New Zealand Now with Duncan Graham

WILD ABOUT WELLINGTON

2012-01-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

Our Happy Place

Is there anyone more boring than a Wellington whinger?

John Key should use his new majority to ban offenders, drop them 1080, spray them with
glyphosate. Friendly Freedom Campers have already been exterminated, so the precedent is there to purge this more irritating species.

If none of the above work the present policy of doing nothing with the economy should be
effective, making the grinches jobless and forcing them across The Ditch. They probably voted Labour last November so won’t be missed.

Only when gales blow so hard the Makara turbines are turned off and Qantas jets turned
back that a slight note of discomfort can be allowed into the conversation, for
our location should be the envy of the world. Here’s why:

As I write relatives in Chicago huddling in muffs and mittens are greasing shovels, ready
to dig their way to work through snowdrifts.

Family members in arid Western Australia have turned nocturnal, creeping inside at
dawn, sheltering from the blowtorch winds, super-heated across the burning
sands of the empty interior.

Their two-minute showers use desalinated seawater. And they call WA the State of
Excitement.

Friends in Singapore joke that when children draw chickens they sketch the deep-frozen
plastic wrap variety. It’s the same with the sky. The locals buy it in paintings to hang on the walls of their matchbox flats, for the real thing is seldom seen.

Most days I walk to the CBD past dripping red pohutukawa from a dormitory suburb dozing
beyond the Town Belt. Via Wadestown the trip takes an hour. Some puff’s needed
past Blackbridge but compensation comes where the dark green tree-tunnel of
Lennel Road meets Barnard Street.

The dress circle views are splendid, memorable, flawless, free – so much space after
confinement. Sydney Harbour is also grand, though over-busy. The best views
are through the acrylic on an Airbus queuing to land, but with no noises or
smells the experience is sterile, two-dimensional.

Hong Kong? There’s a challenge, but Wellington wins with its magic backdrop of the Rimutaka, white-capped in winter, smoky grey in summer when the light is most intense.

From Mount Victoria see the topsides of planes sailing slowly, silently into the Rongotai
isthmus, like docking spaceships as in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Watch them from the
gods while playing Strauss on your device of choice. That’s impossible at Heathrow, Tullamarine,
Charles de Gaulle and almost everywhere else.

The more poetic can park in Lyall Bay and marvel how 150 tonnes of metal, fuel and flesh
can roar free of earth’s surly bonds. This is a stalls view. Try doing that near New York’s JFK and you’ll be viewing prison bars.

Another walk to the CBD follows the onomatopoeic Kaiwharawhara stream. Rainfall drained from a vast catchment that includes Karori, cascades, bubbles, washes and tumbles its way through fern and flax, one moment placid, the next a rush.

The creek might be laced with coliform and protozoan parasites, but it looks clear and
clean, and smells the same. Probably not a top drink, but great for a splash after a heated hike.

The Trelissick Park walk takes 90 minutes – and that includes stopping to chat with
the volunteers yanking out Wandering Willy and other Pommy invaders. No need to shout, you could be in Te Urewera. You are just ten minutes from the cavernous furniture shops of Thorndon Quay.

Some vile bureaucrat with a vision as narrow as the gorge once proposed this valley for a
city tip. The idea was knocked back by far-sighted citizens who were green long before the word became political, in the days when gay meant jolly.

Pause a moment, hark to the tui and give thanks to our ancestors.

When it’s too wet to walk (never too hot) take the train. It’s great fun, a real delight.
In any other capital the trip would be sold as a fairground ride, a scary
journey through narrow tunnels dripping damp, on a cliff edge, then hurtling
downhill, rocking and rolling on a 74 year old line to a station by a stadium.

Was this foresight or oversight? Most cities separate transport from sports grounds to ensure maximum congestion before and after games. This is the art of town planning that includes building a city on an earthquake faultline.

Where else could it have gone? The first settlers were washed out of Petone. Eastbourne is
too narrow. There wasn’t much space around Pipitea either till the Deity added extra with the 1855 earthquake, upheaving enough rock to put Lambton Quay well inland.

The result is a city compact – but not compressed, handy but not grasping. An accessible centre of government, when elsewhere that term’s an oxymoron. A stroll between Parliament and the City Council passes a file of ministries.

The Sunday Farmers’ Markets are in Wellington, preserving the rural, village feel. Many cities flank the ocean – but how many have an Oriental Bay for swimming, a waterfront for promenading, rocks for fishing plus seals and penguins all within a gentle, level, buggy push?

Retract the opening sentence – one complaint is in order. Too many vehicles. To make
Wellington perfect let’s ban all private transport.

##

THE FLIGHT OF THE KIWI

2012-01-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

(Kiwi kids in Wellington: What future in their own country?)

More economic refugees head for Oz

There’s probably a Kiwi in your street. If not, they’re on their way.

Every week about 1,000 New Zealanders quit their lush but economically limp homeland, carrying one-way tickets.

Most migrating Kiwis don’t fly far. They just cross The Ditch, as the Tasman Sea is known, settling in the country next door, which under a reciprocal arrangement is open to NZ citizens.

The newcomers can start work and stay as long as they want. However they can’t access Australian social services for the first two years.

In the past twelvemonth more than 50,000 have fled NZ. That’s the equivalent of the population of Mildura – and there’s no sign the flood will ebb. In the same period around 14,300 made the reverse trip – mostly Kiwis returning home – leaving a net migration outflow of about 35,000.

The Kiwi diaspora is extraordinary. One in five NZ citizens now live overseas. That includes more than 100,000 Maori who have moved into Australian cities in such numbers that they’ve built their own marae (traditional meeting house).

The phenomenon isn’t new, but the scale is. In the 1980s former Prime Minister Robert Muldoon commented that the exodus was raising the IQ level of both countries, but there are now many more push-pull factors.

At the heart of the problem is the economy. NZ isn’t an unlucky country but it doesn’t have massive mineral resources so has to rely on fickle tourism and exporting primary produce.

While writing this story in Wellington two major earthquakes struck Christchurch. They hit when the South Island city was just starting to recover from a huge shaking in February that killed 181 and severely damaged the Central Business District.

Many residents say they’ve had enough and swear they’ll leave. This is no instant emotional response; many migrants have been from Christchurch, able-bodied workers with young families, nerves frayed by the non-stop shaking.

Their departures are compounding the difficulty of rebuilding the city, a $NZ 20 to 30 billion job. Before the December rumbles th

During the 2009 NZ general election the National Party campaigned on a pledge to reduce the wage gap with its giant neighbour. The Nationals (the NZ equivalent of Australia’s Liberals) were successful at the polls – but not with their promise.

The minimal wage in NZ is $13 – that’s equal to ten dollars in Australia where the minimal wage is more than AUD $15. However the reality is that in many areas of Australia people can’t be coaxed into the workforce for anything under AUD $25.

In Australia there’s a tax-free threshold on earnings of AUD $6000. In NZ workers – and pensioners – pay 12.5 per cent tax on the first dollar they receive.

There’s another significant disparity. GST is 15 per cent in NZ (ten per cent in Australia) and there’s no exclusion for fresh foods. NZ growth is 1.1 per cent, less than half Australia’s 2.7.

Australians moving to NZ are struck by the impotence of trade unions. In most NZ industries workers are faced with individual workplace contracts and the chance of being sacked – no reason required – in their first 90 days on the job.

The NZ unemployment rate is 6.3 per cent, compared to 5.3 in Australia. The jobless burden is carried mainly by Maori and Pacific Islanders, particularly the unskilled. Meat works and timber mills, the traditional employers for the low skilled, have been closing across the country.

Some of these people are heading for Australia, particularly if relatives have already made the journey and established a base. Queensland is most favoured, taking 40 per cent. The climate is warm, there are plenty of jobs in the mining industry, and a flight to Auckland is a mite more than three hours.

Particularly worrying is the loss of medical and other professionals whose Kiwi qualifications are accepted in Australia. Kiwi locums have been offered NZ $6,000 a weekend to cross the Tasman to keep practices and hospitals open.

Meanwhile in Wellington the just re-elected National government is slashing the bureaucracy. During the campaign the public service union ran ads showing a map of Australia captioned: ‘The only place where your skills will be wanted.’

Before the economic crisis of 2008 NZ welcomed thousands of Asian workers – mainly Filipinos – to fill jobs on farms and aged care homes. Now they’re being sent back and bosses are being pushed to employ locals.

In the past skilled workers mainly came from the UK, though there’s a growing movement of qualified Chinese to NZ, particularly Auckland. If the present trend continues by 2026 there’ll be almost 800,000 Asians in NZ, challenging Maori as the country’s second largest minority.

Of course there are upsides to life in NZ, a nation with about 4.4 million people and seven times that number of sheep. For those who hate Australia’s long blistering summers NZ offers a splendid green haven. In Wellington anything over 22 degrees is considered a heat wave demanding a beach party.

For Ed Hillary types NZ is the ideal place to tramp, cycle, climb and ski all year round. Wags comment Kiwis have to stay outside – TV programmes are crass.

Because the islands are so narrow, warm waters or snowy summits are seldom more than a day’s drive.

The purchasing power of the Aussie dollar means much seems cheap in NZ, including housing. Your AUD $750 will yield about NZ $1000. The smaller cities are compact and roads good. Freeways clog in Auckland, as they do in every Australian capital, but seldom elsewhere.

Australians seeking to escape searing heat, Americanised culture and gruelling drives should consider NZ. One million tried last year, but carried return tickets. Try staying and investing - your move might just help keep NZ from becoming the Ireland of the South Pacific.

(First published in On-Line Opinion, 5 January 2012)

CHRISTMAS PRAYERS

2011-12-24T09:39:00.000-08:00

This is the time when we glance back and peer ahead. It’s the moment to audit the past and plan for the future.

In particular our thoughts are with the people of Christchurch, emotionally bruised and physically battered yet again. We pray that their torment will end soon and their lives return to normality

We pray for those who have been damaged wherever they are, that they may be blessed with the strength to lift their hearts, and that we may seize the right words and actions when called to assist.

We pray to learn from our mistakes and respond effectively to whatever problems we will encounter, applying Christian principles in all that we do.

Prime among these is to recognise that so many are less fortunate. For them Christmas cheer rings hollow. The peace we sing about is not theirs. They see no reason to rejoice.

We pray not to forget that Christmas marks the birth of hope, that most precious quality, and our responsibility is to make the message live.

As Christians we have a duty to engage with the world. Clearly the most pressing issue facing us is economic inequality, yet it remains one of the most slippery problems to seize and land.

Many of us recognise a rising tide of frustration with the way things are. There’s a great moral wrong in a society where one person earns $13 an hour and another $2,000 for the same 60 minutes, where some families jam five to a room while others have one person to every five rooms. Yet the arguments for maintaining the gap are complex and hard to resolve.

Public issues in the past seemed straightforward and simple to fix. A minor legal addition or subtraction. The cancelling or application of a decision. Opponents were easy to caricature - Neanderthal politicians, greedy capitalists, unreconstructed rednecks.

Through our discussions with friends and colleagues, through our study and analysis, through contemplation, we pray to find the wisdom necessary to come to grips with the new reality, to separate truth from fiction, to sift the rhetoric for nuggets of fact, to articulate the issues with clarity.

We pray to accept that the way we do things now may not be the best, and other models may need to be tried. Taking that step can be most difficult because it implies our past actions have been based on flawed beliefs.

So tonight we pray to keep open minds to the possibilities of returning our country to its place as a pioneer for equality, a world leader in fairness.

Tonight, in the spirit of Christmas renewal, we pray for the ability to confront injustice, to make a difference.

(Delivered in St Andrew's on the Terrace, Wellington, 24 December 2011)

MARVIN ELLISON - SEX AND CHRISTIANITY

2011-12-19T10:34:00.000-08:00

SEX - BURDEN OR JOY?

What makes good sex good? It sounds like a racy headline from a back number of Truth, but it was a serious question raised by Christian ethicist Dr Marvin Ellison.

“A major overhaul of the Christian teaching of sex is overdue,” the American academic told an audience at St Andrew’s when delivering the first of the 2011 Geering Lectures.

“If by good sex we mean sex that is pleasurable and powerful to the senses, that deepens our sense of well-being and profoundly connects us to others, then the Christian tradition will disappoint.

“That’s because the church has promulgated a highly restrictive and often punitive moral code. This warns incessantly about the dangers of illicit pleasures. It places severe limits on almost all sexual expression.

“If by good sex we also mean sex that is not only pleasurable but also ethically principled, then there will be even more disappointment. That’s because over the centuries, the church has never produced a reliable tradition of ethical wisdom about gender and sexual justice

“Christian theology has taught that the best sex is no sex. The second best situation is to have sex in marriage – but only for procreation.”

Dr Ellison is an ordained Presbyterian minister and professor of Christian ethics at Bangor Theological College in Maine. This is the state tucked in the top of the north east of the US against the border with Canada.

He was invited to Wellington to lead a series of discussions on the theme: Ethics for the sexually perplexed: A 21^st Century Christian response. His Spirited Conversation topic at Thistle Inn was titled – Why do we have to keep talking about sex all the time?

It was a question he sought to answer by teasing apart the way Christianity has tried to handle sex across the ages, leading to the present “moral hierarchy of the religious right.”

Sexual mores, the conventional patterns of the day, are confused with genuine morals or critically reflective ethical insight, he said. Married evangelists see themselves as higher than the rest of society and feel they can pronounce on other people’s behaviour.

For those seeking guidance from the Bible there’s little that’s positive. British author and former nun Karen Armstrong had written that Christianity has a more negative view of heterosexual love than almost any other major faith.

Much blame can be laid with Paul the Apostle. His comments included the famous line in Corinthians (7:8-9):

‘Now I say to the unmarried persons and the widows, it is well for them that they remain even as I am. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to be inflamed (with passion).’

“Hardly a ringing endorsement for marriage,” Dr Ellison noted wryly.

This led to sex being treated with suspicion and an excess of significance. St Augustine didn’t help the cause of sex as joyful and a gift to be celebrated.

Despite a loose love life as a young man (he had a lover for 13 years) the fifth century philosopher had a major impact on Christian theology, particularly by developing the idea of original sin.

“Augustine agreed with Paul that marriage was good, though always tainted by sin,” Dr Ellison said.

“Augustine encourages the Christian husband and wife, once their youthful passions have dissipated, to cease their sexual activity and live together as Christian brother and sister in a properly chaste, that is celibate, marriage.

The Protestant Reformation did not reverse the Christian tradition’s longstanding sex-negativity, nor challenge the second difficulty - that Christian sex has also been patriarchal sex.

“Sex is authorized only within a power structure of gendered inequality in which the husband is in control and the wife submits,” he said.

“Within the marital zone, husband and wife were regarded as spiritual equals. Accordingly Protestantism has celebrated a companionate model of marriage in which the unitive or bonding purpose of marital sex is affirmed in addition to its procreative purpose.

“However, spiritual equality did not translate into social equality between men and women.”

In 1991 Dr Ellison helped prepare a Presbyterian study document called Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Social Justice.

This took a pro-sex, feminist, and gay-affirming stance, offering a radically different ethical framework about sex and sexuality. It was rejected – 640 votes to 37, but was published and sold 40,000 copies.

“It provided an alternative perspective by mapping out a progressive Christian ethic of sexuality grounded in the central affirmation that a gracious God delights in our sexuality and calls us to wholeness in community,” he said.

“The report asserts that the fundamental ethical division in the church has never been between men and women or between heterosexual and homosexual persons.

“Rather, the great divide is between justice and injustice. A reformed Christian ethic of sexuality will not condemn, out of hand, any sexual relations in which there are genuine equality and respect.

“What is ruled out, from the start, are relations in which persons are abused, exploited, and violated.” Duncan Graham

(Dr Ellison’s commentaries will be published by St Andrew’s Trust for the Study of Religion and Society.)

(Panel)

BOOKS BY MARVIN ELLISON

Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, second edition, edited with Kelly Brown Douglas (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010)

Heterosexism in Contemporary World Religion: Problem and Prospect, edited with Judith Plaskow (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2007)

Same-Sex Marriage? A Christian Ethical Analysis (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2004).

Body and Soul: Rethinking Sexuality as Justice-Love, edited with Sylvia Thorson-Smith (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2003)

Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996)

REVISITING CHRISTIAN INDONESIA

2011-12-18T20:29:00.000-08:00

Inter-faith issues – a ‘pressing concern’

In 1960 Pamela Ormsby was part of an eleven-member team from the National Council of Churches to visit Indonesia. The group’s goodwill visit was designed to build a closer relationship with Christians in the Archipelago, and to learn something of their concerns.

The visit was planned for 1957 but political instability in Indonesia caused the journey to be postponed for three years.

The team of clergy and parishioners from several churches included three Presbyterians. Pam produced a professional 26-page report on the six-week tour, highlighting places and individuals she found most impressive.

The hilltown of Malang in East Java was a particular favourite. Apart from being cooler it also had a vibrant Christian high school and the Balewiyata theological college founded in 1925.

At the time of Pam’s visit the college had an Indonesian principal and three Dutch professors with uncertain tenure. The Netherlands had been the colonial power in Indonesia for 350 years before nationalists seized control in 1945 declaring a Republic that retained little respect for its former masters. The staff knew their visas could be revoked without warning or reason.

Fifty years on and the situation is more stable. Balewiyata (the word translates as a pendopo (Javanese house) of learning) is still operating, though in a different form. It’s no longer a theological college but a training centre for clergy and lay folk, specialising in short-term refresher courses. Theology is now taught in Yogyakarta in Central Java.

Although interdenominational the centre caters principally for members of the Gereja Kristen Jawi Wetan (GKJW – the Christian Church of East Java) and the biggest in the province.

The centre looks much as it must have done when Pam visited, a set of rugged stone buildings dotted around a hill well covered with shrubs and trees, though the traffic and pollution are thicker. A monument records the first Christian conversion – in 1843.

The director of Balewiyata, the Rev Suwignyo (many Indonesians have only one name) said the centre had links with the Presbyterian Church in the US, with churches in Hong Kong and Macau, but no ties with the Antipodes.

“Till now our support has mainly come from Europe,” he said. “We’d much appreciate contact from churches in Australia and New Zealand.

“We’ve had Lutherans from Germany lecturing here, though not at present. There’s a strong need for teachers who can help with our courses. Pastors come in from their congregations to improve their skills in communication, teaching and giving sermons, and to learn more about topics like feminism.”

However the burning issues that inflame churches in NZ and other Western countries, like the role of gay people in the ministry, recognising same-sex marriages and de-facto unions don’t trouble Balewiyata – and Suwignyo thinks they never will. “We’re too Calvinistic,” he said.

The most pressing problems were how to deal with the growth of charismatic churches in Indonesia and promoting inter-faith education.

“Many Muslims come to Balewiyata and we have good relations with other faiths,” he said in his office with the huge dome of a nearby mosque dominating the view like a waxing moon.

“These discussions have to continue. I do not agree with the ideas in (US political scientist) Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations, and I talk about this with our Muslim friends.

“We’ve run programmes where our pastors spend a week in a Muslim kampong and where Islamic preachers live with Christian families.

“Our followers are looking for ways to respond to the Christian charismatic movement. Is it a threat? Well, maybe. The main problem is that they’re fundamentalists and this gives me concerns. We have to facilitate encounters between the churches and those who think they are really pure.

“All religions have such people, but Christians like that can destroy the mainstream churches. We are teaching our pastors to go back to the original scriptures and read them in Greek and Hebrew so they can use their knowledge to handle this trend.”

Suwignyo said there was evidence the mainstream Protestant churches were steadily expanding. However they were fearful of providing statistics lest these be used in anti-Christian propaganda. This year in West Java there have been several serious attacks on churches, particularly those run by Bataks from Sumatra.

The assaults have been led by militants calling themselves the Islam Defenders Front alleging that churches are trying to ‘Christianise’ Muslims – as reported in the July edition of St Andrew’s News.

The GKJW has a waiting list of young people wanting to become ministers. About 80 per cent are men. Those selected need good communication skills and the ability to relate to ordinary working people.

Many are sent to serve congregations in remote villages and kampongs so have to understand the lives of farmers, fishers and labourers at the most basic level. Some services are conducted in hierarchal Javanese though the national language is the more egalitarian Indonesian, similar to Malay.

“You ask if we’re facing lots of challenges,” Suwignyo said. “I prefer to think that we have to do a lot of homework.”

THEN AND NOW

Pam’s report concluded with a plea for churches to stop using the term ‘missionaries’.

‘Indonesia is at our front door,’ she wrote. ‘That means there are roughly 100,000,000 (now 240 million) men, women and children on our doorstep eager for whatever assistance we can give.

‘Everyone, surely, has a mission, and to specifically label men and women going out to work in other lands is not, in my opinion, a good thing. Nor do I think it makes their task any easier.

‘We must send people who can establish themselves in the area and justify their existence there on ordinary citizenship grounds such as educational or medical work.

‘It is much more likely then that their faith will be accepted because they, as persons, are accepted.’

Her words were prescient. Missionaries are now banned in most parts of Indonesia, and can only work with Dyaks in Kalimantan and Papuans in Irian Jaya.

(First published in St Andrew's News, December 2011)

GEERING v BATCHELOR: PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANS and BUDDHISTS

2011-12-18T20:08:00.000-08:00

Reformers or heretics?

Guy Fawkes Night wasn’t a good evening for those expecting fireworks.

Anyone anticipating flashes and thunder from two titans of theology would have left the November discussion at St Andrew’s disappointed after 90 minutes of intellectual sparkle but no big bangs

However others in the 180-strong audience who arrived feeling gloomy about the fate of faith in Aotearoa departed in a different mood. They were uplifted by the optimism of Kiwi Christian Sir Lloyd Geering, 92 (above) and British Buddhist Stephen Batchelor, 57.

Differences in age, background and following didn’t spill into their attitudes towards religions and society.

Sir Lloyd recalled that 50 years ago Presbyterians weren’t even talking to Anglicans. Now they’re finding more points of agreement not just with fellow Protestants, but even with Catholics. In Wellington at least, Buddhists are sitting and talking together with Christians in a church whose founders would have never contemplated such a communion.

Stephen Batchelor is a Scottish-born philosopher and author who calls himself a ‘Buddhist agnostic’. As a monk he studied in India, Switzerland and South Korea. In 1985 he disrobed and married Frenchwoman Martine Fages a former Buddhist nun.

The Batchelors are now involved with the Sharpham College for Buddhist Studies and Contemporary Enquiry in Devon, England and have been in NZ on a speaking tour.

There’s also been big change in Buddhism in the past half-century. In his early days Mr Batchelor could find few monasteries and retreats in Western countries like Australia and NZ. Now they’re almost commonplace.

The double billing was refereed by TV interviewer Noel Cheer, a self-proclaimed ‘post-Christian-religious-humanist'. He introduced the event as ‘A Christian without God meets a Buddhist without belief.’ It was sponsored by the St Andrew’s Trust and the Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust.

Officially the discussion was titled: Can Christianity and Buddhism remain relevant in the 21^st Century? – and the answer according to the two radicals on the platform was a loud Yes – provided the religions adapt and evolve.

“Religion must be relevant to the times in which we live,” said Sir Lloyd. “This day and age is so different to any period up to the last 200 years. Christianity in its classical form had already died when I was a student – it was preached as a way of life. Unfortunately ‘religion’ is a blocking word. It’s associated with the supernatural.”

The St Andrew’s Theologian in Residence (dubbed the Methuselah of Theology by moderator Noel Cheer), took aim at his favourite target.

Fundamentalists, he said, were people who saw traditional religions being challenged and feared the change. They felt their own ways were under threat and reacted because they were “too lazy to think”.

Mr Batchelor urged people to move away from the current view of the secular being opposed to the religious. He said the original meaning of the Latin word was ‘of the age’ and that he wanted a marriage of the two apparent opposites.

“I see secular Buddhists applying core Buddhist values in a secular world,” he said. “All religions need to have their feet in the past – but how firmly?”

Sir Lloyd said the secular referred to the temporal world where we live irrespective of religious beliefs. It was being driven by and open to scientific exploration that is constantly being reviewed.

“Science doesn’t provide any values – it’s value free,” he said. “Science gives us knowledge. Religion is a way of living. Science doesn’t give us this.”

“Buddhists find themselves in a similar situation to Christians,” said Mr Batchelor. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to uphold traditional Buddhist beliefs in a secular world.

The two men agreed in their hostility towards the development of organised religions. “Ossified by their own institutional structures,” according to Mr Batchelor, while Sir Lloyd was blunter: “In divining Jesus the church destroyed everything He stood for – He was dressed in a false set of clothes and put on a pedestal.”

They agreed on the need for religions to embrace ecological issues and be involved in politics. Sir Lloyd confessed to being a member of the Green Party.

They also shared support for voluntary euthanasia, a dislike of dogma and approval of parables as a means of teaching. Parables and short, pithy sayings opened up opportunities for readers and listeners to interpret the stories for themselves.

If there was any disagreement it came in their views of the faiths. Sir Lloyd said the differences came out in the characters of Buddha and Jesus, with the former looking in and the latter looking out.

