I don’t want to!

First published in Column 8 on the 17^th November, 1993

Having avoided writing about politics during the election run-up (apart from my recommendation of MMP, a piece of advice most voters in my electorate signally ignored), I still don’t want to write about politics. Politics, and politicians, we’ve had quite enough of.

And I don’t want to write about dinosaurs, even though I allowed myself to be persuaded to visit the mechanical monsters at the museum. The mechanics and the marketing – and the sound effects – were marvellous, but I don’t want to write about dinosaurs. They’ve had enough media attention to last several billion years.

And I don’t want to write about unemployment, even though the French contemplate cutting back everyone’s hours and wages in order to give unemployed people jobs, and even though the English politicians are finally admitting that there is a correlation between crime and unemployment, a fact that our politicians have so far been unable to perceive. Blast, I’m writing about politicians. They’re insidious, and creep in wherever you don’t want them.

I don’t want to write about employment either, even though some gentleman with the memorable name of Mex Bouzaid has managed to create employment in Queenstown – yes folks, the word was ‘create.’ He seems to be beating the Employment Service at their own game.

And I don’t want to write about recycling either, even though we’re told we don’t do enough of it, and when we do, we have to pay to get rid of it, and when we’ve got rid of it no one wants it.

I don’t want to write about the fact that the community is constantly blamed for not recycling enough, when no local authority wants to set up anything that will actually use what we recycle.

And I don’t want to write about the arguments over whether cloth nappies or disposable nappies are better for the environment, because that would be writing about the environment, and I don’t want to write about that either.

I don’t want to write about whether it’s better to use more trees to make disposable nappies that can’t really be disposed of, or whether it’s better to use more water to wash away the poo and the chemicals that clean the poo out of the cloth nappies. I just don’t want to write about such Karitane-yellow matters.

And I certainly don’t want to write about crime and the way criminals make more money out of ACC than non-criminals – because I don’t want to write about ACC either: that would mean I’d have to write about politicians, and as I said…

Nor do I want to write about people being attacked for no more reason that that the exist, because as soon as I start writing about crime I’d be writing about unemployment and politicians – see what happens?

And I don’t want to write about Suffragette Year because it’s politically (!) incorrect for a man to write about women. We mere males cannot possibly understand the complexities of what it is to be female.

I’m looking forward to All Male Year, and suggest we start aside our dollars now to fund it, because I doubt if there’ll be any government subsidies going.

And I don’t want to write about sex, or Aids, or condoms or abortion or homosexuality, because then I’d be moralising, and since the present trend of the world is to believe that morals and feelings and doing your own thing are all pretty much the same, I’d probably be wasting my time.

And I most definitely don’t want to write about film stars, because they get constant attention, while nobodies live and die – and get maybe a centimetre of news space.

And I most definitely don’t want to write about myself. When I write about matters on which I have opinions - my wife says that means opinionated – the world ignores it.

On the other hand, when I write about my beard, or buying clothes, or bringing up kids, everyone and her sister comments on it.

Anyway, is there anything interesting about me which I haven’t already written?

Courtesy of A Great Dream Language School

Karitane-yellow was a joke name in our house for the poo on a nappy, which we saw a good deal of over several years of having five children.

Much more positive

First published in Column 8 on the 27^th October, 1993 

In spite of the strong urgings of the recent Otago Daily Times editorial, I’m going to vote for MMP. [Mixed Member Proportional]

I’ve read several views on the referendum. I’m probably more fortunate, in fact, than many voters who’ve found the argufying back and forth painfully difficult to understand, and who’ve all but given up trying. (Fortunate in the sense that reading is something I enjoy, even when the subject is politics.)

What’s been offered to television-viewing voters who read little? Fatuous Government ads which explain nothing. Tedious to watch, they turn people off in microseconds. I suspect the aloofness of politicians keeps them out of touch with people and they think we’re all nincompoops.

The same actors appear in equally expensive newspaper ads, listing the so-called facts, but offering little in the way of guidelines or help to the confused. (Did they deliberately set out to find actors who would look dumb and bewildered?)

The Times said: Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t – hardly a complement to the present incumbents – and added that this referendum was the ‘most important constitutional event since women were given the vote.’

I don’t agree that this referendum is an equally important constitutional events. The women’s vote changed this country’s history, for a much more important reason than a political one. For the first time men had to think about the way they regarded women. (And still have to.) This referendum is hardly going to change anything as important as that.

