Author:

“Family First” On Another Planet

I posted last year about the so-called “anti-smacking bill” that removed the defence of reasonable force for those accused of assaulting their children. It passed, but proved to be a subject of great media controversy and is widely tipped as being the moment that the Labour government passed its use-by date.
The Children’s Commissioner (I love that we have a Children’s Commissioner) has just released a report, One year on: Public attitudes and New Zealand’s child discipline law (pdf, 190K). It found general support for the new law:

…participants were asked about their support for the new law… Those who were aware of the law change (n = 681) were asked to use a 0 to 10 scale (where 10 means ‘strongly support’) to rate how much they support or oppose the law change. A majority (43 percent) said they firmly support it (7-10 on the scale), scale), while 28 percent were firmly opposed (0-3 on the scale)

Of course, silly lobby group Family First were quick off the block with their response, which leads with this wackiness:

there is an 80% opposition to the anti-smacking law…

This is pretty much a straight denial of reality. FF asserts that this research is consistent with 80% opposition to the law change, when it plainly is not. On FF’s topsy-turvy planet, up is down, black is white, and 30% opposition is 80% opposition.
Of course, the NZPA exercised the proper function of journalists, and ran FF’s nonsense alongside the Children’s Commission study results for “balance”, because clearly Bob McCoskrie’s ravings are equivalent to an independent study published with full methodology and results.
In summary: go away Bob McCoskrie; and, thanks, media!

New Govt Down On Climate Change

John Key’s new National govt hasn’t even been sworn in and already the signs are bad for one of the most crucial policy areas. In the agreement with pseudo-Libertarians ACT Key and co. have agreed to put climate change responses on the table. For over a decade climate change legislation has been painfully ground out in the face of massive opposition from the Nats and ACT, and now that the Emissions Trading Scheme is finally in place they have committed to stalling it and reviewing it.
The ETS isn’t perfect, of course, but we can’t afford to start the process of building new climate change regulation from scratch. We need to get moving on this – not just for the sake of the environment, but as the world readies itself for post-Kyoto economics we’ll get seriously stung if we’re left behind. It’s the ideology tail wagging the pragmatic dog, here.
Most frustrating thing: ACT has put forward in its proposed select committee terms of reference that the scientific basis of climate change will itself be reviewed. Unsurprising from a party in the thrall of crank science and climate change denial, but it appeals to the same tendencies lurking beneath the surface throughout the National party. The idea of a select committee in the halls of government giving a platform for the shouting madmen of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition fills me with dismay.
This could all go very badly for New Zealand.

Liday Frinky

Aw yuss, another Friday Lunky! AW YUSS OW!
Nils Olav the penguin
Here is a penguin who is a ranking officer in the Norwegian Army! He is in Edinburgh and I never even knew!
Early storyboards for Star Wars
Cloverfield retold as a series of Google Maps tags (thanks Talula!)
Stephen Fry writes about the beauty of language as only he can: “Nonetheless, I can no more change my language and the sum of its discourses than I can add a cubit to my height or, sadly it seems, take a pound from my weight. Well, perhaps that’s going a little far. I can attempt to disguise my language, I can dress it up into even more elaborate and grandiose orotundity, prolixity and self-consciousness, Will Self-consciousness you might say, or I could dress it down into something stripped. Stark. Bare. Simple. It would be hard to dress it down into something raggedly demotic without it being a patronising pastiche of a street argot to which I quite evidently have no access and in whose mazy slang avenues I would soon get lost, innit? In a sense I am typecast linguistically and although I can for fun try on all kinds of brogues and dialect clothes, my voice, my style, my language is as distinctive as my fingerprints.”
And finally… LIVE PUPPYCAM KYOOT