“I agree if that’s relating to mainstream Buddhism. We need to seek to recover the historic Buddha,” said Mr Batchelor. “There’s not an intellectual foment withing Buddhism as there is in Christianity. But Buddhists were setting up orphanages long before Christians got involved.

“Buddhism has survived because it has transformed in each society and entered into the conversation. Buddhists don’t believe in God, but it would be wrong to say we are not religious.”

Sir Lloyd, said he’d learned more from Buddhism than any other faith outside Christianity. Buddhism had survived for 2,500 years without belief in God, and could point the way to Christianity without God

He also paid respect to Islam, a faith that in its early days, particularly in Andalusia, had contributed much to the world’s learning. This included mathematics, our numbering system, science and “a new burst of theology.”

“If it hadn’t been for the contribution of Islam, Christianity might have died a natural death,” he said. “Religions provide the time-tested frameworks of values. They help us learn how to be human beings and live with one another.

“Although there is no unchangeable essence of Christianity that I want to defend, the chief benefits of the modern world have all come out of the Christian West.”

“Diversity of religions is a very good thing. What we’ve learned through ecology is that life evolved because of diversity. As humans we are an unified organism, not separate bodies.”

First published in St Andrew's News, December 2011

THE MORNING AFTER THE ALL-BLACKS WIN

2011-10-25T11:59:00.000-07:00

Any hope after the Rugby World Cup? Duncan Graham

The day after the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup was a public holiday in New Zealand – Labour Day. That was fortunate. The break provided a useful buffer between the fantasy of the last six weeks and returning to reality in a country that may be tops in rugby but is rapidly heading towards becoming the Ireland of the South Pacific.

While preliminary games were underway the NZ economy was being kicked apart by two international credit agencies. Standard and Poors and Fitch Ratings dropped the nation’s rating from AA+ to AA.

When the news came through Prime Minister John Key was joking his way through a commercial radio chat about his family life - but didn’t mention politics and the economy. As usual he caught the national mood correctly. There were far more important issues on the agenda than bankers’ opinions, and all were focussed on an oval ball.

But as fans wake from the euphoria of winning in a tough sport they are now faced with losing position in the brutal world of fiscal credibility. The tsunami of commentaries and clichés has receded; now we remember that the event cost us NZD 40 million to stage.

Not all the wounds being suffered by NZ have been self-inflicted by the National government during its first three years in office. Last year a mine explosion killed 29 men on the west coast bringing personal anguish and a blow to coal exports.

Also unforeseen was this year’s 22 February earthquake, which devastated the nation and Christchurch CBD and killed 181. The compensation and repair bill could touch NZD 30 billion – that’s more than NZD 7,000 for every citizen.

Rebuilding the South Island city will kick the economy ahead – but work hasn’t started. Tremors continue and the insurance industry is shying away from doing business. Also reluctant to return have been the holidaymakers; tourism jostles the dairy industry for prime place as NZ’s overseas income earner.

Equally unexpected was the grounding this month (Oct) of the Liberian registered freighter Rena in the Bay of Plenty. It continues to spew oil and tumble containers into the ocean, threatening NZ’s clean and green image.

Who’ll pay? That’s still in dispute, but be sure the taxpayers will be in the front line. The grounding on a clearly marked reef has dragged attention away from the plight of rugby players with gammy groins and knackered knees to the issue of government regulation, coastal shipping, and foreign fishers.

Despite unemployment at 6.5 per cent and a youth rate of up to 25 per cent in some rural areas, foreign charter ships are allowed to employ overseas crews, process the catch in China and market it as ‘Produce of NZ’.

Last year six men lost their lives when a Korean boat sank. This year almost 40 Indonesians jumped ship alleging brutality, vile conditions and late pay with rates about a quarter of the national basic wage.

Not that incomes in NZ are worth celebrating. The legal minimal rate is NZD 13 (AUD 10) an hour, which is less than two-thirds of the floor salary in Australia. With no tax holiday for the lowest paid, GST of 15 per cent on everything, and few job vacancies it’s no surprise about 3,000 Kiwis quit their homeland every month to take up work and residency in Australia.

Astute managers might have predicted the collapse of several finance companies in the poorly regulated industry, including South Canterbury Finance. The government had to pay out NZD 1.7 billion to investors under the retail guarantee scheme.

It’s not that the economy has been grossly mismanaged during the past three years – instead it’s been cruising along with little apparent interest in the charts or what other helmsmen have been doing. Much like the Rena.

Awash with these and other damaging experiences it would be reasonable to assume the government would be on the rocks and about to sink at the election on 26 November.

But this event isn’t likely to be an edge of the seat nailbiter like the French-All Blacks final. Unless there are political upheavals of the size of the Christchurch quake (PM Key quits to work in Aussie), the Nationals will continue to lead the country through the next three years.

There are several reasons. Labour in opposition has been directionless after nine years in power under the tough disciplinarian Helen Clark, now with the United Nations in New York.

Her successor Phil Goff is a pleasant but bland career politician who’s held so many portfolios in the past that he’s embedded in the governance of the nation. Meanwhile former currency trader and self-made millionaire Key comes across as the accidental politician, unshackled by ideology, unskilled in the dark arts of dissembling, overall ‘not a bad bloke’.

Apart from being a former All Black there’s no higher accolade in the NZ pantheon.

More than smiles and waves will be needed in the future as NZ continues to sail deeper into the red. The net foreign debt is now NZD 45,000 per person and rising. No political parties have any solid policies for getting into clear water and the election looks set for a contest of meaningless slogans.

Public service cutbacks will continue, but that shouldn’t damage National as most government workers vote Labour.

Key has been tinkering with the idea of selling down some state-owned assets and allowing mining in national parks. Though neither idea has been pursued with enthusiasm that might change if the Nationals win convincingly and don’t need minor party support.

In this likely situation Kiwis unsympathetic towards National, and who’ve been distracted by rugby, might now be moved to focus on another area where they’ve won international acclaim – leading the world in social justice.

NZ was the first country to give women the vote, introduce the eight-hour working day and cradle-to-grave welfare. Despite the country’s huge debt it still gives all over-65s a pension without an asset test.

The Treaty of Waitangi between Maori and the British was signed in 1840 – Australia is still wrestling with the idea of something similar with its Aboriginal citizens. Kiwis got a Bill of Rights in 1990 – Aussies are still waiting.

But if NZ’s best and brightest are heading across the Tasman because they despair of a decent future in their homeland, who’ll be left to lift wages, clean up the fishing industry, boost the economy and seize the moment created by winning the World Cup?

For more information check:
http://www.treasury.govt.nz/budget/forecasts/prefu2008/004.htm

(First published in On Line Opinion 26 Oct 2011)

KIWI CONNECTION WITH INDONESIAN AUTHOR

2011-10-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

Travels of a hyper-polyglot

___________________

Foreigners struggling for fluency in Indonesian would happily throttle Stephen Epstein, just to stop their shame.

For while dilettantes stumble through thickets of syntax, wrestling with the prefixes and suffixes that tangle the allegedly easy language, Dr Epstein finds it all a stroll in the paddy. For this linguist only Melanesian pidgin is easier.

And to make it even more galling the New Zealand academic is self-taught. Korea, its language, history and social structures are his prime interests and where he focuses his intellectual efforts, not Indonesia.

He is currently studying the reshaping of South Korea’s national identity and its transformation into a cosmopolitan society. His students are researching issues in Japan and South Korea. Yet Indonesia continues to seduce.

He’s just released a translation of a famous Indonesian novel. In August as a Presidential Friend of Indonesia he met President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Indonesia’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs sponsored the visit.

Dr Epstein, 48, was educated at Boston in a suburban mono-cultural environment, and then went to Harvard where he studied ancient Mediterranean languages. When he moved to the multi-cultural west coast to do his Ph D at the University of California he discovered a greater affinity with Pacific cultures.

He was initially urged to study Chinese because of the business opportunities, but “fascination with languages and a desire to explore the experiences of daily life in other cultures” overtook any plans for a suited corporate career.

After wrapping his mind around Greek, Latin, Mandarin and a few other languages the backpacking hyper-polyglot who collects vocabularies and grammars like others gather souvenirs headed for Asia.

In 1990 after studying for a year in Korea he headed for Malaysia but wasn’t over enthused. So he hopped across to Indonesia. Enchanted by the people, the culture and words he stayed, wandered and absorbed. His learning style is to listen, converse, and read, rather than write

“Some learn languages to travel,” he said. “I travel to learn languages. It helps when you can approach people instead of having them start the conversation, expecting to use English. I’d rather be in the position of controlling the encounter.

“In Indonesia people are friendly and relaxed. I just smile and let the conversation go. It’s not usually like that in Europe.

“I’ve only had a couple of bad experiences, one in Lombok where I was being set up for a mugging, but got away, and the other in North Sulawesi when two drunk policemen tried to force their way into my hotel room one New Year’s Eve.

“Such events are rare. Usually I get asked into people’s homes, to meet families, to attend weddings and parties. I’ve been invited for tea, stayed for lunch and still been there days later.”

The one time hitchhiker is now director of the Asian Studies Program at Victoria University of Wellington.

But he keeps returning to Indonesia, sometimes accompanied by his Korean wife Mi Young. He goes to tramp the mountains, explore the archipelago’s lush landscape and polish his language skills using every available source.

“I found listening to BBC broadcasts in Indonesian particularly helpful,” he said.

”As the register (level) of language goes up, the language gets easier. So I still have problems with sinetron (soap operas). The situation is reversed in Korean.”

Dr Epstein’s skills are now on public display with the release of his translation of Putu Wijaya’s Telegram, written in 1973. The translation, published by the Jakarta based Lontar Foundation as part of its Modern Library of Indonesia series covering the past 80 years, will be re launched at the Singapore Writers’ Festival on 22 October.

An earlier launch was hosted last month (September) in Wellington by Agus Sriyono, the Indonesian Ambassador to NZ.

It’s the first time the prolific Balinese writer’s novel has been available in English. The task was neither simple nor speedy. Dr Epstein has already translated some Indonesian short stories and was keen to handle a book, but his academic duties got in the way.

These included teaching and editing the volume Understanding Indonesia published by Victoria University’s Asian Studies Institute, and running seminars on Indonesian studies.

The translation of Telegram started in 2003 but got shelved for four years. The task wasn’t made easier by the quality of the original printing.

“I worked for some time with a particular sentence but couldn’t get it to make sense,” Dr Epstein said. “Eventually I contacted Putu who sorted out the problem straight away: The version I was working on had publishing misprints.”

Telegram is a stream-of-consciousness story of a lonely knockabout Balinese magazine journalist living in Jakarta with his ten-year old foster-daughter. A telegram arrives saying his mother is ill.

Should he return and take up his family responsibilities, or continue his indecisive, directionless life?

Although the publisher is promoting the book for its insights into Indonesian life, helping make the literature more accessible to foreigners, Telegram doesn’t depend on location. It isn’t thick with cultural references difficult to penetrate.

The novel is sprinkled with references to Western and Indonesian literary figures and quotes in the style favored by poet and essayist Goenawan Mohamad, who helped establish Lontar in 1984.

The book also has some snappy one liners (‘in love, anxiety is never far away’, ‘being insignificant takes guts, too’ and ‘daydreamers can get roughed up’) which gives Telegram an easy Perry Mason feel.

The anti-hero is an individualist who drinks beer, chases whores, has a long-standing imagined relationship with a married woman and generally acts in a most un-Indonesian way. Or in the way Indonesians are supposed to behave.

And all this back in the early days of the morally uptight and suspicious Soeharto regime, though Dr Epstein said Putu had not suffered the censorship and condemnation of other writers of that era.

Now 67, Putu has written 30 novels, 40 dramas, short stories and sinetron scripts. He will be present at the Singapore launch, along with Dr Epstein. Another Lontar book, a translation of Oka Rusmini’s Earth Dance, described as being about Balinese women confronted by social realities will also feature.

In his Wellington office with views cascading down to a cricket ground, the tops of city high-rises and the harbour beyond Dr Epstein rejected suggestions that he’d be better off on an Australian campus where Indonesian studies are a major discipline and the archipelago just a short flight north.

“I love to walk the NZ mountains, just as I do those in Indonesia,” he said. “I don’t intend to move, but I’ll continue visiting Indonesia. Learning the language is an ongoing process. I still have a few peaks left to climb.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 10 October 2011)

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE

2011-09-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

GOOD GOVERNANCE & HONEST DEALING

In a few moments we’ll be praying, as we always do, for honest dealing and the good governance of our city.

Some newcomers find this request a mite strange, polluting worship with the toxins of politics and commerce, though there are solid precedents for mixing the secular with the spiritual.

In her dramatised history of St Andrew’s, Frances Porter told of the 147 passengers of the Bengal Merchant who arrived in late February 1840, almost four months after leaving Glasgow.

Other vessels that year from London and Portsmouth were to drop anchor in Port Nicholson, bringing one thousand new settlers. But the Bengal Merchant wasn’t just another barque from a northern port with a cargo of land hungry economic refugees.

These pioneers were members of the Church of Scotland and they came with their own minister to establish the first Scottish colony in New Zealand.

In those days faith was not separate from enterprise. These tenacious folk fleeing a feudal society and a jobless future didn’t just bring their tools, stock and hopes. They also transported a vision of a fresh egalitarian society where those who worked hard and remained steadfast in their faith would garner rewards to be shared with the less fortunate

And that faith was tested indeed. Floods, earthquakes, fires and fighting. At times the settlers must have thought God had cursed them for abandoning their homeland.

The Scots could have kept to themselves, like many minority groups, stayed apart from the dominant English, found their niche and closed the door.

But these were muscular Christians, determined to be involved in public life.

Along with the churches they built the structure of government and society, creating a democracy where human rights have substance and the rule of law has meaning.

They persevered; they overcame the hardships and consequently we are all the richer. The foundations they laid included values that have made this nation the least corrupt in the world, a position we share with Singapore and Denmark.

Activist Kate Sheppard, largely responsible for New Zealand being the first country in the world to give women the vote, and whose determination we celebrate this month, was motivated by her Christianity and her Scottish heritage.

We pray to remember that we worship here in quiet, comfort and safety because those aboard the Bengal Merchant believed in the common good and were not to be deterred. They created what John Key has labelled our ‘socialist streak’.

We also pray to remember that the benefits we enjoy and the freedoms we exercise are not universal. Unlike our neighbours in Fiji we can worship where and how and when we choose.

We were welcomed to St Andrew’s by fellow parishioners, not security guards as in Indonesia. When we pass the peace we don’t expect our neighbours to be spies, as in Iran.

When we enjoy our coffee in a few minutes time, the things we’ll say about our government will not result in arbitrary arrest, as in Syria.

Later, when we walk onto The Terrace we’ll watch out for cars – but not snipers as in Libya.

This morning we give thanks for those who came before us. We pray not to betray the ideals of the first Scots in the Bengal Merchant by being indifferent to the evils and injustices of the world. We will participate in public life to ensure that honest dealing and good governance prevails.

(Read at St Andrew's on the Terrace on Sunday 25 September).

GIVING WELLINGTON A LIFT

2011-09-03T22:47:00.000-07:00

Tunnels, flyovers and motorways are no solution for Wellington’s transport problems. The answer is ski lifts, but in the absence of snow we’ll call them PyLifts – details later.

Unlike Auckland our city is compact, accessible, easy to negotiate. We can walk to the CBD from most inner suburbs. For many it’s downhill. The problem comes when decline becomes incline.

That’s where the PyLifts will come in handy, whisking clapped-out commuters up to their lonely spouses, carrying bag-laden shoppers back to their empty kitchens, transporting tired kids home to homework.

I live below the main ridge of the outer Green Belt. Every morning our neighbours dash downhill to the station, mums chasing prams threatening to runaway, kids kicking stones (boys) or skipping (girls) or scootering (unisex) at speed.

Every evening the process is reversed, but like cars there’s only one gear to go backwards. As the sun melts behind the pines on Johnston’s Hill the gasping column slowly returns, shuffling one weary foot after another, chests heaving, eyes bulging.

It’s a heartrending sight. The City Council should install benches every 200 metres equipped with defibrillators. These could be called Cardiac A Rests.

Rich listers who can afford petrol gun their motors as they hit the hill, binge-drinking fuel, burning rubber, disturbing the peace. They blow smoke – which is exhausting. The soft swish as the cables slip over the PyLift pulleys will restore calm.

The streets hereabout celebrate durable British leaders. Churchill, who made Britain great, and Thatcher, who didn’t, are both recognised, though not Wilson and Bevan. This is a conservative suburb.

A new nomenclature is required, better reflecting the reality. Myocardial Rise sounds appropriate. So does Ventricle Avenue and Coronary Close. The main feeder road could be Aorta Drive.

The PyLift will diminish the chance that these thoroughfares will become dead end streets.

Unfortunately the Capital is the heartland of two powerful tribes, Te Naysayers and Te Procrastinators, so not all will be convinced. They’ll claim PyLifts will be unaffordable, unsightly and unproven.

Nonsense. The infrastructure is already in place, no Resource Consents necessary, no immortal inquiries required.

We’ll use the existing pylons that snake downhill from Transpower’s Wilton substation. If the Auckland Harbour Bridge can have Nippon Clipons, so can we. A few pulleys, some extra cables, a plug into the lines above and it’s all go.

No need for excavation of our lovely gorse-clad reserves to dig tunnels, no graffiti-covered concrete pillars propping up motorways to scar the landscape. Not even a light rail.

Queenstown folk don’t tramp up Bob’s Peak – they ride in style aboard a gondola. Let’s get with the Mainlanders.

The pylons have been in place since mid last century. They’re part of the landscape, sturdy, powerful, deserving heritage listing.

But would Mayor Wade Brown approve? Could tree-huggers become pylon patters? The PyLifts (to be officially known as Py In The Sky) would be efficient and non-polluting.

Trilling tui would perch on the cables. The chairs would pass over the treetops so no new leaves need be turned. The cables play symphonies in the wind. The power runs at 50 cycles. The steel isn't heavy - more lighht rail.

What could be greener than that?

VOTE MMP or FPP or SOMETHING ELSE IN KIWI BALLOT

2011-08-27T20:01:00.000-07:00

Despite more than six per cent unemployed, much higher levels in depressed areas, and an economy bumping along the bottom - Kiwis will re-elect National's John Key (above) and find time and money to tinker with their electoral system.

Kicking the tyres of NZ’s voting vehicle

Back in 1993 New Zealand changed its electoral system from First Past the Post to Mixed Member Proportional Representation.

After test-driving the process through five governments, on 26 November (along with a general election) voters will get the chance to maintain, modify or scrap a German import and used in only a few countries.

For anyone reared on Australia’s federal bicameral system with its messy division of responsibilities between Canberra and the States, the Kiwi process looks refreshingly clean and green. One national one-house parliament, three-year terms, no state governments and no compulsion to vote.

But the impression is superficial. MMP, with its weird jargon of ‘overhang seats’ and the ‘Sainte-Lague allocation formula’, is not for ballot-box babes. Grossly over-simplified it gives every elector two votes – one for a candidate, the other for a party.

But a party that doesn’t get a national five per cent vote doesn’t get a seat, unless it can get a candidate elected. This has led to the bizarre situation where the right wing ACT scored five seats with only 3.65 per cent of the party vote in the last election, while anti-immigrant One Nation got no seats despite 4.07 per cent.

According to the NZ Electoral Commission the ‘origins of electoral reform lay in the gradual breakdown of public trust and confidence in politicians, Parliament, and the simple certainties of the old two-party system.’

Other factors included ‘decades marked by economic uncertainty and the emergence of new social and political movements’ and that although Labour won most votes, National (the equivalent of Australia’s Liberals) got most seats.

The other serious criticism was that FPP voting created a system that didn’t reflect the reality of the world outside Parliament.

Here MMP has been a success. Almost 34 per cent of the 120 seats are held by women (the Australian figure is 25 per cent). Maori, Asian, Pacific Islanders and gays now feel comfortable in a debating chamber that once caged alpha males.

(There are seven dedicated Maori seats in Parliament, five held by the Maori Party. Altogether 23 MPs are of Maori descent.)

However minority interests can wield real power, leading to the criticism that one or two unlicensed passengers can steer the bus. The previous Labour minority government led by Helen Clark (NZ’s first elected female PM) appointed NZ First leader Winston Peters as Foreign Minister to keep the government going.

In the 2008 election campaign John Key, the present PM, promised a referendum in his successful bid to get National into power so voters could, as he said, ‘kick the tyres on MMP’.

Voters will get a two-part questionnaire. The first asks if MMP should be retained, the second offers four alternatives – FPP, Preferential Voting, Single Transferable or Supplementary Member.

If most reject MMP a second referendum will follow to select a new system. If voters stay with MMP as the polls hint, there’ll be an inquiry into possible changes. The real test will be the turnout; too low and there’ll be limited mandate for movement.

Understanding how each system works, the possible benefits and problems requires electors to be serious psephologists and political junkies.

The 1992 referendum that led to the present MMP system attracted a turnout of only 55 per cent. At the time social change was roaring drunk and the political landscape a battleground of ideas and ideals.

The grass has now grown over the sites of savage skirmishes involving race, equality, social justice and the environment. The issues remain but the protagonists have been disarmed by compromise, exhaustion, some victories and the realities of trying to cope in a sagging economy.

It would be difficult to find two countries so similar and close, yet so politically different as Australia and NZ today. The shaky isles have same sex civil unions, an emissions trading system and a popular PM who draws wide cross-class support.

There are no boat people to frighten the masses or big miners to threaten the government. The crisis issues are the price of milk and All Black jerseys.

The endless brawling brutality of Canberra is absent. The Christchurch earthquakes, the Pike River mining disaster and crazy weather that saw snow-smothering Wellington are the real concerns, not some esoteric voting system.

Then there’s the Rugby World Cup, just before the election. In NZ they say that rugby isn’t a matter of life or death – it’s more important than that. Politics won’t score after first bounce at Eden Park.

The social factors that forced the original referendum have been neutered by time and discovery that Armageddon hasn’t arrived because same-sex couples are recognised and polluters penalised.

John Key, 50, appeals because he’s perpetually sunny, a latecomer to politics from business, unburdened by the baggage of ideology and hate that drive long-time practitioners of the black arts. As a middle-road liberal he’s taken the toxins out of public debate, helped by toothless unions and an exhausted Opposition.

Key’s single-parent State-home background should have made him a cloth-cap Labour die-hard. His English father, who died when John was six, fought in the Spanish civil war; his mother had a Jewish background. Instead Key became an international financial trader and a multi-millionaire. Despite this he’s got none of the arrogance and aloofness that normally infects such men.

Labour, led by a 30-year veteran politician and nice guy Phil Goff (but not as nice as Jolly John) slumps further behind. He holds his job because there are no clear contenders with the charisma and style to match Key.

If the polls are correct National might end up with an overall majority, not needing the backing of the minorities that get their power from MMP. Which would make continuing debate about voting systems even more academic.

(First published in On Line Opinion 27 August 2011. For comments see

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12523

WELCOME TO THE COLDEST LITTLE CAPITAL IN THE WORLD!

2011-08-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

BEING WISE ABOUT WELLINGTON

2011-08-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

How well do you know our city? Having a cruise ship tied up at Aotea Quay (that’s the area hidden by the horizontal forest and inaccessible to locals) provides a good test.

The visitors are unmistakeable. Large lads whose fashion statements are white socks with sandals, their ladies preferring tent dresses and sunshades like cockatoo crests. No cheap slimlines that slip in the handbag; they favour long lens clunky cameras that sell for thousands – and that’s duty-free. The style is ostentation plus.

If they’re unfolding crisp I-Site maps upside-down they’re off a ship; backpackers and motorhomers carry Lonely Planet guidebooks, grubby and sun-bleached. These folk wear jungle greens, look lean and hungry and are almost indistinguishable from each other. Tip: The ones with beards are men.

But the real giveaways for the nautical nomads are the fancy nametags. This makes it easy to sidle up and say: ‘G’day Doris and Basil – welcome to Wellington. Now what are you looking for?’

Some find this mildly worrying. Where they come from anyone confronting a stranger in the street has to be a bag snatcher, a strip club hustler or flogging fake Rolex. The instinctive response is ‘No, thanks. We’re fine,’ only to recant once you say ‘OK’ and start to walk away.

Then come the testing questions. The Cable Car is top on the must-do list. It’s creatively signposted with the cute cutout tilted tram, though seldom noticed above eye level.

The narrow entrance is also easily missed by outsiders, their vision blurred by the flesh show of Lambton Quay, the capital’s catwalk, aka Cleavage Canyon.

It jars having to use a multinational takeaway to help locate a local icon, but telling people to look out for a hamburger joint usually puts them on the right track.

Don’t suggest they stroll north or south. They may have sailed the seven seas but still can’t navigate by the sun. Americans think metres are devices to measure fuel consumption. But whether from Algeria or Zimbabwe everyone recognises the Big M sign.

Not all want to see the Beehive and Old St Paul’s. I once sent a worried couple looking for the Philippines Embassy (in Hobson Street) off to the Korean Embassy (in Hunter Street).

