both the hassle factor and the giddily high carbon footprint this sort of party puts out.

The only other major thing one will need is a pig, and again, cheapest isn’t always best. Ideally, a good butcher should be able to order one in for you from a reputable supplier, and you don’t want one whose final pre-cooked weight will be more than 25 to 30kg, figuring that ideally each kilo will serve between two and three adults.

Go free-range if possible, as pork is one of those meats which quickly reveals how it was raised on the palate, and a pig whose life was nasty, brutish and short will taste as such. A good butcher will also be able to mount the pig for you on the spit, which should have attachments and prongs not

just for head and tail but also U-clamps that fit around its spine and through its back to keep it from twisting as it turns.

Other than that, there are only a few things one needs to do successfully spitroast a pig. Remember that no matter if they were cooking lamb or pig or goat, this is the sort of cooking that our ancestors, thousands upon thousands of years ago, were doing whenever they got a chance.

This isn’t rocket surgery (as the blonde actress once reportedly said). The pig does not require much in the way of treatment; some people like to brine the pig first, but this isn’t strictly necessary. At the suggestion of a Cuban living in Florida whose family roasts a whole pig for Christmas and just about any other feast they can find on the calendar, I gave my pig a rub of cinnamon, sugar, garlic, salt and pepper, and then stuffed the cavity with a dressing of celery, apples, chorizo sausages and herbs, trussing the whole thing up with butcher’s needle and twine – much like one does with a turkey.

When you are ready to go, the first step is setting up your fire. And a good spit-roasting kit should have a “firebox” in which to lay the coals. Build the fire as normal, and once it has been going for about twenty to thirty minutes you are ready to mount the pig and attach the spit to the turning motor, which is required for anyone whose idea is not spending six hours standing next to hot coals slowly turning dozens of kilos of pig. Once it is underway, and the coals have gotten hot, use a fireproof rake to pull the coals towards the two ends so that there will be more heat under the head and haunches, where the meat is thickest, and slightly off-centre so that fat doesn’t drip directly onto them. As well as being quick to reveal how it was raised, pork is a very polite meat in that it tells you when it is done, and a bit of poking and prodding will reveal when it is ready. For an 18kg pig, figure on about 6 hours, for something closer to 30, eight or more will be the go. When it is ready, bring the whole pig, spit and all, to the table and have at it.

Oh yeah: I forgot to mention, this is an all-day project. The good bit is that you can get it going mid to late-morning and have all your work done; the bad news is that you may need to fire up your regular grill to give your guests a round of sausages and chops to keep their BMLs (Blood Meat Levels) up, to say nothing of absorbing all the beer that is consumed as a natural byproduct of the process.

Truffle-Bourbon KumAra You’ve cooked your pig, but what do you serve with it? Along with all the typical barbeque sides and salads, here’s a little something that will wow them.

You’ll need 2 kg sweet potatoes/kumara 125g butter, room temperature 2 teaspoons truffle oil 2 tablespoons Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup; light corn syrup may be substituted 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup good bourbon whiskey or truffled bourbon 1 small black truffle, about 1/2 ounce (optional)

Method Heat oven to 180°C. Bake the sweet potatoes for one hour, turning them mid-way. Peel and mash the sweet potatoes until they’re smooth and free of chunks. Melt the butter; add the fresh chopped truffle to it if you’ve got some. Add to the potatoes, then add the salt and bourbon or truffled bourbon. Mix thoroughly and taste for seasoning. You may have to add more salt, butter, bourbon or truffle oil; the balance is right when one tastes a gentle whiff of bourbon at first bite, which then yields to truffled richness on the back end.

Pour into a baking dish and bake for about 30 minutes or so, until thoroughly warmed through and bubbly.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 83

touch life > drive

Hot pepper The Cayenne is worthy of Porsche badge, argues Mark Phelan

Like a lot of car enthusiasts, I’ve always been ambivalent about the Porsche Cayenne. Sure, it’s powerful and luxurious, but Porsche built its reputation with light little sports cars. I doubted a fivepassenger SUV that weighs 2,300 kg could be nimble and exciting enough to deserve to wear the revered Porsche badge.

I began to change my mind driving a Cayenne to the children’s hospital last summer. My nephew Cormac had been bitten by a dog, and I had my full Tony Stewart NASCAR mind-set in gear: Get out of the way or I’ll knock you out of the way.

Traffic parted before the oncoming Porsche badge, and I gained a new appreciation for the German sport SUV. Porsche gave the Cayenne a number of upgrades for the 2008 model year, and the SUV now ranks among the top competitors for luxury SUVs. The 2008 Cayenne model line starts with a modestly priced $128,000 base model with a 290-horsepower 3.6-litre V6 and six-speed manual transmission. Adding the optional six-speed Tiptronic automatic transmission raises the ante a little.

84 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

Porsche also offers the Cayenne with a 4.8-litre V8 that produces 385 and 500 horsepower in S, and Turbo models, respectively. The S comes with an optional automatic transmission and prices start at $175,000. The Turbo comes only with an automatic and costs $260,000.

All Cayennes feature seating for five and a sport-tuned all-wheel drive system.

The base Cayenne V6 competes with SUVs like the $121,000 (but only US$46,200) BMW X5 3.0si and $106,000 (only US$39,300) Volkswagen Touareg 2.

Changes for 2008 included the addition of direct-injection to improve power and fuel economy. The Cayenne’s fuel economy ratings remain among the lowest in its class, however.

The headlights were reshaped to give the Cayenne a sporty new face.

