Discomforting Truths

Sadly, we don’t expect politicians to acknowledge discomforting truths. Especially truths that weaken their argument. It’s probably a condition we are all guilty of from time to time, including columnists from the right and left of the political spectrum. Which makes it difficult to assess the merits of things like the government’s Welfare Working Group report.    

According to Chris Trotter’s article in the Otago Daily Times 13 Aug, the Welfare Working Group deliberations conjure images of Scrooge, workhouses and prisons for the poor. He also raises the revered Michael Joseph Savage from the dead to cast a disapproving eye on the proceeding. Trotter worries about the report targeting long-term beneficiaries, “overwhelmingly those on sickness, invalids and domestic purposes benefits; people who can’t work; people whose physical or mental disability makes ordinary paid work impossible; and people engaged in the raising of babies and small children.” He is also concerned by a society that defines sickness, invalidism and sole parenthood as self inflicted conditions. 

Which is all well and good but his appeal to our humanity would be more convincing if it acknowledged the following discomforting truths: 

Despite drug and alcohol addiction being a patently self-inflicted condition, successive governments have treated it as a sickness worthy of an endless benefit. Incomprehensible as it is to most people who work for a living, these ‘sickness’ beneficiaries are not expected to earn their own keep. I doubt very much that the socialists of Michael Joseph Savage’s day would countenance such muddled thinking. I imagine their compassion would run to ensuring that drug and alcohol treatment was available for anyone who wanted it, with the provision that an adult with a debilitating addiction should be in a rehabilitation programme or working for a living.  

Savage would probably approve of current benefit rates for widows. I imagine he would be in favour of and domestic purposes benefits for deserted solo parents, and parents who, because of illness for instance, cannot earn sufficient money to raise a child. But what would he say about young girls and women who make a lifestyle choice to have babies that must be supported by strangers (tax-payers) who work for a living?   

Many of these girls and young women (and the tom-cat young men who impregnate them and forget them) would be astonished, resentful and possibly hurt to be labelled selfish and irresponsible. And with some justification. They have been brought up by governments, officials and parents to believe that if they want it and it’s not against the law to have it, then it is their right to have a baby. A detail like providing for the child is irrelevant. 

One can almost see the puzzled expression on the pregnant young woman’s face when confronted by someone who does not understand this normal and acceptable behaviour. And again with some justification. For normal and acceptable is what it has become. The necessity of working for one’s keep, an adage once universally understood and accepted, is a foreign concept to people conditioned to believe they have a right to be exempt. 

Why do some people assume that uttering this discomforting truth is beneficiary-bashing? 

Arguments about beneficiary-bashing are tiresome and time-wasting. Sometimes I feel like I’m watching a re-run of debates about racial and sexual equality.  What we should be talking about is how to generate work, personal responsibility, self-reliance and social cohesion.  

I believe in cradle to grave social welfare. But unless it is tied to an individual’s responsibility to work it is nonsense. There is a necessary condition of course, full employment, by whatever means is available. If that is established there is no argument: Unless one chooses to drop out and provide for oneself, working for a living is not a matter of personal choice. It seems ridiculous that everyone is entitled to an old-age pension, including drug abusers who have not worked for twenty years, but no one has a similar entitlement  to work for a living.  

I am watching the government with considerable suspicion because full employment as a democratic given is anathema to them. However, the Welfare Working Group at least gives us an opportunity to explore alternatives to welfare dependency. For that I am grateful.   

Christopher Horan.

 

Because We Hate Them?

The subject of imprisonment has few equals for highlighting partisanship. Chris Trotter writing on ‘Prison Smoking Ban Out to Hurt,’ Otago Daily Times 2nd July, made some good points about the comfort value of smoking but went on to suggest that a cigarette has the power to calm “pain, anger and confusion tearing your guts to shreds.” I doubt that even Phillip Morris in the good old days would have gone that far. 

Chris Trotter went on to suggest that we forget for a moment the indisputable evidence of cigarette smoking’s fatal effects and acknowledge the “smoker’ heroic status.” This was  merely a precursor to the point of the article: 

According to Trotter, the ban on cigarettes in prison has nothing to do with health and everything to do with giving us, the law-abiding majority, the opportunity to really hurt prisoners by taking away their last shred of autonomy. In other words, it’s all about spite. There is some truth in this. Spite is one of the common emotional responses to criminal acts, and, I would suggest, a natural one. But a moment or two of thought would suggest that spite is merely a by-product of the no-smoking-in-prison legislation.  

