On the new NZ On Screen site that just launched, there’s a clip from NZ comedy legend Billy T James in 1990, doing a ‘newsreader in the future’ gag with the nation’s crooner Sir Howard Morrison. Howard delivers this line: “..there’s no truth in the rumour that the last four remaining Pakeha seats will be abolished…” There is applause and laughter, and the camera cuts away to someone in the crowd smiling happily at this riff on NZ’s controversial Maori seats…
…waitaminute…
…is that…
…a young version of National party leader John Key? The very chap who just got into hot water over the proposed abolition of the Maori seats?
Check for yourself. At the 3’30” mark.
Category: Everything Political
Endorsing The Greens
Ruth just posted on how she’s voting this year, and it has moved me to comment: in a shock revelation that will come as no surprise to anybody, this election I’m voting Green.
Why? It’s the climate change, stupid. (To coin a phrase.) I feel strongly that the Greens are the only party that are really talking about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The stronger their voice in Parliament, the more they can push the government to start dealing with the problem.
There are other reasons to vote Green; there are other reasons not to vote Green. But from where I’m sitting, climate change is the most important issue in the world right now by a wide margin. All of the other pros and cons of various party platforms just look insignificant next to it, like choosing the best music to listen to while the Titanic goes down.
So I’m voting Green. And if you agree that anthropogenic climate change as the biggest problem on our horizon, I urge you to vote Green as well.
(Also, I loved Ruth’s final comment in her post: “My favourite thing about New Zealand elections is that you vote with a fat orange felt pen, a clear sign of a serious democracy at work.” Hee!)
Powell Endorses Obama
Cheney made him soiled goods by forcing him to front the “case for war” to the UN, and then threw him on the garbage heap. Now Colin Powell gets his revenge on the governing clique that always hated him.
Not that Obama particularly needs the boost right now, and not that McCain is the same as CheneyBush, but it still tastes pretty sweet. Powell was a company man who was deliberately betrayed, but he never lost credibility among the Repub base or mainstream US, so his floor-crossing endorsement is big news. Even more so given that usually he’s reluctant to speak out at all, thanks to his deeply ingrained good-soldier approach to politics (the same one that led him to ruin by dutifully presenting garbage intelligence with those satellite photos of Saddam’s “weapon factories” ahem).
I remember at a party in ’99 or so, gleefully predicting that the 2004 US Presidential race would be between Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell. I was, of course, completely wrong but it has been nice to see them both in play in 2008, with all that confrontational identity content (race, gender) well in the mix. I kinda imagine that the USA right now feels like it’s getting healthy for the first time in years.
Flowups: McCain, Green Billboards
Two linky followups to posts from previous-time:
In relation to the dumbfounding “My fellow prisoners” comment uttered by John McCain, here is Bob Harris with a considerate reflection that merits your attention:
McCain’s weird POW flashback this week, where he called supporters his “fellow prisoners,” is another reminder (as if we need one) of just how much McCain processes things through the lens of Vietnam. (Speaking compassionately: how could he possibly not?) And of course, his personal anger toward his captors remained intense enough that he refused to apologize for openly calling them “gooks” as late as the 2000 campaign: “I hate the gooks,” McCain said to reporters on his campaign bus. “I will hate them as long as I live.”
And my post on Green billboards mentioned that billboards are of particular public interest in this election – evidence of the fact, the Sunday Star Times has invited John Ansell (designer of the hugely divisive Iwi/Kiwi billboards) to write a semi-regular column about this year’s political billboards. You can find the full version on his blog. He snarkily gives props to the Greens for their material, but more interesting is how he excoriates National for their rubbish billboards but tries to weasel around this by saying they’re meant to be rubbish. Er, no John, no. They’re just rubbish. (h/t Poneke)
My fellow say what now?
(Man, busy. So I’ll just propagate this instead of saying anything new. Picked up on GMSkarka’s LJ, but it’s all over.)
In this 13-second clip, McCain calls Americans his “fellow prisoners”.
To be fair, however, he is very very old.
(It don’t mean anything, of course – but don’t pretend the US media wouldn’t be all over Obama if he made a slip of this magnitude. They might yet come after McCain for this one.)