The Cayenne has the distinction of being the only one of the SUVs to offer a manual transmission. The manual in the V6

Cayenne I tested encouraged eager driving, providing a full quotient of fun in the countryside and good zip around town.

Both Cayennes I tested had responsive steering, excellent brakes, good performance, smooth rides and comfortable interiors. The adjustable suspension holds the vehicle flat and stable through curves, making the Porsche an exceptionally stable and sporty SUV when driven fast.

Backseat accommodations are evidence that rear seats have not traditionally been an area of expertise for the sports car specialist, however. Legroom is tight, and the claim that it has room for three adults is just another reminder that Germans shouldn’t do comedy.

In addition, the mechanism to fold the rear seats forward to increase cargo space requires an awkward two-step process that exposes the seats’ mounting hardware to view.

The 540 litres (0.54 cubic metres) of cargo space behind the rear seats is among the smaller load capacities in the segment.

While the rear seat needs work, the interior is otherwise good.

Road and wind noise are minimal, and the materials look and feel fine.

The lack of common features like rear-object detection or automatic cruise control is a drawback in a vehicle priced so highly, however.

The V8 engine in the S provides head-snapping acceleration and the automatic transmission shifts fast and smoothly.

Fuel economy for both V6 and V8 models could be better. The US EPA rates the V6 Cayenne at 14 mpg in the city and 20 on the highway, about 1 mpg worse than the X5 3.0si and the same as the V6 Touareg. The 385-horsepower V8 scored 13 mpg city and 19 mpg on the highway in EPA tests.

That’s better than the 300-horsepower Range Rover Sport, equal to the 382-horsepower Mercedes ML550 and 1 mpg worse than the 350-horsepower X5 4.8i. All the SUVs require premium fuel.

If you need to clear the road in front of you on the way to the hospital – my nephew is fine – the Cayenne is hard to beat, and it’s certainly an SUV that’s good enough to be called a Porsche, too.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 85

touch life > toybox toshiba Qosmio X300 Whether you’re a newbie or a hardcore gamer, get ready to combat a new level of extreme mobile gaming with the Qosmio X300, a fiery gaming Notebook built to frag the competition. Toshiba’s latest multimedia beast is jam-packed with the latest highpowered components, including a top of the line graphics card, lightning-fast DDR3 RAM, two Hard Drives and flaming looks for maximum entertainment and game performance from any battlefield. The Qosmio X300, housed in fierce fire-red tribal casing, backlit with red LEDs and dressed with a glossy black keyboard, is designed to unleash competitive instincts for battle. Sporting a 17 inch 1680x1050 High Definition widescreen, state of the art NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTX graphics with 1GB on board, five Harman/Kardon speakers including a subwoofer, and a whopping 4GB DDR3 1066Mhz of system RAM, the Qosmio X300 delivers mind-blowing gaming and entertainment. The Qosmio X300 features the latest Intel Core2 Duo Processor, dual hard drives; 200GB (7200rpm) for ultra-fast transfer speeds and 320GB (5400rpm) for back-up storage; and DDR3 RAM for a powerful gaming machine with added grunt. The Qosmio X300 is available now at a standard retail price of $4,999 including GST, with $200 cashback, from selected retailers. http://www.isd.toshiba.co.nz

Nokia N96 Nokia N96 boasts live TV, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, turn-by-turn voice navigation, 16GB of internal memory that can be increased to 24GB with an optional microSD card, superior sound and music, N-Gage gaming and a stunning 2.8” display.

Supporting live TV as it happens using DVB-H technology, the Nokia N96 delivers advanced television viewing across a number of channels. It is even possible to record favorite programmes to watch back whenever suits, be it on a train, in an airport lounge or in a café over a drink.In many markets, the Nokia N96 comes pre-loaded with a blockbuster movie (title varies by region). Feel part of the action as it erupts through the vivid 2.8” display and built-in 3D stereo speakers. Sit back, watch the plot unfold and enjoy the special effects hands-free, practically anywhere, thanks to a cleverly designed ‘kickstand’ on the back cover. The Nokia N96 has the ability to store up to 40 hours of video content transferred from a PC via hi-speed USB 2.0 connection or found online with WLAN and HSDPA support. The Nokia Video Center offers access to a variety of content ranging from movie trailers and comedy to news from world-leading providers such as YouTube, Reuters and Sony Pictures. The Nokia N96 supports the most common video formats including MPEG-4, Windows Media Video and Flash Video. Capture clear, bright, high quality video clips at 30 frames per second as well as sharp, defined photos with the 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED Flash. Images can be geotagged instantly to record the location and directly uploaded to online communities such as Share on Ovi and Flickr. www.nokia.com

86 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

Epson’s 3LCD business projectors Epson has launched two highly mobile and energy efficient 3LCD business projectors combining powerful performance with a range of easy to use functions in a sophisticated and stylish compact lightweight body. Each projector has a footprint smaller than an A4 sheet of paper and weighs just 1.8 kg. Wireless connection to PCs and laptops can be done in seconds with ‘Quick Wireless Connection’ using the USB wireless key included with the projector. Simply plug the USB wireless key into the PC or lap top and the wireless connection is made automatically – no need to wrestle with set up or connection screens. The EB-17 Series projectors are also compatible with the Windows Vista Network Projector function, which enables full PC to projector functionality in just three clicks of a mouse.

