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.      

Assets

We don’t have holy men singing eerily from the mosque. We have the people’s television. Every day a kind of rosary for the souls of speculators. Others may have to attend a special indoctrination class to understand the prayers: The Fed, The Dow, NZX Fifty, The FTSE show. 

We read of discount book value and cash flow, hedge funds, futures markets, complex portfolios, assets and asset stripping, profit margins and high geared corporate debt, Collateralised loan obligations, depreciation and low productivity.  

But even the uninitiated are able to pick-up the meaning of “shedding” workers. And who needs language to get the message when factories are fleeing the workers that made them, or the push for Easter opening? 

We need more investment, apparently. Ahem! We have one hundred and fifty thousand idle workers.  

Happy Christmas.

   

Private Prisons

Why not privatise the army? The Americans have gone some way along that road in Iraq. It’s a lucrative business. In New Zealand schools airlines, banks and railways continue to be tempting for investors with short memories. Way back, private Catholic schools had to be rescued by taxpayers. Had they not been bailed out they would have closed. And it is much too recent (and painful) to discuss the sad tale of our bank, railway and airline. 

One can see the temptation. The argument goes that bureaucratic institutions are expensive, inefficient and archaic. Private enterprises are cost-conscious, efficient and innovative. To believe this one would have to ignore the hundreds of shops, cafes etc. that provide awful service. Accepted, the argument goes, but we are talking of large institutions run by qualified and experienced people. Like banks and finance companies for instance? 

But let us concede that government institutions run by bureaucrats are stodgy and are not famous for startlingly innovative service delivery. These institutions often operate excessively rigid and complicated procedures which are tiresome. They would argue that where important public institutions are concerned caution is a necessary watchword. Currently millions of investors throughout the world argue that caution was exactly what was forgotten by the innovative stewards of their investments.

Now, to cut to the chase: Privatising prisons has nothing to do with penology, the study of punishment and the ethical considerations of locking people up. It doesn’t even have anything to do with prisons. It is about unchanging political attitudes, selfish voters and political parties whose central policy is expedience. 

Listen to ordinary people before an election: What’s in it for me? They don’t vote for a healthier environment or social cohesion or a legacy for their children’s grandchildren. They have money on their minds. Money now. Hence the focus of policy makers seeking to attract the only two streams of voters that matter to mainstream parties; those who imagine they can make money running prisons and those - the majority - who hope that leaner prisoners equates with reduced taxes. 

I think the saddest part of this legislation is that it highlights the dearth of vision in New Zealand politics. Norman Kirk was able to inspire with his vision but died before he was tested. David Langi, although he did not follow through, had the potential to be an inspirational leader. Helen Clarke was able and competent but lacked the ability to inspire. John Key seems affable and reasonably competent but if the tired old ploy of privatising prisons is an example of his vision I think we’d better prepare for many more years of mediocrity.