FPP [First Past the Post] has the support of big business. That alone should make us suspicious (!) Big business in New Zealand has hardly been the champion of people’s rights. When Mr Bolger called businessmen ‘heroes,’ as though they were somehow saviours of the nation, I woke laughing in the night. Big business profits aren’t ploughed back into the country, at least not into the part of the country that needs it.

Then there’s Shirtcliffe and Co, with their almighty resources. It makes you wonder what motive these pro-FPP bods have in spending so highly on campaigning for the status quo.

I’ve read two major pro-MMP articles. Both were honest enough to say that MMP won’t cure all our ills. They didn’t say politicians would somehow mature overnight, becoming capable of achieving worthwhile tasks. They did remind us that politicians mostly resist the thought of change.

They didn’t say MMP works well everywhere, though it works very well in some places.

What they did say was that FPP isn’t fair. They pointed out that for the majority of voters, FPP wasted your vote. As David McLoughlin says in an article entitled Don’t Blow the Chance of Real Reform: ‘…every NZ Government since 1951 has won a majority of seats in Parliament with a minority of votes.’ Crazy.

Dunedinites, of all voters, must be fed up being represented by Opposition members time after time. Isn’t that a result of FPP?

I’m going to vote MMP, and I hope most other people do too. It would send a strong signal to the politicians of this country, these privileged humans who notoriously ignore the rank and file who elect them.

I’d fed up with feeling that I don’t even have half a say in how this country is run. If MMP did nothing else but remind politicians that they’re the servants of the people, not their dictators, I’d be pleased.

Maybe then my tiny two-pronged vote might count for something more than a pencil tick on a page.

This curious advertisement appeared around the time of the referendum. 

MMP remains contentious thirty years later. One of its curiosities is that it allows unelected members to get into Parliament by being on a ‘list.’ The list is connected to a convoluted system that relates to how many electorate seats are won (or are not won) as against how many…well, it’s too complicated to explain here, so better to read this explanation, because after all this time I’m still not sure I understand it.

This compilation from 1996, after the first election under MMP, gives some of the views of people who voted or didn’t vote for the referendum, plus some animated explanations from Footrot Flats characters.

While MMP allows smaller parties to get a chance at being in Government, it also led to the appalling situation created by Winston Peters three terms ago, when he decided, after days of keeping the country waiting, that he would side with Jacinda and the Labour Party, even though National was ahead. This meant we got a coalition party governing us who turned out to be one of the worst in the country’s history. For many people it felt as though MMP made a mockery of their votes by allowing a coalition decided purely on the basis on one man’s say so.

Self-help books

First published in Column Eight on the 20^th October, 1993 

When I read those self-help How-To books something curious happens. I agree all along the line with what the author says, but as for doing something about the problem, a lazy streak takes over and mumbles, ‘Some other time.’

Only some How-To books, of course, demand a change in our lifestyle or character. The majority are in the How To Boil an Egg, or How To Repair Electrical Fuses and Flexible Cords Safely, mode.

NZ Books in Print shows only 24 titles starting with How To. But the Public Library’s computer lists some 4000! Plainly there’s a great deal of interest in teaching yourself How To Do Something – or at least a great deal of recognition by publishers that How To titles sell.

The variety is cosmic. How To Be a Space Scientist in Your Own Home, or How To Colonize. How To Abandon Ship, How To Be an Alien, and (really useful), How To Count Like a Martian. If physicists continue to redefine time and space and tell us that someday we’ll start going backwards, it may be useful to read How To Avoid the Future. 

As a male I can learn How To Be a Real Man, or a Family Man, or a Gifted Parent, or How To Be a King, or How To Be Popular with My Pet. (For people with dogs, that should be How To Be Pupular.)

A modern woman can read How To Be an Assertive, Not Aggressive, Woman: a total guide to self-assertiveness in life, in love and on the job. Or else she can learn How To Be Chic, Fabulous and Live Forever.

On the other hand she, or her husband, can learn How To Clean Everything (a book I think would have a very short life in all but the most particular households). It may be better to read How To Decorate a Dump.

While we’re on domesticity, we can learn How To Cook a Wolf – useful if we’re travelling in North America – or How To Deep-Freeze a Mammoth (something we may need if Nobel prizewinning scientists continue to produce genetic material from dead insects.) It may then be useful to read How To Tell a Proton From a Crouton.