The EB-1725 and the EB-1735W incorporate Epson’s exclusive EasyMP technology with network capability and multi-screen display allowing up to four projectors to be connected wirelessly to just one computer, thus creating larger, panoramic or split-screen displays, or simultaneous display of the output from four different applications. Epson’s EasyMP NS Connection software gives a more stable and higher performance wireless connection, controls wireless network screen functions, and has an added security feature to prevent unauthorised interference from sources outside the projector-PC connection. The EB-17 Series projectors are available from 22 August 2008 through Epson dealers at an RRP of $3600 (EB-1735W) and RRP of $3300 (EB-1725). www.epson.co.nz

Olympus Mju 1060 10.1 megapixel Olympus Mju series combines slim, stylish design with powerful 7x optical zoom performance that is made possible by state-ofthe-art Olympus lens development technologies. The Mju 1060 features Olympus’ new Intelligent Auto function, which can be activated by setting the mode dial to “iAuto”. iAuto will automatically analyse scene content and apply optimum settings to suit the scene. iAuto provides solutions for situations the conventional Auto modes are not able to handle – such as macro shots or night scene shots that include people – enabling worryfree shooting by virtually anyone, in virtually any shooting situation.The Mju 1060 includes Olympus’ renowned Face Detect & Shadow Adjust technologies to ensure that both human subjects and background scenery are properly exposed. The Mju 1060 will be available in Australia from September 2008 for AU$449 RRP. www.olympus.com.au.

ARCHOS Internet Media Tablet The new line of small portable devices: ARCHOS 5, ARCHOS 5g and ARCHOS 7 deliver a new way for customers to enjoy continuous and instant access to the Internet, Media and TV. The new ultra-thin Internet Media Tablets provide the power of a laptop with the world’s first implementation of the ARM Cortex superscalar microprocessor and a high resolution 5” or 7’’ touch screen (800x480), which lets you enjoy media content in high quality. The new processing power means users of ARCHOS’ Internet Media Tablets now have an unrivalled way to surf the Web on the go, with web pages fully displayed on the ARCHOS screen as with a PC. One of the best features of the new line of products is the fully-fledged email application, which lets you check and reply to emails and share attachments with anyone. www.archos.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 87

see life / pages

An historic vista Michael Morrissey discovers contemporary and classic approaches to historical narrative in this latest crop of titles GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN������ ������������� STAR

By Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton, $37 Anyone who hasn’t read a Paul Theroux travel book is missing out on one of the outstanding writers of the genre. This worldscale rail trip re-tracks a vast journey that Theroux made 33 years before and which he described in his justly famous The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975.

Theroux has since become well-known for his enthusiasm for travelling by train – an enthusiasm that I share. Apart from the soothing clickety clack, the romance of steam (now sadly hard to find), it provides a great opportunity to strike up an interesting conversation with a talkative stranger. If they are an eccentric, or an opinionated right wing bigot, or pass subversive comments about the government, so much the better. Though well into his sixties, Theroux often travels in backpacker mode exposing himself to discomfort, drunken staff, poor hygiene and the occasional stomach bug – though surprisingly this doesn’t strike until more than half way through his journey.

Much of the time, Theroux doesn’t enjoy travelling – it is lonely, often food is not too enticing, and companions are not always salubrious. Nonetheless, like a true addict, there is no sign he will give it up even though his first long rail journey cost him his marriage. At the beginning of this wonderful narrative, he even attacks the very idea of being a traveller as someone who is “bone-idle”, a” fugitive freeloader” who suffers from vanity and presumption – speak for yourself Paul!

Despite his seeming attraction to discomfort, the only time he is deeply content is reading a good book while being gently rocked 88 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

by a train as it speeds through the night, knowing he will arrive in a new country by morning. His journey is immense – from England to central and eastern Europe across Asia to Japan and back via the Trans-Siberian Express – some 28,000 miles.

Some of his most interesting encounters are with famous writers like Pamuk Orhan (Turkey), Arthur C. Clarke (Sri Lanka) and Huraki Murakami in Japan. Theroux often has a love-hate relationship with the countries he visits as he does with travel itself. This emotional ambiguity adds spice to his writing which is never bland.

It is tyrannical governments that liberal Theroux dislikes, not the people they rule. I was surprised, even astounded, by the egotistic level that dictators can rise – or sink to. For instance, in hard-to-enter Turkmenistan, local dictator Niyazov had banned the Internet, cellphones and satellite linkup to keep its citizens ignorant of dissident opinion. This supreme despot even renamed the months of the year after himself, his mother and other members of the family!

Theroux also has plenty of justified antagonism towards Lee Kuan Yew’s continuing dominance and Singapore’s over-regimented laws – i.e. being naked in your own home is an offence.

Despite Singapore’s apparently squeaky-clean image, Theroux goes on a tour of its seedy nightlife and discovers underage prostitutes in its back alleys. Theroux is fascinated and even drawn to the country’s darker underbelly but though he describes these vices does not indulge or participate. Japan too, is filled with multistoried porno emporiums, kinky bars and a population (mainly male) devouring trashy manga comics which Theroux fears signal the end of literature. While Theroux can be caustic, and a little self-centred at times, he is an honest writer with a vivid captivating style and his accounts are crammed with satisfying historical and geographic detail. I glad to have made this journey with him.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

By Jhumpa Lahiri Allen & Unwin, $35 While most of us think of Indian writers as living in India or writing about India, Lahiri is part of a new breed of expatriate writers who write about Indians abroad – in her case, the USA. Sometimes they live in Seattle but mostly in and around Massachusetts. Her characters, drawn from the upper middle professional classes are typically doctors, medicos, engineers with Harvard or MIT PhDs whose parents come from West Bengal – India’s cultural hub – and have connections with Calcutta.