It probably ruined their day – it certainly did mine. Tormented with guilt I ran up and down the CBD looking for the misdirected visitors, got a stitch, missed an appointment and suffered Sisyphus nightmares. In these I’m doomed to forever seek shelter in alien cities as night draws close and shadows threaten.

Since then I’ve boned up on all the embassies – and of course have never been asked for directions since.

Moral: If you seek to care, first prepare. That includes asking tourists what they think.

Those from cultures where honesty is rude give the usual flannel about charm and climate, even when being sandblasted by grit from site demolitions.

Asians used to the silver cloud piercers of Singapore and Hong Kong privately think low-rise Wellington is a village, primitive because we drool over gothic revival in wood, the building material for peasants.

Europeans and North Americans tend to be direct. This can create awkward moments.

Are there any Kiwi souvenirs that aren’t made in China? Yes sir, but they take some finding. Try the Te Papa shop if your wallet’s as good as your girth.

Why don’t you have a central city Overseas Passenger Terminal like Sydney and Auckland? Well we do, but we’re converting it into apartments. That’s why you dock at the wood heap.

Isn’t NZ a clean green country leading the world in climate change law? (Respond with pride.) My word, yes.

So why are you felling and selling thousands of trees? Plantation timber, madam.

But doesn’t the world need more forests? Look, Doris, have you tried the Cable Car? Just past McDonald’s, can’t miss it.

THE LOST CAT GUIDE TO HOME BUYING

2011-03-02T12:16:00.000-08:00

Newcomers seeking to settle ask the same questions: What are the best suburbs? Where are the wanted districts, the desirable locations?

Estate agents are no help. They show the views, but not the atmosphere.

For them every street fronting SH1 is ‘secluded’, every house a home – even when a hovel. ‘Little haven tucked into a byway’ turns out to be a decrepit shack in Killer Beez Close, where the graffiti hits are so old they warrant preservation by the Historic Places Trust.

The City Council publishes a useful guide (http://profile.idnz.co.nz/) that shows whether an area is populated by paediatricians or panel beaters, but not how they behave. And who wants to walk around lugging a laptop? There must be better ways of checking a neighbourhood.

There are. Read on. Better still, take a stroll.

Unwoffed motors in the driveway and squashed beer cans on rank verges are a dead giveaway. So are walls too high to see over, and remote controlled security gates. The subtext: Outsiders Unwelcome.

Fortunately these are rare in the Capital. The signs are subtler. Wee metal boxes with blue lights fixed to the wall indicate the owners don’t trust the locals. Who’d want to live alongside such suspicious folk?

Imagine the reception the kids will get if they jump the fence to retrieve a lost ball. CCTV cameras will record their trespass, which will probably get onto YouTube. They’ll be in the Youth Court next day, cop a conviction and never get a tourist visa to enter the US.

Lawns manicured smooth as bowling greens indicate fanatical perfectionists. They also say Keep Off. If you wouldn’t dare tread on the grass how could you walk on the carpet, even when there’s a welcome mat at the front door?

And what sort of person would scrub the mud off their shoes on a greeting sign? That’s like spitting in the check-in drink at a Fiji resort.

Better look for houses where agapanthus bloom and flax flourish. Both need little care so appeal to those who aren’t slaves to their garden. But beware: A forest of black-trunk ponga may well mask dark dealings in the hidden house.

Take care when noting bottles in recycling bins come rubbish pick-up day. Do these indicate good taste in wine served at sedate dinners – or mark a riotous lifestyle with car doors slammed at 2 am?

Sealed yellow plastic bags and closed lid wheelie bins at the roadside signify lower middle class and limited buying power. In suburbs labelled ‘wanted’ by agents, show-offs flaunt their wealth through their discards.

The opulence test is the prevalence of open-top skip bins. The rich park these at the kerb so passers-by can see who’s tossing out last year’s flat screen TV and Vista-loaded laptops.

Keeping up with conspicuous consumers can rapidly ruin the budget. Watch out for letterboxes stuffed with yellowing bills and all curtains drawn on a hot day. The jovial bloke who was doing something in finance and borrowed your lawnmower might do a midnight flit – along with your machine.

So what are the best signs when selecting a suburb?

Ignore the advertising and hyperbole. Just check what planners and architects call ‘street furniture’.

If there are Lost Cat notices stuck on lampposts and power poles then this is the place to live.

Pussy wanted posters are the finest barometers of a suburb’s worth and the decency of its residents. People who have photos of their pets to hand, a computer to compose heart-stirring pleas for information, and the energy to billpost and letterbox the district clearly care. If offering rewards they surely worry more about their moggies than their mortgage.

As neighbours they should be just purrfect.

(First published in The Wellingtonian 3 March 2011)

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL: LAST CHANCE TO VIEW

2011-02-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

No looking ahead with Matangi

Unless there are more delays, come autumn we’ll no longer be riding the rattler. Instead we’ll be aboard gleaming new yellow-nose Matangi trains whizzing between Thorndon and Johnsonville.

A matter of joy for many. Though not this commuter.

The new trains will allegedly be faster, quieter and cooler, extra reliable and more comfortable. Commuting in Wellington will then be just a whisker closer to the Shanghai experience where trains are like Boeings and go almost as fast.

Who wouldn’t anticipate such a coming with anything less than rapture? This passenger.

Apart the crowds cheering as the first Korean carriages slither away on the serpentine track from Platform One will be a lone commuter blinking tears of regret, huddled near the TAB, a loser screwing up his free Super Gold ticket.

Regret for the loss of a loved one – the English Electric DM/D. Let’s take this moment to say a few words before he’s shunted into the final siding.

He? Of course. Sleek, curvaceous, temperamental ships are certainly ‘she’ but trains are rough and rugged, angular and hard, clearly masculine.

You couldn’t get more clunky than a good old DM/D. He and his mates first came to the capital 73 years ago, but the guys we know best are really young fellas, still in their early 60s, unready for superannuation.

Which explains the fondness. They’re my generation.

Like most old blokes they creak and groan a bit. They’re a wee bit lined around the windows and seem to attract the dirt. Shaky, not so nimble on their pins. Grumpy now and again. Who isn’t when approaching the end of the line?

Reliable? Of course. They’d never go off the rails. Breakdowns were always someone else’s fault – clumsy track crews, short-circuiting electricians, lumpen engineers coupling incompatibly.

It’s true DM/Ds needed a bit of TLC. Who doesn’t? Ask the local DHB how much they’re spending to keep the greys going.

The Johnsonville – City shuttle will never be the same once the Matangis start. Doors will hiss open, synthetic voices will announce destinations. Spy cameras will eye us from above scanning for fare dodgers

There’ll be no windows to open or close with a bang, frightening the girls. The greatest sadness is that the kids won’t be allowed up front to look ahead, quivering with excitement as the black maw gaped, ready to swallow us whole - not a tunnel but a giant weta’s cave.

Suppose another train’s on the same track? Maybe the engine will stop and we’ll be left in the dark. What if someone’s on the rails – could we halt in time? The damp and spooky walls, close enough to touch and smell.

In other cities passengers buy tickets from machines and if there are staff they’re slim, young and wear airhostess uniforms. In Wellington the coarse-clothed guards seem as stout as the carriages with their belts of jailer’s keys.

They probably came with the carriages when they were shipped from Lancashire, but most are cheery, quip-ready, underworked outside rush hour. At least they’re human, big enough to intimidate hoons and heave buggies up steps.

As the DM/Ds aged they became more idiosyncratic. Would we ever get to work on time? Jumping out of carriages into the mud and staggering along the sleepers after a breakdown became a hardening and uniting character-building experience, like cold showers and rugby in the 50s. It made us Wellingtonians.

The Matangi will just make us soft. And modern.

The First Train.

The first train was crowded, and the second train was filled before the first pulled out. The run was a surprise to passengers in the way in which the steep grades, up which the steam engines used to puff for half an hour, were taken easily by the motor coaches and their trailers.

The train left at 3.34½ p.m., and arrived at Johnsonville, after stopping briefly at all stations, at 3.50 p.m., a run of 16½ minutes, well ahead of the scheduled time of 19 minutes. The running was delightfully smooth.

There were crowds on every station, and at Johnsonville the whole of the platform near the station was packed, so much so that movement, once the speakers had commenced, was impossible. The crowd was essentially a family one, the number of children being very noticeable. (The NZ Railways Magazine, 1 August 1938.)

(First published in The Wellingtonian 17 Feb 2011)

NEW ZEALAND ELECTION

2011-01-23T14:30:00.000-08:00

The Key factor: Grinners are winners

He’s a self-made mega-millionaire in a multi-roomed mansion, leading a country of battlers struggling against low wages and high unemployment, many living in damp, overcrowded homes.

His country’s economy is slipping and sliding further behind the self-imposed benchmark of Australia and with no real rescue plan. While Australia spent its way out of the recession his solution was a cycleway. It’s still unfinished.

As Minister for Tourism he oversees an industry that jostles for top place as exchange earner, yet spends his holidays in Hawaii.

He wasn’t involved in the defining event of his generation that split the nation over sport and race. Instead he spent much of his working life overseas in big money dealing, a business few understand and many distrust.

The angry indigenous minority traditionally backs his opponents. He doesn’t need their support yet he’s brought them into his ministry.

In any other country, particularly one with a proud history of iconoclasm, New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key would be a one-term wonder, the butt of ridicule.

But in the election later this year the leader of the National Party, (the Kiwi version of Australia’s Liberals), is expected to stroll into a second three-year term, his mana (authority and influence) secure.

Labour has tried digging dirt and casting slurs, but nothing has stuck on Jolly John. He’s the man for all seasons who smiles his way through political winters, yet still finds the right tone to handle tragedy.

In 2008 he defeated Helen Clark, the feisty, no-nonsense competent but controversial PM for nine years. He succeeded not by trying to be tougher, but by being bland.

Key inherited a collapsing economy and volatile social issues. Labour, prodded by the Greens, had supported a bill to help diminish the national shame of child bashing, but opponents tagged it the Anti-Smacking Law.

Right-wing Christian groups who hated the agnostic and childless Clark saw this as interference in parenting. Huge opposition forced a referendum that collected almost 1.5 million signatures (87 per cent) against the law.

Had Clark remained in power and refused to budge the outrage would have been seismic. Key uttered a few smooth words, left the law in place and the electorate relaxed.

He then reintroduced British imperial honours long since ditched by Labour despite no apparent demand for knights and dames in a nation that claims it pioneered egalitarianism. Again the voters grinned.

Shortly after taking office and nursing a broken arm, Key was jostled by Maori protestors at a Treaty of Waitangi celebration. Clark had refused to attend earlier events after similar insulting behaviour, but Key laughed off the incident and continued making concessions to Maori.

These included happily allowing the Maori flag to be flown on public buildings. Had Clark promoted such a gesture she would have inflamed the lunar right. But who would dare oppose a winner, particularly one who slashed top-end income tax?

This huge concession to the rich at the height of the recession came with a GST rise to 15 per cent that brutally whacked workers. They were already facing lengthening dole queues and new laws allowing instant dismissal in their first three months, with no recourse.

Such blatant attacks on the blue-collar classes by a man with an estimated $50 million should have roused the masses. Yet this and other factors, like an expose of politicians rorting their allowances, failed to fuel hate. Again the Key factor. He seems such a relaxed, friendly, self-deprecating guileless guy he’s impossible to dislike. Or distrust.

He remained unfazed when tens of thousands took to the streets to oppose mining on conservation land. The idea came from a colleague. Key flicked the issue away and talked instead about his vasectomy, successfully diverting public attention.

His success can’t just be put down to a lazy opposition led by 30-year veteran Phil Goff, 57, a professional politician with a long, though unspectacular record in government.

Key, 49, isn’t a career politician and that’s to his advantage. He only entered Parliament in 2002 and wears no albatrosses. Although backed by conservatives he’s no slave to Tory ideology and the old conflicts over issues like race seem absent from his portfolio. He defines himself as a centrist.

Despite his great wealth Key was brought up in a State home by his Austrian-Jewish mother after the death of his English immigrant father. Key doesn’t play on his poor childhood, but instead projects a friendly guy-next-door persona, a bloke who wouldn’t burn the snags at a neighbourly barbecue.

He’d have a beer but wouldn’t get drunk. He’d tell mildly funny stories about his teenage kids that would resonate with other parents. Confrontationists would get placated, and his childhood sweetheart and stay-at-home wife Bronagh would turn out to be small-town charming. So refreshing after Clark’s army of hairy-armpit feminists full of aggro, bashing society into their image.

During the Christchurch earthquake and last year’s Pike River mine disaster where 29 men lost their lives, Key handled the tragedies well, easily and naturally finding the right heartfelt tone.

All this makes politics across the Tasman as exciting as a flat Pavlova. Parliament is boisterous but lacks the grudges and savagery of Canberra. It hasn’t always been so - NZ politics in the past has been rough and brutal. Opposing South African rugby apartheid, US nuclear fleets and French terrorist bombings has given the nation a reputation for guts and principle.

Key says he’ll quit politics if defeated this year. This could be read as arrogance, but it’s really sending a clear message: Stay with me because what you see is what you get. Otherwise it will be back to Labour’s secret machine men and women manipulating their parliamentary puppets.

Clark was thrown out largely because voters got sick of social engineering. They’d had enough of PC correctness and expected the newcomer to return the country to its robust roots.

That hasn’t happened. Key has undone little of Labour’s work, but National’s fear of being labelled the nanny state has made him cautious on curing social ills, like being tough on drivers who drink, tackling the country’s poverty and the widening gap between rich and poor. On these issues he’s had a clear mandate but has failed to act.

There’s one wild card in this scenario of certainty – the Rugby World Cup in October. Should the All Blacks lose NZ will slump into depression, then seek scapegoats. With the Mixed Member Proportional system favouring minor parties, some curious coalitions might result if the electorate puts a pox on all politicians.

Sceptics believe that if Key gets a second term the smile will turn to snarl. An electorate lulled to sleep would be easily ambushed by the rabid right, currently safely kennelled but ever ready to savage NZ’s state-owned enterprises and socialist structures. The Accident Compensation Corporation that provides no-fault cover to all is seen as a likely target, along with the State-owned Kiwibank.

Who’d believe such scaremongering? Even if he sold the family silver and kicked the kids into the street it must surely be for the best. John’s such a nice man.

(First published in On Line Opinion (Australia) on 24 January 2011)

WELLINGTON WEATHER

2011-01-20T11:54:00.000-08:00

Summer - isn’t that a Babylonian tribe? Duncan Graham

British radio raconteur and wit Frank Muir once said Edinburgh had its own private weather. He meant to say Wellington.

When TV forecasters gush about cloudless skies across the nation it takes only a swift glance from plasma screen to window waterfalls to prove the lie. Yet supporting the claims are isobars and cells massaging the troposphere, nurturing a high-pressure system that broods over our lovely land.

Though not Wellington.

For the past 241 years historians believed that when James Cook navigated the strait that now bears his name he missed the entrance to Wellington harbour. Thanks to WikiLeaks and some careless diplomatic cocktail chat we now have the truth: The master navigator knew the location but feared being either becalmed or wrecked.

The Roaring Forties, the Rimutaka-size swells and Barrett Reef’s razor rocks were manageable; the problem was the weather between Pipitea and Petone.

To live in the Capital it’s best to be a Christian, Muslim or follower of a faith that believes in the unproven. That makes it easier to accept something others say is true – such as there is a summer - though their statements can’t be tested.

Last century isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea cleared jungle airstrips and built wooden planes believing such displays would attract the airdrops that sustained the Allies fighting during the Second World War.

A similar cargo cult operates in Wellington. People put outdoor furniture on decks and barbecues in parks, foolishly believing these artefacts will attract the sun.

The Big Lie propaganda technique outlined by George Orwell, and refined by Senator Joseph McCarthy to sustain the Communist bogey, is still being employed in New Zealand.

Local government, the media and advertisers are in a cabal to convince Wellingtonians that there is a summer. Naysayers are outed as un-Kiwi.

The conspirators do this by staging bogus Outdoor Events that are always ‘fully booked’ so their veracity cannot be checked, by publishing pictures of folk we’ve never met splashing in the sea (clearly syndicated photos from the Gold Coast), and advertising flimsy ‘summer-weight’ clothing.

Also in the plot is Carter Observatory holding an exhibition called Here Comes the Sun and Circa Theatre staging The Motor Camp featuring fools in shorts and silly shirts.

The Central Library, which should know better because it stores facts, has an untouched display of books on fishing and golf arranged around a glass case of shells and cutouts of pohutukawa. This is labelled Summer Days. Readers are busy elsewhere consulting titles like Fix That Leak and 101 Indoor Games.

All this can lead to the Disbelief Syndrome, a serious medical condition triggered by an inability to recognise the border between fantasy and reality, similar to that experienced by addicted computer gamers. Attacks typically occur when disoriented shoppers rugged in oilskins and seeking an Irish stew stagger past windows displaying mannequins in bikinis and restaurants offering salads.

Wellington’s weather is so dangerously fickle the season between December and March should rightly be given name suppression.

Live elsewhere? No way. Better this than fires and floods.

(First published in The Wellingtonian 20 January 2011)

SURVIVING NATURAL DISASTERS WITHOUT COMPENSATION

2010-12-05T12:26:00.000-08:00

Recovering without ACC

The Pike River mine explosions were tragic enough – but imagine the harsh futures faced by the lost miners’ families if they’d been left with no state support.

ACC Minister Nick Smith commenting on the likely $10 million payout said: “Compared with countries where people may face months or years of uncertainty over legal disputes, the great advantage of our ACC scheme is that families will get access to entitlements immediately."

Indonesia is one such country with few entitlements and no legal aid available to the thousands of victims of two recent natural disasters. These are the fishers and farmers whose homes have been swept away by the tsunami off the west coast of Sumatra in September, and houses burned or buried by the explosion of Mount Merapi in Central Java in November 2010.

The combined death toll is almost 1,000, but ten times that number have lost their livelihoods and livestock. The government has promised cattle replacements. However few survivors will get adequate or any other compensation and must rely on outsiders to survive and recover.

Insurance is alien to many Indonesians. Families and small businesses living on the edge can’t afford the premiums and few trust the big end of town to deliver on promises. That’s understandable. Before the 1997 Asian economic meltdown Indonesia had 238 banks. More than half collapsed, undermined by corruption, heavy debts and appalling management. .

Jamsostek is the State social security agency insuring employees, mainly those working for big national and international companies. It has less than 10 million of what it calls ‘active participants’.

Traditionally Indonesians have relied on their families to provide support in times of need. Children are expected to pay for their parents’ retirement.

More than 2.5 million labour abroad because jobs are scarce in their homeland. The World Bank estimates 35 million are poor and 9.4 million unemployed. There’s little spare cash for public appeals, and too many tragedies to aid disaster victims. The only compensation offered to the estimated 65,000 tsunami victims is a Rp 6,000 (US$0.70) per person per day payout. This has been capped at five members per family and will last for only one month.

Those who go overseas to meet their family responsibilities are generally unskilled. They work in menial, low-paid construction and housekeeping jobs in richer nations like Malaysia, Singapore and Saudi Arabia.

Their remittances are used to send siblings to school, fund medical care and start little enterprises. But individual payments are too small to help families recover from major catastrophes.

One outside agency providing support is the Rehabilim Trust set up by a Wellingtonian, the late Colin McLennan. Its headquarters, known as Yakkum, is on the slopes of Merapi, just inside the outer rings of the danger zone proclaimed after the volcano exploded.

Because Yakkum has substantial buildings, and is relatively well resourced and secure, it became a haven for distressed refugees fleeing the mountain’s fury.

In the past few weeks director Dr Maria Widagdo has been e-mailing supporters in New Zealand about the emergency, describing the floods of terrified people seeking shelter and medical care, and the problems working in smothering clouds of ash.

McLennan went to Indonesia in the early 1980s for a Scout jamboree. The sight of crippled kids begging in the streets shocked him. He resolved that they should get treatment and training to become useful members of society.

Back in Wellington he mustered financial support from service clubs, churches and individuals, garnering enough to buy land, start building and recruit staff. The project and its management rapidly gained credibility and respect, and soon attracted backing from major European charities.

McLennan died in 2007 aged 73, remembered on a Yakkum memorial as ‘a Kiwi who cared’. His work continues through the trust now chaired by Tawa businessman Bill Russell.

“We’ve already sent $6,000 but much more is needed.” he said. “We’re able to meet immediate medical needs but long term support is required to help people get back to their land, to rebuild their homes and become productive again.”

MANDARINS MUST EXPAND THEIR ASIAN HORIZONS

2010-11-03T13:05:00.000-07:00

Learning about our Muslim neighbour l

I hope the blinkered public service mandarins note your editorial (1 November) about engaging with a changing world. They need to expand their vision beyond China and India for trade, schooling, immigration and influence in Asia.

So far they’ve been overlooking a closer market of enormous political and strategic importance.

Indonesia is the world’s third largest democracy with more Muslims than any other nation. It’s our nearest Asian neighbour, our second biggest market in Southeast Asia. Trade between us is worth almost $1.5 billion a year and growing. Most is in our favour. .

We’re frequently first in line giving aid following natural disasters, like SurfAid assisting with the current Mentawai Islands tsunami response. We’ve been closely involved in advising on earthquake damage mitigation and geothermal energy.

About 25 years ago the late Colin McLennan established a unique rehabilitation unit for disabled children in Yogyakarta. This Wellingtonian’s vision has now expanded to Bali and Nias.

Yet few seem to recognise the opportunities in what Trade and Enterprise calls a “relationship-driven market.” Earlier this year Amris Hassan, the outgoing Indonesian ambassador to NZ, commented in The Jakarta Post that many businesses were failing to seize the openings created through visits by leaders of both countries.

“NZ must capture the opportunities in education. Indonesian students seeking to study abroad provide a big market,” he wrote.
“NZ schools and universities say they want overseas students but to be frank they’re not doing enough to attract Indonesians … there are 20,000 Indonesians studying in Australia. That figure is 50 times larger than the number of Indonesians in NZ schools and universities.“
The NZ Embassy in Jakarta responded with a report underpinning Mr Hassan’s comments. It added that a better relationship in education should provide a direct economic benefit and “form a pillar in a stronger political relationship.”
Worthwhile words, but they’ve stimulated little movement in Wellington ministries. There’s still no government-to- government protocol for education.
It’s the same with tourism. Minimal effort is being put into promoting our attractions in Indonesia, a country of 240 million with a rapidly expanding and cashed-up middle class.
The faults aren’t one-sided. Live cattle sales to Indonesia have hit a gateless fence. A Free Trade Agreement with Indonesia hasn’t been finalised so young people can’t apply for NZ working holiday visas – and vice versa.
Sad because our image in Asia isn’t just clean and green – it’s also safe and welcoming, while Indonesia is a magic, friendly land for our youth to explore and learn about moderate Islam.
This absence of students and visitors means we live in the shadow of Australia while Kiwis only see the Archipelago from 10,000 metres as they fly to Europe for their OE.
Indonesia’s march to democracy is stunning. It has a large economy that will only grow bigger, and it has the power to be more than competitive with China.
We understand Prime Minister John Key plans to visit Indonesia early next year. That’s good news. However if the doors he opens aren’t used by NZ entrepreneurs and departmental heads prepared to include Indonesia in their Asian vision then he’s wasting his time.

(First published in The Dominion Post 4 November 2010)

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AGUS SRIYONO - NEW MAN DOWN UNDER

2010-11-03T12:52:00.000-07:00

Making 1,000 friends – and zero enemies
Shortly after arriving in Wellington the new Indonesian ambassador to New Zealand, Antonius Agus Sriyono was introduced to a senior public servant.

“Just call me Tony,” said the casual Kiwi. Fortunately the newcomer had researched his posting well. He’d read about egalitarianism Down Under so wasn’t too nonplussed.

“I’d discovered this culture of informality grew out of the first settlements (in the early 19th century) when immigrants had to build their own houses and do everything themselves whatever job they’d had in their home country,” he said.

“This was the first time I’d encountered such familiarity in my 26 years as a diplomat. Usually it’s deferential, ‘sir’ or ‘excellency’. As a Javanese I know all about protocols. But I replied: ‘OK, just call me Agus’.”

This anecdote might give the impression that the Archipelago’s new man in the South Pacific (his responsibilities include Samoa and Tonga) is so laid back and adaptable that his Embassy is a retirement waiting lounge for burnt-out bureaucrats.

When he got the job his colleagues in Jakarta congratulated Agus on being appointed to a position where the occupations would be golf, fishing and sleeping.

He’s relaxed – but that’s not a synonym for slack. “I play a little golf but only at weekends,” he said.

“I don’t fish and I’m happy with six hours sleep. Everyone has to be here by 9 am and many are still working at night.”

As darkness doesn’t come till after 9 pm during summer and Jakarta is six hours behind Wellington, recreation time for staff is going to be in short supply if the 15th ambassador to NZ maintains the pace.