Gardeners, you can learn How To Enjoy Your Weeds, How To Make a Cloud, a Holepunch (to make rain in the aforesaid clouds, no doubt), or How To Make Snop Snappers and other fine things.

Motorists, you can learn How To Be a Motorist (!), How To Avoid Automobile Accidents, and even How To Get Off Speeding Tickets.

In case someone has borrowed that book first, you may have to read How To Hold Up a Bank, or alternatively, How To Rob a Bank Without Violence.

After that it may be worth reading How To Survive Your Life, or if that’s not so difficult, How To Survive Christmas. At the worst, try How To Eat a Hotdog on the Main St of Thames.

If reading itself is a problem, you can tackle How To Read a Book. And if that’s approaching the matter too broadly, try How To Read a Page (if the worst comes to the worst, and neither of these is where you need to begin, there’s always How To See.)

The scope is enormous: I can learn How To Juggle, How To Spy, How To Be Poor, How To Conquer (it seems a bit late for that), or How To Banish Cellulite Forever. I can even learn How To Be a Pom, which should be useful with my in-laws.

Do you like to look on the negative side of life? Read How To Make Yourself Miserable for the Rest of the Century.

And if all this learning is too much for you, try How To Do Nothing with Nobody All By Yourself.

One of the many covers of this obviously popular book. 

Coming back to this column in 2026, I was interested to find that a number of these books were still in print, and those that weren’t were at least visible and described on sites like Goodreads, where they’re still read. A number of the titles, of course, are of books for kids, containing imaginative and playful ideas.  

One book, How to Enjoy Your Weeds, which took me a bit of tracking down, is out of print. But in light of the fact that this year, in our garden, we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time pulling out weeds (the excess weeds due to more rain than usual, I think), I could do with reading it. I might find something more useful to do with them than disposing of them. I’ve tried storing them in closed bins, but the stink is high when they’re released, and I’m still not sure they’re great for my compost. We’ve shaken the life out of them in order to retain the soil that clings to them, and we left them in large bags to be collected by the Garden Waste people. But still I cling to the idea that they must be good for something, since God made so many of them!  

Whoops!

First published in Column 8 on the 13^th October, 1993

Whoops! My column last week brought two phone calls about two different matters, both of which proved that I don’t know everything. Yet again. Naturally, I’ve since spent several sleepless nights evaluating my worth as a human being.

There was a third whoops (!) regarding an earlier column. In that one I said that the small Canadian town of Chemainus had only 32 murals. In fact, it now has 40. The brochure my wife brought home is the first edition, available at a more reasonable price only because it’s out of date.

To get back to the other two whoopses (!) Last week I talked about the success of Business Grow in Christchurch, wondering why Dunedin hadn’t picked up on the idea. Two days later Business Grow was launched in Dunedin! No credit to me, of course, since the first I heard about it was when the co-ordinator, Lynne Harrison, rang to tell me, but marvellous serendipity all the same.

I’m glad we’ve got in on the act, and hope Business Grow a la Dunedin is a soaring success.

My other phone call was from a European New Zealander. (That police word for Europeans, ‘Caucasian,’ gets up my nose.) He told me that October 10 (the day I thought there was little point in keeping in the calendar), had actually been a day of considerable importance in the history of the New Zealand Chinese community.

The Chinese called the day the Double Tenth, and always had a holiday on it until a couple of decades ago. The anniversary began with the dethroning of the last Chinese Emperor in 1911, when China became a republic.

New Zealand Chinese celebrated the day by shutting up shop completely, and holding a memorial service. Chinese children took the day off school, much to the envy of their European counterparts, and all the Chinese families went on a picnic at which sports and games were played.

One Chinese lady I spoke to said her family always had their portrait taken on that day, in the morning, before going off to Logan Park for the picnic.

By the 1950s the sporting side had become the major emphasis, according to Ng Bickleen Fong, the author of The Chinese in New Zealand and the sense of fellowship was being lost. The sporting aspect became a national affair; travel to the tournament was paid for by the Chinese Association.

In due course the Chinese people shifted the tournament to the Easter break so that more time could be spent at it.

The Double Tenth itself was stopped in 1972, write Dianne and Peter Beatson (in their book Chinese New Zealanders), because our Government decided to recognise the Communist Government in China. However, some Chinese still remember the day with a nostalgic warmth, though they celebrate it in a rather quieter way.

A similar commemoration takes place on November 18, but since it is a very much smaller ethnic group in New Zealand, the Latvians, most of us Europeans won’t have heard of it.