Her “short” stories are often 40-50 pages long so only eight are required to fill a medium-sized book. A rewarding and satisfying book as it turns out.

Lahiri is an elegant, thoughtful writer with a deeply humane even old-fashioned streak that makes her a reassuring and rich read. Not that her writing is old-fashioned but at least her characters aren’t dripping with cellphones nor glued to the Internet and remain more concerned with marriage and family. These Indian families haven’t quite cut their ties with their home country and haven’t quite settled in – the cultural dilemma of migrants from time immemorial. The children of migrant parents, though educated at America’s finest universities, still feel the pull of arranged marriages and traditional values. However, many of her characters break with tradition and marry Europeans and have successful lives though stresses and strains manifest.

All the stories are excellent but in some ways the first and longest title story is the finest. Ruma, in her late thirties is a full time mother and happy to stay that way for some years. When her retired father arrives to stay for a week, he is dismayed to find that she is not planning to return to work for some time. Rather than her return to employment, the big decision that involves her household and her father is whether to invite him to stay. Her often absent husband, being a contemporary liberal-minded European, wants her to make the decision. The narrative skilfully and sensitively shows a gradual connection growing between Akash, the initially uninterested grandson and his grandfather – he takes the

boy on outings and gets him interested in the garden which he adroitly creates.

Her father is so unobtrusive and helpful around the house that his joining the family seems like an easy decision to make. But as the switching point of view reveals, he has a lady companion, enjoys his solitude and doesn’t want to move in. In an almost Chekhovian manner, the story takes us delicately through shifts of emotion and belonging without any confrontational drama.

No one is drawn in an unsympathetic way.

One of the intriguing and attractive things about Lahiri’s stories is that the reader cannot be sure who is to be the central focus of the story – a trait also found albeit differently in Tobias Wolff’s stories (see review below). As the focus shifts to the father, we learn that his answer will almost certainly be no – though at this point he has not yet been asked. When she finally makes her move in the most subtle way imaginable – even though we now anticipate her father’s response will be to decline – there is a moment when we think perhaps (though he does not) he will say yes.

Meanwhile, Akash has put a cat among the pigeons by accidentally purloining a postcard his grandfather was intending to send to his concealed new found lady friend. When Ruma finds the letter she feels momentarily betrayed but decides to post it nonetheless. It is clear to readers that her father’s motives are honourable and not selfish. Thus Lahiri manages that supremely difficult feat – the intelligent happy ending. No one, least of all the reader, is left out in the cold. In this manner, Lahiri has in effect revived the nineteenth century tradition of the well-resolved ending and given us hope without sentimentality or moral glibness. And to round off this list of theological virtues, she has shown faith in her characters and charity towards them and the reader – without compromising high literary standards. Good writing then, can be an act of love. Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize for this book is well-deserved.

BOMB, BOOK & COMPASS: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China

By Simon Winchester Viking, $40 To the Occidental mind, China is a mysterious place. And yet several things about China are crystal-clear. It is the most populous country on earth, it has a long history, and it was, and may yet again become, the most powerful country as well. These grand yet simple facts are well-known. What is less well-known is the fact that for some two thousand years – roughly from 500 BC to 1500 AD – China was a stupendously technologically inventive culture that created paper and printing, as well as umbrellas and bombs, steel and the stirrup, toothbrushes and seawalls. And many, many more – ball bearings, air conditioning fans, cast iron, chess, the seismograph and inoculation against smallpox.

The man most responsible for informing the West and the world about this all but forgotten heritage was Joseph Needham, a Cambridge biochemist and linguist turned technological historian. He accomplished this feat by dedicating fifty years of his life to writing 24 large volumes entitled Science and Civilisation in China.

Now, Simon Winchester, also a man of great curiosity and accomplishment, author of some 20 books on arcane aspects of history – has told the fascinating and improbable story of one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable individuals. What is INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 89

remarkable about Needham is his ferocious intellectual energy, as sacred texts so he feels free to revise them each time they are driving historical and cultural curiosity, dogged scholarship and reprinted thus saving readers the irritation of coming across a his linguistic abilities. The tall, strong, bear-like Needham, (who clumsy or superfluous passage. Other authors feel old stories looks owlishly English in photos) was not without flaw – he had should be printed as originally published. I’m not too fussed either a wandering eye which his wife tolerated. His love for Chinese way. Though I do occasionally wince on re-reading my own earscholar Lu Gwei-djen, also a biochemist, whom Needham even- lier work, my inclination is not to revise. tually married after his own wife’s death is a love story that is difPossibly because Wolff is an American, several of his stories ficult not to be moved by. The photo of the aged couple on their (eg “Hunters in the Snow”, “Soldier’s Joy”, “Bullet in the Brain”) wedding day, married after meeting fifty years earlier, is deeply involve men, guns and violence. The violence often happens sudtouching the more so when we read that she died two years later. denly and is all the more shocking for its unforeseen arrival. In The incorrigible Needham soon after proposed marriage to three this tactic, he is reminiscent of the great Southern writer Flannery other women, all of whom politely refused.

