PIcture: TV3

Though unconnected, the Weepu story followed close on the heels of widespread protest against Facebook which had effectively banned a photograph of a Sydney mother breastfeeding her baby from one breast while expressing milk with a pump from the other.

Both stories were about censorship. Facebook had censored the photograph of the Sydney woman because it breached its rule that a woman’s breast could only be shown if she were using it to feed a baby; any other depiction of a naked female breast was regarded as a gratuitous display.

The La Leche League, the New Zealand Colleague of Midwives and Plunket had used their influence to persuade the Health Sponsorship Council to censor a 2-second film clip of Weepu bottle-feeding his baby because, they argued, it would damage their message that ‘breast is best’. La Leche League director Alison Stanton observed, ‘It’s really important that those messages are consistent across the board.’  

The idea that a 2-second shot of even someone as famous and admired as Piri Weepu giving his baby a bottle, would persuade any parent to stop breastfeeding their child in favour of bottle-feeding is so utterly preposterous that it will not bear examination. And any ‘damage’ that it did would be infinitessimal compared to the damage this episode has done to the not entirely favourable opinion that many New Zealanders already appear to have, not of the League’s goals,  but of the stridency of their methods in promoting those goals. As a piece of public relations this was a disaster.

Equally disastrous were their attempts to control that damage. They declined invitations to appear on Close Up, Campbell Live or, to my knowledge, any other TV programme, leaving the field open to the already greatly loved and admired Piri Weepu to feature in a 6-minute interview on Campbell Live, holding his beaming and utterly captivating daughter, while he demolished their inane and fundamentally anti-democratic reasoning.

Linda Williams of the Maternity Services Consumer Council fronted up to defend that reasoning in an interview with Mike Hosking on Close Up. She struck me as a pretty smart woman, but the inconsistency of asserting the right of mothers  to breastfeed in public and be shown in the media doing so, while denying the right of fathers (and I assume many mothers) to be shown in the media bottle-feeding their offspring, seemed to escape her completely.

It needs to be recognised that this isn’t just an injunction against a famous footie player bottle-feeding his baby on TV; it is an injunction against any man or woman being shown on New Zealand television bottle-feeding a child. That is what ‘consistent across the board’ means in Alison Stanton’s statement, ‘It’s really important that those [pro breast-feeding] messages are consistent across the board.’ In other words, ‘no message or image suggesting a  viewpoint contrary to that of the La Leche League or other proponents of breastfeeding should ever be televised or published.’ That sort of injunction belongs in totalitarian states, Ms Stanton, not in New Zealand. And it invites the sort of name-calling with regard to your organisation’s methods of persuasion that I have avoided in this piece, but frankly came perilously close to using.

What is totally beyond me is why the Health Sponsorship Council bothered to seek your opinion at all and why they were so lily-livered as to act on it.  Bottle-feeding may not be ‘best’, but it does not kill 5,000 Kiwis a year, as smoking does. If the sight of Piri Weepu holding his baby daughter in his arms  while he bottle-fed her had served to help get across the message that a famous All Black, a ‘real man’, cares so much for the welfare of his family that he has declared his home a smoke-free zone; and if that message had stopped even one more person from  smoking, it would have been well worth it. We will of course never know.

La Leche has a positive message, but the delivery of that message has served to make many women who are unable to breast-feed feel like failures. I know because I have met some of those women.  When you have moved from informing parents on the relative merits of breast- and bottle-feeding to wanting to censor alterative viewpoints or practices, you have moved from helpful persuasion to harmful fanaticism.

This, as Alison Stanton sought to persuade us, was no ‘storm in a teacup’. The premise of the League’s and its supporters’ argument for deleting the 2-second clip was fatuous, but what it told us about their approach was positively frightening.

Michael, a friend of ours who is a well-known actor, was appearing in a stage production of  Sweeney Todd. The part required him to have lank, unkempt, greasy-looking hair. So he stopped shampooing or moisturising his golden locks and limited his toilette to simply letting the shower water run over his head.

The initial effect was that his hair did indeed fit the part – lank, unkempt and thoroughly unattractive. After a few weeks, however, the original sheen returned and, to his astonishment, his hair looked even better than it had before. It was soft, silky and luminescent. (I may be slightly exaggerating to make the point.)

When the production was over, he continued to wash his hair only in water, eschewing shampoo and conditioner. And he’s never looked back. 

