I assume Phil Goff would like to be Prime Minister of New Zealand. He has every reason to think he deserves the job. He’s served a lengthy apprenticeship, having come into Parliament in 1981, the same year as Helen Clark. And he’s had a distinguished career as an MP and Cabinet Minister. He’s highly intelligent and well-informed on a whole range of portfolios from Justice to Foreign Affairs. And he comes from good Labour stock.

Goff and his party are languishing in the polls at the moment, but their figures are actually better than Helen Clark’s and Labour’s were in early-mid 1996. Both the party and its leader then looked like dog-tucker. In my book, Helen, Portrait of a Prime Minister, she takes up the story:  Read the rest of this entry »

Bath tragedy: Mother’s fight to save baby This was the Herald’s front page headline yesterday. The subhead read: Twin dies after being left for ‘just minutes’.

From the story we learned that ‘a desperate young mother frantically tried to revive her baby daughter after finding the infant floating face down in the bath next to her twin sister.’

But the mother’s efforts were unsuccessful and the baby later died in Starship Hospital. The story continued:

‘Police are investigating the death but say it’s too early to know if charges will be laid…. It is understood the mother briefly left her daughters in the bath while she went to get something ready for them.

‘”It was just a matter of minutes,” Detective Michelle Shepherd, of the Waitakere child abuse team, said. “She immediately scooped her out of the bath. She phoned the ambulance who talked her through doing CPR.”‘

The remainder of the story highlighted the dangers of leaving small children unattended in the bath.

The story was back on the front page again this morning:

Mother of bath tragedy child on CYF list

Read the rest of this entry »

Reuben Strahan - 18 hours old

 A few days ago I had  an email from my oldest friend, Ivan Strahan.  ’Oldest’ in both senses of the word - Ivan and I were at school and university together in Belfast. Now semi-retired, he lives in the lovely little seaside town of Donaghadee with his gorgeous wife Claire. You may have heard of Donaghadee,  perhaps as the chorus of The Old Orange Flute: ‘Toora loo, toora lay, Oh, it’s six miles from Bangor to Donaghadee.’ [I know, it doesn't rhyme!]

Ivan and I are in regular email correspondence. Regular from him at least; I’m a hopeless correspondent. But this email was special. It was to announce the arrival of Ivan and Claire’s first grandchild:

‘The new arrival made an appearance yesterday, 1st March.  A baby boy, 8lb. 5oz., fair hair, no complications, mother and baby exceptionally well. Attached photos taken at 18 hours old.’

The new baby’s name is Reuben, a name I happen to be particularly fond of since one of my own grandchildren, and my first male grandchild, is also called Reuben.

Ivan has been a little bit anxious about being a grandfather, so I sought to reassure him by sending him the script of ‘Second Chance Dad’, which I wrote for National Radio’s Top of the Morning programme in 1998. Curiously enough, it was broadcast on the occasion of my own grandson Reuben’s fourth birthday.

***

Grandchildren are special. Talk to any doting grandparent - and ‘doting’  grandparents are the sole variety - and they will inform you, with absolute assurance, that their grandchild is the most intelligent, the most beautiful, the most talented creature that ever breathed air. Where their children’s children are concerned, grandparents are devoid of modesty, without shame, incapable of rational assessment. The child may be the ugliest thing that nature spawned, it may have the manners of a tomcat, the intelligence of a flea, the personality of a rock, and all the charm of masticated chewing-gum, but to its grandparents it will remain the apotheosis of every human virtue, a thing of beauty, whose loveliness increases and is a joy for ever - to paraphrase Mr Keats. Read the rest of this entry »

Mine: He just doesn’t get it.

The ever-brilliant Tapu Misa’s column in this morning’s Herald.

Twice during the week I had occasion to grab a bite of lunch by myself in a local café. The proprietor of this establishment has had the good sense to furnish his patrons with a pile of magazines to read. Not the sort of stuff you find in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms - tattered copies of the Woman’s Weekly and Readers Digest, dated July 1995, and back-copies to 1943 of the National Geographic with articles on the long-lost Fakawi tribe of the upper Amazon.

(I don’t wish to mock the National Geographic. It was the only magazine in which a frustrated Belfast adolescent could find pictures of half-naked women. Admittedly they were pigmy women, and some had plates in their lips, but Irish beggars can’t be choosers. As they said during the potato famine, ‘Be grateful for small Murphies.’)

No, these were top-class magazines obtained by the café from the shop across the road - GQ, Arena, Vanity Fair, that sort of thing.