O’Connor. Another serious writer who works in this way is Cormac Needham also proved to be politically naive – he believed a McCarthy. But it’s not the kind of violence that produces vicariskillfully constructed piece of communist propaganda which had ous thrills in the reader – it’s sudden, it’s over, then the perpetraAmerica engaging in biological warfare in Korea. The charge was tors have to deal with the consequences. denied and later disproved. Needham was shunned and reviled for Like all writers (well, nearly all), Wolff is a moralist. Some of his stance. Happily, he survived this political gaffe and his ongo- his stories like “The Chain” demonstrate the same principle to be ing scholarship backed by Cambridge University restored him to found in Crime and Punishment – that once someone decides to grace. A story that could have ended badly ended in triumph – a do something immoral, the consequences can be unpredictable vindication both of Needham’s indomitable spirit and the demo- – they can accelerate out of control beyond the original intention. cratic process which subjected him to counterattack but in the end In “The Chain”, Gold winds up owing a favour to a man who forgave him. Had the boot been on the other foot and Needham kills a dog on his orders (the dog attacked his daughter). But his not towed the line in a communist country, he would have been reciprocal act against the offended party’s car leads to the killing shot for political heresy. of someone not responsible. The story does not describe Gold’s Needham met and admired Rewi Alley, who pioneered the idea guilt, but we feel it… of small resourceful movable “guerilla” industries – a response to Wolff also uses the apparently diversionary tactic of taking us the pervasive invasion of Japan.

Alley introduced Needham to “Pause to consider for just a moment how many bread and honey and the irrepressible Needham responded lives might have been saved if, rather than fighting a with a vigorous display of Morris war, the top generals had had hand to combat! – the dancing – happily clothed and not naked – for among his many battle of champion being an ancient tradition other oddities, Needham was an enthusiastic nudist. A burning question – which is ultimately unexpectedly into a minor character’s world – perhaps we should unanswerable – is why did China’s glorious era of technological call it the lateral effect. In “Firelight”, a son goes window-shopping invention come to a halt around 1500? Surprisingly, Winchester with his mother for an apartment to live in – but it seems no matdoes not mention the reining in of the Chinese sea exploration ter however many possibilities they examine, she will never choose made at much the same time – maybe it was a closing down of one. They meet an embittered academic called Dr Avery and sudtechnology as well? Speculative explanations include the absence denly his miserable life becomes the focus of the story. In addition, of a mercantile class; too much bureaucracy: the vast homogeneity Wolff’s descriptions are loaded sensory with careful insights – “This of China – in contrast to smaller competitive Europe; the endless boarding house was worse than the last, unfriendly, funereal, heavy climate of totalitarianism. Winchester suggests that after five centu- with the smells that disheartened people allow themselves to culries of technological stagnation, China is on the move again. Time tivate”. Woolf stories are full of such deft phrasings. and history will tell. Instinct must suggest that for one nation to More than 20 years ago, one of his stories was included in the dominate history indefinitely is not a desirable thing. now famous Dirty Realism selection made by Bill Buford, in an One colourful story has Mao Zedong asking Needham which is early issue of Granta Magazine. The stories were often about peobest – the bicycle or the car – and Needham opting for the bicycle. ple unkindly referred to as trailer trash. In Buford’s description An incident, whether true or not, that’s unlikely to be repeated. – “waitresses in roadside cafes, cashiers in supermarkets, construcOne thing that is indisputably true is Needham’s fantastic feat of tion workers, secretaries and unemployed cowboys. They play writing an encyclopedia-sized history virtually by himself. bingo, eat cheeseburgers, hunt deer or stay in cheap hotels. They drink a lot and are often in trouble: for stealing a car, breaking a OUR STORY BEGINS window, pickpocketing a wallet.”

By Tobias Wolff This is the world that many of Wolff’s stories skillfully explore.

Bloomsbury, $59.99 And whether we like it or not, I suspect this world will always be with us. Maybe one day computers will clean toilets and put out I first encountered Tobias Wolff’s work some twenty years the trash and cook hamburgers and assemble electronic gear and ago in his fine collection Back in the World. The current book work in call centres but that day hasn’t arrived yet and probably is a mixture of selected stories plus new work. Interestingly, in never will. Meanwhile, writers like Tobias Wolff are needed to his introduction, Woolf says that he does not regard his stories bring us – in Dostoyevsky’s phrase – Notes From Underground.

90 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

Though I am a lazy-minded fellow who nonetheless can occasionally get through a 900-page biography of Hitler, I often prefer my history in byte-sized bites. This assembly is a sterling example of such a book. Twenty four chapters – each a moderate 10-12 pages – chart rival conflicts throughout history. Pause to consider for just a moment how many lives might have been saved if, rather than fighting a war, the top generals had had hand to combat!

– the battle of champion being an ancient tradition. Though one wonders if the losing side “happily” accepted defeat.

The book covers 2300 years of history – beginning with Alexander the Great and concluding with John Kennedy. It’s what they call a Eurocentric book with only one such clash – Chiang Kai-Shek versus Mao Zedong – being in Asia.

So let’s dive into the middle. The life of Hitler was filled with conflicts. This chapter could have had him matched against Churchill or Stalin. Instead Ernst Rohm, leader of the Stormtroopers, has been selected. Both men were cut from a similar cloth. Both had been wounded in World War 1 – Hitler wounded in the leg and gassed but Rohm’s face was blown off. Even after plastic reconstruction, it still looked a mess earning him the unflattering description of “a grotesque baby” or a “pig”. Initially, when they met they liked each other but the immense size of the SA – some 3 million members by 1934 – made Hitler nervous of threatened coup so he had Rohm shot. Death was frequently the way ancient political rivals solved their rivalry.