His priorities are getting more Indonesian workers into NZ (tough because language levels must be high and jobs scarce), more post-graduate students into NZ universities (difficult because Australia’s the favored destination) – and the top issue, improving trade.

In this task he faces several hurdles: Indonesia imports almost NZ$ 900 million (US $680 million) worth of goods from NZ, mostly primary produce. But the reverse trade, mainly petroleum and paper, is worth only NZ$ 570 million (US $430).

NZ is the international leader in dairy farming and grassland management. Agus said he was keen to get these skills into Indonesia to boost local supplies as the population consumes more milk – as opposed to milk powder. He’s initiating talks with Fonterra, the dairy cooperative that buys and processes most milk in NZ, to encourage investment in the Republic.

The second is that many business heavyweights in Indonesia think the NZ market with only 4.25 million people is too small to warrant their attention. Agus counters that although consumers are few they’ve got full wallets.

Then there’s the Free Trade Agreement between NZ and Indonesia, which has not been completely signed off despite being approved almost two years ago. The problem, according to Agus, is that Indonesia still subsidises some forms of agriculture while NZ farming is free of government support.

Also caught up in the FTA dispute is the working holiday scheme, which would allow young people to spend a year in each other’s countries earning, touring and hopefully developing understanding of other cultures.

The scheme already operates between NZ and Malaysia, Singapore and China, along with many European countries.

“Smart but poor people who would benefit from using these visas don’t have the money for air fares to go abroad,” Agus said. “We’ve got to find a way to get around this difficulty. I don’t want to see only the rich get such opportunities.”

If there have been any hiccups in Agus’s career they get swiftly swallowed. He was born in Magelang, Central Java in 1957 where his parents were teachers keen for their talented lad to join them at the chalkboard.

But Agus had other ideas. He’d always been a leader, even in school. He went to Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta graduating in international relations. After three years working in public relations for the property development company Ciputra Group he joined Foreign Affairs in 1984. Donning the dark suit and entering the high priesthood of diplomacy fulfilled a long held ambition to master the refined arts of subtle statespeak.

“I’d always been interested in history,” he said, “I don’t know why – maybe it’s in my genes. I have about 3,000 books in my library. Many are about leadership.

“I tell my staff they must learn to lead, to communicate effectively and clearly in speech and writing. They must mingle with the local people. They must have 1,000 friends – and no enemies. They must separate the personal from the professional.”

He’s had one book published – a text on international relations – and is now a third of the way through writing a book on the Cold War. Apart from English his language skills include Dutch (his first posting was in The Hague and his parents spoke Dutch), French, Portuguese and some Russian.

Agus’s last post before Wellington was Moscow where he was deputy chief of mission for two years. With his wife Astuti Retno Widiati Sriyono he has three children. One son is a diplomat in Australia, another a journalist with Tempo magazine in Jakarta and a daughter at school in NZ.

“I am conscious that Indonesia ranks 111 on the International Corruption Index and that NZ is the least corrupt country in the world,” he said. “I have zero tolerance of corruption and that applies to myself.

“One must have integrity. I learned that from my parents, and it was reinforced by the late Ali Alatas (foreign minister under the Soeharto regime). I worked for him as a private assistant. He was my hero.”

But successful diplomacy requires compromise. Doesn’t that cause difficulties?

“No problem, I’m a Javanese. I’m lucky – I come from the majority ethnic group and the minority religion. (He’s Catholic.)

“All diplomatic actions should be based on inter-cultural understanding of other countries and their history. I’m committed to fixing problems. What I preach is what I do and I try to do my best. I want to be a good listener. (He is.) Every night I pray: ‘God, I put myself in your hands’.

“There have been ups and downs but I’ve never regretted my career choice. Emotionally, rationally and professionally it’s a most satisfying job and I don’t expect this to be my last posting.”
(First published in The Jakarta Post)
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HYMNS FOR OUR TIMES

2010-07-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

Discarding theological vaudeville

It’s not just racks of lamb and slabs of cheddar that earn us export income. Hymns are also bringing in the dollars.

On 4 July a convocation of American organists in the Washington Cathedral will be singing a 100 per cent pure New Zealand hymn commissioned from Kapiti Coast pacifist Dr Shirley Erena Murray.

“I know the Cathedral. It’s huge and full of banners of war,” she said. “I thought this was a good chance to get across a peace message, so my hymn, The Great Voice of God, includes lines about building peace and the cross never being a weapon.’

“Peace is what Jesus was all about. Peace is at the very heart of the Christian message. Hymns, spiritual songs if you like, are not theological vaudeville.”

Churchgoers may not know Dr Murray but they’ll be familiar with her philosophies, expressed in modern hymns used in NZ and congregations around the world.

Even in places where you can’t find Anchor butter you’ll probably encounter a Shirley Murray hymn in any one of nine languages.

So far she’s written 220 and shows no sign of exhausting words and ideas. Although a trained pianist she doesn’t compose the music so is known in the trade as a ‘hymn text writer.’ Her awards include a NZ Order of Merit and being made a fellow of the Royal School of Church Music.

US-based Hope Publishing markets her work overseas, though Dr Murray has retained copyright in Australasia and Asia. In Taiwan she helped Christians write English verses and transliterate hymns set to local tunes.

Like a true wordsmith she doesn’t wait for the muse to nestle in a sylvan setting before starting work, but garners ideas from the real world of pain and promise. She gets them on paper before e-mailing the polished product to the US: “We should give thanks to God for the miracle of information technology.”

A verse might start pushing to be born while its parent is sewing buttons or pulling weeds. “It’s a gift,” she said simply, “we have many good composers in Aotearoa though not many hymn text writers.”

Dr Murray, 79, developed an early love of words and language, and playing with limericks. Raised in a musical family in Invercargill she recalls a period when people sang unashamedly. Now shrinking mainstream church congregations feel coy about expressing their feelings, fearful of making fools of themselves.

“Where do our spirits go if we don’t sing?” she asked. “We should get on our feet, breathe deeply and move our bodies. Hymns are the folk songs of the church and when the folk don’t sing there’s a crisis of confidence in the church.”

Rewording familiar hymns has its hazards. Not all go to church for an uplifting sermon. Some attend to partake of the familiar, finding comfort in ritual and feel let down if someone has fiddled with the language.

“It’s difficult to work on the edge without some people reacting badly,” Dr Murray said. “I started to write about the city. Urban areas were considered sinful with God only residing in the countryside. There is also beauty and good in cities.

“Fine hymns present fresh and thoughtful ideas that connect with the Gospel and bond people. They should not be maudlin or use language badly. Yet in many minds hymns should be four square, grey coloured, old time.

“Old hymns were so predictable – love and dove, sing and king, glory and story, the tired remnants of outdated theology, fine if you don’t want to change your thinking. The Gospel gets ironed out by bland terms and non-inclusive language.”

Dr Murray’s career as a hymn text-writer has been in lockstep with the great social movements of our time – women’s liberation, the rejection of racism, homosexual law reform, ecumenism, peace campaigns, Maori land rights and the environmental movement. All are reflected in her works and most have been embraced, though she’s disappointed that ‘green hymns’ haven’t been greeted with much enthusiasm.

Also powering her pen has been the determination that New Zealanders should be singing our songs, not European imports celebrating white Christmases with the simple syllables of holly and ivy, though it’s tough finding anything that rhymes with pohutukawa.

After studying the classics, French and music at Otago University, in 1954 Shirley Cockroft married John Stewart Murray. He was a churchman with a well-burnished social conscience, later to become moderator of the Presbyterian Church.

After several other positions, including ecumenical chaplain at Victoria University, he moved to St Andrew’s on the Terrace in 1975 when the congregation was in urgent need of new directions – and a distinctive voice.

“Ministers tend to be word people,” said Dr Murray. “Many can’t find the right hymns to fit the sermons. At that time St Andrew’s was the ideal place with the congregation supportive of anything that might make a difference.”

When not actively promoting causes from Amnesty International to a nuclear free world, the couple helped form the NZ Hymn Book Trust backed by five denominations. They collected new works and eventually saw their dream come true with the NZ Supplement to With One Voice in 1982.

Other hymnals followed recognising indigenous histories, new social structures, values and aspirations, separate and different from those of Europe.

“Hymns should not be seen as an add-on to the service,” Dr Murray said. “New times need new words. Hymns resonate. They make worship more lively. They are the little packets of theology that we remember. What’s a hymn if it isn’t something to be shared?”

(First published in St Andew's News, July 2010)

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PAM ORMSBY - FEISTY VETERAN OF A B PROTESTS

2010-07-25T21:20:00.000-07:00

‘Lunatic Fringe’ wins moral war

Pamela Colleen Ormsby rejects the feminist tag. Or any other off the peg label which makes people jump to assumptions based on the term, not the person.

But there’s no doubt the feisty veteran of the Presbyterian church St Andrew’s on the Terrace had been in the front ranks of Wellington’s social reformers since her arrival in the capital as a fresh 22-year old from Auckland.

That was back in 1955 when the “Maori, part Irish, part God-knows what” shorthand typist took up a position on the Ministerial staff of Eric Halstead, Minister of Industries and Commerce.

Away from her job Pam rapidly became an activist. She was heavily involved in the Citizens’ All Black Tour Association that fought to stop the 1960 tour to South Africa if Maori players were again ineligible for selection. A 1959 photo shows her leading a parade with a banner shouting: ‘No Maori, No Tour’.

“We started off as a small ad hoc group (which erupted into a nation-wide protest within days attracting 150,000 signatures to a petition) but in many ways the involvement determined the rest of our lives,” said Pam.

“I got involved because it was a social justice issue. I hope I’d have done the same thing whatever the race of the players. We lost that well-fought battle but eventually the war was over.”

When the team left for South Africa in 1960 a prominent sports journalist dismissed CABTA as “two percent of the lunatic fringe.” Then when the All Blacks were doing rather poorly the same journalist excused them on the grounds that what else could be expected when they knew they had “half the population against them.”

An apology by the NZ Rugby Union to Maori excluded from tours to South Africa during the long years of apartheid came only this May.

“My values were drawn from my upbringing,” said Pam. “My father Charles was a blacksmith at the Otahuhu Railway Workshops, but sick with TB. Those were tough times in the thirties and when he couldn’t work, the Railway Tradesmen’s Organisation, as was their wont, chipped in to help out.

“I clearly remember him telling me that because he didn’t want me to get sick too, instead of hugging or kissing we would salute one another. It was a very private thing, and I’m so grateful for the way he explained the situation to a four-year-old.

“I was baptised in the Methodist church but the Presbyterians were closer so I went there. In Sunday school I started to realise things aren’t always what they seem. I learned to question, to know that I didn’t have to accept everything I was told.”

Her Dad died when Pam was 14. At Seddon Memorial Technical College she became a top student and a shorthand whiz.

Her minister in Auckland told her that when she moved south she’d worship at St Andrew’s, but Pam had a mind of her own. “I’ll decide for myself,” she thought, but her links had preceded her. The day after she arrived in Wellington she was surprised by a phone call from St Andrew’s minister, Jack Somerville.

He’d become well known for opposing the 1951 State of Emergency in the bitter waterside dispute. Church leaders (including Lloyd Geering, then at St James in Newtown) risked jail under draconian laws banning support for strikers.

“Within 48 hours I was in St Andrew’s and have been there most of my life,” she said. “I went a bit AWOL in the early 1970’s when churches were a bit sniffy about broken marriages, but was rounded up by John Murray (he’d been CABTA’s man in Taihape) in his first week here.”

In 1957 Labour won office and Pam moved onto the staff of Arnold Nordmeyer, a Presbyterian minister, the Minister of Finance and author of the notorious Black Budget of 1958.

Pam was not afraid to voice her opinions telling her boss during a dictation session that his proposed higher taxes for single people was unfair. She recalled the moment:

“Miss Ormsby,” he countered (accent on the Miss), “if you are so extremely unattractive as to be unable to better your status that is no fault of the country’s taxation system.”

Pam has great admiration for ‘Nordy’ describing him as “fearless, forthright and highly principled” and her time in is office as the best in her working life.

In 1960 Pam toured Indonesia with a National Council of Churches goodwill mission to build ties with Christians there.

Then came OE. Pam went to Europe and married Kiwi teacher (and CABTA man) Bernie Grice in Scotland. The adventurous couple drove back to NZ through Europe, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia in a tiny car, only to have it written off in a Karori crash.

Back in Wellington Pam quit her Parliamentary job when Robert Muldoon became Minister of Finance. “I didn’t want anything to do with the little sod,” said Pam. “I’d learned to dislike him long before he got into politics.”

Pam moved to Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey) to teach and then became head of school. Her activism continued to the point where she was thrown out of the public gallery in Parliament twice and once banned from the precincts for a year.

The issue was the 1981 Springbok tour of NZ that divided the nation, the biggest civil disturbance since the 1951 State of Emergency.

In the late 1970s Pam married Polytech tutor Owen Ball in St Andrew’s. In the course of expeditions to out-of-the-way places around the country seeking geological specimens, Pam and Owen found themselves sub-enumerators on a penguin census – a dirty, smelly but absorbing experience assisting a Canterbury University zoology study of Tawaki, the Fiordland crested penguin. Owen died in 2002.

A member of Session for many years, Pam enjoyed an active role in the life of the congregation. For her a special highlight was as Moderator’s Minder for John Murray.

Despite the distance from her Gaelic roots Pam still retains some Irish sentence structures. Was school good? “It was, it was indeed.”

When asked to describe herself Pam settled on “stroppy”. “I am forceful,” she said, though without arrogance. “I’m a no-nonsense person. I don’t like being called a feminist because I don’t back all the ideas of feminism.”

“For me Progressive Presbyterian means not being tied to old ways of doing and thinking. It means being open to challenge alongside the freedom to challenge. It’s conversation and communion, where once there was dogma.

“Sadly a whole generation of liberal Presbyterian ministers retired and left way for a new fundamentalist group. But despite this I remain optimistic.”

(First published in St Andrew's on the Terrace News, July 2010)

FREE FOOD - BUT IS IT ART?

2010-06-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

Big Sale: 100 per cent off everything Duncan Graham

Imagine a shop where there’s no check-out and no till.

Where the food on the shelves can be taken without paying; where there are no hard-eyed security guards assuming everyone’s a thief; where the staff offer a bag to take away your non-purchases.

Not fantasy but fact in central Wellington, New Zealand, where artist and activist Kim Paton (pictured) has opened the appropriately named The Free Store.

“For three years I ran a grocery shop in a country town and saw the waste,” she said. “Under NZ law goods can be sold after their Best-Before date, which is usually reckoned to be half the shelf life. Many shops quit such foods at half price or give them to staff. Bakers say that bread must be sold on the day it’s baked.

“In my shop I used to give away over-supplies or damaged goods. I believed that if I got it for nothing then it had to be passed on for free.

“However it’s illegal to sell food beyond its expiry date, so these things go to landfill. Most customers know that there’s somewhere out the back of supermarkets where unsold food goes – and I want to get this issue discussed.

“The system of getting rid of unwanted food is hit and miss. I used to get so frustrated – there needs to be a much better way for handling surpluses in the supply chain.

”As a society we are defined by our consumption. It’s part of our language. Shouldn’t feeding the hungry be less about food production and more about better distribution?”

Ms Paton, 31, has an honors degree in fine arts and is studying for a higher degree in business. She’s had several solo exhibitions and was approached by Wellington curator Sophie Jerram to take part in a project called Letting Space sponsored by the NZ Arts Council and the Wellington City Council.

Letting Space rented an empty shop for a fortnight and organised insurance cover. There have been similar stores in European countries, though many are swap shops. In NZ and Australia charities and churches give food parcels to the poor or supply meals

“The project asks: How can we make better creative and sustainable use of Wellington's inner-city empty commercial spaces, particularly during the recession?” Ms Jerram said.

“How can artists engage with property owners in ways that are more than just the provision of ad hoc gallery spaces in empty shops? Can we imagine a lively city where artists have as much visibility as retailers?”

Ms Paton’s proposal, based on her experience as a shopkeeper, was to get suppliers to donate surplus food which she would then give away, to raise questions about consumerism, what people want and what they need.

Although she got many knock-backs support surprisingly came from Progressive Enterprises, one of the biggest supermarket chains in Australasia.

She said companies that contributed food were keen to reduce waste and do this efficiently. They wanted to find new ways to develop a positive image in the community.

“A few suppliers would not cooperate because they claimed that if their food was given away it would be a threat to their viability and damage brand names,” Ms Paton said shifting plastic crates of donated bananas, vegetables and bread around her little shop, making space for new deliveries.

“These are easy clichés and superficial arguments. Most people will continue to buy their goods in ordinary shops. Status quo economics are an environmental hazard.”

The Free Store is no ordinary retailer. There are no flashy signs pushing bonus buys and special deals. Here the deal is irresistible. Take what you like and pay nothing.

On the shelves were packs of coffee, tins of fruit, cans of cool drinks, boxes of breakfast cereals and even disposable nappies. Some goods were past their ‘Best Before’ dates; others donated because the cans were slightly dented or packaging torn.

Retailers in NZ are extremely fussy about presenting goods and reject anything that’s slightly flawed

Potential customers to The Free Store were nonplussed. Some stood in the doorway, reluctant to enter but keen to get something free. It was written in their faces – where’s the catch? What’s the risk?

It seemed that only students from nearby university flats, backpackers and the really down and out felt confident about striding in and filling their bags.

Most seemed to take only what they needed and didn’t exploit the situation. Several said they felt uncomfortable about not paying. Ms Paton chatted to customers but put no restrictions on what people could take, giving her useful insights into human behavior.

“It’s not the poor who take too much,” she said. “Usually those who can afford to pay are the ones who over indulge. I don’t expect anyone to plunder the shop.

“The Free Store is not a joke, a religion or a charity. Contemporary art gives us a language free from restrictions, to talk about topics we don’t normally discuss. This is about our needs, how we consume goods and whether there are better ways of doing things.”

Meanwhile in the street outside passers-by peered cautiously through the window. Better not enter; if it’s just too good to be true it probably is.

Only those with a poorly defined sense of skepticism (or an excess of courage) entered. What they saw was what they got – free fresh food – and a novel experience.

##

REMEMBERING BALIBO

2010-06-26T09:10:00.000-07:00

The pain that won’t go away

Duncan Graham

Far, far away, Indonesia continues to get a bad press. Not just because of corruption, smoking toddlers and women having to wear long skirts in Aceh, but because of a tragedy in 1975.

At an outdoor memorial service in New Zealand for Gary Cunningham, the young Kiwi cameraman who was shot in East Timor 35 years ago, an Indonesian citizen privately offering apologies and sympathy approached his aunt, Pat McGregor (pictured above). Indonesian Embassy diplomats and NZ government representatives were not present.

“There’s no need to apologise,” Mrs McGregor said as spokesperson for the Cunningham family. “It was not the fault of the Indonesian people. I was bitter at first, but I’ve got over that. However I’d still like those two involved brought to justice.”

(She was referring to former Special Forces officers Yunus Yosfiah and Christoforus da Silva who are alleged to have ordered the killings.)

On 16 October 1975 Indonesian troops invading East Timor (now Timor Leste) shot Cunningham and four other foreign journalists in the village of Balibo despite a sign on their house wall saying the reporters were from Australia. Although two were British, two were from Australia and one from NZ, all were working for Australian TV channels.

The men became known as the Balibo Five and failure to find those responsible for their deaths has been a running sore in Indonesian- Australian and NZ relationships ever since.

Balibo, an Australian feature film about the incident released last year has been banned in Indonesia, despite protests by Indonesian journalists. It was going to be shown at the Jakarta International Film Festival last December.

The film, based on books about the event and an Australian coronial inquest, claimed the men were deliberately killed because their reports would have revealed news of the secret invasion into what was still a Portuguese colony.

The Indonesian government has long claimed the matter is closed, arguing that screening the film would open conflict between Indonesia and Australia. However there was a surprise development last December when retired colonel Gatot Purwanto confessed that the men had been ‘executed’.

The Australian government has started a war crimes commission investigation into the killings – the fifth inquiry into the tragedy

Gary Cunningham, who was born in Wellington in 1947, moved to commercial TV in Australia after working for the NZ Broadcasting Corporation.

Late last month (May) about 50 people gathered in the rain on a hillside above Wellington to remember Gary and his colleagues, speak of the tragedy, condemn the Australian and NZ governments for not confronting Indonesia, and unveil a memorial bench covered with a Timorese ikat (traditional woven cloth).

Tim Pankhurst, secretary of the Media Freedom Committee, and chief executive of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association said it was important to remember that journalists faced danger when reporting wars, and needed support and protection.

So far this year 13 journalists have been killed on the job, the latest an Italian reporter in Bangkok. Last year 71 died.

Mr Pankhurst said fear of offending Indonesia had been behind past governments failing to pursue the issue. He called on the NZ government “to show similar courage and commitment” to Australia in chasing the facts.

Media professionals and human rights activists have continued to press Indonesia to prosecute those responsible for the shootings. Indonesia has continued to claim that the men were accidentally shot during a firefight between the Indonesian military and Fretilin militia.

Fretilin was the socialist resistance group, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor.

The journalists’ bodies were burned and some remains buried in Jakarta, though there are doubts that the ashes are those of the men. The men’s relatives were not allowed to fly to Indonesia for the funeral and could only attend a memorial service in Melbourne. Cunningham family members were not able to visit Timor Leste till 2003.

Mrs McGregor said support for the memorial had come from the Media Freedom Committee and the Indonesia Human Rights’ Committee (IHRC) a NZ organisation that has long been campaigning for justice for the Balibo Five.

Gary’s brother Greig Cunningham said many people were unaware that journalists put their lives at risk so viewers could get the news in the comfort of their homes.

East Timor had been a Portuguese colony for more than 200 years. When Portugal began to relinquish control in 1975 many nations, including Australia and the US, feared Communists might take control of an independent nation. After seizing control Indonesia made the little country its 27th province.

For the next 24 years fighting between Indonesian troops and East Timorese guerrillas took the lives of an estimated 100,000, Timorese and Indonesians, through warfare, starvation and disease.

In a 1999 referendum the people voted four to one to become an independent nation. Since then NZ troops have been part of the international peacekeeping force in Timor Leste.

Mrs McGregor said the news of her nephew’s death came on her silver wedding anniversary. At first the family was told Gary had died in crossfire, but later heard rumors that the journalists had been killed in cold blood.

“It was a great shock to us all,” she said. “Gary had worked in Vietnam during the war and knew the risks. He wouldn’t have done anything foolish. The government wouldn’t tell us what had happened.

“It’s important to honor him, even after all these years. We all feel just a little bit better now. Gary gave his life in the pursuit of truth.”

##

KONFRONTASI- A WAR FEW WANTED

2010-06-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

Voices from a Border War
Robert Gurr
Wilson Scott Publishing

We all know smoking kills, though it usually takes years of inhaling toxins before the heart shudders to a halt or cancer triumphs.

But back in 1963, lighting up in the jungle during Soekarno’s Konfrontasi offensive against newborn Malaysia could have meant death was just seconds away.

That’s because the Indonesian soldiers continued smoking kretek (clove) cigarettes while trying to infiltrate Sarawak and Sabah, giving away their locations to the keen-nosed troops tracking them, according to these accounts from the men who were there.

It was a lesson learned too late, indicating not just a lack of authority but also that the Indonesian army, which was largely using irregular militia, didn’t really have its heart in the job.

It’s widely believed that the Ganyang Malaysia (Crush Malaysia) campaign had been launched for domestic political purposes, diverting attention from economic problems.

Soekarno had earlier been indifferent to Britain giving its colony independence. Then he changed his mind and started arguing that Malaysia was destined to become a puppet state. Konfrontasi ended quietly after Soeharto became president.

The four-year undeclared war cost Indonesia 590 lives. More than 770 men were taken prisoner. By contrast the British Commonwealth forces supporting the Malaysian federation lost 114, most of them Gurkhas.

Australian and New Zealand troops were involved and took the opportunity to refine their jungle warfare techniques. These were later applied in Vietnam – though not always by US forces who seemed not to have learned the importance of stealth and discipline, radios off, hand signals only, no after-shave and no smoking.

The Viet Cong did not make the same mistakes.

Also important was winning the hearts and minds of the locals. The phrase has now been corrupted by cynicism but in the Borneo border fighting it had real meaning.

Without the help of the ferocious Dyaks known as Iban, and who were often hostile to the Indonesians and enjoyed collecting their heads, the Commonwealth forces would have been floundering in the swamps and lost in the dense tropical forests.

The Iban had families on both sides of the border so could move around easily, though not always safely. They were used in psychological warfare, taking false messages to the Indonesian military, such as warning them to beware of minefields that didn’t exist.

The egalitarian Ozzies and Kiwis respected the Iban culture, paid the people to work, gave them medical supplies and won their loyalty. By contrast the Indonesian militia were reportedly brutal.

Brigadier Robert Gurr was head of the 1st Battalion Royal NZ Infantry Regiment fighting in Borneo and in this book he’s collected the stories of the men he commanded. There are only a few minor attempts at balance – these are the accounts of the victors.