Five Years of From The Morgue

Kinda incredibly, today marks five years of blogging. My blog can pull on its big backpack and go off to school for the first time.
939 entries, over 250K words, and I still haven’t internalised this blogging thing. I still see myself as “person who blogs” rather than “blogger”. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a niche? If my blog was a definite sort of thing, then I can imagine starting to identify as the person or does that thing. But I’m still not sure, after five years, what I’m doing with this blog, and maybe that stops me calling myself “blogger”.
I think I know why I do it though. Well, there are lots of reasons – its nice to write stuff and know people read it, of course. Its even nicer when people talk back to you, in comments (4250 of those so far) or in person. It supports my vanity and my humility both; vanity because people read at all, humility because stupid things I say get thrown back at me in comments scant minutes later.
It’s a good way to feel like I’m staying in touch with a lot of people I wouldn’t otherwise stay in touch with. In part, this blog fills the role of the old SCFBBS that was a big part of my university social life – I feel like the posts on this blog form part of a bigger conversation with many people I like and even some I don’t know at all.
Most of all, I have realised that I blog because it makes me think. It prompts me to engage with things I’m reading, with issues of the day, with odd events that happen to me, and apply my brain to them. Transforming thoughts into words is a fascinating process and this blog nudges me go through that process for all kinds of things that might go unexamined otherwise. It helps me figure out what I want to think about something. It lets me try out ideas. It often reveals thoughts I didn’t know that I had; more frequently still, it makes me generate thoughts I certainly wouldn’t reach any other way.
So thanks to Iona, who first sowed the idea of blogging in my head. Thanks to David, who actually dragged me in and whose generous hosting of the additiverich collective has continued without pause. Thanks to all of you who read and comment and linky. I still don’t know exactly what sort of blog this is, but I hope it is some kind of interesting.
And as a small reward of sorts for those who’ve made it through my navel-gazing, I give you:
every From The Morgue post on one loooong page.

Not good for the Greens

[The election bombardment will end soon, I promise…]
I was disappointed with the showing made by the Greens at this election. Given the general environmental crisis and the promise of support for Labour, leftie voters who were disillusioned with Labour should have had a natural home with the Greens. The departure of sadly controversial Green MP Nandor Tanczos would have dispelled some fears; the Green party has stood up for itself over the last three years, retaining independence from government but still able to enact smart legislation, and showing through the waste management bill and the “anti-smacking” bill (among others) that it could work broadly across the house. Add to this what everyone agrees was a wonderful campaign, and you have a political party that didn’t put a foot wrong.
And with all this, it still didn’t make it to 7%. Disaffected voters clearly wanted Labour out of government, so the Greens didn’t benefit from their desertion of Labour. The “anti-smacking” bill, rightly identified as the turning point for the nation’s support of Labour, cast a shadow over the Green party as well (and National, who had also supported the bill, somehow waltzed free without being tainted). The general resistance to “nanny state” (how I hate that term) caught the Greens as well, with their advocacy for a low-footprint lifestyle.
Is 7% as high as it’s ever going to get? Will the Green party always be this small? Co-leader and chief asset Jeanette will likely be gone next election, and what then? No other party is even close to taking the environmental crisis seriously. Heck, ACT have 5 MPs in government coalition and they’re led by someone who thinks climate change is a scam.
Perhaps this is it, then. I don’t know what they can do differently.
Green % vote at the last four elections:
2008: 6.43%
2005: 5.30%
2002: 7%
1999: 5.16%

[media] The Comment Section

Furthermore – can we have new political commentators please?
It was hard to stomach the presence all over the TV of professional **** Matt Hootron, smugly spinning for his Nats inner circle masters. Hooting is just getting more and more visible, despite being neck-deep in the mire of the Brash National leadership, as revealed in Hager’s “The Hollow Men”. His newspaper column is pure PR for the Nats – how come no-one is talking about the inexplicable moment on Saturday when a victorious John Key, live on TV linkup talking to Hootsmon, told him he was pleased that Hooting could run the “Key wins” newspaper column he’d read earlier? Do all political columnists send drafts of their columns to party leaders the day before they run? I mean, WTF?
I’ve talked before about the huge bias in NZ political punditry towards conservative white men, and the surprisingly large representation among them of active National party operators such as Hootron. Our media continues to do us a grave disservice by perpetuating this state of affairs.
Which by no means is an endorsement of token lefty Chris Trotter. Incredibly, his post-election column in the Sunday Star-Times began “the NZ left has just suffered its own 9/11”. This epic lapse in taste and judgment leaves me feeling nauseous.
My recommendation – razor gangs for the commentariat. Chop out the grumpy old men and give the space to new blood, new faces, new perspectives, and particularly to political and perhaps even ethnic diversity.
And please put Matt Hootie back in his box.