Now the real reason why these magazines are there is not that the café’s patrons are bored out of their trees and desperate for something to read. The real reason why the magazines are there is to hide the embarrassment, to cover the shame of that most tragic and guilt-laden of creatures - the solitary diner.  Read the rest of this entry »

NZ Bus has bowed to blackmail and changed its mind about allowing the slogan there’s probably no god - now stop worrying and enjoy your life to appear on the sides of its buses.

As a commercial operator, the company is entitled to make that decision. It no doubt reasoned that disgruntled theists would stop travelling on its buses and might well start a campaign to encourage others to do the same.

The god-botherers must believe that their creed is pretty weak if they see something as innocuous and understated as this particular slogan as representing a threat. Most atheists would say there is almost certainly no God, conceding only that it isn’t possible to prove the case one way or the other. The non-existence of God comes as near as possible to being a fact, since there is absolutely no empirical evidence to support a claim to the contrary.  Read the rest of this entry »

Ross Giblin/The Dominion Post

 Why should we care about Radio New Zealand?

Because it is the only broadcast medium in the country that takes the time to examine issues of consequence to New Zealanders at length and in depth. It can do so because, and only because it is a non-commercial radio network. It is not beholden to advertisers, does not need to concern itself with ratings - though many of its programmes outrate its commercial competitors - and its programmes are not interrupted or abbreviated by the irritating presence of advertisements.

Radio New Zealand’s success in commanding a large and loyal audience with programmes such as Morning Report, Nine to Noon, Checkpoint, Afternoons, Kim Hill’s (and formerly my own) Saturday morning show, gives the lie to the proposition that the public are not interested in social and political debate or intelligent conversation. They are.

In contrast the free-to-air commercial television channels offer us quasi ‘current affairs’ programmes such as Close Up and Campbell Live whose function is less to inform than to entertain and whose mandate is to retain the ratings momentum generated by the channels’ preceding news, sport and weather packages.

The entertainment ethos that drives these programmes - and the channels’ network news bulletins as well - is that the viewer has a limited attention span, requires constant stimulation and novelty, and has little appetite for the serious examination of social and political issues. To be palatable, what information the programmes offer must be served up in tasty, bite-sized chunks. Nothing too long, nothing too tough, nothing requiring chewing. The viewer must be given no excuse to reach for the remote to change the channel. Read the rest of this entry »

Lunchtime today. I’ve made some lettuce and tomato sandwiches for Judy and me. (Mollenberg Swiss Bake sandwich bread, Heinz Seriously Good Mayonnaise, butter, salt, pepper.) Yummmmm!  And two cups of Bell tea. (I don’t feel alive till I’ve had it.) I take the sandwiches out and put them on the table that sits on the deck that overlooks our lovely Herne Bay garden. It’s a beautifully still, balmy Auckland day. I call Judy and go back for the cups of tea. Just as I take my first step from the kitchen onto the deck, one of the neighbours at the back of our property starts up his petrol-driven hedge trimmer. We retreat indoors and close the doors and windows.

If I were paranoid, the timing would suggest that the neighbour had been waiting for us to sit down with our sandwiches and tea and had started up his petrol-driven hedge trimmer at this particular moment as part of a campaign to drive us from the district.

But I’m not paranoid. My neighbour is almost certainly at work and has no idea that Judy and I are about to sit down and enjoy a quiet lunch in our lovely garden. And it  isn’t actually him wielding the petrol-driven hedge trimmer. One of an army of professional gardeners who make a more-than-decent living from servicing the properties in our street alone, is the source of the appalling racket. And our neighbour would have no reason at all to want to drive us from the district. We’re very quiet, responsible people.  Read the rest of this entry »

Pic: Lawrence Smith

Those who regard New Zealand prisons as hotels  or holiday camps should read Rosemary McLeod’s excellent piece on Paremoremo in todays Sunday Star Times.

I have been to several New Zealand prisons to meet or interview men convicted of murder or manslaughter, including Dean Wickliffe, who shot a Wellington jeweller during the course of a robbery and gained further  notoriety by twice escaping  from Paremoremo, John James Murphy, convicted of murdering a young woman on Papaparaumu Beach and burying her body in the sand, and Dr David Minnitt who shot his wife Leigh and was found guilty of manslaughter. I’ve also given talks to prison inmates and made television programmes about their life inside.

On every occasion when I have spent time in a New Zealand prison, even those most forward thinking in their approach to crime and punishment, it has taken me days and sometimes weeks to overcome the deep depression, the black despair  which overtook me as I walked free through those gates and back into my normal life.