I have a soft spot for underdogs so Alexander the Great and General Vasily Chuikov are two of my favourites. Alexander was of course not the brutal world conqueror in his youth – he had first to do battle with Darius The Great who headed the vast Persian empire.

He fought Darius three times and won them all because of smarter military thinking and boldness. First, at Granicus, his 40,000 faced 75,000 Persians. At the battle of Issus, he fought 100,000 and the last, Gaugemala, 250,000 – an immense army at this early time. Despite these daunting odds, Alexander triumphed. Of course these battles – like all battles – were horrible: “...hacked limbs flying everywhere, the ground red with blood, the very air misty with sprays of body fluids, the shouting and screaming so loud that it could be heard for miles around.” Surely it would have been better if Alexander and Darius had met in single combat like David and Goliath?

And who was Vasily Chuikov? He was the Russian general who held Stalingrad against the might of Von Paulus’s Sixth Army. The Germans had occupied nine tenths of the city – Stalingrad looked certain to fall. But it did not. Fighting was done in the ruined buildings, street by street, sometimes even floor by floor. German morale was eaten away by skillful Russian snipers. Despite losing 13,000 of his army of 53,000 in four days, Chuikov held – even though the Germans came within 180 metres of his headquarters.

Then came the great Russian encircling counteroffensive that had been concealed from Chuikov so that he would continue to fight with suicidal energy.

So the great and often bloody pageant that is history unfolds, fight by fight, battle by battle. Grim, awful – yet from a distance, horribly thrilling. Books like this with their broad brush strokes and quick summaries enable the lay reader to get a quick lucid overview of history’s highlights without being bogged down by excessive amounts of detail.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 91

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see life / music

The year’s best ‘Best-of’ Chris Philpott awards Creedence Clearwater Revivial top marks for their latest compilation, and finds some other notables as well Conor Oberst Conor Oberst American singer-songwriter Conor Oberst emerges this month with his latest, highly-anticipated solo album – his first since 1996’s The Soundtrack To My Movie, which was released only on cassette tape! Luckily for us he’s moved on to newer CD technology with this latest release.

While Oberst is best known as the lead vocalist for Bright Eyes, a collaborative project he started in the mid-90s, he’s also the lead writer for that group, and this solo effort isn’t too far removed from his work there.

Based primarily around his familiar foundation of acoustic guitar, the album breezes through any number of styles and genres, whether it be the straight folk of opener “Cape Canaveral”, the quirky southern swing of “I Don’t Want To Die (In a Hospital)”, or near-bluegrass of “Sausalito”.

All this is tied together nice and neatly by Oberst’s unique vocal and smatterings of harmony, with his vivid lyrical style providing imagery that could best be compared to a master painter applying strokes of colour to a blank canvas.

In my opinion, Oberst has managed to release one of the year’s best written albums, and in doing so, has established himself as one of this generations premier songwriters.

Sun Kil Moon April I know what you’re thinking: “weird name.”

Sun Kil Moon – named for Korean bantamweight boxer SungKil Moon – is primarily the solo project of songwriter Mark Kozelek, former lead singer for the little-known but highlyacclaimed alternative group Red House Painters, joined by musicians Tim Mooney, Anthony Koutsos and Geoff Stanfield.

Kozelek – who takes care of singing, guitar, producing, writing and composing duties for the group (and I’m guessing doesn’t have too much spare time) – is clearly inspired by melancholic folk 92 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

artists such as Neil Young, and that influence shines through in the beautiful but haunting opener “Lost Verses”, its sparse acoustic guitar work and vocal setting the albums’ tone of loneliness and self-reliance.

That inherent beauty is consistent throughout, but sadly the album doesn’t really get going, rarely moving out of first gear, and continually missing opportunities to lift the listener to the next level. April requires you to really stop and listen carefully, without ever really rewarding that attention by moving out of its sparse, forlorn, even slightly depressing comfort zone.

Even album highlights like “Moorestown” and “Unlit Hallway” don’t stray too far from Kozelek’s well-established formula, making April a decent album that didn’t quite take advantage of the clear talents of its writer.

Creedence Clearwater Revival Best Of Kiwis certainly seem to have a soft spot for CCR, with tracks like “Proud Mary” and “Midnight Special” rearing their heads at more fireside sing-a-longs than I can even be bothered trying to remember.

It’s hardly surprising the group are remembered so fondly; the Californian rock band, led by legendary frontman John Fogerty, have managed to put together perhaps the most recognisable repertoire in music history.

Honestly, is there anyone alive who doesn’t know at least some of the words of classics like “Bad Moon Rising”, “Have You Ever Seen The Rain”, “Down on the Corner”, “Fortunate Son”, “Lookin Out My Back Door”, or those aforementioned party favourites?

Despite the fact that a new CCR ‘Best Of’ disc seemingly emerges every few years, this year’s version is augmented perfectly by a rerelease of the group’s 1980 live disc The Concert, cementing the group’s status as one of the 1970’s premier live bands, giving the listener a total insight into one of the great bands of the 20th century.

Pound for pound, the sheer number of tracks here, combined with its accompanying live album, makes this 2008 ‘Best Of ’ one of the best value releases you’ll ever see, and the perfect gift for … well, almost anyone.

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see life / movies

Two future visions A Jules Verne classic is remade for a new generation, while the brooding Babylon AD hits its target Babylon A.D Starring: Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Melanie Thierry and Charlotte Rampling Directed by: Mathieu Kossovitz Rated: PG-13 (for intense violence and language, action) 90 minutes Babylon A.D., which had all the cauliflower earmarks of a trashy action throwaway, turns out instead to be a disturbing, wonderfully executed vision of the future, the equal of last year’s wellreceived Children of Men. The film also returns Vin Diesel to his ideal mode as a basso profundo decimator. In Babylon A.D. he plays Toorop, a hardened mercenary scratching to survive in a brutal, bombed-out Eastern Europe.

