Farewell, Walter...

Walter Hadlee has played his last innings. A creditable player at a time when New Zealand couldn't compete internationally, he was a dogged leader who brought together the likes of Bert Sutcliffe, John Reid, Martin Donnelly, Jack Cowie, and the much under-rated Merv Wallace. As with all the cricketers of his age, a seven year hole in Hadlee's time at the crease was attributable to World War II. Hadlee went on to become Chairman of New Zealand cricket: his gutsy character brought him into conflict with that other most dominant and bloody-minded cricketing personality of the 1970's, Glenn Maitland Turner.

Walter was an odd character. It takes a certain kind of obsessive mind to play test cricket. It takes an even more compulsive personality to captain his country; to breed three international cricketers is simply insane.

For the last sixty years Walter has been the grand old man of New Zealand cricket. His favourite party trick was based on his fanatical devotion to numbers and statistics. At a cocktail party, he would ask somebody their age and birthday. Within an instant, he would say: "Ah, you were born on a Tuesday."

Walter will now be debating Inzy's suspension with St Peter, and telling God what day He was born. Farewell, old chap.

The Life (And Death) Of Brian

Every political party has its clever people. They live and breathe the game of politics far more than policy itself. There was once a time in the National Party when a tiny group of activists were individually referred to, in private, as the “Nth most EVIL person in the National Party”. There were about four of them in total. They played poker, stayed up all night at Party conferences brokering information, and argued the future of right wing politics.

They existed as a de facto group of Young Turks, arguing for change in a tired old party that was destined for a long walk in the wilderness until they reformed their Old Guard. It was a strange assortment of Wellington-based folk: they loathed Winston and his coalition, and believed that after nine years of selling the same team to the public, the public would bite them back. 1999, and 2002, proved exactly that.

The Labour Party has had its cabals: their internal and external factional powerbrokers will plot and plan its future even when the going is good. Helen Clark, Pete Hodgson, Trevor Mallard, Steve Maharey, Phil Goff, and David Benson-Pope have no great policy framework for the country. They simply enjoy the thrill of wielding and trading political power. Their unity is contingent on their ability to read the political tea-leaves and stay ahead in the polls. When they fail in that respect, they disintegrate. It’s now a matter of survival for them, since they have become Labour’s Old Guard. It is tired and reactionary. As Helen Clark comes under fire for strategic mis-steps, her only instinct is to fight back as viciously as her instincts can.

The atmosphere at the Ellerslie Racecourse on election night, September 17, 2005, was electrifying. Don Brash, the rookie MP who had become rookie National leader in his first term, had managed to double National’s vote at the polls. There were well over 1,000 supporters present. In the space of a year, Brash had rebuilt the National Party from near annihilation to within a whisker of the Government benches. He had rebranded the Party, and in his wake, had brought forth a whole new battalion of MPs.

Twenty-three of National’s current MPs are new faces. They owe their places in Parliament directly to the brand that Don Brash took to the country last year. That, coupled with the overwhelming support he got for taking the leadership on before the election, make his personal support in caucus very strong.

Brash’s leadership position isn’t set in stone. It is dependent on his ability to keep National in the lead. But with an eight point difference, and gaining, between National and Labour, only an absolute moron would suggest that National dumps Brash. Bill English and John Key may have leadership ambitions: but both know that they are far better placed to inherit the Prime Ministership when Brash chooses to step down, than to cause squabbles in the Party that prevent either of them becoming Cabinet ministers after the next election.

It is now a statement of political fact that only a complete moron, or a Labour Party supporter, would advocate Don Brash relinquishing the leadership of the Party when he has Helen Clark, and the Labour Party, so clearly spread on the racks. To their credit, the Labour Party is saying precisely that. Not content with losing the battle over their misuse of taxpayer’s funds on the pledge card, and finding that their strategy of personal smear against Don Brash made them less popular with the public, they are simply calling for his head.

In the last week, Labour’s Pete Hodgson has issued no less than nine press releases calling for him to resign. It seems slightly bizarre that Hodgson, who is also Minister of Health, has had nothing health-related to talk about at the same time that Helen Clark vows off attack-politics. It is the equivalent of parliamentary stalking from Hodgson, and a strange kind of obsessive-compulsive behaviour from a man whose only strategic contribution to Labour in the last few weeks has been a strategic collapse of Labour’s support base.

Labour wants Brash’s leadership to become the issue. They need him to go if they have any chance of sneaking through another election. It’s understandable that they would target him. Yet they have become so blatantly obsessed with him that whatever they say from this point forward can only cement his leadership. Helen Clark’s government has become so untrustworthy that the more Labour attacks Brash, the more the public want him as Prime Minister.

National’s caucus, with one glaring exception, has been impeccably disciplined in recent weeks. They maintained a clear focus of attack on Labour’s corruption, and did not hold back from that clear focus when Labour started a dirty war. They did not retaliate on Labour’s terms. They maintained their dignity when Labour dragged National’s leader through the mud, and refused to speculate on Labour-driven spin on Brash’s leadership.

Labour has continued to lie and obfuscate, to its own detriment. Whereas once political commentators admired a Prime Minister who could stand up and openly claim that she had had conversations with Gallery journalists confirming various rumours, now the Gallery journalists are not prepared to go along with her spin. Kevin Brady, the Auditor-General, has made it clear that he will not accept untruths told about him, for the sake of the Prime Minister’s political expediency. That brilliant gall, which allowed Helen Clark to spin her way out of any controversy, is failing her. Her spin has lost any subtlety. Voters simply do not trust her.

Which brings me to Brian Connell. The Rakaia MP has studied Helen Clark over the past four years, and has formed the impression that he too is worth of a large office on the ninth floor. Except Connell has never understood subtlety. When a lone MP makes a dig at a party leader, it is wise to have other MPs supporting him. Connell hasn’t. The preposterous spectacle of the Labour Party egging Connell on, suggesting that Connell is a symptom of some gaping faction within the National Party, has ridiculed the mid-Canterbury MP. After writing his own political eulogy, by leaking discussions of a caucus meeting to the Independent’s Tim Donohue, Connell has finished his career himself.

Connell claims not to have been the leak after the caucus meeting. Instead, when the Independent story broke, Connell responded to media inquiries, saying that he was not the leak, but that since the information had been leaked, he was free to comment on it. That, of itself, constituted an act of shit-stirring that is unacceptable for a member of a political party. If Connell had said absolutely nothing to the general media after the original leak, it is possible he could have avoided sanction from the Party. That he chose to speak publicly confirming the caucus discussion demonstrates a baffling degree of political stupidity expected of Judith Tizard and her ilk. It’s not befitting of a National Party MP.

Connell is, of course, technically telling the truth about the caucus leak. Connell did not speak to Tim Donohue after the caucus meeting. Except two facts are crucial, and have not yet come to light. Firstly, Donohue, who is very close to Brian Connell, was able to quote events at the caucus meeting word-for-word. Secondly, Connell has refused to release his cellphone records on the day of the caucus meeting to the Whip’s office. Don Brash, and the National Caucus, have considerable reason to believe that during the caucus meeting, Connell’s cellphone was on, and open in a call to Tim Donohue. Connell didn’t have to comment to Donohue: he had the discussion verbatim anyway.

That act of sabotage by an MP has no place in the National Party. Brian Connell doesn’t represent any kind of tradition of “Young Turks” in any political movement, except the Labour Party.

They’re welcome to have him. With Taito Phillip Field on the way out, they may well need him.

The VRWC

Seems that there is a vast right wing conspiracy, after all.

He/she has published a song, Pay It Back.

I didn't know the Exclusive Brethren could sing so badly.

Bauble-Watch

Sometimes it's nice to get another reassurance that our Rt Hon Minister of Foreign Affairs is doing his best to protect the taxpayer's interest in state assets. Consider this confidence-inspiring response to a question in the House, concerning a Close Up programme the night before:

R Doug Woolerton: Did Television New Zealand accurately portray the interest that the Minister has taken in this case?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Absolutely no. Television New Zealand last night completely misrepresented my letter to Mr Robinson’s family. [...]

R Doug Woolerton: Why does the Minister believe that Close Up’s report is so at odds with other reports that he has received?

[....]

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Most of the reports on this matter are from reputable and highly professional Government agencies. The other report is a desperate attempt, with baseless tabloid journalism by a failing news organisation and its washed-up head of news, Bill Ralston, to win back the hundreds of thousands of viewers who are deserting Television New Zealand in droves. If this is the best that Mr Ralston has to offer the viewing public of New Zealand, it is little wonder that those who care about accurate news coverage that puts the facts before the egos of journalists are crying for his head.

Sinister Elements: Pete's Story

A close friend of mine (for the purposes of this post, I shall call him “Pete”) works for a large consulting firm. Pete has a nice home in an exclusive Auckland suburb. He and his wife drive new model European cars. He plays golf on Friday afternoons. He earns well over $500,000 a year. He has little interest in politics.

Pete guy lives a privileged lifestyle. He has done exceptionally well over the last seven years. Although the economy has been pretty good, and he has property investments that have funded his retirement twenty years before he is entitled to superannuation, he owes much of his success to Helen Clark, Michael Cullen, Trevor Mallard, Annette King, and Steve Maharey. Between them, these five Ministers have presided over the fastest growth in the State Sector that New Zealand has seen since 1935.