I was sceptical when I first heard this story:

‘You can’t get your body clean just with water, you have to have soap. And you can’t get your hair clean just with water either, you need shampoo to get the dirt out and moisturiser to put back the natural oils the shampoo has taken out. Why do you think they sell all those shampoos and moisturisers in the supermarket, if people could do without them?’

Judy gave me her ‘Irish idiot’ look:

‘To empty the pockets of people like you perhaps.’

I decided to give it a go. For the first couple of weeks my hair looked lifeless. (I think ‘lifeless’ is what they say in the ads.) By the third week, it started to look OK.  By the end of the month it was looking really good, not ‘luminescent’ perhaps, but definitely shiny, soft… and clean.

‘There you see!’ said Judy, employing the traditional female coup de grace. ‘The natural oils in your hair have come back. It looks great.’

It did. It does. And I can’t be absolutely sure that it doesn’t  also look rather less grey and rather more auburn than it did before.

‘Maybe those shampoos and conditioners strip the colour out of your hair as well as the natural oils,’ I volunteered.

‘Maaayyybeee,’ said Judy. ‘Or it could just be a trick of the light.’

Well, there you have it. I’ve been washing my hair under the shower without the assistance of shampoo or conditioner for about three months now. It’s quicker, cheaper and, as Sweeney and I can verify, you’ll never be lovelier.

While I have absolutely no doubt that the Occupy protestors against global corporate greed and the ever-increasing gap between the world’s rich and poor are correct in their analysis and that their anger is justified, I’m less impressed by their methods.

The logic of tent-squatting in civic squares eludes me. It serves merely to annoy and alienate the general public, whose support the squatters presumably want.

More importantly, it cannot achieve its aim which is to remedy entrenched global injustice through small scale local action. If you were to ask the protestors what they actually want New Zealanders to do, other than joining them in their protest, I doubt that you would get a coherent answer. 

An even more interesting question might be: what would have to happen, either globally or in New Zealand,  for you to be sufficiently satisfied to voluntarily end your protest, remove your tents and go away?  I’m reasonably confident that nothing they might propose would be remotely within the realms of possibility. It follows that this sort of protest action can have no foreseeable end, since there is no feasible way for the citizenry or local or national government to meet their demands. If all they are going to do is say, ‘This is really bad and it’s got to be fixed, and we’re not moving until it is,’ they will be squatting in their tents for years and quite possibly for the rest of their lifetimes.

This in turn serves, rightly or wrongly, to promote the view that someone who has the time to sit in a tent for days, weeks, months and possibly years, cannot be a very productive citizen and may indeed be protesting on the public purse.

What the protestors may not realise is that their aim of reducing the gap between rich and poor is supported by left-wing political parties both in this country and around the world and that those parties are much more likely to bring about the sort of structural economic changes which they want than squatting in tents in civic squares and getting up the noses of other people.

More probably they have contempt for traditional party politics and dismiss the democratic process as corrupt and serving the interests of the privileged few. It would be interesting to know how many of them belong to a political party and how many vote.

I detect a note of cynicism on my part in that last comment. But watching and listening to the protestors on television, I cannot help wondering whether they see entrenched global inequity as an opportunity as a much as a cause.

Here’s the tape that’s caused all the fuss. Fairfax has confirmed that it’s the real thing.

After listening to it, you might well decide that it is truly a storm in a teacup. But – it got Winston Peters and his motley crew into Parliament, so the PM may now be wishing he’d released it on the spot!

It’s difficult to decipher, but here’s a link to a transcript on The Jackal’s blog.

The children who gave their parents a ride on the ill-fated balloon would, he said,  ‘be consumed with feelings of guilt and regret despite others telling them it was not their fault.  They would also be thinking that other family members would be blaming them for their parents’ deaths, even though that wouldn’t be true at all.’

Mr Kirker’s speculations also included the observation that ‘the scenario was similar to that of the 9/11 victims, and the terror attacks might have put the thought to jump in Chrisjan Jordaan’s and Alexis Still’s  minds.’

And, in case Herald readers were wondering who jumped first:

‘Mr Kirker said it would usually be the man who would take the lead in that situation and would suggest jumping from the basket to the woman.’

I expressed myself disgusted with the rank insensitivity of this piece of crass sensationalism. Most followers of this site agreed.