I’ve only ever known two Latvian New Zealanders, one of whom was the wonderful Lily Latisheva, an artistic and operatic lady of considerable presence. Her talents were rather unappreciated in her adopted town. (The other Latvian, conveniently, is married to my Chinese consultant.)

November 18, anyway, was when Latvia won her independence after World War I. Being squashed between other large hungry nations, she lost it again – until the recent demise of the Soviet Union.

Unearthing all these matters hitherto hidden to me makes it worthwhile writing a whoops (!) or two.

Puyi, the last Emperor of China

In 1996 I met Lynne Harrison. She came to the shop I was running to give us some advice on how to use Business Grow, which she was still involved with. I made mention of this in my diary at the time, but had forgotten about it until I checked for any references to ‘Business Grow’ in my own business life.

The full title of Ng Bickleen Fong’s book is Chinese in New Zealand – a study in assimilation.

 

Creating jobs?

First published in Column Eight on the 6^th October, 1993

The third anniversary of my first Midweek column comes midway between today and next Wednesday, on October 10. I could say this gives October 10 something to be proud of each year, but with due modesty, I won’t.

October 10 doesn’t seem to be a day on which other things of great note have happened, though it was the day Liz Taylor and Richard Burton got married for the second time – somewhere in Botswana. Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union on this day, and a British QC called Igor Judge rose to the High Court and became, confusingly, Mr Justice Judge.

Fascinating stuff, huh? At least the Pankhurst item has some topical relevancy.

Three years of finding column ideas have included hair-tearing when the Sunday evening clock is ticking on towards bedtime and I still haven’t written anything. On other occasions someone has spoken no more than a sentence and ideas have tumbled out too fast to keep up with.

The bit of the brain that produces ideas is a fairly enigmatic corner. It constantly cries, ‘Need more input!’ But having received aforesaid input, it’s just as likely to ditch the lot into some miscellaneous brain bin and inquire why you haven’t fed it today.

Thus, while feeding my brain from my 1988 collection of clippings, I came across a couple of items related to job creation ideas, both of which came from (good grief) Christchurch.

I hear on the news that Canterbury is now the fastest growing area for job creation in the country. Business Grow, the scheme which uses a business adviser to link businesses with a wide range of assistance to help them with expansion, began there. Four hundred have come out of this idea alone. (Has Dunedin begun Business Grow yet?)

Back to the 1988 clippings. On October 12 that year James Maddren, a Christchurch businessman, suggested to the South Island Local Bodies Association that they consider selective immigration to the South Island (like about a million people), to increase our population base and improve our economy. (A new job is supposed to be created for every five new people.)

The association’s executive committee was to investigate the proposal. I guess it did, but I haven’t seen droves of skilled immigrants arriving. Did the Government scotch the idea with its usual anti-immigration approach?

In another clipping a Christchurch law tutor named Owen Dennis ran an ideas seminar in Dunedin for the NZ Institute of Management. What he presented wasn’t new, but the first paragraph of the report reads, ‘Here’s a great idea: start an ideas competition to generate jobs and activity in Dunedin.’

I can’t remember anyone taking this up, although not being the most organised collector of detail, I may easily have missed it. Has anybody tried an ideas competition here in town?

We could do with an ongoing ideas presentation on a public basis, perhaps as a weekly column in one of the newspapers. A list of all sorts of ideas might well stimulate local brains dulled by too much occupation with incomes and outgoings.

The bright, witty, foolish and downright silly ideas would all need to have a home in such a list, because even though a particular idea may have no merit, it may spark off something really useful. They’d need to be ideas, though, not just criticism of the status quo.

Thomas Edison is said to have a goal of coming up with a minor invention every ten days and a major one every six months. He was one man. What might a similar city-wide goal in the job creation area achieve? And if Christchurch can do it, anyone can…I mean, can’t we?

 

Justice Igor Judge, courtesy of the BBC

As things do over 36 or so years, there have been some changes. I don’t know that the ideas idea has ever taken off, but immigration has, at least as far as the North Island is concerned. And Christchurch is a sprawling city nothing like its former self. So maybe the ideas idea worked well there.

Another creative idea in learning Spanish

 At the beginning of Sept I wrote about an approach to one part of learning Spanish that I was trying. It was slow, but was working well enough. It involved memorising ten random sentences and joining them together with a 'story' so that I didn't forget their order. 