As an ex smoker I have sympathy for prisoners who are going to be deprived of their fags.  They are more vulnerable than the rest of us. When the urge is upon them they cannot divert it by going for a run or having a coffee with a square of chocolate. But I have even more sympathy for the inmates of psychiatric institutions who are going to experience a ban on smoking not next year but today. 

Yet, given the evidence that smoking destroys health, it is hard to reasonably argue against a ban on smoking in hospitals. Hospitals make for an interesting comparison with prisons because we pause when we think of ‘innocent’ inmates of an institution being deprived of the fag that calms their nerves. Cannabis also calms the nerves. This train of thought could be interesting but for the moment I’ll restrict myself to practicality. The ideal solution; separating psychiatric and prison inmates and staff into smoking and non smoking buildings, is not practicable and never will be.

So, we have this new law, which in my view is a pragmatic response, more to do with the fear of litigation than concern about health. We live in an age of litigant’s suing residential institutions and Governments for neglect or abuses perpetrated generations ago. Who would have a better case than a non-smoking prison inmate forced to share a cell with a smoker for years? 

Talking of hate, imagine a bitter ex prisoner lying in a hospital bed right now dying of lung cancer. Never smoked in his life but shared a cell with smokers for years. Would he, I wonder, conclude that we forced him to share a cell with smokers because we hated him.   

A Sop For All Occasions.

You are offered it automatically if one of your family is murdered, or if you are one of a hundred family members sorrowing after a disaster, or one of a thousand students who attend a school where someone has been assaulted. So it follows that the same fashionable solution applies if you lose your job.

   The workers in a Canterbury freezing works were notified today that their factory is closing. But of course, the workers "have been offered counselling." I can imagine it: 

   "Mr Nikora, I understand you have been here for twenty years and, because of your age and the fact that we are in the middle of a depression, you have no hope of getting another job. That is most unfortunate, very sad. How does it make you feel?"

   Whack!

Modern Gods and Religious Beliefs

Those among us concerned at the demise of worship may rest assured that worship is more vibrant in New Zealand than it has ever been. What’s more, the schisms of the past have been trampled underfoot. Such is the reverence of new generations who have no room and less time for time-wasting Bible disputes. What matters is that all agree on God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Or, as they are more commonly referred to; the Dow, NZX fifty and the FTSE show. And to hell with the unemployed. When did they ever show a profit?

Sleeping Soundly.

 

 I slept soundly through the war, in my cot unaware   

Of blasted buildings, despair and life-long grief, 

People burning or blown apart, the stray bomb

That crashed through the school-hall roof.

My mother’s father boasted of killing the Boer.

My father’s father was killed on the Somme.

A generation later, though they’d seen it all before, 

Few said no to the second world war.  

 

I don’t know what slaughter my great granddad saw

But he probably fought in someone’s war, he and 

Generations that went before. Men who followed

The call to battle and left their blood to feed the grass 

For a stranger’s grazing cattle.

In the year two thousand and sixty five,   

In Guatemala, the Balkans, Rwanda and Darfur, 

I hope this year’s babies can look back and say,

I slept soundly through the war.

The Money or the Glory? I’ll take the...

I always turn to the sports pages of my newspaper first. Perhaps I delay reading about politics, money-making and violent crimes until I have been uplifted by the purity of athletic endeavour. Which just goes to show how I cling to naivety. Because, more and more, the sports pages are more about money than sport.   

   I’m soft on nostalgia too. The excitement and colour of the Commonwealth Games. All those wonderful athletes marching around the track, eyes shining with the pride of representing their country. For, no matter what the competition may hold in store, this is the hour of glory they have dreamed of.

    So much for nostalgia. Probably since the 1974 Games in Christchurch, (which I loved) the Commonwealth Games began losing its lustre. Commerce had come to stay. Glory was all very well but it didn’t have the allure of money in the bank. 

   Last Sunday Morning when I took out the sports section of the Sunday Star Times, I read about Kimberly Smith, a high performance marathon runner and a serious medal prospect. Alas, unlikely to compete in the games because her agent advised against Deli’s pollution and security. 

   Agent! Pollution! How pathetic that the world’s fittest physical specimens are being advised to use this as an excuse for spurning an invitation to the best that India has to offer. Safety is something else. No one in their right mind would encourage athletes to take a chance on terrorists. If only that were the primary reason for turning down the invitation. 

   Smith is quoted as saying, “It’s just really bad timing with the Commonwealth Games being in October when all the marathons start.” The article went on to say Smith would like to run a marathon in New York, Chicago or Berlin. Unlike Deli, which offers only glory, these are lucrative events for top athletes.  