It is difficult for those who live outside Wellington to comprehend just how enormous this public sector growth has been. The ballooning of the state is the direct reason why 62 of New Zealand’s 100 largest employers are in the state sector.

This development has been very beneficial to certain business interests who have been smart enough to engage with Wellington politicians and bureaucrats. Pete is at the centre of one of these business interests. Like all good businessmen, he goes where the money is. And the amount of cash flowing out of government departments on very large-scale, multi-multi-million dollar projects, is astronomical. The State is spending seventeen billion dollars more today than it is six years ago. Pete’s very happy with how this Labour Government has helped his business.

Pete lunches and socialises with Cabinet ministers and senior officials on a regular basis. He is not the biggest biller of services to Government by any stretch, but his firm will probably provide $10 million in services to various government departments in the next financial year. There are some players in Pete’s industry that will bill an individual government department several times more than that on a single project.

Pete is a sensible guy. He gets good personal financial advice. He’s not a genuine high-net-wealth individual, but he’s getting there. Pete has structured his income through various legal devices so that he is paying tax on only $60,000 a year, and the rest of his income is attributed to loss-qualifying companies. Pete pays a net 6% income tax.

Pete doesn’t stand to gain from tax cuts under a National Government. He’s paying bugger-all tax as it is. His company is rolling in cash, based on services he’s selling to Government clients that have no commercial sense. They don’t know what they’re buying. Government doesn’t care what it’s buying. It has the money, so it must spend. And they’re buying from Pete and many other Petes in Wellington.

Just over a year ago, things changed for Pete. He understood that it’s sort-of fun for a while increasing margins to government clients who don’t care what they’re buying, and making large sums of money in the process: Pete became involved with a project working with people in another company that was charging even more outrageous amounts to Government departments that cared even less what they were buying. Project schedules were over-run, service levels on the project weren’t achieved, and project costs snowballed. The Government client paid the bills, and nobody on the project—the external firms, nor the department’s internal managers, the public servants—were held accountable.

Pete’s outrage at the waste and over-indulgence in the public sector that was making him so much dosh drove him to loathe the current government, and how it was blowing away titanic sums of money for no effect. The issue for him was no longer personal business gain, but core belief. Pete was not a political guy. He could talk to politicians and bureaucrats, and sell them ideas, but he kept out of politics. He didn’t particularly have a great affection for the National Party, but he could see how Labour was destroying New Zealand.

Pete’s decision to donate to the National Party didn’t come lightly. He did so very cautiously. He did it anonymously, without ever having met any National candidate or official. It wasn’t an astronomical sum, but enough for it to be declared. On election day I asked him if he wanted to come to an election-night party; he declined because it didn’t interest him, but wished us luck all the same.

This guy has never met a National Party official. Don Brash has never heard of Pete. Nor has any senior National Party official. And if Pete has it his way, they never will know that he was the source of a donation inspired by his anger and outrage at Labour’s excess in the public sector.

But that wasn’t the only reason Pete wanted to remain anonymous. Just as Pete, and countless another anonymous donors in 2005 donated to Don Brash’s National Party because they were disgusted with the thought of three more years of Labour’s squandering of opportunity, Pete wanted to remain anonymous out of fear. Just as Labour Ministers are now inventing fictitious insurance backers of the National Party, Pete knew the consequences of Labour Ministers knowing of his donation.

The Labour Party is vindictive. There was never going to be a guarantee that if he made a contribution to the National Party, that National would win the election. And Pete and his wife still have to make a living, whether or not Labour is in power. Pete knew that would have been a whole lot harder if his name had ended up on a National Party donors’ list.

History has shown Labour’s motivation to target people it does not like. The public sector's tentacles are very long, and Labour has tamed them reach in every corner that serves its interest. It is these sinister elements drive people to make anonymous donations. Those elements are the fear of reprisals by the Labour Government to a known anti-Labour supporter.

I don’t personally approve of anonymous donations to political parties. If the culture of fear has become so great—and Labour has shown that it will do anything to remain in power, even steal an election with taxpayer funds—then in my mind that shows even more reason why we should stand up and be counted. Far more people need to have the courage to stand up to Labour and say that we will not support graft, vote-buying, and corruption. The more people who are prepared to put their names to their support for National, the easier it will be for others to join us.

And the sooner we do that, the sooner we will be rid of this corrupt gang of political hooligans.

Field of Dreams

Pondering the outstanding cast from Labour’s South Auckland constituency, it’s easy to see why Mangere voters can do without Taito Philip Field for six months while they work out whether he’s a crook or not. Labour's stand-ins in South Auckland will do an outstanding job during Field's absence.

The reason is that Labour has an unparalleled cabal of brilliant and hard-working group of MPs in the Auckland region, who never balk at the opportunity to roll up their sleeves and put in a top performance for the team.

The MP for Mangere may have been banned from his constituency office, and from Parliament, while he sits at home on full pay (including electorate MP allowances) pondering the refurbishment of his seven residential properties and the general management of TP Field Developments Limited. Field does so in the knowledge that neighbouring Labour constituency MPs will be doing their best to represent the good people of Mangere on Field’s behalf.

George Hawkins, the former diligent and hard-working Minister who inspired so many, sits to Mangere’s South East, in Manurewa. Hawkins’ much-publicised mastery of his Police portfolio mean that crime will be a thing of the past once the Police have finished their investigation into the sitting Member.

Ross Robertson, the prolific and internationally-celebrated MP for Manukau East, is parked right next door to Field’s electorate. Robertson’s rapid rise through the Labour Party ranks over the last eighteen years to the dizzying heights of Assistant Speaker in the current Parliament mean that Field’s constituents will get a good hearing in the House.

Further to the North, Mangere’s constituents will have the resources of the admired and formidable Judith Tizard, MP for Auckland Central. Tizard, as the long-standing Minister for the National Archives and the National Library, will serve the reading interests of Mangere’s 18,000 speakers of Samoan and Tongan with aplomb.

Mangere is a General Electorate seat. Only one of the two Maori seats bordering Mangere is held by a Labour MP: Nanaia Mahuta in the Tainui seat is established in Wellington circles for her energy and vitality as a Minister outside Cabinet. Mahuta is also the Minister of Customs. Since Customs offices are often situated in close proximity to immigration offices, Mahuta is well qualified to represent Mangere’s constituents on immigration issues.

Yet no single Labour constituency MP in the area can fully replace Field's ingenuity for novel parliamentary methods. List MP Ann Hartley, although rejected by Northcote voters, is a one-time manager of the Child Abuse Prevention Society. She will be able to put her theories to good test, and eliminate child abuse from the Mangere electorate over the next six months.

Finally, List MP Darien Fenton, the especially telegenic former Vice President of the CTU, lives in the electorate. Fenton worked closely with Field in the Service Workers' Union, where they were organisers together. Fenton will be able to demonstrate a similar degree of compassion and concern for Mangere's least fortunate citizens as Field has managed over the last nine years.

Voters in Mangere can rest assured that for the next six months, their parliamentary interests are well-served by Labour’s Auckland team.

A La Recherche du Temps Urdu (In Remembrance of Things Urdu)

Cricket is a mystical game. It has its own traditions, culture, and history, which cannot be explained to the layperson. As for the rules of play, they are as ancient and as numinous as the cricket Gods themselves.

How possibly could a North American begin to comprehend the hallowed willow: that unforgiving mini-beast that requires loving application of linseed, and gently knocked in, so that it will last for just twenty-two matches, of which half will be rained out? How to enlighten the non-cricketer on the importance of the knocking-mallet: that if the willow hasn’t been treated before it strikes leather, the bat will shatter; that if knocked too heavily, the instrument will lose its spring and be forever dull and useless?

I have played a lot of cricket. At any one time, I would have three bats, each knocked to different degrees, which I would use depending on the playing conditions and my attitude to the game at hand. Each bat would last three seasons. They only lasted because I rotated them, and treated them and prepared them immaculately pre-season. For a non-cricketer to pick them up, they may have seemed heavy. For me, they were a finely-balanced extension of my left arm, prepared by me. I knew exactly what style of play was necessary for each bat. Nobody else was permitted to even pick them up. For a player to even suggest that was the equivalent of a novice violinist asking Nigel Kennedy to lend him his Stradivarius for practice.

There is one exception to my batting toolkit. It is a Duncan Fearnley Magnum, oversize, which is not a finely-tuned instrument. It is not an extension of my left arm. It is the batting equivalent of a clown shoe. If my Slazenger V800 was a high precision rifle with a laser-guided scope, then my Magnum is a daisy-cutter. If any other batsman can pick it up, let alone apply the back-lift when a cricket ball is bearing down at ninety miles an hour, they are welcome to do so. I would only ever use it near the end of the innings when I have out-concentrated the bowlers, and started spraying deliveries onto the pitch. As long as I put the bat within a few light years of the ball, the latter would find itself somewhere on the pavilion roof.

Thus cricket is a fanatical game that attracts fanatical people.

Cricket journalism is also a unique art. Because cricket writers have so many hours during a test match to compose their thoughts on a game in which nothing often happens, the quality of their output reaches poetic levels unseen in the mainstream media. Consider this from Amit Varma, two years ago, on a Test match between Australia and India. Varma achieves something that few mainstream journalists manage to convey: to place you inside the thrills and spills of a game that you regret not having watched. Jeremy Clarkson could have been a cricket commentator. Lord Denning, if he hadn’t opted for that oh-so-fleeting of judicial careers, could have done likewise. What Varma shows, in what may seem especially moronic to the non-cricketer, is that the game is even more sublime because there was no result.