The idea was to give me some fluency in getting Spanish words out of my brain in a proper order and onto my tongue. 

I've been doing that over the last few months as one aspect of my Spanish learning, but it takes a bit of effort to keep up with that as well as the daily use of Anki cards, reading the Bible in Spanish, and memorising a couple of Psalms as well (in Spanish, of course - I already know them well in English). 

I'm always keeping an eye out for different approaches because it's easy to get into a rut and not really put any effort into something you've doing for a while. Continuing to be creative, in other words. 

Anyway, another aspect of my learning has been to get Grok (the AI from X, formerly Twitter) to translate a children's book I wrote a few years back into Spanish, one short section at a time. At present we've just finished chapter four, so the progress is quite slow. That's okay, it's all part of the learning process. 

Yesterday I had an idea as to how I could make further use of this translation. Up till now I've been taking various sentences from each section as it gets translated and putting them on the Anki cards. I have a 'deck' on Anki that's devoted to these. Yesterday, I decided to challenge myself further by seeing if I could memorise the latest section that's been translated - in Spanish. This is going to take some time, but then learning Psalm 139 also took some time, but was worth it. It introduced me to new words, gave me a better sense of grammar than I'd previously gained while doing Duolingo, and showed me how Spanish has a different approach to the arrangement of words in sentences. 

I was already aware of that, of course - two years of Duolingo taught me some things at least - but getting that sense of re-ordering in my head rather than just parroting it off Duo forces me to think more carefully about where words go. Sometimes it even shows me why they go that way, though not always (so far!)

So, one more step on the way. I don't have any great ambition in terms of being able to speak Spanish at this point - there aren't many Spanish speakers in my part of the world - though I have improved in terms of reading it. Being able to speak it out, even if it's because I've memorised it, is another way of helping myself become more familiar with the language overall. 

The original cover of the book I'm having translated into Spanish -
one day I may have another go at updating it. 
Cover by Regan Nicholls

Murals

First published in Column Eight on the 22^nd Sept, 1993 

Before my wife went overseas to visit her family, we spent an evening with some friends. These people had not long before to Canada’s Vancouver Island. Since my wife was also going to be spending some time, they encouraged her to go and visit the town of Chemainus (pop 3500). She did. But more of Chemainus in a moment.

I suppose Dunedin is not unusual as a city these days in having a few murals scattered around. Every city has walls that cry out to stop being so boring. Neither, I guess, is Dunedin unusual in that it gives scant attention to those murals when someone decides the walls no longer serve a ‘useful’ purpose.

Considering the immense amount of fuss that’s been generated regarding the proper location of the Art Gallery, I find it strange that on at least two or three occasions I can think of, perfectly good murals have vanished because of some redevelopment.

Obviously art is only of worth when it’s stuck up in a gallery, at the perfect temperature, with lights somewhat dim, and people walking around in reverential tones. Robust outdoor art has to look after itself, and too bad if someone wants to take the wall down and recycle it.

Until a few years ago there was a delightful mural painted on a house on the corner of Tennyson St. All other buildings had been demolished, but this one hung on. Someone was optimistic enough about its future to paint a mural on it, but finally the house, and the mural, crumbled. I have a photograph of it somewhere, and wonder how many other people recorded it.

In the Dowling St carpark another mural was painted, on the shell of what had once been a picture theatre. This was truncated when some city planner decided the the shell served no purpose, and an open-plan carpark would be more aesthetic. Now we have what might be called the Venus de Milo of murals.

Murals are only to stop vandals spraying graffiti, aren’t they? Murals are things kids do on walls, as class projects, aren’t they? Murals are meant to be temporary, right?

That’s how it seems in Dunedin, but in Chemainus (pop 3500), they think otherwise. Over a period of several years the people of nearly-dead-on-its-feet Chemainus refused to let it become a ghost town. Instead they commissioned artists to paint murals on any walls not otherwise occupied.

There are now 32 murals. These murals have a double function: they are firstly a top tourist attraction, and have given Chemainus a revival in income terms.

Secondly, they’re a panorama of the history of the town, from its earliest Indian occupied days through the time when the sawmill made the place thrive, right on up to the present.

These paintings are representational, for the most part, some having an almost photographic reality about them. They’re full of the faces of earlier town residents, usually taken from old photos, each in a setting that explains their part in the town’s life.