That doesn’t mean they’re non-stop Boy’s Own Annual yarns of gallantry and smart soldiering. There are plenty of tales of stuff-ups and incompetence. Some of the worst casualties on the Malaysian side were not inflicted by Indonesians but by helicopter accidents.

Other problems included communication systems failing and mistakes in translation. There’s also humor. A commander about to evacuate a limping soldier found the man had put his boots on the wrong feet in his rush to withdraw.

One Kiwi in the midst of an ambush was surprised to hear the Indonesians calling out in English: ‘Come and get it British!’

“At such times life becomes like a slow-motion movie,” the soldier said. “I recall being intensely irritated that Indonesian intelligence should be so bad it could confuse a New Zealand infantry company with a British one.”

Of course the Border War was no chuckle time. Jungle warfare was nerve-wracking, brutal close-quarter combat where the enemy could suddenly appear, fire, and then vanish behind the dripping green curtain.

Some in the Commonwealth lines wondered what they were doing so far from home risking their lives in mud and malaria for a political sideshow.

But this was also the era of the great Communist scare when Australians felt particularly vulnerable. The West was terrified that Soekarno was turning his country into a Communist state and had to be stopped.

Although there’s evidence the Indonesian military was unhappy with their president’s leftist leanings they found themselves on the same side with Communist guerrillas also fighting to destabilise the Malaysian Federation.

Technically the Commonwealth forces were not supposed to enter Indonesian territory to avoid inflaming the international political situation. They had to wait on the Sarawak side for the Indonesian soldiers to cross over or parachute in before they could attack.

Inevitably such rules were ignored. By entering Kalimantan, making contact and then retreating, the pursuing Indonesians were lured over the border and trapped.

The troops were also not allowed to bombard Indonesian bases with artillery “unless the enemy acted aggressively.”

The Indonesians tended to operate in groups of 20 to 30 men and had no such restrictions on their movements. Until the later stages of the conflict they were the numerically superior force.

Thirteen years after Konfrontasi ended, good relations had been restored between the former combatants. One NZ officer attended the Indonesian Staff College where he met some of his one-time enemies. He reported that he was impressed with their honesty:

“Amidst laughter tinged with some sadness I would be regaled with the hardships they suffered in Kalimantan. They (the Indonesians) existed on very limited supplies over very long and extremely complicated supply lines and communications, but they were still able to fight with determination.”

By contrast the Commonwealth forces were backed by artillery, air power and good support with munitions, food and medicines.

There’s clearly a need for histories telling the Indonesian side of the conflict. It wasn’t the greatest moment in the Republic’s history but it deserves recognition for the courage shown by the men on the ground supporting their country.

(First published in The Sunday Post 13 June 2010)
##

AMRIS HASSAN AND NZ

2010-04-30T22:29:00.000-07:00

The tough task of boosting trade Amris Hassan

Amris Hassan, 51, the Indonesian ambassador to New Zealand, ends his three-year term this month. (April) A former academic, PDIP politician and businessman he reflects on terrorism, lost opportunities and his bid to boost business and educational ties between the two countries.

When I took up the appointment in 2007 I wasn’t given any specific objectives, other than maintaining the good relationships that have marked our 50 years presence in Wellington, and improving Indonesia’s profile.

I decided the Embassy had to be active, like a corporation out to make a profit. I demanded and got more funds and have spent a lot of time using my position to push Indonesian manufacturers to lift their game by expanding into export markets.

That hasn’t been easy. Once they heard that NZ has only around four million people some companies didn’t see the need to make the effort. One food additive manufacturer told me that he could sell more products in Bogor, so why bother?

So I decided to do things the other way around and take NZ businesspeople to Indonesia. That’s yielded results. We now have NZ retailers importing outdoor furniture, shoes, clothes and other consumer products from Indonesia.

In some cases our goods, like women’s clothing, are more expensive than those sourced from China. But I’ve been able to show that Indonesian materials are higher quality, and that counts when selling to the Western world.

NZ exports huge quantities of dairy foods to Indonesia and around the world, and does so very efficiently. But any Tom and Jerry can produce milk. The art is to find the niche markets for products like gourmet cheeses and milks. There are millions of Indonesians like me who are prepared to pay for high quality foods.

There’s still a long way to go, but bilateral trade has expanded enormously. It was worth NZ $1.2 billion (Rp 7.8 trillion) in 2006. Now it’s almost doubled to NZ $2.2 billion (Rp 14.2 trillion).

There’s a great deal of goodwill towards Indonesia in NZ. It hasn’t always been that way. Indonesia’s profile as a nation ruled undemocratically by the authoritarian government of President Soeharto was not well received by Kiwis.

When I first went to Wellington I didn’t realise the level of egalitarianism in NZ, and the dislike of nepotism, bribery and corruption. It’s critical that Indonesian diplomats and official visitors go out of their way to mix with Kiwis and get to understand ordinary people, and not just government officials.

New Zealanders can be frank and direct, but that’s OK. You know exactly what they think. They are friendly and discrimination and racism is almost non-existent.

In attempts to establish pathways to ASEAN, some NZ prime ministers visited the Republic during the Soeharto administration and President Soeharto came to NZ in 1972. But the real breakthrough came when the late President Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur) visited NZ in 2000.

Kiwis warmed to his humanity and liberalism. They said: ‘This blind guy can be a president? We had no idea Indonesia was so different.’ They became aware that the authoritarian era had passed and Indonesia had become the most democratic nation in Asia.

Then came the tragedy of the 2004 tsunami. Kiwis are emotional and sentimental people and responded with great generosity. People in the streets were collecting money for the victims.

In 2005 President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came to Wellington and two years later Prime Minister Helen Clark made a serious trip to our country, despite Australian travel warnings.

At this stage official relations between Indonesia and NZ are at their warmest. Sadly, many businesses are failing to seize the openings these visits have created, particularly with education follow-ups. NZ must capture the opportunities in education. Indonesian students seeking to study abroad provide a big market.

NZ schools and universities say they want overseas students but to be frank they’re not doing enough to attract Indonesians. Maybe it’s the Commonwealth syndrome where efforts are concentrated on countries like Malaysia and Singapore, when Indonesia is NZ’s nearest ASEAN neighbor.

Or perhaps it’s because to most Kiwis, Asia is China and huge efforts have been put into developing contacts and trade with that country.

There are 20,000 Indonesians studying in Australia. That figure is 50 times larger than the number of Indonesians in NZ schools and universities. However we have already helped develop school and teacher exchange programs and these are progressing well.

Look at the long-term benefits of building contacts and networks in international relations through education. Vice President Boediono, the Minister for Foreign Affairs Marty Natalegawa and the President’s youngest son Edhie Baskoro have all been educated in Australia.

Yet NZ has a very high standard of education, providing students with a clean environment and costs are relatively lower. This isn’t just an academic observation. My children attended schools in Wellington and one daughter will return to study economics at university this year.

The other good news is that more Kiwis are visiting Indonesia. Garuda is planning to reopen its NZ service and should have flights to Auckland from Jakarta and Denpasar via Brisbane early next year.

Another area I’ve been keen to promote is the earth sciences. NZ is a leader in geo-thermal energy and can help us a lot.

Like Indonesia NZ is on the Ring of Fire and subject to earthquakes. The country experiences more than 14,000 tremors every year. NZ has been developing new technology to help soften the impact of big quakes and strengthen public buildings.

We organized a conference in Jakarta two years ago that was attended by a large number of Kiwi scientists explaining how they do things. Also present was the NZ Minister of Civil Defence and our Minister of Foreign Affairs.

A similar workshop in Yogyakarta was conducted a year later. As a result a new Geo Sciences Center will be opened at the University of Gadjah Mada.

Against these positives have been the problems of perception. Some still see Indonesia as a nation of extremists. Just when I think I’ve convinced people otherwise there’s been another bombing and I’ve had to start all over again.

The converse is that NZ is thought to be a part of Australia. There should be a NZ – RI Friendship Association. Similar organizations have been established by Germany and Japan in Jakarta. USINDO (United States-Indonesia Society) is another excellent model.

I don’t know whether I’ll go back to politics or teaching, but I’d really like to continue with the diplomatic service. We’ll see.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 29 April 2010)

##

OUR WAR-TORN HERITAGE

2010-04-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

Keeping the legends alive Duncan Graham

Newcomers to our culture confront many puzzles. The most bewildering has to be the Anzac tradition.

Other nations boast of great victories. We trumpet a defeat. Our partner Australia even uses the bloody catastrophe of Gallipoli to mark the birth of a nation.

If you plan to be at the Dawn Service on 25 April better be mighty early. Even if the rain is coming down in bullets there’ll be no parking far beyond a bugle’s call of the Cenotaph. That’s hard proof the Anzac legend hasn’t died.

Nor has publishers’ enthusiasm to mark the event with new books and reprints. Here’s four:

The Anzac Book
The Men of Anzac
UNSW Press
(Through Addenda Publishing $69.99)

TV pictures from Afghanistan are well-scrubbed versions of the original footage, the severed limbs and body contents edited out so we’re not sickened and outraged.

The censors doing the cleansing have a long ancestry. Back in 1915 they ensured the folks back home knew nothing of the ghastly experiences their menfolk were enduring.

The first edition of The Anzac Book published in 1916 was a jolly collection of cartoons and yarns from the lads in the trenches. It reads like an account of a Boy Scout camp where the main problems are bad tucker, biting insects and toffee-nosed officers.

This third addition puts events a mite more in perspective with a new foreword and introduction, plus previously censored pictures. The flavour of larrikin humour and she’ll-be-right philosophy remains, with an embossed cover showing a sturdy soldier resolute before a shot-splattered flag – an image popular in Soviet realism propaganda.

The idea was to create a diversion for the men hunkered down in the mud, filth and misery. Some were talented artists. Few were wordsmiths.

Australian author Les Carlyon writes that the original had ‘too much waggery and not enough pathos.’ Sample this book alongside something from below.

1918 – Year of Victory
Edited by Ashley Ekins
Exisle (correct) Publishing $54.99

Who knows Bapaume? This small French village was shredded in autumn 1918 during a massive offensive led by the NZ Division of the British Third Army. Till recently the losses were underestimated and the assault downplayed.

New research by Massey University’s Glyn Harper shows at least 10,000 Kiwis took part. More than 820 died and 2,373 were wounded in the battle for ‘Bloody Bapaume.’ Three VCs were won. It was a critical victory on the Western Front.

Professor Harper’s paper is one of 15 from a 2008 conference in Canberra published in this book. Good, solid academic analysis, most of it intelligible, and no jingoism.

A Soldier’s Tale
M K Joseph
Harper Collins $29.99

From fact to fiction, and a story grounded on the late Kiwi poet and academic Michael Joseph’s personal knowledge of the Second World War.

It’s a sad, slightly improbable, worrying tale of a British soldier and a French collaborator. They shelter in a cottage as Europe is being liberated.

When he rejoins his unit she’ll lose his protection from the avenging Resistance militia and a lusty American. This tale of a moral quagmire exposes the awful corrupting brutality of war, and the bastardly way some men in conflict treat women. No character survives with their honour unwounded.

This reprint from 1976 holds up as a good yarn but an awkward read. The prose is a mix of the learned and coarse, puzzling arcane references and rhyming slang.

It’s brisk, short and spare; it would make a compelling film. Says the author, dismissing writers who glorify conflict and multiply the horror: ‘Most wars are just ordinary.’ But not the ethical issues.

Alamein
Iain Gale
Harper Collins $38.99

There’s plenty of glory and horror in this fictional account of the great desert clash that turned the war against the Axis powers. The Anzacs played major roles and proportionally suffered the greatest casualties.

Gale is a Scottish military historian who researches carefully, but fails to match his knowledge of armour and strategy with a feeling for character and dialogue as he darts both sides of the lines.

Montgomery – ‘a talented opportunist’ was up against the master tactician Rommel. But it was the sinking of the German fuel ships that gave the Allies the advantage, along with superior numbers of men and tanks.

Gale is a big picture writer who’ll appeal to armchair combatants. He wasn’t there and the reader never catches the feel of heat and sand, despite many accounts of flies on corpses and snappy chat between officers and foot soldiers in minefields.

War suspends the proper order of things. It lets evil slip by to infect and corrupt the individual forever, even when the goodies win the major event and the crowds back home are cheering.

Get into a quiet huddle with any Digger this Sunday. He’ll speak that troubling truth.

(First published in The Dominion Post 24 April 2010)

##

OTARI-WILTON: A JOB WELL DONE

2010-04-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

Bush therapy

Roots can be massive
and assertive, even in the air
and given time
one huge tree can turn
clean into another.

Next Wellington Day let’s celebrate the life of Job Wilton, the city’s original greenie.

Back in 1860 he built a fence. But so did every other cocky.

The difference is that this settler from Somerset fenced off seven hectares of kohekohe forest. He did this to keep out the timber cutters plundering the hills and the cloven-hoofed beasts chomping native plants.

Imagine the sneers of his neighbours. The newcomers’ duty was to slash and burn, turn wilderness into pasture and profit.

Derision didn’t seem to have bothered the farsighted farmer. For every knocker there’s an admirer and eventually his example led others to follow. Forty years after Job sunk his first posthole the area had been enlarged into a scenic reserve popular with picnickers. By then 99 per cent of native forest in Wellington and Hutt had been put to the axe.

Now there’s 100 hectares of native bush just over Tinakori Hill and only six minutes drive from Lambton Quay. Ponder that for a moment, then count how many other capital cities have such an asset.

Though a little of what is now Otari-Wilton’s Bush has been developed, much remains rugged. Trees still stand that were saplings before Kupe circumnavigated Aotearoa. There’s 14 kilometres of track, some so steep they make Plimmer’s Steps look as level as Customhouse Quay.

Elsewhere boardwalks lead to bridges spanning the seemingly unstoppable Kaiwharawhara Stream. It gushes from the dark and dank scrub through a glow-worm grotto, then splashes down a long waterfall sliced through greywacke before finding the forest floor.

Here it bubbles along, bouncing across the stones. Lucky trampers might spot an eel, protected in this environment. The water looks clean and bright. It shouldn’t. The catchment includes the Karori cemetery, and the roofs, roads and yards of that vast suburb.

But that’s the charm of Job’s lot. It negates cynicism. Those who’ve been to city parks overseas might expect an over-used, vandalised facility where nature is in retreat.

Here the bush is boss. Tracks on the northern slopes are disappearing as vines and creepers fling their tendrils across the walkways at night. The passion fruit’s passion is to regain the land. It’s aided and abetted by supplejack and fungi, waiting for the last footfall before erupting from underground.

Other accomplices include the ferns and trees shedding leaves and bark, conspiring to litter the path so early morning explorers can’t see prints left the night before.

Turn left or right? Wasn’t there a sign here somewhere? Take the wrong route and you might need a LandSAR callout. Even the sun has joined the plot to confound by fading directions. Red arrows may be fine in the Air Force, but not a good idea when exposed to beams shafting through the foliage.

That was my excuse when I emerged from the chilly undergrowth, tramping boots and bare knees smeared in mud, straight into a wedding party on a manicured lawn. Fortunately the bride wasn’t superstitious, or she might have thought the coarse gatecrasher a portent of rough times ahead.

So soundproof is the bush that nothing could be heard just a few strides from the clinking glasses and champagne laughter.

The snotty-nosed guests looked grand but their finery could not compete with the fernery, nor their baubles with the jewels in the rock garden.

Here’s every bush, tree, grass, hebe and epiphyte, - the clever plants that perch on trees – indigenous to greater NZ. They’ve come from the sub-Antarctic islands to the specks beyond Cape Reinga.

There are said to be 1,200 varieties, including hybrids. Job Wilton’s mates brought the bramble and briar, virile gorse and hearty oaks, but these aliens have been banned, Rimu rules.

Not expelled from this Eden have been the birds and beasts from afar though they seem to be in retreat. Blackbirds are doing OK, scratching through the buttressed base of northern rata, but sparrows, the aerial mice of the built environment, find the bush too dense for comfort.

Bird watchers reckon the tui is making a comeback as possums fall off their perches, but this year the songsters seem to be fewer. Or maybe they’re taking a furlough from over-exercising their vocal chords, using the break to compose new tunes. Hearken this space.

The kereru are certainly present though seldom seen. They give themselves away through the whoosh-whoosh of their wings above the podocarp canopy, the slump of branches as they crash land among the berries.

These plump pigeons should be extinct. Full of fruit they’re reluctant fliers, and easy prey. No wonder this is Otari, the place of snares. Kereru are a real target species.

Near the main entrance is a walkway with splendid views across the treetops. Here you can wonder at the symmetrical topsides of ferns. It’s an experience akin to space travellers looking back to earth and seeing it differently for the first time.

Elsewhere there are enough fallen logs or well-placed benches to rest, contemplate the world and talk to the trees. These are the equivalent of psychologists’ couches - places where the distressed and despairing can find relief and renew spirits.

The information centre is no misnomer. Here you can learn almost everything about our plant life in print or through lectures by renowned experts. Which is just right, because this is NZ’s only botanic garden dedicated just to natives.

Also here is a small collection of verse, like Paekakariki poet Dinah Hawken’s Northern Rata at the top of this story, written by people who have been moved by the beauty of the place – and grateful for Job Wilton’s vision.

Best visit before dusk when the feral dog owners arrive, confident rangers have clocked off before letting loose their gore-slobbering beasts. There are ten entrances. The principal one is on Wilton Road. There’s a bus stop and a small car park. More details on www.wcc.govt.nz

(First published in The Dominion Post 3 April 2010)
##

Dr Maria Widagdo

2009-11-07T18:49:00.000-08:00

SCAMPERING ACROSS THE SKYLINE

2009-09-18T13:10:00.000-07:00

Joy to hikers, ban the bikers Duncan Graham

If Robert Frost had written about Wellington instead of New Hampshire he’d have re-composed his evocative verse to celebrate hills that are lovely, dark and deep

The finest place to view them is from the Skyline Walk, whose promoters claim it takes less than six hours to tramp from South Karori to Johnsonville. Nonsense. The small print, so tiny it’s invisible, would reveal you’d need to be Valerie Vili fit and determined not to stop, whatever the lure.

That would be impossible for the temptations are overwhelming. Because the track winds and wends its way up crests, around spurs, between outcrops and over saddles, every turn presents a vista new.

These are Rita Angus hillscapes, bosomy and beautiful, mysterious dark cleavages separating the lusty swellings, the colors constantly changing as the sun flashes Morse between the racing clouds.

It’s below the snow line but not the clouds, so it’s unwise to traverse the tops when the weather turns Wellingtonian. The winds can be ferocious, the rain horizontal for this is the first high ground hit by the Roaring Forties as they funnel through Cook Strait.

Fortunately there are plenty of exit points. If you want to call off your tramp there are easy escapes into the comforting tarseal of Karori, Wilton, Crofton Downs, Ngaio and Khandallah.

On a clear day to the west you can see forever, or at least to the South Island, so close it’s a wonder no one has built a bridge. If this was China or Taiwan where they do, not debate, we’d be able to drive to Picton.

To the east there’s a God’s-eye view of a sparkling toy city, with seagull planes gliding silently into Kilbirnie and dinky liners cutting their wakes across a mirror sea. It’s a sight so magnificent it should be pasteurised by Fonterra and exported by the gigalitre

If you’re walking north the TV antenna on top of Mt Kaukau at 445 metres is a handy landmark. But because the track is so serpentine one minute the mast is on the left, the next on the right and then behind. Frequently it disappears.

It’s the same if you’re heading south and use the Brooklyn wind turbine to get your bearings. This can lead the unwary to fear they’re lost. That happens even though there are plenty of signs, because some users have made their own tracks.

These deceivers and despoilers are mountain bikers and it’s in keeping with their character. These are the hoons of the hills, the terror of trampers, silently bursting round bends along a track little wider than a footprint, cut deep by racing wheels then scoured by running water during every downpour.

Apart from those who leave their pooch poo on the pathways, the trainee Mongrel Mob is the major hazard. More pedestrian types mutter greetings, some even exchange banalities about the weather, but the thugs on wheels don’t even acknowledge the presence of others sharing their space.

The Wellington City Council has put up signs urging cyclists to show courtesy, to obey the simple and obvious rules. It’s a total waste of time – these morons move too fast to read.

The other tactic now underway is the installation of narrow cattle stops so the cyclists don’t have to cut the fences to keep going, for the track also passes through private land where off-white Corriedales and black Angus rule.

They’re also great eroders, using their cloven hooves to claw out sheltering caves, exposing crumbling greywacke slabs like Picasso cubes and scattering the tracks with rubble.

Slip on these loose stones or skid on cowpats and if you don’t twist an ankle you’ll take a tumble. Choose your accident spots with care; some slopes are close to vertical.

The early settlers felled everything that stood still and sooled sabre-toothed mastoids and marsupials on the rest. But thanks to saturating the area with brodifacoum the birds are returning; many are exotics like European skylarks and finches, and Australian magpies.

There are a few locals, including secretive pipits, the raucous paradise ducks whose courtship sounds like corrugated iron being ripped and joyful tui, though they tend to stay close to the suburbs.

Soft-steppers may surprise feral goats before they dash for cover, and at one location someone released a chook and a cock. These pioneering fowl have raised a clutch and there’s now much incestuous behaviour underway in the undergrowth. Best keep the location secret lest WCC’s assassins move in with guns and toxins on this charming extended family.

If only they would slaughter the other invaders, the powerful H G Wells monsters who stride in columns across the hills. No problems with the new Makara turbines, they’re elegant. Transpower’s towers are crude, though their cables sing symphonies for strings.

The other imprints are acceptable; a brick chimney place where the Kilmister kids once sheltered and watched their flocks by night. Collapsing stockyards with rails held up not by Number 8 wire but pink and blue plastic baler twine ensuring impermanence. A tunnel full of weta comfy in their dank, mossy-walled bunker.

In spring the russet tauhinu and golden gorse sprinkle the hills with fresh colours. Council workers try to keep it at bay by slashing with heavy-duty mowers on long reach hydraulic arms.

But the gorse is the Taleban of New Zealand. It stays just clear of the whirring blades, waits till the machines retreat, then moves back from its guerrilla strongholds, reoccupying the cleared areas, terrorising the local flora.

The obvious stopping place is Mt Kaukau with picnic tables (though no toilets or rubbish bins), but if you’ve taken to the hills to avoid humans then find another spot.

There’s no shortage. Such is the vastness of this lovely land that all Wellington could flee here should the big tsunami drown the airport and turn Miramar into an island.

This so easily accessible area is where civil defence should set its headquarters. Like hobbits we could just dig into the hills, distil gorse flower gin and stone the placid livestock to maintain a supply of lamb chops.

Only one group would be banned from this commune of refugees from the coast; the mountain bikers.

(First published in The Dominion Post 5 / 6 September 2009
##

TEN GOOD REASONS FOR LIVING IN NZ

2009-07-26T20:57:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Key Country Duncan Graham

Every time I go into Woolies to collect the fortnight’s supply of rotgut I cringe at the price, the packaging and the choice.

Back in my once beloved Oz, chateau cardboard comes in four litre boxes around $AUD 10. Here it’s $NZ 20 for three litres.

Whingeing about supermarket prices defines the newcomer, comparing and contrasting local offerings with the imagined good stuff left behind. After a while the assimilation process kicks in and migrants realise all wasn’t so great back in the home state.

What’s good about NZ? Here’s a well-researched list worthy of an honorary PhD:

Rain: Never, ever complain about the rain – someone might hear and turn it off. Where I came from people pray, dance, plead and ask the government for the stuff. Usually to no effect.

There ain’t no flies on us: Well, not too many. Making the great Australian salute here means you’re greeting a mate. With no window screens you get a clear outlook, not a pixelated insect-eye view of the world.

Key and Goff: How to tell them apart? Politicians so bland, free of noxious ideologies and Rudd-Turnbull gladiatorial combativeness it’s no wonder sport and crime make page one. Oz-style compulsory voting will be needed to waken the electorate and maintain the myth of democracy.

White ants: How come they never got into NZ? Or have possums licked them all up? Anyone who’s been eaten out of house and home – literally – will bless the absence of termites. Talking about possums, NZ is the only place to see these cuddlesome creatures. In their homeland they’re so rare they’re protected. Instead of feeding them 1080 let’s promote them as a tourist attraction.

The Senate: NZ has a plague of politicians but at least there’s no federal system duplicating services and playing bureaucratic tennis, batting issues to and fro. Let’s have a national holiday to commemorate Julius Vogel who abolished provincial government in 1876.

Bumble bees: NZ seems to get along fine with these happy creatures that brighten the beauty of any garden, yet bio-security across the ditch reckons they’re the insect version of apple fire blight.

Cameras in courtrooms: The truth revealed - the judicial process is no Hollywood drama. Lawyers are boring overpriced gits, often inarticulate and the process is glacial. But name suppression is a Kiwi curse – identify the bastards so we can shun them.

Bill of Rights: Oz Tories and socialists agree – this is the swine flu of constitutional law and will destroy the nation. How come Kiwis survive?