After my third game in post-school cricket, I was called to give evidence to a Wellington cricket disciplinary hearing brought against my fellow opener. He had scored a few runs, and played and missed a ball outside his off stump. The ball brushed his pad on the way through to the keeper, and the keeper and the slip cordon appealed for a caught behind. The batsman, as was his habit, ignored the appeal and trudged off to square leg in his psychological preparation for the next delivery. He didn’t see the bowling umpire raise his finger, and was shocked when he heard the fielding team cheer that they had taken his wicket.

It was a bad umpiring decision. The umpire later stated that he didn’t think the batsman had hit the ball, but thought he was walking, so granted the appeal. But what happened in the next few moments was crucial: in the milliseconds of release of frustration at a bad decision, the batsman gave what the umpire called an “evil” look. The player shook his head as he walked past the square-leg umpire, chanting quietly: “No, no, no, NO!” I could just make out what he said.

At the time, it wasn’t clear whether he was saying this to himself, for his own lapse in concentration in snicking the ball, or genuine frustration with the umpire. The player was stood down for six weeks for voicing dissent.

Because cricket is an intensely mental contest played over very long periods of time, cricket journalists are less well-disposed to cover rapidly-changing events over short interludes. The treatment of Darrell Hair in his decision, on the fourth day of the Fourth Test between England and Pakistan, to call off the match, has spread headlines well beyond the cricketing world, but in the process has lacked the critical analysis that makes cricket such an exquisite game.

Law 42 of the Laws of Cricket specifically covers the issue of ball-tampering. A player is allowed to clean the ball and polish it, but not change the condition of the ball. The umpire is the sole judge of whether ball-tampering has occurred, and has various sanctions he can apply. One of those sanctions is awarding five runs to the batting team and changing the ball.

Darrell Hair judged, rightly or wrongly, that the Pakistani team had deliberately changed the condition of the ball, well beyond merely polishing or cleaning it. England was awarded five penalty runs. In the scope of an individual match, that sanction is far less severe than a bad decision on a dismissal.

What happened next strikes at the very heart of the game of cricket, and the bystander struggles to comprehend it without considering the unique personalities of Pakistani captain Inzamam Ul-Huq, and umpire Darrell Hair.

In nearly a hundred and thirty years of international test cricket, only ten players in history have scored more test runs than Inzy. Only nine players in history have scored more test hundreds. As important statistics are in the culture of cricket, that still gives only a poor perspective on Inzy’s greatness.

Much has been written on Inzy’s laziness at the stumps, his lack of fitness, his curious blend of brutality, and paradoxically, his subtlety and lightness of touch as a batsman. A far more telling statistic is one that cannot be measured by immense accumulations of runs and test averages. That is that of even the greatest players in the modern game, Inzy is practically unrivalled in his capacity to turn good deliveries into average ones, and average deliveries into poor ones.

Inzy, like Sachin and Adam Gilcrist, are virtually impossible to bowl to. Their creative genius is such that even the finest masters of consistent rhythm and swing will find balls on a good line, and a good length, dispatched to the boundary. They do so not through sheer fluke, but all the time. This trio has a capacity to regularly manufacture shots that should not even exist within human capability.

Some will say that they simply see the ball much earlier than their peers. Others will suggest that they have much faster reaction times. But they will all be wrong. The reason that Inzy is so great as a batsman is the same reason Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong are so phenomenal. They quite simply defy the laws of physics.

Secondly, Pakistan and the subcontinent in general, do not share the same values around the Spirit of The Game. This is a culture clash of seismic proportions in world cricket. It is why the Board of Control for Cricket in India sets the world tour programme. It is why Shoaib Akhtar is allowed to bowl with a “hyper-extensive arm”, rather than simply “chucking”. It is why Sachin Tendulkar carries demi-God status. Cricket is a religion in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh. It is because of their faith that they are prepared to cheat at all costs to win.

So when Inzy instructed the Pakistani cricket team to remain in the dressing room in protest at Darrell Hair’s ball-tampering decision, rather than resuming play, Inzy was issuing a direct challenge to the Spirit of Cricket that governs the responsibility of cricket captains, the requirement for fair play, and general player conduct. As unparalleled as Inzy is as a player, he assumed the power to undermine the most important cricket law of all: the supremacy of the umpire.

That is no small challenge on Inzy’s part. It is effectively the worst possible act that can be committed by a cricket captain. If the disgraceful underarm bowling incident 1981 sparked a re-emphasis on fair play, then Inzy’s action should not go unpunished. He was not merely pushing the boundaries of interpretation of cricket rules. He was drawing a big red line through the rule book.

There is no sanction available for Inzy’s decision not to take the field. The reason there is no sanction is because the idea is so incomprehensible to the spirit of cricket that nobody thought of creating a sanction for it.

Until, that is, Darrell Hair was faced with the prospect of inventing a new sanction that does not exist in the rules. Given the extent of Inzy’s offence, ending play and awarding the match to England was proportionate. In addition, Inzy should have been hung, drawn and quartered by the ICC.

The subsequent actions by sub-continental commentators and cricketers, to make the issue about evidence of ball-tampering, rather than Inzy’s behaviour, deliberately miss the point. In fact, they attempt to divert attention from Inzy's assault on the rules of cricket.

Darrell Hair’s decision to award five runs to England was allowed for in the rules. Even if wrong, that was his decision. It was a legitimate decision for him to make.

Yet instead of cooling down and accepting punishment for his refusal to take the field, Inzy came out all-guns blazing after the Fourth test. Pakistan threatened to boycott further one-dayers in England if Inzy was found guilty of ball-tampering. Again, the issue wasn’t whether he changed the condition of the ball: it was his refusal to accept Hair’s instruction to take the field. The following day, India sided with Pakistan, announcing they would join other sub-continent nations in refusing to play in a game that Hair officiated in.

Realistically, that slashed Hair’s potential umpiring commitments in half. He could not umpire in games involving Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or his own country of Australia. That confined Hair's umpiring commitments to test matches between New Zealand, South Africa, England and the West Indies. It was an untenable position for Hair. He had faced an impossible, unprecedented scenario in the Fourth Test, and made use of the only sanction he thought available to him, and half of world cricket was ganging up on him. There was no way he could reasonably continue as a member of cricket’s elite umpiring panel.

That confluence of events led to Hair suggesting his resignation, on condition of a private settlement with ICC taking into account Hair’s potential earnings as a professional umpire over the next few years. It was an invitation for the ICC to make him redundant, given that the sub-continent had pre-empted his redundancy. That request was no different to a senior executive resigning from a board due to circumstances that make their jobs untenable.

So what did Malcolm Speed, ICC Chief Executive do in return? He leaked Hair’s offer, putting him out to dry. In one of the most disgraceful acts in the history of cricket administration, Speed shifted focus away from Inzy’s misconduct, as an easy way of getting rid of burying the issue of sub-continental rewriting of the spirit of cricket.

Thank you, Malcolm Speed. You have answered the key question facing world cricket today. You have given us certainty. In the process, you have knifed your own country-man. Ball-tampering, chucking, threats to withdraw tours when a player doesn’t get his way, and disrespecting umpires on the field, have all been legitimized by your conduct towards Hair.

Thanks to Inzamam Ul-Haq, and Speed’s effective endorsement of his behaviour by assassinating Hair, the Spirit of Cricket no longer exists.

RIP: Peter Dunne (1954-2006)

Peter Dunne was a pragmatic and decent guy. Always a little pompous, fronting a one-man party for so many years, if you could look past the preposterous things he would do with his hair, you knew he was generally moving in the right direction. He believed in the fundamentals of an open, prosperous economy. He supported the Reserve Bank Act, the Public Finance Act, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, and the principles of open government and clean democracy.

Economically, Dunne was always pretty dry. He left the Labour Party in 1994 because it become a little too dominated by pinkos and liberals, and was constantly apologizing for any of the works of Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble. When Dunne left Labour, it looked as if Labour would even rescind the key tenets of orthodox economics. Dunne couldn’t quite bring himself to join the National Party, but by 1996, for all intents and purposes, he was one of us.

Hence in 1996, National made him a Cabinet Minister, and chose not to stand a candidate against him in Ohariu-Belmont. Dunne won the seat in a landslide, and National pulled its second highest party vote in the country in that seat. This confirmed, he was one of us.

Peter Dunne being Peter Dunne, he spat the dummy in 1996 when Winston beat him to the chase for a ministerial seat. Dunne seethed and writhed and got very cranky. For many of us in the National Party who didn’t like Winston, we kinda agreed with him. He was still one of us.

Even in 1999, when Peter Dunne supported the Labour Government, many of us saw his point. Labour hadn’t changed back the clock of history between 1999-2002; it had acted reasonably competently, wasn’t by that stage accumulating massive surpluses or wasting too much money, and didn’t seem to be doing too much harm. Labour didn’t need Dunne’s support in 1999; if he could get a few baubles flung his way, then good on him. He was still almost one of us.

Peter Dunne was always somebody with principle and integrity. He strove to do what he thought was best. He was never lily-white, but as politicians go, he was a nice enough bloke. Sensible was his mantra. It was never a particularly sexy idea, but in a vacuum of political ideas, it won the worm in 2002. Fuming and blustering like a spoilt child when he didn’t get his way, he could be. But most of the time, reasonable.