Just imagine if, in Dunedin, the stern characters on the Early Settlers’ Museum walls left their portrait gallery and came out to breathe the open air, to be seen doing the things they did in real life. Or if events out of our history book took on a more visual form.

We’ve got plenty of boring, blank-eyed walls lazing around the city – including the new Archives building. New Zealand has plenty of artists who’d be glad of a commission to paint on a large ‘canvas’ a picture that would be seen by more than just the elite or wealthy.

And the people of Chemainus wouldn’t begrudge us imitating them. Karl Schutz, the man behind the idea, has already been in Australia to help set up a similar scheme there.

Almost the only kind of large-scale murals we now have in the city are advertisements, the sort of thing you can see anywhere in the world.

Let’s go for something different.

 

Lurch, a character from The Addams Family, 
which used to be on the entrance to a flat in View St. 

I’d love to say that this column had some effect on those in authority in Dunedin, but perhaps others were already thinking along the same lines. Suffice to say, Dunedin now has a large ‘collection’ of murals that range from the rough-edged to the superb…a few can be seen here. Already some of those that were existence when I wrote this have gone, but in general the newer ones are outstanding examples of what can be done.

I can no longer remember the mural in Tennyson St, and sadly don’t appear to have the photo that I talk about, though I have a wide range of photos of Dunedin murals taken over a number of years.

Chemainus now has around 53 murals. You can find an earlier post here that has links to some other sites with photos of Dunedin murals. 

Curiously enough it’s only in the last few days (late Sept 2026) that a mural of Ed Sherrin that itself dates back only a few years was ‘vandalised’ after his opening act Macklemore started to preach Pro-Palestine at a Sherrin concert.

Ed Sherrin mural before and after 

Useless?

First published in Column Eight on the 1^st Sept, 1993

While attending the last stretches of the Dunedin Competitions, my ear caught a line from a song on suffragettes: ‘We enjoy men individually, but as a group they’re rather stup…id.’

This must be Give Men Flak Week, because I’ve also come across two book titles: Things You Can Do With a Useless Man, and Dads Say the Dumbest Things. Can you imagine the outcry if the subject was the opposite gender? Sexism doesn’t appear to exist when men are being put down – it only runs one way.

Men, solid citizens as they are, have put up with being flailed for decades – long before women’s lib came on the scene. And they continue to suffer it. you only have to look at the television to see the way men are treated in commercials, or in sit-coms. They’re always the fools. The worst examples are the ones where some game is being advertised. Who’s the schmuck who loses? Always the father.

Let’s get real here. What man is useless? Useless is defined (rather weakly) in my dictionary as ‘having no practical use or advantage.’ But the inference in the book title I mentioned is of something even less than that: a person with no purpose or function at all.

You’d think that womankind, having been victims of oppression for so long, would (on gaining a measure of equality), look kindly on those now less fortunate than themselves. Not so. Condescension is the order of the day.

A Useless Man: this sounds to me like a man seen through the eyes of some woman who expects things of him that he has no skill at, or no innate ability to do.

Perhaps a useless man is one who doesn’t fit the Kiwi bloke model: the man who doesn’t drink much, if at all; the man who doesn’t go crazy if he misses a rugby match, or the man who can’t remodel his home because it’ll look worse at the end than it was at the beginning.

On the other hand, perhaps a useless man is one who communicates with his kids (even if, as they grow older, it is with some increasing degree of difficulty). The man who knows when his wife’s birthday, and their wedding anniversary, occur. The man who can take something his wife bought back to the shop, and complain – because his wife is too chicken to. The man who knows how to cook three variations of his favourite mince and rice dish.

The man who continues to love his wife when her logic fails him, when she has PMT three weeks running, when she decides to try out a recipe for a very strong curry or when she’s got the cheque book in a muddle.

If there really is such a creature as a useless male, he must be getting as rare as the yellow-eyed penguin, though perhaps needing less money spent on preserving his species.

One of the positive things unemployment has done for many blokes is to give them time with their kids when they never had it before. Time when they’re not tired, or absorbed in trying to do up the house after tea and on the weekends.

Now they have time to walk with their kids to school, to sit in on classes, to help them with their homework, and tuck them up at night. To go out and play games with them. That can only be an improvement.

But even apart from unemployed men, a feature of modern day manhood is the way in which they parent their kids: how many men of the last generation would have pushed a pram, carried their babies in a backpack, or even changed their nappies?