Since the post appeared, I have received emails from Wayne Hopping, a cousin of balloon pilot, Lance, and from Vidi Chandra whose parents Howard and Diana Cox died in the disaster: Their comments about the Herald speak for themselves.

 Wayne Hopping wrote:

Thank-you, Mr. Edwards, for your article revealing evidence of how the mainstream media conflate entertainment with news. It is no wonder they’re in critical care and on life support, waiting for someone to pull their plug. That couldn’t happen soon enough!

Some of my family members are haunted by Lance’s last few moments of life without The Herald employing staff whose emotions supercede logic and covet pseudo-science flatulence to disguise that as news. They only add to our grief. Shame on them!

This is the email I received a couple of days ago from Vidi Chandra:

Dear Brian

Your post on the unhelpful and unseemly speculation on the balloon crash last moments by the ‘expert’ filled me with hope that there it’s not just me that finds this outrageous and disgusting reporting.

I am one of the children mentioned in the article which speculates I will be  ‘filled with the natural feelings of regret’. I neither gave my parents the balloon ride as a gift nor ‘watched in horror as it erupted in a ball of flames’. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

My partner complained to the NZ Herald but they have not replied. I am about to ask them to take the article down again.

I found a reporter hiding in the garden of my mother’s house who identified himself as working for the NZ Herald in the days after the tragedy. They are truly scum.

Thank you for sticking up for standards of reporting and decency, I have always valued your opinion and respected your work.

Kindest regards

Vidi

I suddenly had this yen for luncheon sausage. It was the sort of yen  I still occasionally get for a cigarette after a quarter of a century of not smoking. You’re suddenly taken unawares by some distant need, some powerful repressed impulse  that has fought its way up from the depths of your subconscious to confront you. ‘God, I’d love a cigarette.’ ‘I could kill for a piece of luncheon sausage.’

The cigarette yen is no problem. I used to know a very charming, urbane share broker called Alfie Des Tombe who could smoke just three cigarettes after dinner each night and that was that. I envied him but I could never be like him. I know that if I smoked one cigarette tonight, I’d hate the taste, probably choke on the smoke and feel quite nauseous. But within a week I’d be back to 20 a day. Where cigarettes are concerned I’m an addict and I’m not going to tempt fate.

As for the luncheon sausage yen, I really don’t know where it came from. Making kids’ lunches maybe in another life.  When they’d gone, the last piece, doused with HP sauce, rolled into a tube and down the hatch.  Or maybe in a white bread sandwich with a little salt and some hot English mustard. Divine!

Well, ‘divine’ in memory at least.  I had to have some luncheon sausage.  

I could find no luncheon sausage at the upmarket New World supermarket at Victoria Park. Maybe supermarkets didn’t sell luncheon sausage any more. Maybe nobody made luncheon sausage any more. Or maybe you could only get luncheon sausage from a butcher. I headed down West End Road and up the hill again to the Westmere Butcher.

The Westmere Butcher, you need to understand, isn’t just somewhere you go to buy meat; the Westmere Butcher is an Auckland institution. Its status, to use an overworked, but in this case entirely accurate epithet, is ‘iconic’. It is regularly voted Best Butcher in Auckland by Metro magazine. Its meat is of the highest quality and nothing is too much trouble for the army of butchers waiting behind the counters to serve you.

Their pork sausages are to die for.

‘Two dozen pork sausages please. Can you divide them into six lots of four. In plastic bags please. We pop them in the freezer and take four out when we feel like sausies for tea.’

‘Six lots of four pork sausages in plastic bags coming up. That be all?’

‘That’s all today thanks.’

The place is always packed. It was packed when I arrived on my luncheon sausage quest. Must have waited, oh, 90 seconds before the young woman behind the counter asked me what I wanted.

‘I was wondering if you had any luncheon sausage. Not even sure that any one makes it anymore.’

‘No!’ she snapped. ‘We don’t sell that sort of rubbish here.’

I don’t know if all the other customers eyes were on me at that moment or if a stunned silence actually descended on the shop. It felt like it.

‘What did he say?’

‘I’m not sure, but I think he asked for luncheon sausage.’

‘Oh my god, he didn’t, did he? Not luncheon sausage. Not at the Westmere Butcher. Is he mad?’