In the annals of New Zealand political history, Peter Dunne’s chapter will not be very prominent. He was never a flash-in-the-pan; more of a slowly-simmering custard about to curdle if placed under too much heat. Worked well with something more substantial. Dependable, if cooked under the right conditions.

So it is, after twenty-two years of almost-distinguished parliamentary life, that we can stop and give thanks to the political career of Peter Dunne. Peter, wherever you are, buddy, you didn’t achieve much, but you meant well.

Because, dear reader, now that Peter Dunne has become just another lame apologist for Helen Clark’s corrupt and outlandish junta, he has gone full circle. He has tattooed himself to Helen Clark’s breast, always to be associated with her sleaze and contempt for the taxpayer. For a Labour Minister of Revenue, that would be dishonourable. To be propping up a disgraced Prime Minister who will do anything to retain power--even buy an election, and an ailing Finance Minister, is the ultimate act of self-immolation. In Peter Dunne, the one man who has staked his political career on his independence and ability to walk when things get a little too shabby, that is unforgiveable.

Rest in Peace, Peter Dunne. Your political career is over.

Why Labour Won't Pay It Back

The Auditor-General’s report into unlawful spending of parliamentary services funding is not restricted to Labour’s use of the pledge card. The A-G identified widespread use by Labour and other members of parliamentary services funding for electioneering purposes—the bill for Labour alone is well over a million dollars. The Greens, Act, United Future, and NZFirst are all in the hole as well. National got off relatively lightly—ten grand was very, very small by comparison.

We haven’t yet seen the A-G’s report. It’s the report that the Prime Minister doesn’t want the public to see. Why? Because it discloses that Labour’s misuse of taxpayer funds during the last campaign is more than twice the cost of the pledge card.

It’s a separate legal point as to whether the Auditor-General is even required to publish its report. Scrutiny of Parliamentary Services is not covered by the Official Information Act. Labour and other Parties could block to stall the release of the report as long as possible, if at all.

It does give a lie to Labour’s current spin that nobody knew the rules. Every party knew the rules around applying parliamentary services funding for electioneering purposes. In the final three weeks of the campaign, Labour was desperate. It was trailing in the polls, and prepared to play dirty for the sake of buying office. It had no money left of its own that it could legally spend. So its answer? To bring in the unions to spend up large on Labour’s behalf. Its second solution? To bully Parliamentary Services to allow it to use parliamentary services funding for electioneering, in the clear expectation that nobody would notice it after the fact.

No party is lily-white in the application of parliamentary services funding for electioneering. National slipped up to the tune of ten grand. In the mayhem and chaos of an election campaign, it is perhaps conceivable that in the last ninety days, individual MPs of a political party might send communication to voters which constitutes electioneering during their normal duties. It is conceivable that the value of that communication might be $20,000. In the Nat's case, their misspend was $10,000, which they have repaid.

If the rules (which the Labour Party set after the previous election) were so unclear, how is it that one party in particular mis-used its funding to such a preposterous degree, and National did not?

The short answer is that Labour expected to spend its funding for parliamentary services, entirely for electioneering purposes, with impunity.

The longer answer is that Labour spent more than half a million dollars more on electioneering, using parliamentary services funding, over and above the cost of the pledge card. That constitutes a cynical and deliberate attempt to rort the taxpayer to pay for its own campaign. The Labour Party’s premise was that if it was going to lose the last election, it might as well go out with a bang. No reasonable, objective opinion—and the opinions of the Auditor-General, the Solicitor-General, the Chief Electoral Officer, and the Secretary of Justice are generally pretty reasonable and objective—could see it otherwise. Labour abused its parliamentary services funding, in a concerted effort to win the campaign. That, dear reader, is the very definition of corruption.

Why are smaller parties so keen to protect Labour over this? Partly because they will support Labour at any cost. They don't want an election. They don't have the campaigning funds to fight another one, and they know they're dog-tucker even if they had the funding. Partly also because they don’t have funds of their own to repay what they misspent during the campaign. Partly because Labour has dangled the carrot of public funding of their parties for them. That’s a red-herring in terms of Labour’s culpability in the last election, but a critical bribe for smaller parties, for whom lack of fundraising is one of their major organisational problems. Smaller parties are even less able to reimburse Parliamentary Services for its misallocation than Labour is for its mammoth $1 million sham.

There are moments in a government's lifetime that signal its irreversible decline. I can well recall some of the unfortunate activities and decisions of some National ministers in the last two years of Government that suggested that power had gone to their heads. They pissed voters off. That arrogance directly contributed to the voter-shock that the Nats experienced in 1999 and 2002.

But for all its failings in its dying years, the Bolger-Shipley transition from 1996-1999 was not corrupt or venal. They did not feather their own nests. They actually believed that they were making a positive contribution. They made mistakes driven by arrogance.

If Helen Clark was more focussed on staying in touch with her voters, and Cullen not unwell at present, then neither of them would have allowed this tragic situation to exist. Labour have set a new standard for third-term governments, with unrivalled arrogance, hypocrisy, sleaze, filth, self-serving corruption, and absolute contempt for taxpayer and voter alike.

Voters have become used to the Judith Tizard factor in politics: somebody so loony, so contemptuous of the voters who elect her, so distant from reality that she will spout of any old nonsense as a justification for her government's actions. For such acts of inadvertent self-ridicule, Helen Clark rewards her with all the baubles of Ministry. In isolation, she is easy to ignore. Yet what the misuse of parliamentary services funding has shown is that the entire Labour Party has remodelled themselves in Judith Tizard's image. Collectively, by not repaying the money back, by attempting to "validate" their unlawful actions, by buying smaller party support and spinning the discussion into "democracy funding", we now have a Labour caucus full of Judith Tizards. It is a Government that has set itself up for inadvertent self-ridicule every day that it continues to exist in defiance of normal standards of political behaviour.

Voters no longer believe in Helen Clark or the Labour Party. And they've brought it all upon themselves.

Fears and Loathings

My friend just bought a puppy. Ever since I heard that he bought that dog, I’ve been terrified that the dog might develop psychological problems and get larger and bite the postman.

Another friend recently stole a small goat, and placed it among his sheep. I lie awake at night fearful that the goat will think it’s a sheep, and start fucking the other sheep. Even worse, I fear that the goat, being a satanic symbol, may well be Lucifer’s spawn, and impregnate a whole new breed of evil goat-sheep.

Another friend just bought a new fridge. Studies have shown that cannibals are most likely to store human remains in old fridges, rather than new fridges. My friend has not told me what he has done with his old fridge, so I now assume that I am next on his list of people to chop up and boil on his NEW STOVE!

Yes, people. These are genuine fears.

The Big Smack-Down

Watch the pinko liberals come out again and raise the canard of Section 59 of the Crimes Act, linking it to the deaths of innocent children.

As one commie wag claims, “physical violence is a continuum”; that a smack is half-way to a punch, that a punch is half-way to a beating, and that a beating is half-way to death of a child.

Interesting theory from the childless few who pontificate about child-rearing of the masses. In their happy-clappy world, rugby, boxing, and martial arts would be outlawed, as being just a little bit too mean. Violence in movies should be banned, too. People can’t control their ideas, see. They aren’t capable of distinguishing right and wrong. If I see Arnie machine-gunning a tribe of bad guys, I will feel justified in going out and buying the biggest Stinger that a Russian black-market can afford.

But it’s a view that is deeply divorced from reality. Children don’t die when a parent gives an hysterical child a quick smack. I wasn’t seriously harmed when a cranky teacher threw me in a gorse bush. Even Jeremy Clarkson, that bastion of English civility, wasn’t damaged when he was hit in the face by a lemon pie.

There are degrees of violence. Some of them are so minor that to make an issue of them makes the recipient seem like a pansy. Case in point: I am frequently slapped in the face by chicks. Often by fat chicks. I’m not sure why this seems to happen so often, but what kind of wowser would I be to call the police and make a formal complaint? Other times, physical violence is downright entertaining. Recently, I was outside a bar when a guy slapped me. I was fairly surprised by this, so I say to him, as he’s about to run off: “Why are you slapping me like a girl? That’s not even a girl-slap! Come back and do it properly!” But he’d run off by then, and I couldn’t contain myself from the comedy of the situation.

Other times physical violence is reasonable or necessary in the circumstances. Jerry Collins on the rugby field is such a star because when he makes a tackle, the other player takes so much longer to get up afterwards. Jerry is superb to watch. When he’s drunk himself senseless after a game, he’s fairly intimidating, and it’s not wise to stand near him, but on the pitch he’s simply awesome.

Yet those situations are a long way removed from a serious physical beating against a child.

One young child I know frequently gets smacked. It is the discipline of first resort to his parents. I have observed that the child is generally very badly behaved. This frustrates his parents no end. They have never given the child a real beating. It doesn’t take somebody of supreme intelligence to conclude that smacking that child so frequently destroys any shock value in an occasional smack. Is that child in danger of being hit so hard that he suffers serious injury? Of course not. Should his parents consider other forms of discipline that are more effective? Absolutely.

Smacking children is not bad because it may lead to long-term physical harm. It’s not even bad. It is simply neutral, if applied too often. A child learns to put up with the sudden pain. The shock value disappears. When I was a child, had I been given the choice of receiving the wooden spoon or being deprived of the morning cartoons for a week when I misbehaved, I would have taken the wooden spoon every time, knowing that it’s much easier, as a child, to get punishment over with quickly, than to have to face the consequences of my behaviour.