More DomPost WTF
Today the Dominion Post, our capital city’s newspaper of record, features as its below-the-fold front page article the demented rantings of the online reactionary lunatics. (Not so prominent online, thankfully. The comments themselves are here, and they’re just as stupid as you might expect.)
Anyone who reads comments anywhere online will know these people – emboldened by anonymity, aggrieved by a world too complex for them, they seize the opportunity to decry political correctness and to call for a return to barbarism. They’re everywhere, sadly, but they are also a vanishingly small percentage of the total population.
They have been mercilessly lampooned for a long time, even by such outlets as the Private Eye, which for all its many virtues is hardly up with the play in the internet age. There is an addictive website devoted to ridiculing the more idiotic bletherings of this disgruntled rump. And yet, there they are, reported as front page news. As if they matter; as if they’re worth listening to.
Another fine journalistic decision by the DomPost. You know, I bet if you google for five minutes you can find people online calling for Obama to be lynched – that can be your front page story tomorrow!
Green Billboards 2008
I just want to give some recognition to the best design work of the NZ election campaign thus far, and it has come from an unexpected source – the Green party. The Greens don’t have a history of excellence in the visual design stakes, and their hoardings for the last election were (IMHO) pretty damn ugly:
The whole series of 2005 billboards is visible here.
This year, they have put some serious resource into the billboard campaign – either that, or they’ve stumbled across an exceptional designer willing to work for cheap. Everything about their ’08 boards is on point. Check out this one, which was the first one I saw:
It’s perfect stuff – the composition of the image is great, the broad horizon speaks to the Green’s themes, even the demeanour of the model is well-placed. The simple, simple, simple message is genius. And I love the typeface of the key message (although I would have preferred the “vote for” typeface to match). Best of all, it works on the big scale – it looks fine on the screen, but enormous on the side of a building it really throws weight.
It’s great to see. Billboard design has symbolic importance for this election, thanks to the role played in the 2005 election by the highly contentious (and very well-designed) “iwi/kiwi billboards”. Sure enough, googling up the images for this post has turned up much interest and praise, some of which is summarised here at FrogBlog. Labour partisans The Standard even fear these billboards are too slick!
I think this is a significant step up in game that the Greens need to make if they want to make it happen this election. They have clearly decided internally to campaign on the “vote for your children” line, which seems like a risky choice to me but executed this well they might pull it off. I’m impressed with these billboards, and their new leader Russel Norman is giving a good account of himself (even though he seems to be hated in the house?). You go, Greenies.
Steven Price on the “Terror Raids”
I spent last night thinking and reading about the “terror raids” of last October. First I attended a public meeting on the subject organised by the October 15 Solidarity crew, with Media Law Journal blogger Steven Price speaking on the contempt of court case surrounding the raids.
It was interesting stuff, and Steven (as ever, I’m advised) was a great and interesting speaker. The case he talked about, currently before the courts, concerns the publication of excerpts from a leaked affidavit by the Domionion Post and other related outlets.
It alleges that the editor of the Dominion Post (Tim Pankhurst) and colleagues prejudiced the right to a fair trial of the October 15 defendants. Price thinks the case is likely to succeed, and he outlined several reasons why:
- The newspaper article was highly sensational and ran at a time of high public interest
- The article cherry-picked the most sensational parts of the affidavit and did not represent its overall contents well.
- The affidavit was itself a cherry pick of evidence by the police, who meant to use it to convince a Judge to allow search warrants; so the article was a cherry-pick of a cherry-pick.
- The newspaper’s decision not to identify who was speaking in published quotations had the effect of encouraging the public to attribute the inflammatory statements to all the defendants, even if these views were not shared
- The affidavit was suppressed and would never make it to trial, so the evidence presented would never be encountered by jurors and could not be addressed and contested in a trial context
Steven thought last night that the likely outcome was a guilty verdict that would see Pankhurst & co. fined for their act of publication. That would be an outcome I wholeheartedly support. In this I part ways from the sage commenter on NZ affairs Russell Brown, who recently said “If Pankhurst and his employer are not successful in their defence, it would worry me if the court were to apply a very harsh penalty.” I personally think a very harsh penalty is entirely in order. It isn’t, to my mind, the fact of publication that makes Pankhurst et al. so deserving of punishment – it’s the manner of that publication. It would have been entirely possible to run the leaked affidavit in a less sensational and prejudicial way, tempering the most dramatic material with contextual information and generally trying to avoid the leap to conclusion. It would still have been a leak, it would still have been a suppression breach, and it would still have been a bad decision in my opinion, but there I think Russell’s point about the public’s “right to know” stands up. If that “right to know” is being fed highly biased and prejudicial material that is in turn sensationalised, then that is a distant bridge too far, and Pankhurst and the others involved should bear the consequences.
