When bear-hugs go bad

See, this is exactly what happens when I leave writing the blog to the last minute: I get scooped.

In response to a Herald article about the assault of a 19-year-old Navy cadet by a 44-year-old petty officer, I would have pointed out the interesting contrast between headline and the content of the story:

The 19-year-old complainant, who has name suppression, was surprised to see Waa - her instructor at naval reserve unit HMS Olphert - when he turned up at her Wellington flat on November 2 last year. She let him in and he asked for a coffee so they went into the kitchen. He then asked to see her bedroom.

She instead showed him the lounge. But after he asked again she "relented" and they went into her room.

Prosecutor Flight Lieutenant Randall Walker said Waa lay on her bed and discussed how to tie knots. She practised on her dressing gown cord and tied a knot around her wrist. Waa then pulled on the dressing gown cord, which tightened as she tried to step away. Waa then gave her a bear hug that "lifted her off the ground".

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"As he left he went to kiss her but she resisted his advance. She was visibly upset by these events," Flight Lieutenant Walker said.

The headline, of course, was "Navy man falls from grace over bear hug". Oh, come on, it was just a bear hug! It's not like an man in a position of authority sought to use it to sexually assault a young woman. Just a bear hug!

Yes, I would have done all this if only Julie at The Hand Mirror hadn't done it first. So I just have this to contribute:

Tiegate

Sorry about the delays in getting anything of substance up today - I assure you it's nothing to do with a lack of supply.

I realise that television news makes the Herald look like the Harvard Law Review, but I couldn't resist sending this particular gem your way, courtesy of 3 News and EtH Marketing Manager Pete. For those of you who were washing your hair during last night's 6pm bulletin, here is an important piece on Health Minister Tony Ryall's dress sense.

I REPEAT: HERE IS THE LINK.

Should you think that a little light-hearted bullshit never hurt anyone, think of it this way:

• 3 News bulletin broadcast time: 60 mins
• Minus, ooh, 17 minutes ad time: 43 mins
• Minus nine minutes of weather, say: 34 mins
• Minus a segment of sport: 25 mins
• Minus about five minutes of general banter and graphics and such: 20 mins

That's 20 mins of news - even if we count 'dog rides skateboard' as news. So an article on Tony Ryall's tie abuse during the swine flu scare, a scare stoked by none other than 3 News, took up 10 per cent of the news time. Now that's journalism.

Readers' Bore-um

It's been a while since I lifted the lid on this particular fiasco. Remember - these are supposedly the best letters received all day, and a human being has hand-selected them for publication.

'On flu':

Shades of Animal Farm. The pigs are fighting back. Beware of the ducks.

J. Davis, Tauranga

What? Is this supposed to be a haiku? I don't understand what you're talking about.

'On Fiji Proposal':

If the Maori Party could hold a coup of their own they would and there would be no democracy for NZ.

Helen Acraman, Te Atatu Peninsula

It's true - she's got documents to prove it. Sure, they're written in her own faeces in a language unknown to man or beast but... you get the picture.

'League team':

Stephen Kearney may have got away with the Rugby League World Cup final last year, and as a proud Kiwi living in Australia, I never miss a chance to remind the Aussies. However, he is kidding if he thinks he will win again with the side he has named.
Where are the form players: Tuiaki, Roberts... [insert interminable list of players and their flaws, which, in a terrible mix-up, has made it into the letters page of a serious broadsheet newspaper]... and someone please put some glue on Ropati's hands.

Steve Hunt, Sunshine Coast

Murray Deaker is thattaway ------->

'Global warming book':

I had hoped that Gareth Morgan's scientific assessment of global warming might answer the question posed in the IPCC's last report: "CO2 has been increasing at a constant rate since 1900 to 2006 and our IPCC computer models [blah blah blah...]

Gareth's answer was confusing. He told me the opposite, that global average temperature is still rising, so who should I believe? [...]

I was left disappointed.

Rex Sellar, Onehunga.

Hi Rex. If I were you, on questions of climate science I would believe a bunch of climate scientists, rather than an economist/man about town. But I feel for you - I too have been left disappointed by some of Gareth Morgan's books. His book on crochet left much to be desired, while his magnum opus on the history of the Tongan language contained inaccurate and often contradictory information.

Hey hey hey, it's Mt Albert!

There are, as far as I can see, three main groups of disappointed people after any election: disgruntled supporters of the losing party, defeated MPs and newspaper publishers. The buzz around election time sells papers as, for some unknown and sadly misguided reason, people turn to the mainstream media to tell them which colour - red, blue, green, Act - wants what and who will give them the biggest bribe. So what's the next-best thing to an election? A byelection!

Of all the pumped-up pseudo-scandals that the Herald has talked about, the only one that seems to have any merit - the principle of people running for election, their party losing, and them deciding they are going to take their ball and go home - has barely been mentioned. Instead, the Herald has been full of scandalous tales of rampant political skullduggery:

• the nefarious Greens' plans to - shock - run a candidate in a byelection
• Labour's nefarious (alleged) plans to ask them not to
• the 'Tizard effect', whereby Labour supposedly had to choose someone who was not a sitting MP so that Judith Tizard wouldn't get back into parliament
• the nefarious academic paper that Labour favourite David Shearer wrote years ago calling for the UN to regulate mercenary groups in failed states, and how this allegedly conflicted with Phil Goff's views, and how no two politicians in the same party have ever disagreed on an issue before, never ever
• now, today's article alleges a massive rift on the 'left' with the headline "Greens attack Labour's 'grey' man:

The gloves are off between the parties of the left in the Mt Albert byelection, with Greens co-leader and candidate Russel Norman dismissing Labour's flag-bearer, David Shearer, as a "grey machine man" and "National-lite."