I have formed the view that no one is competent to express a view on New Zealand prison life until they have shared that experience.

Pic: stuff.co.nz

“Key booted for Brooke by TVNZ” was a front page headline in this morning’s Herald. Shock! Horror!

The story began: “Television NZ bumped Prime Minister John Key from its prime-time current affairs show so it could feature former All Black Robin Brooke saying sorry for groping a teenage girl.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s Herald makes interesting reading for anyone who thinks that, despite his Wall Street millions, John Key’s state house background makes him more sympathetic to those on lower incomes. GST is to rise by up to 2.5%. Such an increase disproportionately penalises those at the bottom of the economic heap - lower income earners and beneficiaries - since a much greater proportion of their income is spent on essential items such as food, power and rent. They are to be compensated by an unspecified decrease in personal taxation and an unspecified increase in benefits and Working for Families.

On last night’s Campbell Live, the Prime Minister gave Campbell a guarantee that lower income earners or beneficiaries would be no worse off after the changes in the budget. ‘No worse off’, but not necessarily ‘any better off’. Middle and higher income earners, on the other hand,  will of course be better off as a result of any decrease in income tax, since that is an economic truism. So, in a nutshell, the rich will get richer and the poor stay where they are, which in real terms means ‘go backwards’. Read the rest of this entry »

In an earlier incarnation, more than a quarter of a century ago, I was contracted by the State Services Commission to media train public servants. With my Fair Go colleague Judith Fyfe - she of the huge, eccentric specs - we put people from pretty well every government department through crash courses on handling the press, radio and television. We enjoyed these sessions and so, mostly, did the participants. But, after a time, we began to notice that the personalities, and even the wardrobes of our students, very much reflected the departments they came from.

So the Foreign Affairs people were witty, urbane and looked as though they’d just stepped out of a Moss Bros commercial.

The Social Welfare people were rather worthy, appeared not to have had time to brush their hair, and their wardrobe must have come from their local op shop. We concluded that this might be deliberately intended to help them fit in with their clients.

The Treasury people, who all had first class honours degrees from Oxbridge, were dressed like university dons and invariably began by making it absolutely clear that they had nothing to learn from anybody, least of all subhuman media whores like us. We enjoyed reducing them to gibbering wrecks during the interviews. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: TV3

NZ Listener

I really shouldn’t have brought my laptop to Vietnam. We intended  to do the occasional blog on our travels and leave it at that. But the temptation to check out what was happening in Godzone - there’s not much in the Hoi An Times - was too hard to resist, so I took a peep this morning at the Kiwi Sunday rags. Had the government changed? Had Herne Bay been declared a disaster zone in our absence? Had Phil Goff rocketed in the polls? Had Bainimarama invited Helen Clark to act as mediator in the NZ-Fiji standoff? Had Lockwood Smith introduced smacking for naughty MPs? You know - the really big stuff.

No, nothing much had changed since we left two weeks ago. According to the Herald on Sunday, the really big news was that John Campbell might be sacked.

I like and admire John. He’s a talented broadcaster and a really nice person. That’s the problem really, I can’t be in the same room with John because I’m a diabetic. My sugar levels go off the scale. Read the rest of this entry »

You know there’s something amiss with your holiday when you wake up thinking how nice it would be if you were going home. That was first thing this morning.

We’d taken the hour long flight from Hanoi to Hue on Vietnam Airlines the previous day without incident, other than the fact (agreed by all the passengers) that the First Officer who was flying the plane was either drunk or had yet to pass Piloting 101. To be fair, he was OK on the flat bits; it was taking off and landing that had him stumped. People were crossing themselves and praying as we thundered endlessly down the runway on take-off with absolutely no sign of actually taking off.

‘We’re going to run out of runway,’ the plump American lady in the seat next to me said. She had barely finished the sentence than we were in the air. A steep climb was followed by a stomach-losing, roller coaster dive and a collective passenger cry of ‘Wow!’. Read the rest of this entry »

Pic: John Selkirk

Pic: John McCombe

Pic: John Selkirk

The issue of ‘celebrity justice’ is in the news again - ‘famous’ Kiwis getting name suppression in criminal trials because publicity for their offending might  cause them ‘unreasonable hardship’. (I put ‘famous’ in quotes because when I was told the names of the defendants in two recent cases, I was none the wiser as to who they were.)

As Phil Taylor demonstrates in an excellent piece in this morning’s Herald, this is a complex question. On the face of it, the principle that we are all equal before the law should apply. The TV star and  the All Black should receive the same treatment from the justice system as everyone else.