There is a degree of obsessiveness from both sides of the smacking debate: those who ludicrously proclaim that smacking is the only form of discipline that works (when it clearly isn’t), and from the liberals that smacking leads to the deaths of children (when it clearly doesn’t).

Parents need to be empowered with choices. They need to take responsibility for raising their children. They need to have discretion as to how they exercise discipline, and choose the ones that work.

Smacking a child does not denote that a parent wishes to harm a child. If used very rarely, the shock value alone can be useful. But it isn’t a particularly effective tool, especially when used repeatedly. Most parents who take responsibility for their children’s upbringing come to this view, without the interference of a nanny-state imposing ideological positions on parenting.

The occasional smackers are not the cause of society’s social ills. They are a little misdirected, and in most cases probably realise when they have given their children a smack, that they have done so out of their own anger, rather than an intention to correct a child’s behaviour, and feel guilty for not being able to control their own frustration. They certainly don’t need do-gooding politicians telling them they are criminal as well.

What is far more criminal is a social system that encourages a certain group in society to have children that they cannot afford to feed, house, or clothe. Any welfare system that rewards those who cannot take responsibility for themselves to pretend to take responsibility for helpless children, will lead to major social dysfunction.

It is no coincidence that almost all of the young children who have been murdered by caregivers have grown up in dysfunctional homes. The prevalence of welfare, poverty, crime, substance abuse, and poor health is a much greater indicator of serious harm against children than any specific, albeit slightly misguided child-discipline techniques by otherwise lawful middle-class.

So if the Labour Government cares for the safety of children, they will discourage, rather than reward, people to have children that they cannot afford to raise.

The New Crusaders

Recently, my HK-based nemesis Cactus Kate put up a list of her favourite journalists. I don’t know what’s going on in that girl’s head since she started writing for Fairfax, but that assortment of pinko sops is not my idea of a good read. Helen Bain? Temperamental cow. Chris Trotter? Socialist! That other blogging pinko? Nothing more to be said. Shame on CK for appeasing them with mild praise.

Following this post, there was much commentary over at kiwiblog as to what constitutes a journalist. Some carnally self-sufficient cretin objected that a paid writer practicing as a lawyer in an overseas jurisdiction should be allowed to make any judgement on the quality of New Zealand journalists.

Subsequent to that, again at kiwiblog, DPF highlighted the mini-war of words being fought between Ian Wishart and Fran O’Sullivan. I made a comment to the effect that Wishart is a clown, and that I’d back Fran’s serious writing any day of the week. That public address guy then pitched in, quoting and supporting something I had written, attacking Wishart. Shocked and appalled at this recent development, I should clarify my view of Wishart’s work.

There are few quality journalists in this country. The reasons for this escape me. There is certainly no shortage of journalism graduates emerging from tertiary institutions—in fact, there is a vast oversupply of budding Woodwards and Bernsteins. Despite occasional strikes by one of the Labour Party’s funding channels, journalists are pretty well paid. Sure, they do not earn as much as international counterparts, but they’re not paid on performance here, either. Of course, there isn’t a great degree of competition in the New Zealand media marketplace, which doesn’t help, but that alone doesn’t account for media-ocrity.

I am not one of those right-wingers who suggests that New Zealand journalists, as a whole, are captured by liberalism and socialism. I don’t believe that at journalism school, aspiring reporters are put through an ideological washing machine, and emerge as card-carrying advocates for Helengrad. There may well be a washing machine, but that’s no excuse for journalists to capitulate on their personal values and give in to the communists.

And that is the key point. Every person has a degree of bias. The role of a journalist, like that of a judge, is to make an honest appraisal of the facts of a case, and draw conclusions accordingly. The journalist sets out with a relatively open mind. There are rules around what evidence is admissible, with respect to treating subjects fairly, aiming to get a balance of testimony, and making judgements at the end.

Those judgements will inevitably be enriched by bias. That bias makes the reading interesting. Nobody wants to ingest a strict diet of facts without judgement. That’s the difference between Barry Soper and Colin James: the former lists off the facts and draws banal conclusions that are of no value to anybody, whereas the latter lucidly analyses the facts, to the benefit of the reader.

Most New Zealand journalists do not have considerable outward bias. They simply do not draw conclusions. Again, I’m not sure why this is. They might come up with the excuse that they are cynical--but they are presumably not so cynical as to not vote. I believe that they're simply lazy. It would also explain why, for much of the last six years, they consume, without question, the spin that comes from the Prime Minister’s office. Comparatively, the Government’s spin machine has overwhelming resources, designed purely to influence the Press Gallery. The Government’s message is all that most press gallery reporters get. A lazy reporter can get by, quite comfortably, simply recycling the government message.

Of course, there are New Zealand journalists with considerable socialist bias. Chris Trotter is one. Finlay McDonald is another. Oliver Driver—not a journalist, but prominent in the media, is particularly extreme.

On the conservative side, the pickings are much more slim. I’m struggling to think of a single New Zealand journalist with considerable right-wing bias. I suspect that Rob Hosking leans to the right, but that suspicion probably has more to do with him being a GC, and since I loathe all socialists, he must not be one. But enough of syllogisms.

The outcome is that without serious right-wing journalists in New Zealand, with a smattering of left-wingers, and an under-resourced, mediocre core of writers who are dominated by a liberal, socialist establishment, there is very little effective balance in the New Zealand media.

That is why, in theory, Ian Wishart’s Investigate is a good thing. It is useful to have a right-wing journal that critically examines New Zealand government and society, and draws conclusions albeit with a mostly right-wing bias. It gives readers choice. If you want to read about how the world is run by conservative old men who oppress women and minorities through their manipulation of truth, read The Listener. It’s mostly staffed my middle-class, liberal white men with small penises and guilt complexes, and happens to be owned by conservative old men who apparently don’t have any problem with publishing liberal clap-trap, but that’s another story.

Likewise, if you want to read about life from a conservative perspective, Investigate should offer that.

Except it doesn’t. In the Benson-Pope affair, Ian Wishart overstepped the line. He didn’t go seeking the facts. He started with a conclusion, and chose the facts to support the conclusion. That is no longer playing the role of judge-inquisitor. That is stepping down to a role of prosecutor, without regard for the facts. In Benson-Pope’s case, a reasonable conclusion may have been that Benson-Pope was a bully. He probably intimidated his students. Many students disliked him. He probably engaged in the kind of behaviour that would no longer be acceptable in today’s classroom. Sure, it’s appalling that somebody of Benson-Pope’s dubious character should be in Cabinet. Benson-Pope almost certainly misled the House when he stated that he knew of no other complaints against him as a teacher. That would have been a reasonable judgement. But the evidence does not support Wishart’s claims that Benson-Pope was lecherous or a pervert.

Likewise, when Wishart did an exposé on Helen Clark, he went way too far. It would have been reasonable to conclude that Aunty Helen has held a long-term ambition to change New Zealand society. It would have been equally reasonable, from a conservative perspective, to conclude that the Labour Party has spun its way through office, manipulating the media while it makes subtle changes to social policy that fit its outlook on the world, through stealth. That is a fair belief. While it’s amusing to ascribe dubious evidence that the Prime Minister is a closet lesbian with major psychological problems stemming from her alleged confusion over her sexuality, that’s also pretty nutty. Ian Wishart must be out of his tree if thinks that’s a rational argument. It’s not. The conservative reality is that Helen Clark has a liberal agenda because she’s a liberal socialist. Any other speculation from loungechair psychobabblers damages the serious message of serious journalism.

There is nothing wrong with taking on the crusader’s role. I consider myself a right-wing crusader. David Farrar does an excellent job as the pre-eminent right-wing blogging prosecutor in New Zealand. Jordan Carter does a reasonable job as the Labour Party’s defence lawyer on-line. Chris Trotter, a pinko of long-standing, manages to mix the crusader’s role with providing what is often very clever and compelling analysis. But unlike Ian Wishart, none of them put up the pretense of being balanced or neutral. They honestly say: “This is my perspective. Here is the evidence that supports that perspective.”

The only redeeming quality in Wishart’s campaign is that it’s not a socialist campaign. As a campaigner, he is very effective. He’s had one very successful government scalp so far, and a major contribution to the public humiliation of two other ministers. But let’s not kid ourselves that he’s out to seek the truth. He’s there to present his argument. The reader should judge his argument accordingly.

Public Address is also a de facto extension of the government spin machine. They are (mostly) socialists, and crusaders for the filthy garbage that will ruin this country if they continue in government (again, my bias showing through). Keith Ng and Damian Christie are fair and amusing respectively. But that's only a small part of that site. If Public Address also puts up the pretense of being neutral and balanced—or make claims about being serious journalists, as opposed to crusaders for their cause—then they are being dishonest with everybody.

Then again, unlike Public Address, Investigate's heart is in the right place, even if its crusades are sometimes a little extreme, obsessive, and crazy.

The blogosphere has a reasonable balance of socialist and right-wing crusaders. New Zealand media is short on journalists with a right-wing bias (who have a harder job, given the government-controlled flow of information, and have much better career options outside journalism, given that right-wingers are professionally overwhelmingly more talented than socialists). But what we don't need is crusaders masquerading as serious journalists. The Left has enough of those already.

Introspection

A few weeks ago, I made a flippant remark to an old political mate, seeking his advice on my suitability for parliamentary representation. His initial response was diplomatic: “Don’t think it would be right for you,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Because you lack tact, sensitivity, modesty and discretion.”