I get irritated at the way fathers in American sitcoms still act stricken when their wives are having a baby. I saw each of my children born: five wondrous and unforgettable occasions. I even helped deliver the last, a rather frisky fellow. This is something many older men never experienced.

But according to some, men are so useless. They can only repair cars, play pianos, clean drains, paint pictures, empty gutters, wash dishes, program computers, lay concrete, write books, keep wives warm, and snuggle children on their laps.

I’m sure there are many more things they’re useless at, but that’ll do for starters.

The Dunedin Competitions would have been the singing competitions specifically, the section I had most involvement with. I did occasionally accompany instrumentalists in the instrumental section as well.

Somewhat sadly, the two books I mention were both written by men. Men have a great ability to put themselves down.

Respect

First published in Column 8 on the 25^th August, 1993

A caption accompanying a photo of the Tokoiti School children receiving a computer from Mr Bolger was unsure whether the children were more in awe of the computer or of Mr Bolger. After all, he is the Prime Minister.

In the same week, however, we were told that yet again politicians had made it to the bottom of the list when it came to being trusted as a group.

I rather think that answers the question. Nevertheless, this isn’t going to be a column putting down the worthy people in Parliament – they spend enough time doing that themselves. Rather I want to look briefly at the whole matter of respect. (I note that Miles Singe had the same idea in his last column.)

There’s a prevailing theory that no one should be given respect as a matter of right. They have to earn it.

I don’t know when this idea arose, but I don’t think it was the norm in my youth. In those distant, halcyon days, if a person held a position of respect, you didn’t spend time questioning their motives, their behaviour and their attitudes. Rather you just got on with life and assumed they held that position because they’d been entrusted with it.

There have always been some people in authority who have demeaned their positions by poor behaviour. But the poor behaviour of some isn’t a reason to question the behaviour of all.

I believe there’s a place for questioning some in authority, but equally we have to assume a person holds a position more for a good reason than for a bad one.

Television is a prime mover in the demeaning of all sorts of groups, and not just demeaning them, but shoving their faces in the mud.

Television interviewers, in fact, would have to be considered leaders in the ‘earn-your-right-to-respect’ stakes: the normal approach to interviewing a person these days is to drag down all their defences.

Don’t let the person finish a statement; don’t let them contradict what you think they should say; mock anything that smacks of opinion; run down anything that hints of taking a stand.

Unless, of course, that stand is itself one that mocks authority.

When this approach becomes the norm for everyone, no one can do their job properly: someone will always question the behaviour of others, including their proper and good behaviour.

No authority group is immune from this questioning: police, judges, ministers of religion, teachers, civic authorities, parents – the list could be extended for pages.

In my more opinionated moments, I’ve blamed teachers for the way kids behave, and the way kids knock everything that was given due respect in the past. Teachers no doubt blame parents for allowing their kids to go their own way. Wherever the blame lies, both groups suffer, and as they suffer, so ultimately do the kids.

I know some authority figures have let us down, and others will continue to do so. In the end, however, an attitude that says you can’t tell me what to do because you haven’t earned the right to do so, is self-destructive.

A society where no one trusts those in charge, whatever that charge may be, is a society that will wind up trusting no one.

A backstabbing, name-calling, tongue-lashing, slur-casting, lampooning, scoffing, sneering, carping, critical and cynical society. Sound familiar?

Not the place to bring up the kids.

 

Respect across generations
courtesy AlgerianFrames

It’s disturbing to read this piece after thirty odd years: on one hand there is now virtually no respect for any authority, and on the other, there is virtually no authority that deserves respect. Every avenue of society has been affected by this disarray. Worse, for me, is that fact that we all join in this to some degree, in spite of knowing that we are soiling our own trousers in the process. The buck stops firmly at each of our doors.  

Men in danger

First published in Column Eight on the 16^th of June, 1993

When I began my column last week, Peter Ellis had been found guilty, but continued to act as an innocent man.

As the days moved on, it became obvious that there was more to the matter than we’d previously heard. Guilty or not, Peter Ellis’ behaviour had often been foolish, and the staff at the centre had allowed it to be so. We can now see why Ellis wasn’t – at first – the only person incriminated.

In the end, he took the brunt of the blame. and his conviction will add fuel to a volatile debate.

The debate is about a good deal more than the rights or wrongs of a particular childcare worker’s case. It’s about men working in childcare. I have no doubt there are some members of the community who now believe more than ever than men should not work with young children.