   For all I know Kimberly Smith is wonderfully unselfish and wildly patriotic, and I look forward to following her progress. However, because she is a child of the professional sports era, she would be dumfounded by my disappointment at her reaction. Our generational attitudes to sport cannot be reconciled.  

   Yet my reaction to Carl Hayman, the ex All Black, taking the money from a French club rather than returning to represent New Zealand, was quite different. Perhaps my understanding of professionalism in Rugby is more developed. Players get knocked about then realise they’d better sell their services to the highest bidder before they get laid up. Fair enough. But in the dream time of my youth I never saw rugby players parading on a Commonwealth Games athletic track.

   So, I need to get up with the play. Carl Hayman and Kimberly Smith represent modern sport. So does renowned kayaker Ben Fouhy, who baulked at competing in national trials with lesser mortals because it didn’t suit his programme. It seems he may now be funded by Sport & Recreation New Zealand to run his own programme. This is where everyone else needs to get up with the play. 

   If athletes want to be treated as professionals they should not expect taxpayers to fund their lifestyle. They should pay their own way. Perhaps then the 70 million dollars that Sport & Recreation New Zealand spends could be devoted entirely to genuinely amateur sport.

  

Confessing.

We are witnessing a boom in media-driven public confessions; yet another area for exploitation by reality television. The script format could have been decreed by Mills and Boon: Scandal, relentless pursuit of the sinner, tears, remorse, anguish, forgiveness. To conform to the titillation format the subject matter is usually limited to adultery, embarrassing intoxication, fraud by a respected member of the community, and more adultery. We have not, as far as I know, witnessed attention-seeking sinners pursuing the media but it’s sure to happen soon. I suggest this development has the potential to be tedious in the extreme? 

No doubt the Pope agrees with me. His clergy managed to keep scandal at bay for about a thousand years. It was easy for much of that time because they were in charge. They had the power and the authority of law; they wrote it. But over time the secular voice became more important than the ecclesiastical and now the church is up to its ears defending the indefensible. As is most powerful institutions such as multi-national corporations and governments, secrecy is paramount. But from the start the catholic church had an unfair advantage on its competitors, it enshrined secrecy as a divine right. It’s pretty hard to argue against divine wisdom, sanctity, and the Holy Ghost.

In the modern context a priest’s divine right to keep secret the confession of a child molester is ridiculous. In my most thoughtful moments I am willing to believe the seal of secrecy could also have had a positive function. Perhaps as a means of maintaining professional discipline. Priest are men and men tend to give way to enmity, greed, malice, anger and envy, especially when all powerful, unless they are curbed. However, my experience tells me that the main motivation of the church was to avoid scandal and thus falling numbers and decreasing power. Such is the way of powerful institutions. The difference with the Catholic Church is that secrecy once had the authority of law.

Which is not the case with international corporations or parliaments or even relatively minor financial institutions. But while scandal costs money, careers, and seats in cabinet, silence remains the unwritten rule. So, tedious or not, that’s why we need the attention-seeking sinners.

 

Just wondering.

More and more I wonder about the Israelis. I have lost count of the number of books I have read about the holocaust. Each time shocked anew at the insensitivity of the perpetrators but also acknowledging to myself that, given the right circumstances, every country is capable of acting with the same inhumanity shown by Nazi Germany. Except Israel, surely?

But sadly, no. Over the past decade the rhetoric flowing from Israel about the Palestinians reminds me of apartheid South Africa’s appeals for understanding. You cannot understand us, they used to say, until you have lived here. Well, I did go and live there. What I found was a government and most of the white people in the country with a distorted view of the world. A world shaped in their image and identified by rabid racism, privilege, and hate.  

So now I have something else to wonder about: How remarkable it is that the only people who have not learned from the holocaust are the children of the survivors. 

No Going Soft on Drugs

No Going Soft on Drugs.

That’s always a safe slogan for a politician. I’m not suggesting Simon Power, Minister of Justice, is manipulating public sentiment for his own ends. On the contrary, Power obviously believes what he is saying about the drug problem. Most New Zealanders share his view that flexibility on this issue is the road to uncertainty and even more serious problems. People want clarity. In support of Simon Power, Joanne Black in the Listener put it this way: “There is no question about how many grams of a class C drug a person might be allowed to carry or use: it’s none.”

So we all know where we stand and so we should. We’ve been standing in the same place with the tide creeping steadily up past our knees for fifty years. Where has the seriousness of the drug problem lessened in that time? Not America or England or Australia or most other countries including New Zealand. It is worse and will continue to get worse while we hold on to patently useless strategies to deal with the problem.  