Toorop is hired by Russian crime lord Gorsky (a nearly unrecognizable Gerard Depardieu) to smuggle a girl named Aurora (Melanie Thierry) from a Mongolian convent to New York.

He’s joined by one of the convent’s sisters (Michelle Yeoh) on this perilous pilgrimage during which they are attacked by everything but flying monkeys.

The chilling villainess of the piece is Charlotte Rampling, in an utterly convincing performance. She is the leader of one of several powerful interests who are determined to acquire Aurora.

The girl is not as fragile as she first appears. In fact, Toorop begins to wonder if his beautiful package is a saviour or a weapon.

Director Mathieu Kassovitz (Gothika) has done a remarkable job with this material. The action scenes are a little murky, but the atmosphere is superb, from a pocked and toxic Russia to the glittering affluence of North America.

His rendering of a future Manhattan, though brief, is captivating. Every block of this vertical, electronic ad-plastered island 94 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008

looks like Times Square. The details are excellent as well, down to the decor and the compulsory media saturation.

Seamless in its execution, the movie plays out like a grittier version of The Fifth Element. Babylon A.D. is a savage fairy tale, a tad overburdened with symbolism, but gripping nonetheless.

Reviewed by David Hiltbrand Journey to the Centre of the Earth Starring: Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson, Anita Briem Directed by: Eric Brevig Rated: PG (for intense adventure action and some scary moments) 89 minutes Journey to the Centre of the Earth is cinematic sci-fi proof that the Earth’s core is made of cheese. Who knew?

Mercifully, it’s old-fashioned family-friendly B-movie cheese, served up in this Brendan Fraser/Jules Verne action epic for kids.

Seek out this “Journey” in a theatre showing it in 3-D. You’ll want the T-Rex, with his snapping teeth, the bio-luminescent birds, the gigantic Venus flytraps and that mouthwash Fraser spits down his sink all right in your face. Or lap. This is 3-D the way it used to be – playful, used for effect, but not really a technology that can lift a middling movie much beyond tolerable.

Fraser stars as a Trevor Anderson, a teacher of “tectonics physics,” a man who has studied the deep geology of the Earth and its relationship to the drift of continents. His brother did the same. But Max, that brother, went missing 10 years ago. When Trevor baby sits Max’s 13-year-old son, Sean (Josh Hutcherson), they stumble across Max’s annotated copy of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Max, it appears, was a “Vernian,” somebody who took the 19th century sci-fi writer’s fiction as fact. And he disappeared

looking for a way into the centre of the Earth.

So the lads race to Iceland to follow Max’s trail, take up with a doubting and sexy Icelandic mountain guide (Anita Briem) and work their way into the planet through a volcano, facing one crisis after another with one one-liner after another.

“Dibs on the mountain guide!”

The Verne novel has been adapted every 20 years or so, pretty much since the dawn of cinema. The fantastical notion of a primordial “world within the world” is irresistible as juvenile entertainment. The director, one-time special effects specialist Eric Brevig (he worked on Total Recall, among other films), doesn’t skimp on the spectacle, though any movie set in caves and abandoned mine shafts – time for a mine-shaft-cart roller coaster ride! – is, by definition, an overdose of blacks, browns and, ahem, “Earth tones.”

Fraser, as he proved in the Mummy movies, has a lightness to his performances that keeps this from turning tedious. The short running time helps, too.

Is it fantastic as film fantasy? Not really. But then, if you’ve got anything in memory to compare it to, it’s not for you. As a fun piece of kids’ sci-fi, Journey has science and pseudo-science and cliff-hanging action, all flung at you in those wacky 3-D glasses.

Let this be your guide. “If you’re old enough to recall any earlier Journey to the Centre of the Earth, you’re too old for this one.”

Unless, of course, you need more cheese in your diet.

Reviewed by Roger Moore WALL-E Starring: Fred Willard, and the voices of Ben Burtt, Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver, John Ratzenberger Directed by: Andrew Stanton Rated: G 92 minutes WALL-E, a savvy sci-fi Pixar comedy, has almost no dialogue.

But with images and sound effects alone, it touches, it teaches and it tickles. It’s the best Pixar film since Finding Nemo.

Some 700 years in the future, Earth is a vast wasteland. Literally.

Garbage clogs the ruined streets of ruined cities, from the sewers

all the way into orbit (space junk). Humans have so trashed the joint that they’ve abandoned the planet for a gigantic spaceship, leaving robots behind to clean up the mess.

And the last one working on this project is WALL-E, a cute little Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-class. He’s a trash compactor with eyes, gears, a fading finish and a job, a “directive.”

He compacts the trash cubes that he then stacks into vast obelisks of junk.

WALL-E has a pet roach (roaches will survive the apocalypse) and a curiosity about the people who left all these Frisbees, toasters, VHS tapes, cigarette lighters (and Luxo Pixar lamps) behind.

And WALL-E is lonely.

Then a spaceship drops a “probe” robot, a sleek, white, floating dynamo (it’s meant to look like an Apple product) with a ray gun and a temper. She’s called EVE, and her “directive” is finding signs of life. WALL-E, who whiles away his off-hours watching songs and dance numbers from Hello Dolly on tape, is in love.