“They’re completely overrated,” I counter. I then come up with a brilliant argument, if I may say so myself, giving lucid examples of successful MPs in the current House, who either lack tact, sensitivity, modesty or discretion.

He says: “Yes, but they’ve each got one of those qualities.” He then comes up with a vague theory about how successful elected officials are polite to prospective voters, whereas my behaviour is often considered rude.

“Fuck ‘em,” I say. “I’m far more fucking polite to those people than they fucking deserve.”

My faults do not trouble me, since they are so few, and so minor (which makes it a pointless exercise, really, given that everybody I associate with agrees that I am the least fallible person they know, and humility does not come easily to me, but for the sake of this story I will continue in this vein).

But I suppose that it is also true that I am not well known for possessing an abundance of compassion. I don’t see this as a major fault, because I don’t think it’s important. Human history is not compassionate. God offers few favours. Nature doesn’t often just give people a break. For many people, reality sucks.

Reality sucks for them. Most people lead shitty lives. They have mediocre aspirations—if they have any at all. They have shitty jobs. Their spouses are fat and/or ugly, their jobs are meaningless, their children stuff their faces with lard in front of the playstation rather than becoming successful sports fanatics, and to top it off, they’re born stupid.

My life, by contrast, is excellent. I am currently engaged to three different, and very hot chicks. I will replace each of them before I have to front up the cost of engagement rings, let alone the wedding ceremonies. I am involved in productive and well-paid (albeit highly-taxed) employment. I don’t need to worry about where the party is happening on any given evening, because I know that where I go, the party comes with me. And to top it off, I was born with a brilliance of charm and intellect that, to be quite honest, nobody else I have ever met has been able to match.

So I figure, therefore, that if God wanted to add compassion to my many gifts, He would have done so. He chose not to. My lot is not to reason why. And to be brutally clear about this, I don’t think my life would be any more interesting if I was some limp-wristed pansy hand-wringing liberal who cared about stupid people who are too indolent to take responsibility for their own lives first. Rather, that degree of compassion would diminish my sense of being.

Not far from my office in Queen Street, I frequently witness those who have played the worst of what could have been a good hand in life. They sit idly on the pavement, often dozing, with a hat or cardboard box, and a sign, giving passers-by some clue as to the misery of their lives, with the expectation that a stranger will offer them compassion.

Fucking beggars, is what they are. There are perhaps a dozen of them in Auckland city. Most of them have been on the streets for a couple of years at least—which only proves that their lives are not so dire. But nobody does anything about them. At best a large proportion of the swarms of office-workers ignore them. Some of them clearly donate money to them.

Should I feel sad about their plight? Well, I don’t think so. Actually, they piss me off. They often piss me off to the extent that I have frequently stopped to harangue them for messing up the central city. Many of them know who I am by now—after repeated scowls at them for trying to make their shitty lives my problem—they’ve learned not to stop me for spare change.

A few months ago, I popped over to Domino’s Pizza to pick up a feed for my team. One of these bums was camped outside Domino’s Pizza. He was dozing in the sun. He had a sign informing all who bothered to read that he had no money, and needed money for food. I also observed that he was, from a purely medical perspective, chronically obese.

“Hey, buddy!” I say, very loudly, as close to his ear as I dare approach without infecting my nostrils with his stench. He stirs to a state of partial awareness. He takes a moment to adjust his glue/drug/booze-addled eyes, and looks up at me. But he doesn’t say anything. So I say:

“Did you write that sign yourself, did you?”

He nods.

I say: “That’s very good work. Really, it is. Presumably, if you can write, you can also read, right?”

He nods again.

“Stand up,” I say gently. “I’ll show you something that will really help you out. Don’t worry, I’m not walking you anywhere. Stand up.”

So he stands up. I point to a sign on the window behind him. Remember, this is a pizza store. For a guy who’s supposedly hungry, a pizza store is worth looking at. But the sign—no big words that are difficult for somebody smart enough to write his own sign—reads: “WORK AVAILABLE HERE: IMMEDIATE START.”

“There you go, buddy. You’re hungry? Work in a pizza store! You need money? Minimum wage, you get four hundred bucks a week, and people thinking you’re doing them a favour by making them pizzas! It’s a perfect opportunity! You’ll even be able to afford to take a shower once a week!”

Bum mumbles something vague and shuffles off. I go in and pick up my pizzas, relieved that there’s now no chance of me stumbling over him on the way out. The pizza guy looks grateful that I’ve moved him on.

About a month later, I saw another bum with a sign. This was an innovator, as far as bums go. His sign read: “Please give me money so I can buy food for me and my dog.” And to prove his point, he had a small mongrel on a rope. I don’t know what the protocols are in the bum industry—for all I know, there could be another bum who owns the dog and rents it out to other bums, so that they can get the benefit of not just bum-donors, but animal welfare types as well.

So I stop. I say to him: “Is that really your dog?”

He nods. Bums tend to nod. They don’t talk much, unless the words are random streams of semi-consciousness.

“Why did you get yourself a dog if you can’t afford to feed it?”

Bum shrugs.

I say: “You must be pretty hungry, right?”

Bum nods. I’m diplomatic at this point, even though he thinks that the fact that I’m talking to him indicates that I’m going to dip into my pocket and bathe him with coins.

But I don’t. I say: “Here’s an answer to both your problems. If you’re that fucking hungry, then eat your fucking dog!”

I don’t know if either of these guys learned anything from their discussions with me. I like to think that I was doing them a favour, by offering them an opportunity to solve their problems, as well as the potential added advantage that the Queen Street walkers would be saved the inconvenience of having to see these human eyesores. What they certainly do not learn from the bleeding hearts who toss them spare change is to take responsibility for themselves. I don’t know what kind of other state support they’re getting—frankly that’s not my problem. The Government confiscates massive amounts of my earnings already, purportedly to look after society’s least fortunate.

No fucking liberal socialist is going to succeed in making me feel guilty for their failure to encourage people to take responsibility for themselves.

The Truth About Cats And Dogs And HR People

Cats bad. Dogs tolerable if they live outside and bite burglars. HR People are mindless leeches.

I don’t get along with human resources people as a rule. Their job in any organization is to set the kind of intra-office regulations that I find meaningless.

Typical correspondence consists of the following:

HR Person: “I notice that you were on annual leave for three days two months ago. Please put in a leave form, and in future, please file a form in advance of taking annual leave, and have your manager approve it in advance.”

IP: “No.”

HR Person: “Those are the company regulations. Why can you not follow them?”

IP: “Because it’s not my fucking job to fill in forms. If you want me to be associated with one of your stupid forms, then you fill the fucking thing in, and send it to my secretary for her to sign on my behalf.”

HR Person: “That is not company policy.”

IP: “I don’t give a fuck. And because you’re irritating me, I’m not claiming any annual leave on those days at all. As far as I am concerned, I was working.”

HR Person: “How were you working?”

IP: “I spent a couple of hours each day talking to fucking clients, to make enough money for the firm so that we can employ stupid nobodies to annoy me. And I’m going to claim a day in lieu for Good Friday, when I spent an hour on the phone to a client who was too busy making money for his business to notice that it was Good Friday. Fill in the form for it and have my secretary sign it on my behalf.”

I am not suggesting that a good HR function is beyond the realm of any corporate possibility. The ideal HR person will spend all their time inducting new employees, and making existing employees feel happy about the workplace they are in. In the case of my workplace, a truly effective HR person would ensure that all new employees have signed a waiver, removing their ability to use standard legal means to complain against me for miscellaneous abuses to their fundamental human rights that working in the same building as me necessarily involves. They should be told, during the interview process: “If IP does not like you, he will use your gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religious belief, and/or state of physical disability as an excuse to discriminate against you. He is not actually discriminating against you on those grounds. He just does not like you.”

Now that would be a useful induction.

An effective HR person would organise parties and booze-ups, to make people feel better about the place in which they work.

An effective HR person would also understand that the purpose of recording misdemeanours at parties and booze-ups is not to punish an employee for the bad behaviour. Discipline is not the HR person’s job. Discipline, in a highly performing work environment, is unnecessary. Punishment for bad behaviour misses the point. Due to a slight anomaly (i.e., the Employment Relations Act 2000), bad behaviour is only used as an excuse to get rid of an employee who is not performing.

Not that I am suggesting that these ideal HR people actually exist. I'm not saying, either, that they don't exist. There may be, in some dark corner of Mogadishu, an errant HR person who is not following the rules, and has somehow understood their true purpose in life: to serve the organisation and people that they work for. I just haven't met such a person.

I was reminded recently of the banality of HR people when I attended a barbecue. The barbecue was a boozy affair. A friend and I had done the honours by spit-roasting a whole lamb over a twelve-hour period, stuffed with turkeys, chickens, and tuis. For extra drama, we wired a pig’s head to the lamb’s neck. To true Roman toga effect, we carved, with the aid of a tomahawk, to raucous applause. Even a visiting vegan was entranced by the spectacle of removing the back fillet, to the extent that I was just moments away from getting him to eat some before I was distracted by more interesting company.

The company in question consisted of a pair of busty wenches who had been at another theme party, and happened upon ours. I never got their ages—twenty-two, perhaps. Not very bright. Worked in hospitality. And they were an hospitable pair.