It may be useful to consider what those problems are: In the Hollywood tradition we have visions of innocent young victims whose lives are ruined by horrible drug-pushers. True or false? I’m not sure about the innocent part because becoming an addict takes time and effort. Nevertheless, lives are ruined. But what of the many more young people who have tried drugs, have not become addicts and have gone on to have successful lives? And those horrible pushers: are they really any more horrible than alcohol pushers who have a hundred-fold more victims?  

Drug addiction leads to crime. Addicts cannot fund their habit in any other way. True, but how many drug addicted criminals already have a propensity for crime? My guess is that honest addicts who are merely immature rather criminal would eventually seek help. Addicts with a propensity for crime are unlikely to seriously consider an alternative lifestyle. In between, there are a variety of people whose lives revolve around drugs. Some are stupid and some intelligent, what they have in common is insufficient strength of character to change. We may sympathise, especially for the families of these individuals, but all we should be reasonably expected to provide for them is rehabilitation facilities.  

Drug addiction is a serious and costly individual and social problem. But first and foremost it is a health problem for which there is a cure for those who wish to avail themselves of rehabilitation. In other words it is a manageable problem.

What is clearly less manageable is corruption, not of young innocents but our institutions and society. The drugs trade provides criminal organisations with a product that returns unimaginably huge profits. Protected by gangs with the power and motivation to bribe, blackmail, intimidate, batter, torture and murder. You would have to be unforgivably naive to believe that our men and women customs, immigration, police officers and politicians are immune to fear and greed. 

New Zealand’s Canute-like laws on drugs have failed to stem the tide. Change will not come from more of the same. We have to grasp that painful nettle and admit it is the cure that is killing us. Yes, drugs are a curse, we don’t want them and wish they had never reached our shores, as we could say for alcohol. But when the sea is rising year by year, wishes are pointless distractions. Drugs are here to stay. Posturing about not going soft on drugs won’t change that. But it will allow criminal organisations to increase their power. We could cut the corrosive power of the gangs by taking over the drugs trade ourselves, as we did with liquor. 

Public control of the sale of alcohol through local community trusts was a compromise, a response to the powerful temperance movement’s demands for prohibition. It worked. If communities rather than criminals were in charge of the sale of drugs, rehabilitation centres would cost the taxpayer nothing, communities would have more money and society would be less in danger of corruption. But common sense does not necessarily a safe political slogan make.    

This and that.

                                                    

I’m not sure who owns Transpower (is anyone?) but I’m pretty sure this electricity company bears no resemblance to its state owned predcessor. What raises questions in my mind right now is the stand-off with farmers demanding compensation for pylons and power-lines across their properties. 

What was the original agreement with farmers back in the days when all electricity was state-owned?  

Did the farmers embrace these impediments to tractors as fair exchange for roads and power to their isolated farms? 

And if a deal is done now will that be it? Or will the next owner or next generation want another deal? And will the Waitangi Tribunal have to move over to make room for a new transgenerational conflict? 

Och! As Robbie would say:

 “The best laid schemes a mice and men gang aft agley

an lea us nought but grief an pain for promised joy.”

                                                     ***

Wouldn't you know it. One hundred and sixty thousand people out of work . Many of them young people, and the head of the employer organisation comes up with a plan: Cut the minimum youth rate. Who said they haven't got hearts?

Mike More

Listening to National Radio this morning I heard Mike More being interviewed about his new appointment as our ambassador in Washington. Typically, his speech was extravagant, teeming with metaphor and slogans to such an extent that one wondered at times if he was in a balloon. As usual, he was all over the place. But, like Invergargill’s Tim Shadbolt, he’s full of ideas. Most of them daft but about one in twenty worth considering. Which is better than most of us can say of ourselves.

I should concede, too, that Mike More is widely experienced in international trade and politics. However, two of the points he flew over worried me: Pharmac and beef.

In his impossible mission to get the USA to consider actual free trade. That is, genuine free trade rather than the USA’s biased version, he used terms like ‘navigate’ and ‘nudge’, ‘give and take’. Which is political reality I suppose. But where Pharmac is concerned?

Pharmac is ours. It is our collective means of affording drugs. A cooperative mechanism for achieving fair trade. Which is what the Giant American drug companies hate. They not only want us to buy on their terms, they think anyone who uses words like collective or cooperative is a communist. But to enable us to sell more to the States, Mike is willing to be nudged along on this. He should know by now that American politicians, driven by big business, are not primed to nudge but to gobble.