Key’s Victory Speech

(No-one has transcribed it? Really?)
Key’s victory speech was poorly delivered and a bit rubbish, but it was also gracious and thoughtful. Using his victory speech to talk at length – at great length! – about his admiration for Helen Clark was astonishing. Pledging to represent all New Zealanders, whether they voted for him or not, was an approach clearly lifted from Obama but positive nonetheless. And making a public outreach to the Maori Party was another un-needed but appreciated move.
There were two moments in his speech that won enormous cheers from the room: “Our collective success rests on the success of individuals”, he said, and “It will be a government that values individual achievement.” These are clear signals of the ethos inside National. There is a lot of meaning in those statements, a lot of politics, clearly understood by those in the room without having to be unpacked. Key has come in with a clear agenda, and it is the same as that of the 90s-era Nat government, the members of which still fill his caucus.
The only restraint is that the voters have not given a mandate for a return to the 90s; as Gordon Campbell suggested, the mandate given John Key is “be not-Helen”. Massive reform should erode voter support, and fast. Many inside the Nats are eager to get on with their 90s-era project while they have their hands on the tiller. Expect big battles inside the National party as the ideologues take on the pragmatists.

Election Friday

No conventional Friday linky today. I haven’t been collecting links to odd and interesting stuff this week because it’s all elections, all the time in my little brain.
With the Obama win still roaring in our ears, we Kiwis face up to our own election tomorrow, where the nine-year three-term leftish Labour government led by Helen Clark looks set to be booted out in favour of the rightish National government led by relative newcomer John Key. I don’t think a Nats government would be the end of all that is good in New Zealand, but I am unhappy to look at Key’s team and see all the same faces that helped to break our country in the 90s.
Canadian social philosopher John Ralston Saul’s “The Collapse of Globalism” used New Zealand as a case study for the failure of the free-market reforms demanded by global capital. (He could write a new chapter on how deregulation has led the world into unprecedented economic crisis through the housing derivatives market.) Here’s a Harpers essay summarising the book-length argument in a page. Relevant quote:

Then, in late 1999, came the general election in New Zealand. Fifteen years earlier this small country had become the model for Globalization. Now, overnight, its electors voted to change direction, endorsing a strong interventionist government devoted to a mix of national social policies, enforceable economic regulations, and a stable private sector. Why? Its national industries had been sold off, its economy was in decline, and its standard of living had been stagnant for all fifteen years of its Globalization experiment. Its youth were emigrating at alarming rates. This, the citizens now said, was not inevitable.

Ralston Saul argued that this was the beginning of the end for what he calls “globalism”; the death knell that would reverberate everywhere. It seems he spoke to soon. John Key will bring back into power the politicians who presided over the discredited project of “globalism” in New Zealand, and there is every reason to expect they will seek to pick up exactly where they left off.
So while I don’t think it will be the end of everything, I think we are in for a risky time should National get enough votes to govern without needing a challenging coalition partner. And that’s not even counting the environmental issues at stake in this election.
The good news, of course, is that New Zealand uses a proportional representation system to determine its Parliament, and that means every vote counts. So get out and vote, New Zealanders. I’ve already endorsed the Greens here. You’re all smart enough to figure out for yourselves who deserves your vote.
The other good news: you won’t have to queue for an hour and a half to vote.
This guy understands your pain
(Okay, one Friday Linky: what President Obama can learn from Sci-Fi Presidents. The Morgan Freeman bit is great.)