Steven continued, however, with something I hadn’t seen coming but that is obvious in hindsight: should the contempt case be found against the DomPost (as he thinks is likely to happen), he believes the Judges hearing the “terror raids” cases will be hard pressed to deny a request for a stay of prosecution. In other words, the DomPost’s eagerness to show that the arrestees were worthy of being arrested may directly result in them getting off the charges.
There was much more to the evening’s discussion, including a memorable aside about whether the Prime Minister’s words about “napalm blasts” meant she herself was in contempt… In any case, I read all the material I could track down on the case that evening, and to my mind the best account still comes from Nicky Hager (no surprises there). The two relevant quotes in this post are all the refresher you need.
Anyway. This story is developing, as they say.
Muslim With Excalibur
I was delighted to discover this week that someone has been messing with symbols in a way that seems unprecedented to me. Over in the UK, writer Paul Cornell (best known for his work on the new Doctor Who TV series) has been writing a superhero comic for Marvel based on venerable character Captain Britain. Like his earlier series Wisdom, which was one of the few comics I allowed myself money to buy in 2005, he is using it as a chance to explore ideas of Britishness in the 21st century. Who are these Britons, anyway?
He has attracted controversy for including in his ranks, as the reader viewpoint character, a young muslim woman, Faiza, complete with traditional attire. The controversy hasn’t come from an outcry – rather, from occasions when the comics media has gone all inappropriate (making ‘terrorist’ jokes is just the start of it). By and large, everyone’s been quite happy with Faiza, and it helps that the series as a whole is well-conceived and well-crafted fun.
In an issue released a month ago, young Faiza moves from initiate to full-blooded hero when she pulls Excalibur from a stone, being judged worthy to do so. (Yes, I know it was a different sword in the stone in the legend, so does Cornell, just roll with it.) This is both an obvious move and an audacious one. The King Arthur legend is the only mythology that is claimed by Britain, and over which they feel ownership. And with British identity very much under contest at present – witness endless tabloid headlines about those Muslims changing the way we British people live – it’s a bold political statement as well, about what being British means today.
Here are the panels in question:
Anyway, there’s plenty more that could be said about this but I’ll spare you because I need to get in to the office now.
The issue also includes the shocking death of another character, a shapeshifting alien who assumes the form of John Lennon most of the time because he likes it, and who is executed for mocking his fascistic captors. That’s very British, right there, not being executed for steely defiance, but rather for doggedly taking the piss. I think Britishness is in good hands with Cornell.
Further reading: Cornell’s blog where he takes reader comments on the issue in question.
Waste Minimisation Bill enters law
About two years ago, I tried out that small group action thing I’d been talking about. Three friends and I got together and decided we were going to do something – we chose to make a submission on the Waste Minimisation Bill that was then in committee.
In February 2007, we fronted up before select committee to speak to our submission. I wrote about the experience here.
Now, a year and a half later, the bill has passed into law. It has changed a bit from its earlier form, and you’d have to be a bit of an optimistic reader to find any evidence of our specific submission contributing to the changes, but I feel a kind of ownership nonetheless. This bill coming into law is an important step towards getting this country to sort out its relationship with waste and recycling.
The passing of the Waste bill has mostly gone without comment – largely due to the passing of the Emissions Trading Scheme the same day. The Greens put out a press release but that’s about it – you can read that here.
Anyway, its nice to be able to draw a line under that action. Key lessons:
(1) lawmaking takes a long time
(2) NZ’s system of government is genuinely open to participation from everyone – we have enormous power to influence things, if we only spare the time and energy and interest to use it.
Nice one.