Events conspire to hurl them back to the EVE’s Mother Ship, where WALL-E is treated to the future of the human race. We’re all clueless, zoned-out sedentary fatties, hooked on video and cell phones, sipping super-sized drinks, “consuming” whatever the mega-corp BNL (“Buy ‘N’ Large”) view-screens tell us to buy, floating around in our we’re-too-fat-to-walk carts. It’s a vision of Wal-mart Nation run amok.

WALL-E must accidentally shake the humans out of their complacency, out of their fat-carts, back into our humanity. That’s sort of the mission of the movie, too.

Director Andrew Stanton, who made the more verbal but equally heartfelt Finding Nemo, coordinates a flurry of funny bits that have WALL-E reacting to fire extinguishers, brassieres and car alarms, but making friends wherever he goes. And Stanton finds the poignancy in a “thing” that cares more about our world than we do.

With “WALL-E”, the “Toy Story” studio ditches the chatty rat in a chef ’s hat and talking cars and gets back to its own prime directive – visually oriented kid-friendly cartoons with heart.

“WALL-E” is preceded by “Presto,” a mildly amusing, similarly dialogue-free sight-gag driven short about a hungry bunny and the magician who refuses to feed him at his own peril.

Reviewed by Roger Moore INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM October 2008 95

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Clooney’s punt fails to clear the posts George Clooney starred in and directed Leatherheads, but Roger Moore thinks the kick missed its goal Leatherheads Starring: George Clooney, Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce.

Directed by: George Clooney Rated: PG-13 (for brief strong language) 110 minutes Clooney, his editor and his cinematographer treat this the way he did his last directing job, Good Night and Good Luck. He thought “period piece.” He thought “sepia-toned” colours and “pictorially pretty.”

Doesn’t Clooney remember Steve Martin’s golden rule? “Comedy is not pretty.”

In 1925, professional football is failing. The teams, pick-up squads of miners, veterans and farm labourers, stage knock-down, drag-out brawls in nearly empty cow pastures, games that often end with more knock-down, drag-out brawls. Dodge Connelly (Clooney) is a co-owner/star of the Duluth Bulldogs. They can’t manage a road trip without some franchise – Toledo, Decatur or Milwaukee – folding. What the league needs is a draw.

That’s where Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (Krasinski) comes in. The Princeton star is the toast of the land, a decorated World War I hero who pulls in 40,000-plus per game. If Dodge can con the squeaky-clean Rutherford’s manager (an oily Jonathan Pryce) into a deal, maybe the league will be saved. Before you can sing a verse of Hold that Tiger, the deed is done.

Lexie Littleton (Zellweger) is the fly in that ointment. She’s a Chicago Tribune reporter assigned to uncover the truth about Rutherford’s war heroism. She could blow the lid off the whole league-saving deal.

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“You’re the kinda cocktail that comes on like sugar, but kicks you in the tail,” Dodge snarls.

“Stop it. You’re just acting like a big baby because you miss your mother’s bosoms,” Lexie snarls herself.

It must be love.

The movie is filmed “slow” and cut slower. This should have been a 90-minute fun-and-gun sprinkled with zingers. Instead it’s a 110-minute slog through the mud with pauses for an occasional laugh.

It’s watchable, but Clooney’s expressions when he takes a punch and Zellweger’s patented pursed lips (she makes a pretty good Barbara Stanwyck) hint at the movie that might have been.

If the real NFL had started off this tired, we’d be spending our Sundays watching jai alai.

Reviewed by Roger Moore Doomsday Starring: Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, David O’Hara, Craig Conway and Malcolm McDowell Directed by: Neil Marshall Rated: R (for graphic violence, profanity, brief nudity) 105 minutes The British are better at developing female action stars than we are, recognizing that high cheekbones and a supple trigger finger make an irresistible combination.

First Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies and now Rhona Mitra in Doomsday, an intriguing if derivative sci-fi thriller.

To play a deadly commando in the year 2035, Mitra, best known to American audiences for her stint on Boston Legal, has her hair cut in an ultra-angular shag so that she resembles Victoria Beckham on steroids.

You know it’s the future because Mitra has a detachable eyeball that doubles as a rolling surveillance and recording device.

And cigarettes are prohibitively expensive (wait, that’s already happened).

When signs of life emerge in Scotland, which had been sealed off from the rest of the world decades before, following the outbreak of a monster virus, Mitra is sent in to investigate.

Her mission goes off the tracks when she runs into a contingent of savage rowdies in Glasgow. They look startlingly like refugees from Mel Gibson’s Mad Max films with their mohawks, mascara, magenta hair, studded dog collars and insatiable thirst for blood.

They even have their own Thunderdome, a combination rock concert, pep rally and open-air barbeque pit. The theme song for this circus comes fittingly from Fine Young Cannibals.

Up in the rainy Highlands, in a gloomy castle, a mad – or just angry? – scientist (Malcolm McDowell) rules over a cruel medieval society. He doesn’t have knights; he has executioners. And he is no happier to see a visitor from the larger world.

Most fantasy-action films blow their budgets in the first halfhour, and limp home with their makeup smeared. Doomsday is unusually patient, smartly saving most of its fireworks for the later innings.

One caveat: The film has more blood splatter than a dozen zombie movies. If you can handle that, Doomsday’s drunken mashup of futuristic and feudal is surprisingly satisfying. And when Mitra squints her beautiful eyes, you’d follow her right into the jaws of hell.

Reviewed by David Hiltbrand