Until, sometime later in the evening, as I was passing by the bedroom window on my way back from urinating on the lemon tree in the garden, I observed peripherally, as I tend to when I’m drunk, the two hot busty wenches were removing their garters. With their teeth. I yelled out to random party goers: “Hey! The two hot busty wenches are also hot busty lesbos! Excellent!” Two of the more adventurous males in the gathering clamoured to take a closer look. They claimed afterwards to have seen nothing at all. Subsequently, I claimed that they were a pair of myopic liars.

I do not personally recall why I had been banned from this property for more than a year, but drawing everybody’s attention to the busty wenches, at full volume, reminded the tenants of the property why I had been banned on the previous occasion.

But there was still more to come. I was mixing and mingling, and talking at people, and drinking alcohol in unsafe quantities, when I quite suddenly picked up a vibe in my near audience. This particular audience consisted of the two hot, busty wenches, one of the tenants of the property, and two guys I’d never seen before. I turned to the two guys, and said:

“So, which of you two guys is the homo?”

They stared at me blankly, but uncomfortably.

I said: “Come on. One of you guys is a homo, right?”

A number of people in the immediate, and not-so-immediate vicinity, stopped talking. A few people glared at me. I became vaguely aware that I may have said something unseemly. From behind me, a voice said:

“I take great offence at that!”

I turned around. Some miscellaneous ginga chick—a vegetarian who didn’t approve of killing animals, let alone stuffing them inside larger animals and spit-roasting them—was upset. I also witnessed that she was considerably overweight. I wondered, internally, just how somebody who doesn’t eat animal fat can become overweight to that extent. So I say: “At what?”

“Those are my friends.”

“Good for you to have two friends,” I answer with a degree of gallantry and valour that she neither appreciated nor deserved, but in any other situation might have put me into war medal contention. “Why are you offended?”

“Because I’m one, too.”

“A what?” I ask.

“A homo! And it’s not respectful to use that word.” She’s already got the kind of hectoring pitch that only chicks who are too repulsive to get any, can manage.

“No you’re not,” I respond. “Only guys can be homos. I wasn’t accusing both of them. I was only suggesting that one of the two of them is. You’re a chick. You can’t be a homo. You might be a lesbo, tho’. I’ve got nothing wrong with lesbos. I think lesbos are excellent. Especially if they’re hot part-timers.”

I flick another perve at the two hot, busty wenches to emphasise my point.

“What have you got against gay people?” she asks, not wanting to give up the fight.

I sigh, a little tired of her already. “Look, I don’t have anything against homos. God does. And they will fry in hell for their sins. Not my problem. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with you, either.”

“We’re the same!” she says, lamely.

“No you’re not. You’re a lesbo, one of those guys is a homo. Good on both of you. But you’ve got nothing in common with each other. You get licky-licky with girls, he gets it on with guys. As far as gender preferences go, you’re about as mutually exclusive as it gets. I didn’t offend you. You’re just naturally cranky. Have a piece of lamb. It will calm you down.”

Despite my appeals for peace, the overweight ginga lesbo starts getting more cranky. Pretty unreasonable behaviour on her part, all in all. But she can’t voice her frustration. I have won the argument. The two hot, busty chicks are looking at me as if they are less lesbo than I had previously alleged. I am enjoying their attention. Even the two guys, one of whom I had accused of being camp, are both on my side.

And then a bolt of understanding hit me. “Wait a moment,” I say. “Let me guess. You voted Labour at the last election, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” the cranky butch ginga answers.

“And you work for a living, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she says.

“And the kind of work you do… I’m going to go out on a limb, here… but do you, by any chance, work in human resources?”

I almost pissed myself with her final confirmation. They cannot even stop themselves from regulating how people think and talk when they're not being paid for it.

Sing Bravo Bravo!

The road to Napier is paved with good intentions.

So I said to myself, as I veered haphazardly along State Highway Two—a misnomer if there ever was one. I passed a couple of optimistic traffic police on the side of a highway that had no stretches long enough to achieve the speed limit, and made my way into earthquake country.

There is not a lot to say about Napier as a town. The best view can be had from Bluff Hill, looking out to the sea, and away from the semi-urban centre. The Napier folk celebrate the fact that they have one of the largest collections of art deco architecture in the world. There’s a good reason for this. Art deco is fucking ugly. No other city in the world has seen fit to replicate it. Where it has existed, sensible town planners have permitted wide scale demolition. The fact Napier has art deco architecture at all is a historical accident. After the 1931 quake, the authorities simply took a fad that was already running out of time, and applied it on a wider scale to citizens who were still too shell-shocked to realise what was happening to them. If the upheaval had taken place in 1985, the entire town would resemble a set from That 70’s Show.

I blame Susan Wood for my journey. Last week she did an interview with some random dolphin-trainer from Napier’s Marineland, who was at pains to explain how grief-stricken everybody was about the death of one of Marineland’s last two remaining dolphins, despite the creature living to twice its natural age. According to the trainer, even the seals were sad. "I’ve worked here since leaving school," she says. "This is all I know how to do."

I don’t like cat-people on a good day. This chick was the ultimate cat-person. Cat-people do not have lives of any consequence. They fuss and preen over stupid animals that are far removed from their single useful purpose: to catch mice. This trainer had just applied her catness to small marine mammals. She’d set her whole life around the care of two ageing dolphins, in a country that no longer allows the incarceration of new dolphins. So a visit to Marineland had to be funny.
Kelly is the one remaining dolphin at the unnatural age of 36. It refused to spin when instructed, played dead when it was supposed to jump, showed its tail when it was told to bare its teeth, and generally seemed to be incapable of carrying out even the dumbest tricks. Even its species type—the common dolphin—seemed lame. Kelly should have been bottle-nosed. It should have been able to pop the top off my beer with its nose. Then people would flock to Marineland, and even Chris Carter would pay money to allow them to keep more dolphins in captivity.

I don’t object to dolphins being held in a confined space. And to be fair, Marineland has some pretty confined spaces. The seal enclosures—which contains some albino-like North American species of seal—are smaller than some hotel baths I’ve lounged in. If it’s good enough for a german shepherd to be kept as a pet, why not a fur seal, which is basically a dog with flippers? And if seals can be held, why not dolphins? And if dolphins are allowed, why not whales?

Which gets me to whales. I don’t understand why whales are amazing creatures.

They are not great just because somebody wrote a book about one of them, and called the book Moby Dick. More books have been written about Al Gore than have been written about whales named Moby Dick. That alone does not make whales great.

Nor are they great because they are more intelligent than other species. I once had a dog that barked on command. I have not seen a whale that can bark on demand. Dogs have a profound sense of smell. Whales don’t. Dogs can fetch on land and in water. Do I need to go on with this analogy?

Whales have an international commission established—the International Whaling Commission, no less, to manage whale stocks for hunting purposes. Sure, a bunch of greenie weirdoes from New Zealand and other countries have jumped up and down and hijacked the purpose of the commission to attempt to ban whaling altogether—no wonder, really, that countries like Norway and Japan go out on their own.

Whales are not universally endangered as a species. Pilot whales are in abundance. There’s about a million of them floating about, doing their whaley thing. Some of them beach themselves and give rise to great works of literature, such as Whale Rider. Where would Witi Ihimaera be without whale beachings? But I digress. The Japanese could comfortably hunt and chomp through 30,000 pilot whales a year without negatively affecting pilot whale populations. The Norwegians could eat the steaks of 1200 humpbacks a year without depleting existing stock. There’s even ample numbers of Blue Whales—over 10,000, to allow the IWC to start breeding and farming them.

Because, as we know, no species of animal that has ever been commercially farmed, has ever become extinct.

Yes, many species of whales are very big. Many of them are also no larger than dolphins. The dwarf sperm whale, for example, is smaller than a bottle-nose. The big whales are really just the fat chicks of the oceans. They're fun to harrass and lam/harpoon, but unless they're on the menu, what use are they?

So by supporting the moratorium on whaling, what we are really doing is giving in to the morbidly obese people of the world, who want to justify their over-indulgence on the greatness of the whale species. It’s a sham, and I’ve seen through it.

There is only one solution to protecting whales from extinction, and saving the heart-land of the Hawke’s Bay. Napier would be a far more interesting town, and Marineland a far more visited attraction, if they farmed whales in their pools.

The Great Arts Debate

Unlike a certain SAR-based blogger, I do appreciate the arts. This is understandable, since I'm a very cultured chap. I believe strongly that there is much to learn from the musical, operatic, literary, and visual greats.

What I object to, however, is the Government forcing me to pay for a bunch of lazy no-hopers to claim creativity without any hope of practising it. The Arts for the Dole Scheme is one of the most garbled failures, and most insidious symbols of government largesse. When the Government pays actors and painters to sit at home doing nothing, then they sit at home and do nothing.

Creativity, as I was telling an old-time professional actor friend of mine, stems from desire and personal necessity. As I was buying him lunch a few months ago, he was praising Aunty Helen for everything she has done for Aotearoa/New Zealand’s cultural movement. He then claimed that he was not interested in making money. He argued that he was not good at making money. He proposed that making money is just not good for society.

To wit, I responded: “Which of the great civilisations of history have ever contributed to world culture, except through economic dominance?”

“What?” he asked.

“Simple. Every great civilisation has created great cultural artefacts, by virtue of the fact that individuals have supported and patronised a great artist and encouraged that artist to be creative and productive, or else an artist has doggedly chosen to pursue a career by having that inner hunger—supported by nobody except their own determination to succeed. There is no other way to cultural success.”