The young woman behind the counter was suggesting some alternative packaged meats with Italian sounding names, but I was already scuttling out of the shop, my tail between my legs. It would be all over Grey Lynn, Ponsonby, Herne Bay, St Mary’s Bay and Freemans Bay by tomorrow:

‘He asked for luncheon sausage.’

‘Never!’

‘But that’s not the whole story.’

‘How do you mean – not the whole story?’

‘At the Westmere Butcher!’

‘Oh my god, you’re kidding.  And it was Brian Edwards?’

‘Irish. No class. No breeding.’

‘No taste!’

At Countdown I could have bought enough luncheon sausage to feed an army of waifs on their way to school.  Pork, Ham & Chicken and my personal favourite ‘Savoury Luncheon Sausage’ speckled with peas and carrots and other unspecified vegetable goodies. I bought 138 grams of the Ham and Chicken and 118 grams of the Savoury for a total of $1.59, went home and scoffed the lot with HP Sauce and Hot English Mustard. Not together of course. Gross but wonderful.

You know, I don’t think the young woman should have said, ‘We don’t sell that sort of rubbish here.’ Not out loud at least. In publicly branding what I was asking for  as rubbish, she was branding me, her customer, too as someone without judgement or taste. Kinda snobby really.  One doesn’t expect that in these parts.

Now, anyone for a chip butty?

Health professionals in Auckland have proposed that smoking be banned in all outdoor public places in the city. At least I think that’s what they’ve proposed. The front-page story in this morning’s Herald isn’t entirely clear on whether the ban is intended to be universal within the Auckland City boundaries or restricted to certain public spaces.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether banning smoking in any outdoor public space can be justified in what we like to call ‘a free society’, a limited ban (on virtually anything) invites public confusion and is therefore much more difficult to enforce. A total ban, on the other hand, leaves no room for confusion or the excuse, ‘I didn’t realise you couldn’t smoke here.’

As I write this, a poll on the Herald’s website reports:

Excellent and sensible idea – 43%

 Good in theory -  27%

Not a fan but would go along with it – 4%

Outrageous, a step too far – 26%

That’s 74% of respondents variously in favour and 26% adamantly against. An unscientific poll of course, but indicative at least of majority support for banning smoking outdoors as well as indoors in public spaces.

So yes, if there were such a law, you would essentially only be able to smoke in private indoor locations, including your home and garden, other people’s homes and gardens with their agreement, and (I’m guessing here) other privately owned indoor premises with the agreement of everyone who ever used the premises.

Put even more simply, you would not be able to smoke in any outdoor location where  you might come into contact with another  member of the general public – on the street, in the park, on the beach, in children’s playgrounds, tramping, climbing, jogging, playing or just plain walking. 

I think it’s an excellent and sensible idea.

Smokers talk of their ‘right to smoke’ and indeed no one wants to take that right away from them. There’s really no difference between a person’s right to fill their lungs with tar and die from lung cancer and a person’s right to live on a diet of  junk food and sugar drinks and die of a diabetes-related condition or a heart attack. Please feel free.

But there is no right to pollute the air that others breathe with your smoke, including, I would suggest, your own family’s air, whether in the home or in the car. Especially in the car!  

There is no such thing as a right to do harm.

Anyway, the suggested ban has brought the usual money-based objections from business and the hospitality industry:

Auckland Council member Cameron Brewer said the real epidemic the city faced was obesity, not smoking

‘Smokers’, he said, ‘have got to smoke somewhere and if you try to introduce an outdoor ban, all that will do is see more retreat inside, lighting up in the family home or car, which is much more damaging to non-smokers.’

Not a very convincing argument, since the addictive nature of smoking almost certainly means that those people light up in the family home or car now, in addition to smoking outside.

And smokers don’t have to smoke. They can beat their addiction and stop smoking as millions of others world-wide have done.

But at lease Mr Brewer acknowledges the damaging effect of smoking on non-smokers.

He was also admirably in favour of more public education on the dangers of smoking. ‘That’s what works,’ he said. ‘Municipal meddling over the years hasn’t made one bit of difference,’

Possibly not, but central government meddling certainly has made a huge difference.  The ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces is the most significant reason for the decline in smoking in New Zealand over the past decade. As Heart of the City CEO, Alex Swney,  observed, ‘When that was imposed people thought the world was going to end. But now it seems almost obscene that someone would light up in a restaurant. This would be the same as that – it’s just evolution.’