Holy crap! The gloves are off! Rivers will turn red with blood! Just look at these quotes:

Norman: "I'm sure he's a very nice guy, but it means we've got National versus National-lite versus the Greens."

Shearer: "It would be a long bow to draw to say that. My actions stand for themselves in where I sit on any political spectrum. Dr Norman is really looking at trying to increase his profile, so I guess we can expect this sort of thing from him over the next few weeks."

Ouch! That's hard-hitting.

For the second half of the article, Claire Trevett, who has starred on these hallowed pages before (EtH, that is), simply plagiarised her previous articles on the topic, reusing the same old lazy slander about Tizard and the "controversial battle for the candidacy" - controversial because, as far as I can tell, the Herald made it so.

To finish up, Claire mentions the obviously less-controversial battles for the nominations of the parties on the 'right'. The fact that National head office seems to favour Melissa Lee, while the local organisation allegedly favours one Ravi Musuku, does not register on the Herald controversy-o-meter. Hang on, when it was the Labour central party allegedly meddling in the selections, it was news, but if it's National... oh, never mind.

Finally, on Act:

Act will stand John Boscawen, also a list MP, who became well known for his opposition to the Electoral Finance Act last year.

He has a "take no prisoners" approach to campaigning and could take votes from National.

I guess that's the only area where Act have a "take no prisoners" approach. Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.

Mean-spirited Monday

More pro-zoo propaganda on the front page of the Herald today - "Jumbo breakfast to start the day":

Breakfast with the elephants of Auckland Zoo turned out to be a jumbo birthday treat yesterday for 10-year-old Emily Nock.

"At first, the sheer size of Kashin was intimidating but she was so friendly and gentle," said Emily's aunt Lesley Mitchell, of Meadowbank, after the greet-and-eat event in the elephant paddock. "We were blowing in her snout so she would get our smell and she and Burma lapped up the attention."

Christ. 'Interestingly', this means that both the lead articles on the front page are about Indian immigrants, albeit with a slightly different spin. Why the zoo can't just have some good old-fashioned, middle-New Zealand, Anglo-Saxon animals I just don't know.

Michael Cullen: Great finance minister or greatest finance minister?

With Michael Cullen losing the election and now leaving Parliament, the Herald can afford to take its foot off his throat for once. A relatively fawning article by Claire Trevett accompanied his valedictory speech but, even better, an opinion piece by one Jason Knauf put forward a rather revisionist account for his legacy.

[...] I believe it is a hard ask to point to another Western social democrat of his generation who has left a larger imprint on their domestic policy landscape.

And so on. On one level, it's a nice change from the demonic portrayal that accompanied the man in the mainstream media during his tenure as minister, but its view of Cullen as a cerebral dreamboat grates a bit as it continues. So thank goodness that today we have a corrective. Paul Moon, a "professor of history" at the University of Auckland University of Technology University (UAUTU) "questions a glowing assessment of the former finance minister."

One would hope that Michael Cullen's former speech-writer, Jason Knauf, sticks with his work in PR, for which he seems to have some modest talent, and never crosses the divide into serious history.

His unblushingly hagiographical ode in the Herald to the former Labour finance minister craves a corrective - however brief.

So what insights do we receive from the off-white tower on the other side of Wellesley St? Firstly, he gives a warning about learning from history:

It is true that Helen Clark's finance minister presided over one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth in the country's recent history but he deserves credit for this to the same extent that medieval feudal lords deserved credit for good harvests.

It was largely a set of circumstances well beyond Cullen's control that was responsible for New Zealand's decade of prosperity.

This is a good point, albeit one not to be expected from an academic historian - i.e. someone whose entire profession relies on committing the same fallacy. Having established that we should not make post-hoc rationalisations to try and explain historical events, he goes on to do just that.

However, what the finance minister did achieve was to increase the number of New Zealanders who became beneficiaries - possibly at the highest rate at any time since World War II. And instead of allowing the economy to flourish to its fullest extent, he choked it with unnecessarily high taxes.

So he's not responsible for the good stuff, but he is responsible for the bad stuff. Oh well. From there, Dr Moon takes off his historian hat and puts on his right-wing "Your Views" hat.

[...] Much of the additional revenue that Cullen exacted from New Zealanders was swallowed up and lost in the largesse of an already bloated civil service and on supporting the new categories of beneficiaries he introduced.

[...] That stationary position was due to his unyielding adherence to the ideology of the left - in particular, the sort of sentimental socialism which was joined at the hip with the type Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser would have identified with.

[...] Cullen's intellect has never been in question and he had an impressive and sometimes even entertaining array of put-downs. He and Clark were the powerful left and right jab (or should that be left and more left) of Labour's parliamentary party.

Ha, wait, is this guy a professor at AUTU or a visitor for the comedy festival? Anyway, not the greatest opinion piece in history (geddit?), but hardly the worst either. I guess my point is, after nine years of relentlessly negative coverage of Cullen from the Herald, surely the first piece, Mr Knauf's, was the corrective, rather than the Dr Moon's.

Headline of the day

On page A5:

"Throat slashed"

Anyway, yeah, I'll write something, just let me get something to eat.