I accept this principle. But should ‘the same treatment’ not include the same punishment for the same crime? I would have thought that it should. Read the rest of this entry »

Shahar Peer

For many years I have admired John Minto’s courage in taking a stand, often in the face or virulently hostile public opinion, on issues he believed in, most notably his opposition to sporting contacts with South Africa during the apartheid era.

But I can find nothing courageous about a group of protestors congregating outside the ASB Tennis Centre with loud hailers shouting at one Israeli woman player, “Blood, blood on your hands, freedom for Palestine’ and ‘Go home, Shahar’. ‘Intimidating, cowardly, inappropriate, embarrassing  and  pointless’ might all be better epithets.

And probably, though the concept may have little currency with these zealots, a singularly unsporting way of trying to put Shahar Peer off her game.  And counterproductive too, since I - a severe critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians - and I suspect many others, now hope that Peer takes the women’s singles title despite this barracking harassment.

What is happening in the Middle East cannot and should not be laid at the feet of one Israeli tennis player. Responsibility for the policies that have turned Palestinians into squatters in their own land belongs solely with the Israeli government. If we disagree strongly with those policies, then the appropriate course of action is to attempt to persuade the New Zealand government to impose sanctions against Israel, possibly including sanctions on sporting contacts.

When I’m occasionally asked what I think is the defining characteristic of the New Zealander, I invariably reply, ‘Above all, New Zealanders are a fair-minded people.’ For that very reason, I’m confident that while we might accept the idea of rowdy protests against the presence of a large Israeli sports team, very few New Zealanders will feel comfortable with an abusive demonstration against one woman tennis player, whose only crime is to be an Israeli citizen.

2.55 pm  Friday. Congratulations to Yanina Wickmayer who has just beaten Shahar Peer in closely fought straight sets. Peer was beaten not by the taunting abuse of the protestors outside the ground, but by a better player on the day.  An entirely satisfactory outcome.

 Had an email from my old friend Ivan Strahan in Belfast.  Ivan’s a bit worried about his mortality. People of his own age, and younger, are dropping like flies. ‘We are,’ he wrote, including me in this dire prognosis, ‘in the death zone.’

Death is a no-win situation for the atheist. If you’re right, you don’t get to tell anyone; if you’re wrong, everyone, including God, gets to tell you. That’s the scary bit.

There is of course an upside to being right - you don’t have to worry about being tormented for eternity by some divine psychopath. The downside is that you are inevitably going to find yourself, like Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue: ’stone dead, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, a stiff, bereft of life, snuffed it, up the creek and kicked the bucket, extinct in its entirety, an ex-parrot’. Well, an ex-atheist really. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ursula Abresch

One of the worst arguments I ever had in public was with my teenage son Olly and stepson Quentin. We were in a restaurant in Lower Hutt. Lorraine and Aaron Cohen had just been arrested for drug trafficking in Malaysia. The boys thought the Cohens deserved whatever they got. They knew the risks.

 I remember asking them if they were in favour of the death penalty. They said they were. I then began describing in graphic detail what happens when a prisoner is hanged, electrocuted, gassed, shot, given a lethal injection. At the end of each description, I heard myself screaming, ‘Is that what you’re in favour of? Come on, tell me, is that what you’re in favour of?’ I was red in the face and they were as pale as sheets. The whole restaurant was listening to this exchange. I had really lost my cool.  Looking back, I don’t feel too bad about it. I think I did the right thing. Perhaps not in the right way, but the right thing nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve followed this blog for a while you’ll have noticed that crime and punishment are predominant themes and that my position on these issues can be summarised as either pragmatic and enlightened or pie-in-the-sky wishy-washy liberalism. I’m not a great believer in punishment.

There are many reasons for this, the most important being that as a form of correction punishment is largely ineffective. We all want less crime, but putting people in prison for longer and longer doesn’t lead to less crime. It may in fact do the opposite.

Another important reason is that I’m a hard determinist, that is to say I don’t believe in free will. I’ve held this position since I was 16, long before the ever-expanding list of physical and personality traits that we now recognise as genetically determined had even been conceived.

Hard determinists have trouble with punishment, since blame can only attach to those with genuine freedom of choice.

Among my predetermined personality traits is laziness. If I weren’t so lazy, I would blog more often. But for the next few weeks I have an additional excuse. I’m on holiday. So I’ve decided to re-publish some columns I wrote for various newspapers and magazines over the years which have at least some relevance to the topics discussed on this site over the past year.   And where better to start than this piece from the Listener on why you really don’t have a choice. Read the rest of this entry »