Subsidised medicines: To know the real cost of prescription drugs take a script into a chemist over the ditch – but first mortgage your home. However the $3 fee here is offset by doctors’ charges. Medicare bulk billing is an Oz product worth importing along with a lower tax regime and higher wages.

Pedestrian kids: In my suburb littlies still walk to school alone. In a previous abode scaremongers successfully created images of children running a gauntlet of paedophiles to get to class. Grand business for security guards and school bus operators.

The outdoor lifestyle: Greatly encouraged by the lack of a commercial-free national telecaster and puddle-depth programmes of breathtaking banality. How does Coronation Street and CSI Miami reflect ‘our stories, our songs, ourselves’? Thank God we’ve got Nat Geo on the doorstep. Turn off and turn out.

(First published in Scoop 27 July 09)

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TAKING A KIWI REALITY CHECK

2009-06-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

Deluding ourselves Duncan Graham

There’s a certain mantra chanted by overseas visitors interviewed on Radio National. It requires the newcomer to congratulate us on the beauty of our land, the friendly folk, and the quality of the lifestyle.

Clearly they fear visa cancellation unless they declare they’re carrying the right complement of clichés.

Their compliments are easy on the ear, leaving us who live here feeling balmy and content, even a little smug. If these grand world travellers who’ve been everywhere anoint us little cringers with their praise, then things aren’t that crook.

We dissemble that there’s the odd blemish. Nowhere is 100 per cent perfect. Or pure. Let’s face it, by comparison with the sleaze of Sydney, the slums of Manila and the pollution of Jakarta we’re really not that bad. When we find an underbelly we shear it. Ha, ha.

There are 60 cities in the world with a population larger than the whole of NZ. Yet we’re governed by 122 parliamentarians, 16 city councils and 66 district councils all creating their own laws, rules and regulations. With all this management then surely we exercise the world’s best practice on the way the environment is used and how we behave.

Time for a reality check: Let’s sneak a closer look before we get seduced by the smarmy words of visitors who know us not.

Crime statistics stretch and shrink because no nations agree on definitions, but we’re proportionately jailing more people here than in the UK, most European countries, China and Australia – the catchments for our tourists.
Corrections Minister Judith Collins isn’t proposing to use shipping containers just to house parking ticket defaulters. The courts even give home detention and community service orders to burglars, druggies, and other assorted hoons.
Read them whatever way you like, but the figures seem to show NZ is not the calm, quiet place of our visitors’ imaginings.

Our murder rate is higher than Indonesia, Ireland and Hong Kong. When the figures are teased apart we do more harm to women than men, even when compared with Australia.
A fine place to raise the kids? Statistically it’s the best place to brutalise. UNICEF says NZ had the world’s third highest child maltreatment death rate.
Clean and green? Try the rail line between Auckland and Wellington for the most ghastly graffiti. Our trash doesn’t get recycled – its retrained. Our rivers are overloading with nitrogen and a thousand toxins bloom. Don’t swim in the Hutt River if you value your health.
Beautiful land? Despite chopping, clearing, flooding and filling the space with sharp-tooth ferals, enough scenery remains to charm. Pity about the native birds.
Friendly folk? Visit Flaxmere or chat to boy racers in Christchurch.
Good sporting nation? Ask the French rugby team.
We want others to think Ed Hillary and Willie Apiata aren’t extraordinary exceptions, just a bit above the normal run of rugged and courageous Kiwis. Yet Graham Burton, Antoine Dixon and all the other brutes and bastards are aberrations, unrepresentative of our tolerant and moderate nation.
Thugs reportedly thump a dreadlocked French centre and Shock! Horror!
Wellington mayor Kerry Prendergast says the alleged bashing of Mathieu Bastareaud was a “one-off”. If only. The 30 arrests after the All Blacks game in Wellington weren’t all for jaywalking.
And isn’t it the capital’s First Lady who’s under 24-hour guard following threats of physical violence?
The Dutch issued travel warnings after two holidaymakers were assaulted and one raped. It’s surprising that the governments of Britain, Ireland, Korea, China and other countries whose nationals have also been mugged and sometimes murdered haven’t done the same thing.
The truth is we’re a violent people and all the evidence shows it’s usually fuelled by grog and other drugs. Until we confront our culture of preferring to have a fight than a feed, just for a laugh ya know, then we’ll continue to stage surprise every time it happens.

(First published in Scoop 23 June 09)
##

NZ RECESSION: TRUE OR FALSE?

2009-06-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

Six point proof: We are in the poo Duncan Graham

We’re in a recession, but not because Bill English says so.

What would he know? He’s got a six-figure salary and little chance of being downsized. He doesn’t drive a last century Japanese clunker with an expired WOF. Neither does his ‘purchasing adviser’ on $2,000 (plus GST) a day.

Statisticians say unemployment is at five per cent and heading for eight next year. They’re among the 95 per cent with jobs. From their open-plan offices with whispering heat pumps these screen jockeys can’t see the depressed souls staggering through factory gates into the sleet clutching tear-stained envelopes, only their mates’ yachts cruising Port Nicholson.

I haven’t seen these sad folk either; they don’t live on our gorsey Wellington hillside. But I still know the economy is sick, though I don’t trust the two consecutive quarters of negative growth indices cooked on computers from out-of-date figures.

However I do trust my instincts based on what I see and sense. Here’s the DG six-point recession test:

1) No more Open Homes to visit. Once as common as sparrows in suburbia, the jolly For Sale signs and jaunty bunting are now as rare as kereru. The mass disappearance of the ubiquitous estate agent (Smoothus talkus) with its distinctive sober-suit plumage should be investigated by DOC. Remnant populations need to be trapped and released on Kapiti Island in the hope that they’ll breed back, though not to the plague numbers of before.
2) Friendly bankers. In 2007 we asked for a credit card and were given an unequivocal NO. This was during a stand-up conversation at the counter with a staffer more concerned with her lunch than customers who wanted to deposit, not borrow. Now we have two cards and last week were offered coffee or hot chocolate and seats in a warm office to discuss our plans.
3) Hardware hassles. Once it wasn’t worth visiting Mitre 10 or Bunnings at weekends; queuing at the checkouts with the other DIYs took longer than finding a cheap Chinese knick-knack to fix a minor problem. Now the staff outnumber customers and cause delays by asking if they can help.
4) Op Shop boom. By contrast with the hardware stores, the Salvos and Vinnies are doing great business, though stock quality has slumped. Two years ago I bought a splendid fault-free $250 jacket for $5 that must have been tried once before being discarded. There were many others. Now the clothes look as worn out as the customers. It’s the same at the garage sales; the cast-offs in Karori are like those in Porirua.
5) A good keen builder. Last year we pleaded with a carpenter to do some extra work after he’d finished building our deck. Total disinterest – the jobs were too small to bother uncoiling the power lead for his electric drill. A few days ago he phoned to say he’d like to quote. Seldom has rejection been so sweet.
6) The tarnished Golden Mile. A walk from Wellington railway station to Te Papa via Lambton Quay was once a great stroll just to stare at the cruise ship tourists in their funny clothes and enjoy the window displays. Now there are toothy gaps in the shop fronts with TO LET signs and graffiti on the architraves along the most prestigious street in the nation’s capital. And no liners parked at the overstocked Pinus radiata export log wharf.

So how’ll we know when it’s all over? Forget the predictions of a road to recovery. Bill English can’t give us the GPS fix on this track, or tell us whether we’ll need chains and a four-wheel drive. Like Transmission Gully it’s more hot air than highway.

Cheery John Key is the sort of optimist promising a heat wave in Gore when Metservice is forecasting icebergs in Lake Taupo – he and his millionaire mates will be OK, rain or shine. These people think the dole is a senator from Kansas.

Our criminal justice system relies on juries of ordinary knockabout citizens using their life experience, personal observation and common sense to judge guilt or otherwise on the evidence, not the rhetoric of experts.

Let’s apply the same reasoning to the economy. Only when bankers return to being feral and builders treat modest renovation needs with contempt will I know that we’re back to the good old Open Days.

(First published in Scoop 2 June 09)

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UNDERSTANDING INDONESIAN POLITICS

2009-05-30T22:08:00.000-07:00

Indonesia’s Mr Try-Hard gets voters’ nod Duncan Graham

Out of the chaos of Indonesian politics has come forth clarity. More than half the voters in the world’s most populous Muslim nation prefer moderate secular parties rather than those sheltering under the crescent of Islam.

On the surface this looks like good news for the West, particularly Australia which has long had an edgy relationship with its northern neighbour. About 240 million people are squashed into the archipelago that straddles the equator. More than 40 million live below the poverty line, earning less than $US 2 a day.

The election results are also warming for New Zealand. Indonesia remains our biggest market in South-East Asia. Our exports are worth about $NZ I billion and growing fast, so the stability of our big customer is of great importance. A free trade agreement between the nations was signed in February.

The just released official results of the 9 April election have closely followed informal exit polls. They’ve shown the Democratic Party of the incumbent president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (widely known as SBY) ahead of all 38 parties seeking power, winning 21.04 per cent of the vote.

Second was the Democratic Party of Struggle led by the former president Megawati Soekarnoputri with 14.52 per cent, a whisker ahead of Golkar mustering 14.23 per cent.

Golkar is the political vehicle designed and driven by the late president Soeharto to hold absolute power for 32 years. More recently it’s been steered by the vice-president Jusuf Kalla.

Fourth with 8.16 per cent was the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) that has kept its Islamic credentials in the background while campaigning hard against corruption. This has caused a frisson of fear among those who suspect the party has another agenda.

In New Zealand most Indonesian voters backed SBY.

Clearly with these results a coalition will have to run the 560-seat Parliament, known as the DPR. How that’s going to be engineered is the critical question, though this time round SBY can bargain from a position of strength.

Under the Indonesian system the people directly elect the president and vice president for a five-year term. In the 2004 election the Democratic Party was a tiny player with less than eight per cent of the vote. But the electorate wanted SBY, not his principal rival Megawati, by a margin of three to two.

Optimists say all this shows Indonesians have embraced democracy and are making it work. Those who don’t use rose-coloured glasses note only 61 per cent of the nation’s 171 million eligible electors bothered to vote and millions were disenfranchised through registration stuff-ups.

Critics of SBY’s administration during the past five years often overlook the huge problems he faced and give insufficient weight to his skills in keeping the political system intact and the economy on course.

For a Kiwi comparison, imagine Jeanette Fitzsimons being elected PM by popular vote while the Greens bump along the bottom in Parliament.

In 2004 SBY campaigned for the nation’s top job with businessman Jusuf Kalla, thereby binding Golkar into the government. SBY still hasn’t chosen his running mate for this year’s election. Golkar gave SBY the numbers on the floor of Parliament, but the compromises required eroded much of his authority.

Unless SBY picks a mightily unpopular running mate, or someone considered corrupt, the man with a public approval rating of 70 per cent looks set in the job. Megawati will challenge but she’s a lacklustre candidate famous for being aloof and believing she deserves the job just because her dad was the country’s first president.

Westerners dealing with Indonesia have been barracking for SBY, not because he’s been an outstanding leader but because the alternatives look so scary.

During the authoritarian and corrupt rule of General Soeharto that ended in 1998 with the Asian economic crisis, the military ran the country and just about everything else. The army had seats in Parliament, controlled many businesses, had a major internal security role, oversaw the police and were considered untouchable.

Although the army’s influence is no longer so blatant it’s still a major force behind the scenes. Boosters for SBY highlight his academic qualifications (he has a doctorate in agriculture), his urbanity and English skills learned while studying in the US, and his middle ground, ultra-cautious politics. He appears to genuinely believe in democracy and has gravitas on the international stage.

Supporters play down the fact that he was a four-star general before entering politics and comes from a military family. His father, father-in-law and one son are, or were, soldiers.

Two former generals with questionable human-rights records were major party candidates in this year’s election and Megawati is largely regarded as a tool of the military.

SBY has been unable to stop the imposition of some aspects of Islamic Sharia law in the provinces. These include forcing female bureaucrats and students to wear headscarves, banning alcohol, enforcing prayers and setting up community patrols to sniff out sexual naughtiness, though the Constitution appears to prohibit such local initiatives.

By contrast, and after decades of oppression, the media in Indonesia is now the freest in South-East Asia, robustly pushing the old barriers on a wide range of social and political issues.

Despite doomsayers claiming Indonesia would become another Pakistan as fundamentalism flourished, that hasn’t happened. The battle against terrorism, with significant help from the Australian Federal Police, has notched up many wins against the bombers.

SBY’s push against corruption has had limited success; pulling out the wallet remains the standard way to bypass stalling bureaucrats at all levels. The arrest this month of the Corruption Commission boss Antasari Azhar on charges of being involved in the murder of a businessman has crippled the clean-up campaign.

The judiciary is still a mess, continuing to use colonial Dutch law from early last century, and the over-staffed public service a dinosaur sturdily resisting extinction. Outsiders trying to do business need to tread warily.

The economy has slumped, though not as much as expected and less than other Asian nations. Poverty and poor quality education remain major concerns, although there have been patchwork successes in improving the lives of those on Struggle Street.

The consensus, both inside and outside the Republic seems to be that Mr Try-Hard has made a reasonable fist of handling one of the world’s toughest tasks – and given the line-up against him is clearly the best bloke around.

There are two standout dangers: If he wants to divorce Golkar and get a workable majority in the Parliament, SBY may be forced to cohabit with the PKS and other minor Islamic parties. This could let the extremist tail wag the reformist dog.

The other concern is that the opposition parties frustrated at their inability to find candidates with popular appeal may combine to spoil SBY’s legislative program out of spite. Success here seems less likely; though the emotion is real they’ll find it hard to bury differences because so many are single-issue or policy-free parties.

The election for the president will be held on 8 July, with a run off on 8 September if no candidate gets above 50 per cent of the vote.

##

INDONESIA: THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN FRIGHT

2009-04-21T22:02:00.000-07:00

There’s a group of 17 Indonesian academics currently studying English at Massey University. Five of the seven women in the group wear jilbab, the Islamic headscarf.

Before leaving their homeland they worried about discrimination. Their fears were based on reports of attacks on Muslims in Australia. Though sporadic these assaults get a good run in the Indonesian media.

The women, who have been in Wellington for more than a month, report no hostility. Like the 3,000 Indonesians now living in NZ they are discovering that although this country does have pockets of racism it doesn’t have the Australian hang-ups about Indonesia and Islam.

It would be warming to think we are a more tolerant society, but the reason for our acceptance may have more to do with geography and history than a generosity of spirit.

Indonesia is Australia’s big nation next door, 240 million people in an overcrowded archipelago with porous borders where democracy is still struggling after more than three decades of repressive military rule.

Australians have long considered Hindu Bali their backyard cheap exotic holiday destination, like Kiwis favor the Pacific islands. But few tourists venture into adjacent Java where Islam dominates, and where they might learn more about their neighbours. The Bali bombers, who killed 88 Australians in 2002, were Muslim fanatics from Java and their crimes have not been forgotten. Three Kiwis also died in the blasts but we’ve moved on.

Deep in the psyche of Australia is the fear of the ‘yellow peril’, millions tumbling out of Asia into the vast empty and loosely defended resource-rich continent below. ‘They’ were up there and it was obvious that gravity, if not poverty and envy, would force them Down Under.

This simpleton’s view was nurtured during the late 19th and early 20th century by a virulent anti-Chinese media campaign. The ‘White Australia’ immigration policy didn’t officially end till 1973; some Asians think it’s still in place..

The demons are no longer Chinese, but Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and others, particularly ethnic Hazaras who follow the minority Shi’ite branch of Islam. Many have been genuine asylum seekers fleeing conflict and persecution – a few have been economic refugees seeking a better life.

After paying people smugglers huge amounts they’ve been shepherded through the Indonesian islands where poor fishermen will ferry cargoes of humans across the Timor Sea. People smuggling is not a crime in Indonesia; it is in Australia.

Losing their boats and freedom is no great deterrent to the fishermen. Their families already have the up-front fees from the smugglers, and life in an Australian prison with good health care and wholesome meals is often better than the breadline existence in a coarse-life coastal village.

Until the authorities woke up, many fishermen were getting a free flight home at the end of their discounted sentences with their wallets stuffed with cash garnered in gaol. Though only a few dollars a day were given to buy necessities in return for doing basic jobs, the sums were vast when compared with earnings in their heavily plundered seas.

The previous Liberal government claimed its tough line against people smugglers reduced the flow, but changes in the law under Labor are said by the Opposition to be encouraging the risk-takers.

Previously the asylum seekers, (‘illegals’ in the tabloid press, ‘unlawful non-citizens’ to the bureaucrats), were sent to Nauru under the so-called ‘Pacific Solution’.

Those who made it to the mainland were sometimes given TPVs – temporary protection visas. These did not allow relatives to join the refugees who could be deported once Australian authorities decided the dangers they faced in their homelands had abated. Some who were rejected by Australia were accepted by NZ.

Now the TPVs have been dumped. The boat people are taken to a detention camp on tiny Christmas Island, Australian territory 500 km south of Jakarta. Here claims for asylum are processed. The island has been excised from Australia’s migration zone.

The boat that last week was allegedly fire bombed killing five and putting scores in hospital, has again roused national ire about Islam and Indonesia – a debate that’s seldom heard in this nation.

There are about 360,000 Muslims in Australia, ten times more than in NZ, and they’ve built mosques in most big cities. Well-reported conflicts with local communities over the establishment of Islamic schools, and occasional extremist comments by radical imam have kept the fire stoked.

Australian politicians claim thousands are mustering in Indonesia waiting to make the perilous sea journey in rickety boats. Some arrested by Indonesian authorities have told reporters they ‘loved Australia’ and its ‘good and kind government which would help them solve all their problems’.

Clearly they hadn’t heard the rabid Australian talkback radio comments where the ‘queue jumpers’ have stirred the old fears about ‘the threat from the north’. The fact that there’s no orderly queue for refugees seeking entry to Australia hasn’t dented the myth.

Not have they hearkened PM Kevin Rudd’s claim that his policy is ‘hardline, tough (and) targeted’.

New Zealand, with the huge barrier of arid Australia to the northwest, the vast Pacific to the north and only penguins below has no such concerns. Even if Fiji Frank becomes more ruthless it’s unlikely that flotillas of little boats crammed with the oppressed will set sail for NZ across 2,000 km of empty ocean.

In short, border protection is not a major public issue in NZ, making this country a more welcoming nation to Muslims refugees, migrants and students. As the Indonesian academics in Wellington are now discovering, Islamophobia has yet to cross the ditch.

(First published in Scoop, 22 April 2009)
##

SITS VAC GLOSSARY NEEDED

2009-01-01T22:52:00.000-08:00

WANTED: SIT VAC GLOSSARY Duncan Graham
Is NZ the land of opportunity where all who want work can work? The old adage of Buyer Beware applies in the job market as much as used car yards.
Fed up with your job and want something new? Like planning an overseas trip it’s best to learn the language before take-off. Otherwise you could alight in an ‘Awesome Position’ getting a ‘Handsome Remuneration’ and facing ‘Challenging Opportunities’ when in reality you’ve flown into a failed state and lost your baggage along the way.
Of course some jobs are still there – aren’t they? Immigration publishes labor shortage lists to lure overseas candidates; weekend papers have plump lift-outs pregnant with alluring ads; business forums groan about critical staff shortages - but that’s not the whole story.
Clinicians from Kazakhstan who’ve mislaid qualifications and fudged references may tread a red carpet into a regional District Health Board, but the rest stumble along a dead-end goat track.
Okkers and boomeranging Kiwis are particularly unwelcome. Employers follow the Ministry of Economic Development’s advice and buy local, rewarding stayers who’ve taken the tough times with the good.
Those who’ve sought refuge overseas during every pay and conditions drought, returning once the economic La Nina reversed may have long CVs but little chance of making the short list.
Overseas experience, higher degrees from universities where you can’t see through the stained glass for ivy, jobs in top international companies? Not impressed. Who knows what infectious ideas they’ve picked up during OE and snuck through quarantine. However those spotted sauntering down Queen Street or Lambton Quay through sun and sleet across the decades will see their applications rocket to the top.
Stats say that despite the economic downturn, aka recession, anyone who wants to work can get a job. Missing here are the adjectives. Like ‘worthwhile’ and ‘appropriate’.
There are openings cleaning hotel toilets and Work and Income will help match your lavatorial skills to employers flush with guests. Fine if you want to start at the bottom, but not if you’ve been there, undergone that, and gained qualifications to get out of the mire.
AWOL returnees are amazed to discover the growth in suburbs, prohibitions, graffiti and employment agencies offering ‘key appointments’ that are clearly better than ‘sits vac’. Seven pages promote these pin-stripes, also known as recruiters or human resource consultants, in the Yellow Pages. That’s double the space allocated to massage parlours and adult services combined. There’s the rub.
Aren’t the agencies here to help the ambitious get a job? Wrong. They’re here so they have a job. That’s their ambition. Outsourcing hasn’t lifted standards in the messy business of finding and keeping staff. For all their flash rhetoric few brokers return calls or acknowledge letters, just as the task-masters of yesteryear behaved when there were 100 labourers for every gravedigger’s job, the ultimate dead-end position.
Consultants dress up dross, like real estate agents. And like that industry it’s time for controls. Or warning labels: Applying For Jobs May Damage Your Language Comprehension.
No-one now sweats in an overcrowded office with a ventilation system that breeds Legionnaires. They enjoy a ‘fast-paced situation’ or ‘fun environment’ where they ‘develop relationships’. Indeed. One vacancy promised a ‘clean, fresh and happy environment with gentlemen clients’. Curiously it wanted ‘ladies’ over 18. Other ads are gender neutral and don’t discriminate on age, but their positions are vertical.
Common are pictures of families on the beach or young couples in the snowfields, undermining the point about the workplace wonderland.
These jobs promise ‘great rates’ and ‘awesome conditions’. Undefined, even in the glossy ‘information pack’ applicants have to download. This means the cash-strapped job-hungry spend up big on quires of paper and litres of coloured ink that promote the HR company and little else.
Back to the phone and a matey chat: So what’s the bread? Too direct, absolutely last century; the euphemism here is ‘remuneration’ and antipodean jollity unwelcome. “The package will be commensurate with experience and qualifications.” What range? “Yet to be determined, but in keeping with market rates.” Whose market, which rates? Honey tone turns toxic: “Just check our website.”
Short cut: Check the salary rate in Oz and divide by two.
Also undisclosed are company names. Beware: The ‘respected major corporate’ that looks so worthy could be your present Neanderthal slavedriver planning your exit.
There are some plusses. ‘Girl Friday’ has gone the way of the Moa, shouldered aside by ‘Executive Assistant’ who should be an ‘Organiser Extraordinaire’. This bit of French polish is clearly a cut above an extraordinary organiser, though she still gets to make the tea. She? Inequality isn’t confined to the boardroom.
The medical sector, always straining to get bed-pan emptiers, has hired snappy punsters to ambush the unwary: ‘You can be a picture of health in our DHB!’ ‘We have just the prescription for YOU!’
Meanwhile the adjacent news pages reveal political, staffing and wrist-slashing management crises. Only diagnosed masochists would want to join such dysfunctioning systems.
Also new are ‘communication consultants’ that entice columns of journalists away from disclosure to enclosure. Much sought after in the health industry.
In the Orwellian workplace devised by the HR companies you join the ‘crew’ of a ‘leading edge’ company in a ‘key sector’ of the economy. ‘Team’ is passé. Positions are always ‘senior’. Smart applicants should do their research. ‘Worldwide leaders’ may be pushing brands you’ve never seen in supermarkets, while a ‘strategic company’ can be a subterranean Dodgy Brothers partnership with a strategy of flying come nightfall.
The finest oxymoron is Wellington City Council’s ‘Parking Enforcement Ambassadors’, which sounds like advertising for ‘Undertaker Doctors’.
One show that actually shoots straight is the police. They just want ‘administrative clerks’.
The ads are plainclothes. None are arresting. Happy snaps are banned, along with PR fluff, fancy typefaces and commissioned logos. Boring, boring. Aren’t there any fun folk in the force? Is everything slow-paced among the Mr Plods?
At least they don’t taser the language.

(First published in Scoop Dec 08)
##

STOP PRESS

2009-01-01T22:48:00.000-08:00

Publish pap and perish fast Duncan Graham

I’ve cancelled our subscription to The Dominion Post.

If our household was a DHB this would have been recorded as a sentinel event, for all my life opening the paper has been the key to starting the day, as critical as pouring milk on muesli or spooning beans on toast,

The habit had been established long before I was born. I may have been conceived when the Sunday supplements had been exhausted. Earliest memories of breakfast had dad in pyjamas with the Daily Telegraph, coming home with The Evening Standard. Teenage years were Daily Express along with the Beatles.

I started work on The West Australian, later with the late National Times and Melbourne’s The Age. Newspapers have been integral to my life. I love them and breaking the ritual is like kicking out a child.

The woman who took my cancel order indifferently asked why. “The paper has got too thin - it’s no longer value for money.”

“Financial,” she replied, ticking the REASONS box.

No, not financial, though the monthly saving of $34.40 will help pay for 2.5 kilos of crumbly cheddar. The reasons are deeper and more complex.