So there you have it – ‘Nanny State’ lurking in the wings again. I never had a nanny, but I’ve seen enough of them on telly to realise that they can be really annoying, always trying to stop you doing fun things like sticking your fork in the electric socket or swallowing a marble or shoving  a crayon up Rover’s bum. But when you become a big boy or girl and can think clearly, you come to understand that Nanny really had your best interests at heart and was right all along.

I hadn’t intended to deal with the issue on this site. The nation’s ‘outrage’ about the crime and the judge’s remark have been well canvassed in other forums. But the defences of the judge’s remarks by her colleagues in the law, published in the press this morning, struck me as so inadequate that I need to respond.   

Manukau barrister Kate Leys informed us that, ‘There’s a statutory requirement upon the court to make sure the young person understands and participates in the proceedings’. I really can’t see the relevance of that to complimenting the rapist of a five-year-old girl on being neatly dressed.

Auckland barrister Maria Pecotic agreed with her Manukau colleague: ‘It is to encourage the young person to continue to take that care.’ That argument seems to me to suggest, ‘Well, he may have raped a 5-year-old girl, but at least he takes pride in his appearance.’ I come close to being ‘disgusted’ by that suggestion.

Youth advocate Megan Jenkins told us that a judge ‘might have seen the person three weeks earlier, and if there’s a difference, the judges will make comments on that.’  If I were the parent of a five-year-old girl, brutally assaulted and raped, would I find it appropriate for a judge to compliment the defendant on looking smarter at his second appearance than at his first? The question is rhetorical.

Professor Warren Brookbanks of the University of Auckland law-school said ‘what the judge was trying to do was to accept the mandate that young people appearing in court are to be treated as benevolently as possible.’ If Judge Munro had said, ‘It’s to your credit that you have  given yourself up and that you have expressed the wish to plead guilty,’ I would have found that acceptable. But it’s the very triviality of her compliment that goes to the heart of the insult which her remark offered the girl’s parents – the distance between the bad thing which the boy did (raping a five-year-old girl) and the good thing on which he was complimented (dressing nicely to come to court). That distance is a chasm so wide that to attempt to bridge it defies reason and human sympathy.

All of the arguments  in defence of Judge Munro were advanced within the context of the hearing having been in the Youth Court. In a sense the defendant’s age is therefore presented in mitigation of his crime. The media report that ‘the boy’s mother read in court a prayer written by him in which he asked God to forgive him’.  Leaving aside Her Honour’s (to me) extraordinary decision to allow this self-interested mumbo-jumbo to be delivered in her court at all, it’s difficult to reconcile this sympathetic emphasis on the youthfulness of the defendant with the nature of the crime which requires male sexual maturity and brutish force.

I don’t blame the defendant’s parents for doing everything in their power on behalf of their son. If he were my son, I would have done exactly the same thing, though without the prayer. That is what unconditional love for one’s children is all about. And they are to be applauded. They have behaved responsibly and well.

But the plain fact is that any lawyer will be at pains to persuade their client of the importance of looking both respectable and respectful when they appear in court, of making ‘a good impression’. And the more heinous the crime, the more important that impression is. Criminal defence lawyer, the late Mike Bungay QC, with whom I co-authored a book on murder in New Zealand, not only instructed his clients (primarily murderers and rapists) on the importance of dressing well in court, but often drew a chalk mark on the dock for his clients to look down at while listening to the evidence against them. Their bowed heads were intended to convey shame and remorse.

I very much doubt that ‘looking smart’ was this defendant’s own idea. It will have been on his lawyer’s and his parents’ advice and they were right to give it. But it is a strategy to suggest that something has changed. It was intended, as the prayer was, to say, ‘I am not the same young man who raped a five-year-old girl a matter of weeks ago. Just look at me. You can see that I am someone else.’ No doubt without intending to, Judge Munro validated that impression by complimenting the 16-year-old defiler on his appearance.

Here, finally, is what the little girl’s parents said:

‘We urge the court to consider the impact this has had and will continue to have for years on our daughter and our family.

‘We find it difficult to believe that that this boy who did this to our daughter three weeks ago can write beautiful prayers to God now.

‘Our daughter was fast asleep when this boy violated her  and stole something from her that can never be returned.

‘We felt the judge’s comment about the offender’s smart looking [appearance] was out of place.’

That was the impact of Judge Munro’ remark on them. That is what they felt. End of story.