Nevertheless, Mr More apparently thinks if concessions are the price we have to pay to get more New Zealand beef into the American Market, so be it. But he should also know  that American beef is now as cheap, and sometimes cheaper, than American vegetables. And it got that way by battery-farming cattle. A practice being heavily lobbied for by New Zealand big business. 

I think it would have made more sense for the government to have left Mike alone, up there in his balloon writing dozens of books about his ideas.   

New New Zealand.

I am always moved by the grand sweeping landscape and subtle colours when driving over the Lindis Pass on a journey north. The gaunt beauty of those moody tussocky hills is as powerful now as it was in the early seventies when I first passed this way. But lest we forget those among us who resent our appreciation of natural beauty, graffiti vandals have left their mark on a shed close to the road.  

For once I risk the madness of Christmas holiday traffic.  The Lindis, for the first time in my experience, is relatively busy. Fortunately the traffic is all coming towards me heading for Wanaka and Queenstown and all points Central. Only two mad drivers. One overtaking on a blind bend and another shooting out of a concealed side-track a few minutes later.

At the foot of the Lindis, Omarama is also undergoing its yearly influx. Tents sprouting everywhere and vehicles jerking in and out of look-alike service stations. Omarama is not pretty. It is what it is; a junction servicing travellers. At other times of year it has a spacious, almost empty slow-moving rural charm but at holiday time, forget it. 

On to the Mackenzie Country on a road so straight and easy-riding you could be excused for thinking any speed limit is unreasonable. At the Omarama end, giant irrigation machines are a disquieting reminder that dairy conglomerates have a predatory eye on the stark beauty of this basin. Further on young wilding pines are creeping over the landscape. Greed and neglect combine to threaten what once seemed immutable. But for the time being the majestic sweep of open country nestled between ever-changing mountains continues to be a source of inspiration. 

And then Tekapo. It is inconceivable that this magnificent basin could contain such a cramped, shabby little money-grabbing tourist trap but sadly, it does. And it’s getting worse by the year. Overflowing litter bins, scruffy toilets, souvenirs ad nauseam, an unkempt mini-golf course and, desecration upon desecration in this land of mighty mountains, large fake rocks for the puzzled gaze of tourists. A little further away parked cars and camper vans disfigure the once solitary Church of the Good Shepherd. Is it too much to ask tourists to walk a hundred yards?  

The final insult reduces visitors to walking with elbows tucked in. The footpath fronting the line of devouring business premises is like a third world alleyway, squashed between advertising boards and cars parked a few feet from shop fronts. It is oppressive. Tekapo Township is a blot on the landscape, a lucrative cash cow. And so long as the milk is flowing no one cares how ugly the cow has become.  

On past Burks Pass and Kimble, a little township that is homely, civilised and discrete. The absence of crass commerce is a relief. Then Fairlie which also retains the sense and deportment of an old New Zealand rural township. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the busses pass it by. 

Geraldene alas, has been captured by the passing tour-bus dollar. The country is now littered with look-alike refreshment places that suck you in take your money and spit you out without eye contact. Where food has the look and taste of produce manufactured deep in the old soviet empire before being shipped on an old tramp steamer to Auckland then rumbled, eventually, down to the South Island.

A Darfield cafe restores my confidence. Competent yet friendly service, good Darfield food, comfortable and tasteful surroundings. A spacious, leisurely township where you think of lingering before getting back behind the wheel.  

Why would anyone pass through Christchurch unless they had to? Most of the space in that city is given over to selling, repairing and elevating motor vehicles to icon status. But not only motor vehicles. Big signs everywhere defile a beaten landscape. Buy! buy! by! is the blatant cry. Wherever the eye turns the head is pummelled by migraine inducing advertising graffiti. Only Hagley Park, and to a lesser extent the old cultural centre of the city, retains the aesthetic values bestowed by Christchurch’s visionary founders.    

Finally, Kaipoi. A first time visit for me. I am surprised to find an Egyptian restaurant, an Indian restaurant and an excellent Working Man’s Club in this small Canterbury town. Something of pre dollar-hungry New Zealand hangs in the slow-moving air. 

My biggest surprise is a visit to the Picture House. A modern place with a comfortable lounge where tea, coffee, food and alcohol is served. The pleasant atmosphere suggests   excessive consumption will be frowned on. The owner provides friendly service. The auditorium is furnished with astonishingly comfortable couches. Lots of leg room. 

The film is Five Minutes of Heaven, which proves to be a powerful, intense, intelligent drama. The lights dim on time. No adverts. Straight into the film. No intermission to sell stuff. No distractions. Now, if only this was the new New Zealand.