I’ve turned a page and dumped the paper because I’m no longer interested in turning pages of trivia in search of a gem.

The Dom Post has some outstanding photographers, good writers and occasional scoops of substance – though not enough. It fills the space between the ads with minor overwritten crime and pads the rest with syndicated copy, travel and TV columns post telecast. The columnists scratching for scraps from the week’s news are predictable, seldom stretching themselves – or their readers.

The Dom is not alone. The NZ Herald stumbles down the same road, ignoring the NO EXIT signs. So do the papers in Oz.

Newspapers that no longer challenge their readers have lost the plot.

In the allegedly good old days nervous management continually reassured employees that papers would survive despite TV. Then they said the same thing about the Internet.

Workers whose careers depended on print conspired to maintain the myth even as afternoon mastheads folded, suburban throwaways contracted, and valuable staffers were seduced by the golden but shallow pleasures of PR. Local stories were killed to fit wire copy and great ideas spiked lest the ever-shrinking budget shrivelled further.

The waterboard questioning and acidic scepticism we used on duplicitous politicians and devious businesses were never applied to our own bosses as they assured us all was well – even when the signs of terminal sickness were so obvious.

At the end of our shifts we looked elsewhere while passing the piles of unsold papers; we excused our relatives, friends and neighbours who hadn’t seen our exclusives but were up to date on TV presenters’ lifestyles; we ignored commuters on busses and trains plugged into their compact I- pods, not battling to fold a broadsheet.

As the subs’ desk thinned we dismissed the typos, the garrotted syntax, duplicate stories, flawed research and missed links by falling back on the old cliché about the pressure of deadlines.

Like global warnings and rising sea levels we ignored the obvious.

In NZ the clearest signs came when Fairfax spent $700 million on Trade Me rather than the paper. When the directors realised that the print rivers of gold were running dry the message wasn’t classified.

Papers dumbed down, and the figures were blatantly distorted. Ill-defined readers, not audited sales. Valuable space taken up by contests, in-house ads and oversize photos of alleged stars supplied by agencies that also fixed the interviews, hagiographies essential.

And the people pushing these insults were our former colleagues now awash in cash and driving their own company cars, not squabbling over petrol vouchers and taxi chits.

It’s taken a long time and much personal distress to cancel our sub and admit we should have done so long ago when the younger generation first gave old media the flick. Instead of scrabbling for the flat plastic bag among the saturated agapanthus as horizontal rain rips through Cook Strait, I’ll stay inside and mouse across the world’s top news and comment sites. For the local stuff I’ll rely on Radio NZ to provide audio versions of the print news that it shamelessly pursues.

At a click I can by pass the hand-me-down fillers and infopap to seek what I really want to read.

I could rabbit on about recycling and conserving the forests, but such rationalising would be a misspeak, as Mrs Clinton would say.

There will be adjustments: Ensuring the coffee doesn’t muck-up the motherboard is going to take some care. The luxury of wrapping rubbish in the business pages will have to go. At least I can peep over the screen and smile at my beloved beheading her boiled eggs. How many relationships have been destroyed by a tabloid at the table?

It’s taken a long time to decide that the Dom Post divorce was necessary, made easier by occasional separations when the presses failed or the distributor stuffed up deliveries. Like business trips alone, that’s when you discover you can live without your partner.

A good read needs no fancy packaging, and when I click on the stories I want the screen usually shows nothing but text.

Newspapers everywhere seem to have forgotten that they are all about words. Imaginative layouts, great graphics and sparkling pix can lift the page, but they can’t resurrect prose that comes from dead minds employed by a miserly and frightened business that’s forgotten the driving principle of journalism – robust disclosure and insightful analysis.

(First published in Scoop, Dec 08)

##

Pak Kuntoro in Wellington

2009-01-01T12:54:00.000-08:00

KUNTORO MANGKUSUBROTO

2009-01-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

Working as the hands of God Duncan Graham

At the time it was the toughest job in Indonesia.

Repair a landscape ripped raw by the world’s most extreme natural disaster; house the grief-torn survivors who’d lost more than 170,000 relatives, friends and neighbors; rebuild roads, bridges, ports, power stations, hospitals – all the infrastructure that makes cities function.

Manage a huge budget and be accountable to governments and NGOs in Indonesia and around the world.

Cope with the hostility, the prejudice, the deep-seated suspicions still virulent after 30 years of civil war, the jealousy, the angry confrontationists and the back-stabbers. Aceh was a tortured land drained of trust, particularly hostile towards Javanese from the central government.

That Kuntoro Mangkusubroto stayed the distance, achieved the goals and at 61 looks fresh enough to tackle another epic catastrophe indicates that the director of the Bureau of Rehabilitation and Reconstruction in Aceh and Nias (BRR) is a distinctly gifted human being – though he rejects this appraisal: “I’m just myself.”

Four years ago this Boxing Day a massive undersea earthquake off Aceh triggered a tsunami. Waves to 12 meters swept across 800 kilometers of coast and up to 1.6 kilometers inland.

It was a scene from Armageddon.

The world pledged US $7.2 billion and paid $6.7 billion. Thousands of aid workers flooded in with a multiplicity of agendas. Also lured were those who saw the chance to exploit the situation and milk the largesse.

Indonesia ranks 143 on the world’s corruption index and the cynics predicted much of the aid would never reach those hurting most, and that petty bureaucracy would destroy even the best intentioned and most resilient.

There has been some minor project-level corruption that’s being pursued, according to Kuntoro, but the BRR has not been infected. The agency’s accounts have been checked by international auditors and given an unqualified pass.

“We set up an internal anti-corruption unit, the first for any Indonesian government agency,” he said in Wellington, New Zealand. He was in the country to address a conference on disaster risk management and thank Kiwis for their aid. Like Australia, NZ was among the first countries to offer help.

“We developed new standards of accountability for Indonesia and in advance of many other countries.

“We encouraged everyone to blow the whistle if they saw anything amiss. They just had to send me an SMS. I asked my staff to pledge their honesty and promise never to take one penny they were not entitled to have.”

When President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono hand picked the former Minister for Mines, business rescuer, company director, academic and civil engineer to take on the new BRR job in April 2005 Kuntoro dictated his terms.

They included ministerial ranking, direct access to the President (a privilege used only three times) and a salary three times larger than other ministers, an issue that drew much criticism.

“They were able to moonlight to supplement their salaries. I have no other income,” he said. “I do not take speaking fees or envelopes for anything I do.

“I fly economy class and not just to save money. At the back of the plane people talk to me and tell me what’s really happening. I thought this job was the chance given by God to touch the hands of the needy people, to go and do something good.

“Not many have that opportunity. Our success can be measured.”

Kuntoro said he draws his moral values and anti-corruption stand from his parents: “My father was a straight lawyer and my mother a professor of English.

“They brought me up to do good for other people, to be a good person, to be happy. We led a simple life. Although I started as a civil engineer (he was educated at Bandung Institute of Technology and Stanford University in the US), I fell in love with decision analysis.

“This discipline covers so many issues, but above all moral values are the most important. There are consequences to every action and the last defence is your conscience. You can compromise your strategy but never compromise your values.

“Have I been tempted? Many times, but it’s always like that. Life isn’t all about money. How does money relate to family, values and God?

“There were no how-to textbooks available for this job, no models of what to do. The task was so huge. I’ve had to face demonstrations and brutal words.

“Management was a nightmare. People blamed me for being too slow or not sensitive enough, but I had to remember they were the victims and had the right to blame.

“Twice I felt like giving up. I’m not too religious, but I believe. Yes. I trusted that we were sent by God to do this job. We are the extension of the hands of God and it is our duty.”

The first bureaucratic challenge came within hours of Kuntoro being sworn into office at the Presidential Palace. No one in the government would give him the money for airfares to Aceh because there was no system in place and it was a weekend.

The Australian aid agency AusAID stepped in with US $100,000 cash and Kuntoro and his team were able to get to ground zero. But there was no office or housing. Then the United Nations High Commission for Refugees gave the BRR space.

“I thought these things were God’s doing,” he said. “I was just the man in the middle.”

“When I chose staff I sought people of the highest integrity. I didn’t know them before. I asked if they were willing. If they said ‘yes’ they were employed. If they asked ‘how much?’ or ‘I’ll have to ask my boss’ then they were out.

“I have self confidence – some think I have too much. A good manager must have guts and be self reliant, have a nothing-to-lose attitude. You will make mistakes. The art is in solving problems at the lowest cost, to create harmony and make unbiased judgements, to get results.”

In April the BRR vanishes from everything except the history books. One of these will be written by Kuntoro unless he’s headhunted to fix another crisis.

In material terms the BRR has changed Aceh for the better. Much good has come from much horror.

More than 93 per cent of the job has been done. People are back farming and fishing. Traffic chaos has returned. The roads are bituminised, the bridges sturdy, the 125,000 new houses hygienic, the public buildings of a standard better then other provinces. Visa, work permit and import clearance procedures have been streamlined and accelerated, delivered through a one-stop shop.

Land titles now include the wife’s name ensuring her security should her husband die – a reform yet to spread to other provinces. National whistle-blower laws are being considered.

The templates for business and departmental propriety are there for other agencies and managers to pick up – if they so desire. Could corruption be eliminated and Indonesia rank high among the world’s clean countries?

Kuntoro, normally master of the snappy response, paused: “Yes. But only if there’s the political will.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post on Boxing Day 2008, and in On Line Opinion)
##

BENNY SUSETYO - TURBULENT PRIEST

2009-01-01T12:49:00.000-08:00

Benny Susetyo
Bashed, bloodied but unbeaten © Duncan Graham 2008

Preaching the universal religious virtues of peace, love, understanding and forgiveness is easy enough before backslapping thinkalikes in a safe house.

In the warmth of the applause the speaker can bask in the sunshine of self-righteousness. The challenge comes when the audience is hostile, even brutal and the environment is the street.

Catholic priest Benny Susetyo (PICTURED BELOW) has been confronted by the ugly side of Indonesian life and passed the test splendidly. Though not without considerable pain.

In August he was bashed senseless by three thugs and spent five days recuperating and undergoing tests in a Singapore hospital. So far no-one had been arrested for the crime.

His assault came a few months after hoons from the Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI) thumped peace marchers in central Jakarta, wounding 70. This encouraged the Christian press to claim Father Benny was the victim of a planned assault by fundamentalists aiming to fracture Indonesian pluralism. However the victim doesn’t go so far, saying he doesn’t know why he was bashed.

He said he is no longer in pain and had forgiven his assailants – “of course.” Maybe they were just after his handphone.

If the criminals were religious loonies or hired hitmen who thought their violence might bludgeon the secretary of the Inter-Religious Commission of the Indonesian Bishops’ Conference into silence they selected the wrong man.

For the human rights activist is still hammering his message of reform in the way Indonesians use and misuse religion and he’s taking his mission far afield.

His latest stop was New Zealand where he was invited during Human Rights Week by the Indonesian Embassy to promote the Republic as a multi-faith tolerant society. His visit was also used to celebrate the Christmas season.

NZ is a nation that still holds to a Judaeo-Christian heritage and values, but where organised religion is in decline. There are about 40,000 Muslims in the South Pacific country and only a tiny fraction from Indonesia.

“There are so many things that New Zealanders can do to help democracy and promote public civilization in Indonesia,” he told anyone who would listen during a tour in early December.

“I don’t just mean in terms of trade. Visit Indonesia and do whatever you can to explain what’s happening in the world. Spread the message that religion must be on the side of the poor and disadvantaged.

“Religion is being used as an instrument of power in Indonesia, manipulated by the State and big business.

“Religion has been trapped by rituals, people chasing after symbols and failing to find the balance between the state and the market. Religion must be a source of morality.”

Father Benny sees parallels in Indonesia with the Soviet Union after Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of the USSR who presided over the disintegration of the union and the arrival of democracy.

Father Benny claimed that the Russian people eventually grew tired of the way democracy was being mishandled and corrupted, and are now drifting back to totalitarianism. He fears the same disillusionment may infect Indonesians.

He said this is because politicians are continuing to use religion for their own ends and consequently risking harmony in Indonesia.

Benny Susetyo, 40, is normally based in Malang in East Java where he studied for a masters’ degree in philosophy. He is a member of the Alliance for National and Religious Freedom and has written several books on pluralism and religion.

In the mass media he has used Indonesia’s press (“the most free and democratic in Asia”) to savage the government’s response to the Lapindo mud volcano disaster in East Java, demanding that businessman Aburizal Bakrie (who is also the Coordinating Minister for the People’s Welfare) be held accountable.

The meddlesome priest has even dared to demand the government seize the Bakrie Group’s assets to compensate the thousands who have lost homes, land and jobs to the unstoppable eruption of gas and slime. (A Bakrie company was associated with the gas drilling that allegedly caused the eruption.)

Father Benny has also been a critic of the banning of the Islamic Ahmadiyah sect under pressure from hardline Muslims who believe that only their interpretation of the faith is correct.

His other targets have been poorly educated religious leaders who have used the hate passages in the ancient books to provoke violence. So it’s easy to assume the man has garnered many enemies who might want to give him a hard time – literally and metaphorically.

“We need a new paradigm for religious teaching that will interpret the texts in accordance with modern usage,” he said.

“Take off your exclusive glasses and start looking at the world in an inclusive way. The dialogue must be about life. The challenge for religion is to take sides with the downtrodden, the poor, migrant workers – and advocate on their behalf.

“In many cases religion has lost its true essence in bringing peace and justice to the world – advocating solidarity, forgiveness and being good friends with all. Plurality should be the main issue in the development of our national character.”

In an earlier age Father Benny would have been pilloried as a Communist and publicly harassed by the military and police if not jailed. For he is not afraid of putting the boot into politicians and the corporate world, both untouchables during Soeharto’s authoritarian era.

He has focussed on the power of cashed-up business-backed politicians to buy media time and who use religion to clothe themselves with piety in the search for votes.

At the same time he has trust in the common sense of the ordinary people. He said they had not been fooled by the large number of celebrities and clerics who have put their names forward for public office; these candidates have been dumped at the ballot box.

He unsuccessfully supported the removal of religious affiliation from identity cards and thinks it will be some time before Indonesians can accept the idea that the state and religion should be divorced, as it is in NZ and many other Western countries.

“The issue is not to have a religion, but to be a religion,” he said. “Religion has become a plaything of the state.

“The important things are not the number of places of worship, but the creation of a life of togetherness. We have to become better educated and intellectually more mature.”

##

Romo (Father) Benny

2008-12-14T16:11:00.000-08:00

JACK BODY: Kiwi master of Indonesian music

2008-11-11T20:18:00.000-08:00

Jack Body
Interpreting Indonesia’s sensuality through the Bard © Duncan Graham 2008

Living in one of the most isolated Western countries in the world requires adjustments and rituals. For Pakeha (white Kiwis) one essential has long been the big trip abroad known colloquially as OE, or overseas experience.

This journey, mainly to explore the northern hemisphere and seek the family’s roots, is an important part of the culture of New Zealand, a country still searching for its identity.

Young musicologist Jack Body was no exception. He’d already graduated with a masters degree from Auckland University and won a prestigious arts fellowship. In the late 1960s he headed for Europe where he studied in Cologne and at the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht.

Then he took the long way home wandering through Europe and South-East Asia with his mind and microphone open. The last stop was Indonesia.

“I was an innocent abroad and I knew next to nothing about the country,” he said. “I’d already been to India and was intrigued by the music I’d heard in the streets and villages.

“But Indonesia was quite different. By comparison I found India to be harsh. In Indonesia I started recording the sounds I heard, like other people take photographs of their travels.

“I followed my ears. I recorded birds, animals, street sounds, music. I was fascinated by the fantastic richness of the culture. I liked the way that people took things easily. They couldn’t be bothered to get hot and bothered.

“What attracted me most? The sensuality.”

Back in NZ Body transcribed some of the music he’d collected, a laborious task but one he thought necessary to understand what he’d heard. He also knew he needed more of the seductive archipelago.

In 1976 he scored a guest lectureship at the Akademi Musik Indonesia in Yogyakarta where he stayed for two years. On his return home he joined the academic staff of the School of Music at Wellington’s Victoria University where he’s now an associate professor.

He’s been a featured composer in the US and Holland, a widely exhibited photographer and he also runs a music publisher called Waiteata Music Press. His speciality has been cross-cultural compositions and experimental electro-acoustics.

In these jobs he’s set out to bring the music of Asia, and Indonesia in particular, to the attention of Kiwis and he’s done this with such success that he’s won a swag of awards, including a NZ Order of Merit in the 2001 Honors List. The following year his recordings titled Pulse won the NZ Music Award for the Best New Classical CD.

And all the time he’s been promoting Indonesian culture, along the way collecting a set of Javanese gamelan instruments for his university donated by Ibu Tien Soeharto, the wife of the late Indonesian president.

This year he’s been back to Indonesia twice, recording music played by the soldiers of the kraton (palace) in Yogyakarta. He said the music was an intriguing and ancient European-derived mix of fifes, drums and other instruments performed by men in quaint uniforms whose origins could well be the topic of a PhD.

Body’s work isn’t the only way Kiwis are learning more about Indonesia. He’s organized numerous residencies in Wellington for Indonesian artists and praised the Indonesian government for offering a range of cultural scholarships for structured three-month arts programs. These are expected to be enhanced later this year when an agreement between Indonesia and NZ is signed allowing young people from both countries to get work visas.

Now 64 Body shows no sign of going stale, repetitive or monotone. If he followed the Shakespeare formula he’d be ‘the lean and slippered pantaloon’ but he moves, physically and intellectually, as nimbly as his students.

He has the quirky mannerisms of a long-time creative artist living in a parallel universe where music rules. While he has to be involved in teaching and university administration his mind seems to be somewhere else, pulling sounds and ideas together for some future fusion.

His latest production (“exhilarating, the most ambitious I’ve ever done”), staged with help from the Indonesian Embassy in NZ and the Asia-NZ Foundation, was the Seven Ages of Man, a ‘cross-cultural, multi-media music theater’ piece based on Shakespeare’s famous lines in All’s Well That Ends Well:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

Body’s idea was to mix bits of the Bard in English with music from the Javanese gamelan and a Balinese gamelan, plus an electric violin, four vocalists singing in Javanese and Balinese, and have the lot interpreted in dance and puppetry.

Translation of the Shakespeare was not without difficulties. The verse about the soldier ‘full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,’ caused problems.

“In Shakespeare’s time most of the military were mercenaries, but in Indonesia being a soldier is an elitist occupation,” said Body. “We had to make some adjustments in the language.

”Many people in the English-speaking world have been taught the Seven Ages of Man and I found Indonesians related well to the sentiments.”

The composers included the Javanese gamelan director Budi Putra (originally from Solo but now a NZ resident) and the Balinese gamelan director I Wayan Gde Yudane. Most of the gamelan players were university students and staff, including Jack Body.

In the wrong hands this could have become a real dog’s breakfast, but in fact it worked brilliantly on every level – emotional, imaginative and creative.

There were several reasons; the inclusion of the masked multi-talented Balinese dalang (puppet master) I Nyoman Sukerta as a musician, singer, dancer and actor, was a masterstroke.

So was a lighting system that included a haze machine, recreating in the Wellington timber studio the misty, musty, dusty, mysterious, spooky, smoky and almost tangible atmosphere found in villages and kampongs of Indonesia come nightfall. The only thing absent was the scent of clove cigarettes, for NZ takes its anti-smoking laws seriously.

“The reception has been great,” said the exuberant ethnomusicologist. “I love this synthesis – I’ve long wanted to use dance and now I’ve got the theater bug. We’re hoping to take the production on tour around NZ, maybe even to Indonesia. That would be terrific.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 11 November 08)

##

A CAPITAL TRAMP

2008-10-09T12:33:00.000-07:00

WILDERNESS ON THE DOORSTEP Duncan Graham
Looking for a great walk near our capital without having to pack maps, compass and iron rations? Want to get lost without having to call out Search and Rescue?
There’s an intriguing and easily accessible tramp in suburban Wellington that shouldn’t be overlooked – though it’s frequently by-passed.
It’s rugged and dramatic – sheer cliffs, cascading creeks and some curious history. Ravines sliced and scoured by erosion and earthquake covered in bushy ngaio and ake-ake. Fractured outcrops scribbled by nature, not spraycans.
The main waterway, the Kaiwharawhara stream, drains a vast area of hilly hinterland. If you’re lucky you’ll spot brown trout and black eels slithering under the rocks, proof that despite detergents, oil and household waste running off the roads pollution is under control.
Blackbirds dart through the dank and dark undergrowth of shiny-leaf titoki. Orange-fruit karaka provide the shelter. Kereru, too plump or lazy to fly, test the breaking point of arm-thick branches. Invisible but not inaudible tui fill the spaces between the leaves with their chuckling and chortling.
For most of the one-hour journey you can look up and out, and sometimes see far enough ahead to bowl a straight ball, but not to the left or right. Where the streambed flattens near the sea you can exit to a vista clear. Turn south parallel with the coast. In 20 minutes you’re among the concrete and commerce of Lambton Quay.
Where else in the world could you find such an accessible wilderness well inside the threshold of a capital city?
Wellington City Council volunteer ranger Peter Reimann rubbed his chin but couldn’t think of anywhere quite like Trelissick Park. And that’s not just because he chairs a group of about 30 volunteers who clobber exotics and nurture natives, planting 2,300 seedlings this year.
Reimann is a benign bloke who’d no more rubbish other bushlovers than he would the bush. But he reluctantly admitted other Wellington parks are a mite too manicured for his taste, while he and his busy bees like to keep this 20 hectare slice of scrub just a bit wild.
How do they do it? His reply reflected his past career as a no-nonsense mechanical engineer: “We just see the jobs that need to be doing. It’s just applied common sense.”
It would be grand to add an adjective. Like pristine. But that would be pushing reality. Trelissick Park on Ngaio Gorge has been ruthlessly ransacked for its rimu since Pakeha arrived 170 years ago with axe and cloven-footed herbivores; sheep have pushed their leathery snouts into every nook chomping the sweetest grasses; homesick farmers seeded gorse, released possums to ransack nests and rabbits to ringbark trees.
The place has been a mess of multi-botanical migration: Japanese honeysuckle, Australian wattle and just about every European weed known to botany.
The devastation was so severe that a few years ago officials were said to be eyeing the area for a rubbish dump. Great location, minimal transport costs and the foul seepage could just run into Wellington Harbour.
Fortunately in the early 1990s the much-cursed Nimbies thought otherwise and the pragmatists had to rethink their plans, though logic was on their side. For the environment had been so heavily plundered and exploited, including building a powder magazine (ready to help repel the Russians that later became a plastics factory), arguments that the valley was thoroughly stuffed made sense. So why not add megatonnes of municipal muck?
The whingeing locals who had ambushed the march of progress took up the challenge and with the help of local government have rescued a national treasure. They’ve replanted and reseeded, expelled foreign intruders, poisoned pests, de-gunked the stream and done their best to return the land to BC - the time Before Cook.
When the Yorkshire navigator first arrived his crew could hardly understand their boss, and not just because of his accent. The problem was the birdsong. It’s not like that yet, but the old-timer volunteers who tear down the convolvulus garrotting the native shrubs and stomp wandering willie in his tracks, say the transformation has been extraordinary. Evicted birds are now returning to colonise their once lost lands.
They put much of this down to purging possums and the ability of this fecund, well-drained valley to recover given enough TLC. Not all has been successful. Rehabilitating the stone-walled magazine faltered when thieves torched a stolen vehicle in the building.
Reimann has been involved for the past seven years and now spends three-quarters of his time on the job. He said the management mix of volunteers and council staff (“switched-on people”) along with corporate groups worked well.
“The major on-going problem is the raging torrent that follows heavy downpours from this huge catchment stretching from Karori (where the top end of the creek was once dammed to water the nascent colony to Khandallah and all going into this long-suffering stream,” he said.
“Banks are eroded, trees uprooted and silt deposited. We’re always watching development upstream because roads, roofing and paved yards add to the watershed.
“We want householders to keep bush cover around their homes, put in permeable paving and use big bore stormwater pipes to slow the pace of water flow.”
Yet to be changed is the name. There’s no Maori ring about Trelissick – an early settler’s reminder of his Cornish home that sure as heck never resembled this jungle. There are alternatives aplenty: The Ngati-tama had a pa at the stream mouth. The tribal chief was Taringa Kuri.
Governor George Grey pushed a road up one side of the gorge so he could fight Te Rauparaha. The road has just been reinforced and remains an important escape route north should catastrophe cripple the capital. In the 19th century a railway line was cut and blasted high onto the other flank; funny little trains clickety-clank through narrow tunnels to nurture the northern suburbs.
Plans include a Sanctuary to the Sea walkway linking the northern car park of Otari-Wilton’s Bush with Trelissick Park.
Don’t don boots and backpack just yet; the route will cross the railway line, maybe through a tunnel so the hazards won’t all be blackberries. The thorns of bureaucracy also have to be cleared, though the placid ranger doesn’t see anything insurmountable.
“I’m very pleased with the way things have gone,” said Reimann. “More and more people are using the park. We can really see the results of our efforts.”