“What about talent?” he countered.

”Yes, they’ve all had talent. But the successful artists have all worked their arses off to get there. They’ve had to understand their market. They battle on no matter what.”

Government-funded actor suggests that so much art would be lost if it wasn’t state-sponsored. I answer with: “Like what? That theatrical bullshit you come up with that nobody watches?”

Actor is hurt. I say to him: “Look, don’t take this personally. But the reason why your work is such utter shite is that you’re not hungry enough. You’re content with mediocrity. You don’t have to listen to your audience, or respond to what they want. You just do it anyway, because the State gives you a big whallop of cash for you to sit on your arse, so that it can feel good and pretentious about contributing my money to your idleness.”

Case in point is the TVNZ charter. For the last several years, the Government has paid TVNZ a special subsidy to promote New Zealand content on television. The result: outgoing CEO Ian Fraser says that New Zealand content is under threat, that there has been no noticeable increase in content capacity, that there has been no increased audience demand for local television, television revenue is falling, and, in a nutshell, TVNZ has simply absorbed the subsidy into its baselines. Money is thrown at New Zealand culture with no long-term positive effect. It is spent, simply because it is there, on mediocre television that nobody wants to watch.

This morning, I was walking past the Civic Centre. A cohort of skateboarders were doing funky things with their skateboards, outside one of Auckland’s premier cultural attractions. I stopped and chatted with them. “So what do you guys do?” I ask.

“We’re artists,” they answer.

Riiiiiight.

Meanwhile, the Herald reports this morning that a family of buskers—extremely talented, albeit not particularly attractive young musicians—have been given a different treatment from local and government authorities. The story goes like this: two pianist ingénues, aged 14 and 20, have been slaving their guts out for the last six months, providing musical entertainment on Queen Street, playing some of the most difficult Rachmaninov and Chopin pieces, among many others in their repertoire, in order to raise money to send their gifted sister to ballet school in England.

The Sheffield family are not on the dole. They do not ride skateboards. They simply sit and ply their trade. And they do it exceptionally well. Their audience appreciates them. They show their appreciation by contributing directly to them.

I suspect that the Sheffield brothers do very well from their busking. A few months ago, I offered one of them a couple of hundred dollars to play at a client function we were holding in our boardroom for a couple of hours. He declined, on the basis that he would make more money playing the piano in rush hour.

Yet both the Council and the Police have tried several times to move these kids on. Why? Because they’re not state-sponsored. Aunty Helen—the great arts champion—does not support those who actually have a connection with their audience, and who tirelessly strive to make the most of their talent.

Instead, she’d much rather pay a group of skateboarders to claim creative merit outside the Civic Centre.

Stalin tried to silence Shostakovich, because he wouldn't follow the state-sanctioned cultural regime. The Sheffield brothers have Shostakovich--and very credibly so--in their repertoire. The Minister for Arts and Culture, and the Associate Minister for Auckland, who merrily swan their way through any media opportunity at chardonnay-swilling cultural gatherings, could do much to encourage the Sheffield brothers to continue to play for Auckland city-dwellers.

And then they might actually achieve something for Auckland's arts scene. And it won't cost a single taxpayer dollar.

On Blogging Bitchfights...

Can there be anything quite as inane in the blogosphere, than two individuals from separate multi-contributor blogs, who engage in a war, and actually mean it?

Normally I side with the good folk at The Whig. After all, they're good people... Blair is an erudite figure of insolence, who deserves to live the good life. All he needs is for one of us to sit him down and teach him how to make money, and he can deserve all the fruits of success that his attitude affords him.

The Aboutowners have few redeeming features. They are, in total, a group of smarmy, snarky, limp-wristed pinkos with some particularly dire views on the world. Which is why they will have lives of failure, lest they smarten up sometime soon.

And as much as I dislike admitting it, most of the Aboutowners play fair. Xavier had a go at me recently, in what was a light-hearted and spirited dig. Didn't think it was his best work, but it was not vindictive and nasty.

Tristan is a whole different species. Again, admittedly, his standard of behaviour is not confined to the Left. There are some equally psychotic types throughout the spectrum. One particular female blogger has been recently subjected to behaviour that is no less than that of a deeply disturbed and pathetic mind.

The Aboutowners have distanced themselves from Tristan's behaviour, effectively by saying that they are not going to buy into Tristan's silly little games with Graham over at The Whig. Graham, that behaviour is beneath you. Make the most of having a hot new chick writing for you--that alone is sufficient to drive traffic to The Whig. And forget about Tristan. The little shit isn't worth the waste of ammunition.

War Stories From The Education Front

My standard-three teacher was one of the most peculiar adults I ever knew. He was a great raconteur: comical, passionate, eccentric, and had a great love for physical activity. Like many men in the teaching profession at that stage, he was also senile, and had an explosive temper.

This teacher had several party-tricks. One was to launch into a tangential stream of war stories. He had been at war in the Pacific: I suspect his battle-scars were more psychological than physical. He didn’t quite understand the appropriateness of telling grisly tales of shooting Japs, or Japs accidentally shooting themselves while chasing him through the jungle on Guadalcanal, or throwing hand grenades at passing Japs, or knifing Japs… or any story, for that matter, which resulted in an Imperial Soldier being ferried home in a casket. Three or four times a day—from a maths lesson, to reading an approved school story—he would provide yet another Japanese war story.

In the second week of classes, his young pupils became aware of just how crazy he was: we had already heard his stories recycled, and were just becoming more preposterous each time. On this occasion, as he was reading some innocuous approved story to us, he went off on a tangent again. At this moment, he portrayed himself as a Jap-grenading Charles Upham. He then turned to the class, and said: “And do you know what happened next?”

One of the other kids, Jason—not particularly bright, as it turned out—called out: “What, Mr Snufflupigus turned up?”

It was a great burn. Sufficient for all the kids to erupt into the kind of shrill laughter that nine-year-olds can manage. The teacher exploded. He walked straight through several rows of desks, knocking over the kids who were seated, and grabbed this troublesome child by the neck. He picked Jason up by his throat, with one arm, and lifted him out of his seat. The teacher then carried him, by the gullet, across the classroom, and outside the door. A few of us followed, just to see what would happen next. The teacher then physically threw Jason several metres, over the path, and into a convenient gorse bush.

It was an astonishing act of random violence against a child. It happened several other times during that year—I got “gorsed”, although the teacher had the good grace to carry me by my shirt and trousers.

As children, we did not consider these to be horrific incidents. Getting “gorsed” was not extremely painful. It was certainly pretty humiliating, but I also recall thinking that it was preferable to getting caned.

Casting a modern eye against historical events is dangerous. My standard three teacher was not an outlandish exception. Physical violence against children was as normal at school as it was in many homes. It was certainly not a universal trait among male teachers, but it was not an uncommon one.

Which is why I don’t consider David Benson-Pope’s alleged tennis ball incident to be particularly surprising. Nor, for the standards of the time, in the early 1980s, was that behaviour from some male teachers, extremely outlandish. Such incidents occurred frequently, by well-meaning, but psychologically disturbed people who were unable to function in society. The classroom was the ideal workplace for them: other adults didn't have to deal with their eccentricities, and they had a secure, reasonably well-paid job with little accountability, for life. We can thank the education unions for that, but that is another story.

The long-term effects of my standard three teacher’s actions are non-existent. At a recent school reunion, we looked back fondly on the crazy old guy, who is long since dead. He didn't actually cause any physical injuries, other than a couple of bruises, a few scratches, and some wounded pride. He did teach us that in the world there are some quite fucked-up people. I wouldn't go so far as to call that teacher character-building, but it would be a massive misrepresentation to suggest that he harmed people considerably.

Likewise, David Benson-Pope’s alleged victims will not carry any psychological scars for his alleged sadistic treatment of them in 1982. Physical intimidation and violence by some teachers was not extraordinary.

I don’t blame Benson-Pope for his alleged bullying of defenceless children over twenty years ago. What is disturbing, however, is that a guy with his downright merciless and inhumane tendencies, is in a position of high moral and political authority today. Benson-Pope ascribes to a certain social agenda: he is a bully, and does not have any regard for using callous tactics to get what he wants done.

Nor does Benson-Pope take responsibility for his alleged brutality. His disregard for the sincerity of the complainants, and his constantly changing story, suggest that he has only ever seen the issue as a political fight. He sees it as perfectly legitimate to use his considerable resources, and media machine, to attack his alleged victims. After having selectively leaked parts of the Police Report, he is now attempting to shift the blame for that onto his press secretary. Classic symptoms of a man of supreme desperation, in denial.

Benson-Pope’s alleged actions in 1982 were hardly defensible, if true. But they are understandable in the context of the time.

Benson-Pope could have dealt with the whole issue by meeting his alleged victims in person, and in private, and sitting through with them, and listening to what they believed occurred in 1982. He could have apologised to them for his intimidating behaviour. And they would have forgiven him.

Instead, through his initial denials—and a ferocity of denial that convinced many that he certainly had the combative personality to inflict physical harm, his constant attacks on his accusers, his refusal to face questions with ridiculous excuses for not showing up, and his recent about-turn with protests that he simply no longer remembers what happened—he has destroyed his own political career. He has chosen to avoid a court of law, and in the process, has been convicted by a court of public opinion.

But at least in his senility, the PPTA will welcome him back to the classroom, where he can regale his pupils with political war stories.