And so can you. Take the train from Wellington to Crofton Downs and look down on the evergreen canopy during the six-minute journey. Turn right outside the station. Walk under the bridge and there’s a gap between the flax and a map. Moments later you’re in another world.

(First published in Wilderness magazine, October 08)
##

RESEARCHING NATURAL TRAGEDIES

2008-08-24T01:55:00.000-07:00

Coping with big scale tragedy © Duncan Graham 2008

What makes one society more resilient in the face of catastrophe than another?Why do some people stoically accept the awful things that happen when they encounter the unleashed energies of nature?

Some regard such events as a trial by a testing god; others rail against the elements and curse the uncontrollable forces that released them. Many are just left numb.New Zealand doctoral student Heather Taylor will probe these and other tricky but critical questions in Indonesia and NZ during the next three years.

“Many other research studies on the capacity to adapt to major tragedies have focused on Western populations,” she said.“I want to know if there are universal traits that indicate the capacity of a community to cope. If these traits do exist and can be identified then non-government agencies (NGOs) and others can use this information in the way they allocate their resources.

“For example, if we know that one society can better handle a tragedy and look after themselves to some extent, then the NGO’s energies can be focused on communities that don’t respond well.”

In April Taylor started her studies by traveling to the west coast Sumatra island of Nias that was smashed by a massive earthquake in 2005 killing 800 and injuring 2,000. The superstitious must have wondered what they’d done wrong because Nias was also a victim of the December 2004 tsunami.

Taylor will also study in the Central Java city of Yogyakarta that was horrendously damaged by a massive shaking in 2006 with the loss of 6,000 lives, and West Sumatra that was hit twice last year, in March and September.

Fortunately Taylor, 24, hasn’t had any ghastly personal tragedy to drive her into this unusual research. She hasn’t had to outrun an avalanche of mud or flee a forest furnace, but she does come from a family that believes it has a duty to channel its abilities to the benefit of humanity.

“I have a science background and I want to use my education to help
people,” she said. “I hope to develop the skills to interpret science to policy makers in a language they can understand. There has to be a balance between technical and cultural knowledge.”

Her father is an Australian engineer working for an international Christian organisation and her mother is a nurse who was born in Ethiopia.Taylor was born in Canada and studied to become a geological engineer. This is the profession that advises major mining ventures on the best place to dig or avoid, and the dangers that might result.

After graduating she worked on a big iron-ore mine in Western Australia before moving to NZ to further her studies. Like Indonesia, NZ is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a geologically unstable zone of shifting tectonic plates deep underground and magna boiling to the surface.

NZ, also known as the Shaky Isles, seems to be forever trembling. If you check http://www.geonet.org.nz/ you’ll find a list of the latest rumbles, and can let the authorities know if they’ve missed any. As there are about 14,000 every year with around 150 serious it’s always possible that the experts haven’t noticed the earth move while they’re taking a coffee break.(Most information on Indonesian earthquakes has been compiled by authorities overseas.)

Taylor has won a NZ $90,000 (Rp 650 million) grant to do her PhD through Massey University’s school of psychology. Her homeland has ice storms and floods but is relatively stable, so there’s little need to worry about skyscrapers coming down to earth or to study the phenomena. NZ takes natural disasters seriously.

There aren’t too many high rises; in the capital Wellington, that straddles three major fault lines, timber is the preferred building material. In the big Yogya quake that destroyed 1.5 million homes, the families who survived were often living in houses made of wood or bamboo.Taylor is reluctant to predict exactly which way her research will go, but recognizes that NZ has a well-developed system of building regulations, alerts, emergency routines and other systems to help minimize damage and injury from natural disasters.

These management tools may well be of use to Indonesia.The NZ Earthquake Commission provides rapid relief and covers damage caused by earthquakes, landslips, volcanic eruptions, tsunami and hydrothermal activity to people who are insured.But there are restraints on transferring expertise across cultures.

Taylor said that most overseas aid comes from Western nations with different ideas and values. She would not be drawn on recent controversies where some agencies have allegedly tried to package Christianity, feminism and other Western values along with emergency building materials and water pumps.

Then there are the tales of corruption, with aid allegedly diverted into the pockets of government authorities to the great fury of donors. Another factor that may work itself into her research are the motives behind outsiders giving money or rushing to help. What emotional and attitudinal baggage are they carrying in the back of their white four-wheel drives, bouncing across rubble-strewn landscapes?

“It often becomes the case that the international NGOs are coming from a different culture and are unfamiliar with the culture they’re entering,” Taylor said. “I want to understand the qualities of communities and individuals that withstand natural disasters. Is it their ethnicity, their religious beliefs, their past experiences, their economic background?

“I hope my research will lead to better ways for NGOs to handle big crises. I want to try and avoid the political traps. In the end it’s not what you do but how you do it.“You can get the technology right, but if you mess up on the social side you’ll get nowhere.

“I come from a background within an NGO because of my family. But don’t write me up as a naïve young researcher out to save the world. Hopefully I’ll be able to change attitudes from being superior and paternalistic so that NGOs can do things better as partners with communities.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 19 Feb 08)

WELLINGTON - WORLD HQ OF THE VERB

2008-08-21T00:51:00.000-07:00

TAKING A RISE OUT OF OZ Duncan Graham 2008

The first time I saw Wellington, her heart was wet and grey.

It was a Saturday morning about 25 plus years ago and I was in search of a paper. Nothing moved, except empties skittling across Jervois Quay, rolled by the rain, proof that this had been a bottleground the night before. Was anyone abroad – or were they all abroad? They were – this was summer.

How could the capital of a nation be so bleak? And sleazy? Every second shop should have been a cheerful dairy offering the dawn people a glass of fresh milk with a yellow cream top and a leg of Canterbury lamb just to get the day going before watching the All Blacks perform a haka on the beach. I knew all about NZ – I’d read the tourist promotions.

Back to The Terrace and a timber guesthouse that looked more like a wardrobe perched on the hillside. The tiny communal toilet was on another level, adding to the feeling of being in a place that time forgot.

It had; this was the Muldoon era and anything that wasn’t dour and drab was likely to be baton charged. If not grey you might be Red, maybe even anti-apartheid. Now you can’t even smack your kids for making racist comments.

Outside a line of Vauxhalls, Wolseleys, Zephyrs and other end of the alphabet models seen through smeared glass because the sash windows were stuck fast. As they were in 1880.

But the rain didn’t last and slowly the city came to life presenting dazzlingly clear vistas of the hills and harbor so good that finding a paper became unimportant. Houses roosting like gannets on the bush-clad slopes, a hundred hues of green.

Curious gateways and steps leading into the lush and the dank, full of mystery. Alice would have been enchanted. A city where almost every building had a magic entrance and knockout view could be forgiven for almost anything.

Back again, and it’s still tough getting a paper on some mornings and many stories need a glossary of Maori terms to understand. Back then it was all in English. But crime phobia remains with hyperventilating reports of burglaries and bashings that wouldn’t warrant a filler par in any Australian city.

Perversely this is comforting: If there’s no more shock-horror than a punch-up after the pubs close then things can’t be crook in Mount Cook. Or anywhere else between Ohariu and Owhira.

The era of the sunset home for Austin 7s has passed; today you need a thermoplastic coffin on the top of your Japanese discard people-mover, plus a slobbering Labrador (a Slobrador?) on the back seat panting for pats from passers-by to make a vehicle statement.

The suburban status symbol is now a rusting rubbish skip dumped across the pavement with an unpronounceable trade name best mouthed ‘Ouch!’ It’s the rich nob’s look-at-me tag, more obnoxious than graffiti, uglier than the Mongrel Mob. Not for these folk a pleb’s yellow plastic bag on the kerbside.

Reckon Wellington is going downhill? It will when the next megaquake rocks the faulty city, but in the meantime check your neighbour’s bin for throwouts as proof of opulence. We’ve scored a late model vacuum cleaner working perfectly (though the dust bag was half full), a garden table and enough timber to do some handy woodwork.

The usual cast of whingealots still gets excessive publicity. The latest articulate joycops were given freedom to bucket Te Papa on its tenth birthday, presumably because it lets in the unwashed who might think Jean Dubuffet is the coffee shop checkout chick.

Don’t these up-themselves culture snobs know what the town was like before this magnificent museum, theme park or South Pacific Disneyland was built? Have they ever been to big shows in Australia where superannuated military police patrol the exhibits and all the signs start with DON’T?

Te Papa has transformed the south end of the harbor and it’s consistently the best show in town as all the dads, mums and kids know, largely because it really wants you to come in, jandals no problem, look, photo, even touch. And free. It’s the same at the Museum of Wellington that shows history isn’t bunk, it’s entertainment better than any blockbuster.

On the Civic Centre over-way are the lovely lines of poet Lauris Edmond: 'It's true you can't live here by chance, you have to do and be, not simply watch or even describe. This is the city of action, the world headquarters of the verb.'

If true then Te Papa is the adverb: Welcome.

But that’s not the word Wellington gives to the cashed up from the cruise ships who come here to spend. Lucky liner layabouts, they can still experience the rough old days and sail past shunting yards, concrete overpasses in East German grey and cement silos to berth by a timber dump fumigated by noxious gasses. This is still a country dependent on primary industry, and if you don’t like it lady, then log-off. It’s surprising they haven’t installed pens for live sheep exports so visitors could get some really daggy photos.

The businessmen and bureaucrats in shorts that provided a lunchtime giggle have gone; I’m sure the women wore cloche hats. Now Lambton Quay has become Cleavage Central, whatever the weather. The promenaders take their cue from Kupe’s wife, Hine Te Aparaangi showing her splendid bosoms on the waterfront as she points to the CBD. Wellington in the 80s was blokeville. Now it’s the Women’s Republic as the fashion ads proclaim.

And not just in the city. On the gorse skyline big blondes flip their mountain bikes over taut wire fences with the ease of hanging washing on the line, then hurtle down Mount Kaukau’s twisted tracks studded with jagged greywacke to the applause of a cicada choir.

In the early 80s the other quaint sight was the trolley busses. Progressive cities elsewhere had long abandoned such dated transport. That Wellington hung on was proof it was primitive, laughable. Now electric transport is seen as clean, green and advanced. She who laughs last, laughs loudest.

What appeared to be the curse of Wellington – the lack of flat land for housing – has turned into a blessing, an architectural challenge producing imaginative suburbs, a marvelous creative contrast to the flat, boring terracotta-topped sameness that marks the Australian mortgage belt, particularly in cities like Perth where the Pavlova was invented.

Well that’s what all kids are taught in Oz history 101. Wellington claims otherwise and maybe that’s right. This is a city that’s taking a rise out of everywhere else.

(First published in The Dominion Post 12 April 2008)
##

SAY NO TO TROPICAL TIMBER KWILA

2008-08-17T02:58:00.000-07:00

Killing the Kwila Trade Down Under © 2008 Duncan Graham

Conservationists are claiming an early victory in the preservation of Indonesian native forests, not by taking action in the lush forests of Papua and Kalimantan, but by protesting on the hard streets of Western cities.

Kwila, also known as merbau and ipil, is an Indonesian hardwood much loved in Australia and New Zealand for its durability, color and price. It’s particularly popular in outdoor furniture, a much sought after consumer item in the two countries that love open-air recreation and barbecues.

Though not at present as winter winds cut across Australasia; entertainment is around log fires in well-sealed houses, leaving the rain-lashed backyards empty.

But once the sun reappears come Spring the buyers will be back, though many will not be able to buy their favorite furniture once present stocks are cleared.

“We’ve been trying to persuade New Zealanders not to buy furniture made from Indonesian timbers that have been illegally harvested,” said Dr Russel (correct) Norman, co-leader of the NZ Green Party and a member of Parliament.

“ We’ve been lobbying the shops not to buy kwila furniture for the next season. Of course some don’t care but we are on the cusp of getting there in terms of making people aware of the issues.

“The illegal destruction of forests in Indonesia is a major concern because it’s contributing to global warming. The timber is being cut in Indonesia then exported to Vietnam and China where it’s made into furniture for export.”

Kwila grows to 50 metres and was once common in South East Asia. Traditionally its bark was used a medicine.

According to the Greens about 80 per cent of the illegally sourced wood sold in NZ is kwila. The NZ government reckons this trade is costing the NZ forestry industry $NZ 266 million (Rp 1.9 billion) in lost revenue because buyers are not selecting goods made using local timbers.

The trade to Australia is even bigger. Kwila resists termites, a huge problem in that country, making the timber even more desirable.

Although Indonesia bans the export of kwila that hasn’t been verified as sustainable and legally obtained, conservationists allege the timber is being sent to China using forged documents. Some is made into furniture and sold to Australia and NZ - a lot has reportedly been used in Beijing Olympic Games venues.

Dr Norman was an invited speaker at an event organized by the Indonesian Embassy in the NZ capital Wellington to promote TV programs on preserving orang-utans in Kalimantan where illegal felling is contributing to destruction of the animals’ environment. The films, made by Natural History NZ, are being shown internationally on the Discovery channel. Dr Norman urged Indonesia to pay farmers in Kalimantan and Papua not to fell native timbers.

“Indonesians want to develop economically,” he told the audience. “We’ve chopped down our native forests and it’s not fair to ask Indonesians to do the same without compensation.” NZ banned the felling of native timbers in 2000.

Kwila exports aren’t the only concern of NZ conservationists. In 1999 NZ imported about 400 tonnes of palm kernels for cattle feed; that figure has now jumped to more than 400,000 tonnes as rising milk prices have created a huge demand for dairy products leading to rapid growth in dairy farms.

Large areas of land in Indonesia are being clear felled and turned into palm plantations, mainly for the oil that is now being used to make bio-diesel fuel. The kernels are a by-product.

The campaign to stop Kiwis buying furniture made from Indonesian hardwoods, and spearheaded by the Indonesian Human Rights Committee in NZ seems to having an impact. Harvey Norman stores, a major retail outlet in Australia and NZ and the target of protests in Auckland, has written to the campaigners saying it has stopped buying kwila products and will stop selling goods it has by 31 March next year.

Committee spokesperson Maire Leadbeater said the campaign was starting to change the public perception of kwila.

“I do believe that collectively we have made a difference,” she said. “The NZ government’s recent statements on this issue confirm the close link between illegally logged wood and kwila but unfortunately they are not willing to regulate to stop the imports – yet.

“However retailers are quite sensitive to consumer reaction and many have said they won’t stock kwila next summer.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 12 August 08)
##

COPING WITH DISASTERS

2008-08-04T13:45:00.001-07:00

Disaster management – making the mess less © Duncan Graham 2008

How do two nations celebrate 50 years of diplomatic relations? To play it safe stage a traditional cultural event with a lushness of finger-flicking maidens swirling batik and rolling their enticing eyes.

Thirty minutes of gamelan gonging and it’s all over for another half century.

That’s not the way it will be next month (Aug) when Indonesia and New Zealand recognise five decades of a mostly harmonious and relatively stable marriage. Instead a clutch of Kiwis will fly to Jakarta, Aceh and Yogyakarta to share skills on disaster risk management at a conference that’s expected to attract up to 200 participants and impact on nearby nations.

This isn’t a topic for fatalists who believe there’s nothing that mortals can do when the wrath of a vengeful Deity is unleashed, punishing the faithless and tormenting the transgressors with tsunami, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Those who take a more scientific view argue that many things can be done to prepare, though not always to prevent, natural disasters. Their key word is ‘mitigation’, not earthquake-proofing.

“ We’ve got some real skills here in NZ, developed over the years,” said civil engineer Dr David Hopkins, co-leader of the 21-strong Kiwi contingent.

“We have a different attitude - we work with people; we enjoy rolling up our sleeves. Let’s see if we can make a real difference here, not trying to do everything but working in specific areas of expertise because we’re a small country with limited resources.”

Decoded this means NZ can’t compete against big-donor nations like Japan and the US so has to deliver quality, not quantity.

Hopkins, a specialist in earthquake risk management, looks differently at disaster photos, like those from China’s Wenchuan earthquake in May. While most of us gape at the damage he seeks out the constructions that have survived. Then he wonders why.

In most cases the upright buildings have been robustly built using top materials and following best practices. These included steel reinforcement of concrete, cross bracing walls and no heavy loads at high levels. Critical is the use of materials that can flex not fracture, sway not crumple.

Inevitably the cost is initially higher, which is why some are built to lower standards and building inspectors are bribed to ignore non-compliance with regulations.

This isn’t rocket science; Hopkins knows that Indonesian authorities are just as well read on the building codes that have been developed in NZ, Japan, California and other unsteady locations. The problem is getting the rules implemented. To make his point he employs the image of a skyhook using a chain to hold a huge weight above the people.

“Each link is critical,” he said. “We’re very good at strengthening the strong links but not so good at looking at the weak.”

The idea of discussing disaster risk management to celebrate the 50 years of diplomatic relations came from Amris Hassan the Indonesian ambassador to NZ who lives in Wellington, one of the world’s most shaky capitals.

Three faults run north and south through the harbor and city of about 500,000 people. Wellington is also the center of government and the parliament so if disaster strikes the nation’s leaders would be among the victims. Managing the risks is treated seriously and the city has become a center of excellence in earthquake research.

An audit of public and private buildings recently found hundreds needed strengthening and the work is underway. A technique called ‘base isolation’ using rubber and lead blocks between the foundations and beams of old buildings was pioneered in NZ.

Few Kiwis can be unaware that their land is dangerous. The government has a Minister of civil defence and emergency management who will be at the conference.

As former NZ prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer said: “It does us a power of good to remind ourselves that we live on two volcanic rocks where two tectonic plates meet, in a somewhat lonely stretch of windswept ocean just above the Roaring Forties. If you want drama - you've come to the right place.”

The last major earthquake in Wellington was in 1855, but there have been several recent disasters nearby. Gisborne on the east coast of the North Island was hit on 20 December 2007 causing considerable damage. NZ gets about 14,000 quakes a year; like Indonesia it’s part of the Pacific Rim of Fire.

Hopkins worked for almost a year in Turkey looking at apartment blocks. He expected fatalism but was “mind-bogglingly overwhelmed” by the positive response to ideas of mitigating the impact of natuiral disasters.

His message to public officials, builders and developers is to ask: “Do you have a defensible position?”

“This means asking if you’ve identified the hazards and potential damage,” he said. “You must have taken all reasonable steps prior to the event to reduce its impact under the four Rs of emergency management – Reduction, Readiness, Response and Recovery.

“You won’t be doing enough to be in a defensible position until you examine these issues seriously and develop a sensible action plan that balances the risks, funding constraints and community expectations.”

Geomorphologist (landforms scientist) Dr Noel Trustrum, the other co-leader of the conference, spent time in Aceh after the 2004 tsunami identifying projects where NZ know-how could be of use. He focussed on the Sumatran highlands where heavy clearing had threatened water supplies.

“We want to marry NZ expertise with Indonesian experience,” he said. “NZ is best at doing what’s absolutely necessary, not looking for Rolls Royce solutions. For example twisting reinforcing iron a different way can be significant.

“The Bureau of Rehabilitation and Reconstruction (BRR) hands over to local and regional governments after April next year and there is still a lot of unspent money.

(The Indonesian government created the BRR to coordinate reconstruction after the tsunami. Dr William Sabandar, the BRR regional director for Nias, was educated in NZ.)

“We want to maintain relationships with Indonesia and together look beyond to helping in South-East Asia and the Pacific.”

(The conference opened at the Hotel Borobudur in Jakarta on 5 August.)

(First published in The Jakarta Post 29 July 08)
##

2008-07-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

FINDING WORK IN NZ

2008-07-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

WANTED: SIT VAC GLOSSARY
Is NZ the land of opportunity where all who want work can work? The old adage of Buyer Beware applies in the job market as much as used car yards, writes Duncan Graham:
Fed up with your job and want something new? Like planning an overseas trip it’s best to learn the language before take-off. Otherwise you could alight in an ‘Awesome Position’ getting a ‘Handsome Remuneration’ and facing ‘Challenging Opportunities’ when in reality you’ve flown into a failed state and lost your baggage along the way.
Of course the jobs are there – aren’t they? Immigration publishes labor shortage lists to lure overseas candidates; weekend papers have plump lift-outs pregnant with alluring ads; business forums groan about staff shortages - but that’s not the whole story.
Clinicians from Kazakhstan who’ve mislaid qualifications and fudged references may tread a red carpet into a regional District Health Board, but the rest stumble along a dead-end goat track.
Okkers and boomeranging Kiwis are particularly unwelcome. Employers follow the Ministry of Economic Development’s advice and buy local, rewarding stayers who’ve taken the tough times with the good.
Those who’ve sought refuge overseas during every pay and conditions drought, returning once the economic La Nina reversed have long CVs but little chance of making the short list.
Overseas experience, higher degrees from prestigious universities, jobs in top international companies? Not impressed. Who knows what infectious ideas they’ve picked up during OE and snuck through Quarantine. However those spotted in Queen Street or Lambton Quay through sun and sleet across the decades will see their applications rocket to the top.
Official stats say it’s a seller’s market and anyone who wants to work can get a job. Missing here are the adjectives. Like ‘worthwhile’ and ‘appropriate’.
There are openings cleaning hotel toilets and Work and Income will help match your lavatorial skills to employers flush with guests. Fine if you want to start at the bottom, but not if you’ve been there, undergone that, and gained qualifications to get out of the mire.
AWOL returnees are amazed to discover the growth in suburbs, prohibitions, graffiti and employment agencies. Seven pages promote these pin-stripes, also known as recruiters or human resource consultants, in the Yellow Pages. That’s double the space allocated to massage parlours and adult services combined. Maybe that’s a telling point.
Aren’t the agencies here to help the ambitious get a job? Wrong. They’re here so they have a job. That’s their ambition. Outsourcing hasn’t lifted standards in the messy business of finding and keeping staff. For all their flash rhetoric few job brokers return calls or acknowledge letters, just as the task-masters of yesteryear behaved when there were 100 labourers for every gravedigger’s job.
Consultants dress up dross, like real estate agents. And like that industry it’s time for controls. Or warning labels: Applying For Jobs May Damage Your Language Comprehension.
No-one now sweats in an overcrowded office with a ventilation system that breeds Legionnaires. They enjoy a ‘fast-paced situation’ or ‘fun environment’ where they ‘develop relationships’. Indeed. One vacancy promised a ‘clean, fresh and happy environment with gentlemen clients’. Curiously it wanted ‘ladies’ over 18. Other ads are gender neutral and don’t discriminate on age, but their positions are vertical.
Common are pictures of families on the beach or young couples in the snowfields, undermining the point about the workplace wonderland.
These jobs promise ‘great rates’ and ‘awesome conditions’. Undefined, even in the glossy ‘information pack’ applicants have to download. This means the cash-strapped job-hungry spend up big on quires of paper and litres of coloured ink that promote the HR company and little else.
Back to the phone and a matey chat: So what’s the bread? Too direct, absolutely last century; the euphemism here is ‘remuneration’ and Kiwi jollity unwelcome. “The package will be commensurate with experience and qualifications.” What range? “Yet to be determined, but in keeping with market rates.” Whose market, which rates? Honey tone turns Coromandel toxic: “Just check our website.”
Tip: Check the salary rate in Oz and divide by two.
Also undisclosed are company names. Beware: The ‘respected major corporate’ that looks so worthy could be your present Neanderthal slavedriver planning your exit.
There are some plusses. ‘Girl Friday’ has gone the way of the Moa, shouldered aside by ‘Executive Assistant’ who should be an ‘Organiser Extraordinaire’. This bit of French polish is clearly a cut above an extraordinary organiser, though she still gets to make the tea. She? Inequality isn’t confined to the boardroom.
The medical sector, always straining to get bed-pan emptiers, has hired snappy punsters to ambush the unwary: ‘You can be a picture of health in our DHB!’ ‘We have just the prescription for YOU!’
Meanwhile the adjacent news pages reveal political, staffing and wrist-slashing management crises. Only diagnosed masochists would want to join such dysfunctioning systems.
Also new are ‘communication consultants’ that entice columns of journalists away from disclosure to enclosure. Much sought after in the health industry.
In the Orwellian workplace devised by the HR companies you join the ‘crew’ of a ‘leading edge’ company in a ‘key sector’ of the economy. ‘Team’ is passé. Positions are always ‘senior’. Smart applicants should do their research. ‘Worldwide leaders’ may be pushing brands you’ve never seen in supermarkets, while a ‘strategic company’ can be a subterranean Dodgy Brothers partnership with a strategy of flying come nightfall.
The finest oxymoron is Wellington City Council’s ‘Parking Enforcement Ambassadors’, which sounds like advertising for ‘Undertaker Doctors’.
One show that actually shoots straight is the police. They just want ‘administrative clerks’.
The ads are plainclothes. None are arresting. Happy snaps are banned, along with PR fluff, fancy typefaces and commissioned logos. Boring, boring. Aren’t there any fun folk in the force? Is everything slow-paced among the Mr Plods?
At least they don’t taser the language.
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