If Peter Ellis was guilty, and a long trial and jury decision say he was, then male childcare workers will have an uphill battle to maintain their jobs. Their behaviour with young children will become suspect in even the most innocent of situations.

The whole vile matter of child sexual abuse has poisoned the atmosphere of modern communities. We have the paradox that while society is now more generous in what can constitute a man’s role, men’s ordinary behaviour is treated with increased suspicion.

What was regarded in the past as part of wholesome normal relationships is even under a cloud. Bedrooms and bathrooms have become places where men can find themselves in danger.

Men can be in danger when cuddling children on their laps, or in having children in close proximity to the lower half of their bodies. Men can be in danger if they take children for walks in back streets or go into native bush areas.

And when men are put in the harrowing situation of being accused of sexual abuse, falsely, the discolouration of their lives extends to men in other, similar situations.

Do I exaggerate? Sexual abuse has so damaged many women’s view of men that not only are the guilty condemned (as they rightly should be) but the innocent are tainted.

If Peter Ellis is guilty, then he deserves punishment; there’s no doubt about it. He himself has said he regards sexual abuse of children as a disgusting thing, and it is.

But what if Peter Ellis is not guilty? What if the jury was wrong, and the prosecution was wrong? Worse, what if the social workers were wrong (as they were in an infamous case in England, when the families of half a village lost their children for a time because of the obsessions of social workers)?

Worst of all, what if the parents were wrong because their children told lies, or half-truths, or were led to say things by adults determined to find something sinister?

I worked in childcare when I was younger, in a climate that believed pre-school children needed males to relate to. It had taken years for men to be accepted in this area, an area where men are now needed more than ever.

I’m glad I’m not starting out in that work now: a man could quite innocently step into quicksand.

Sexual abuse, for all its publicity, its court cases, and all the suppressed hurts of people who are now speaking out, is not something the majority of men do. At a time when children need fathers in their families, and when they need men in daycare centres, it would be tragic if we began to believe it was.

 

Some years after the first trial and all the subsequent appeals and so on, an immensely well-researched book appeared on the case: Lynley Hood’s A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case. (October 2001). Dunedin: Longacre Press. ISBN 1-877135-62-3. This book produced extraordinary evidence that case was exceptionally badly handled by the police, that there was an large element of hysteria amongst the parents (a copycat of similar hysteria going on in the States at the time), the people who interviewed the children frequently believed things that the children made up, and much more. The book is hugely detailed, and makes for difficult reading, but it was in part instrumental in turning Ellis’ conviction around. There’s more information on the book in the link above.

 

Speechmaking

First published in Column Eight on the 9^th June, 1993.

Two rumours are doing the rounds. One has it that a computer programmer, hoping to promote his software, recently sent a programme entitled, ‘Make Your Own Speeches,’ to the Beehive. One of the queen bees, Jenny, desperate for help with her speech-making, threw it in her compatible and got a real buzz out of it.

The other rumour has Mike Moore secretly faxing his speeches out to all the other offices in the Beehive in the hope that someone, somewhere, will listen to him. Queen Jenny, being ultra-busy, grabs one of these and makes it the basis for her National Party conference speech.

I suspect that latter rumour has Moore basis in reality, since a typical piece of Moore impromptu was: ‘I don’t make promises, and those I make, I keep.’ (Huh?)

Jenny’s conference speech went much further into cloud cuckoo land: ‘We should not flinch from breaking the surcharge promise…to take the tough decisions to allow New Zealand to make more money, pay more tax and provide a better welfare society. Some people want social justice to come from socialism. I want it to come from opportunity.’

Lots of rhetoric and not much reality.

Maybe this is foot-in-the-mouth month. An Australian linguist recently claimed the New Zealand accent was rapidly changing. Why? Because, when we New Zealanders saw Britain joining the Common Market, we lost confidence in our Britishicity. Collectively we’ve instinctively felt that we’d better start sound like New Zealanders. Huh?

According to this linguist, if you’d asked an Aussie twenty years ago what a New Zealander sounded like he would probably have said ‘no different.’ This linguist is obviously a baby boomer. One Kiwi member of my family clearly remembers Australians laughing at her Kiwi accent as long ago as the 1940s.

The spoutings of the Experts (the Spurts?) is a plague upon all our houses. Not only do we have our own New Zealand variety – parliamentarians – but an endless stream of overseas Spurts who manage to make New Zealand a target for their roustabout sayings.

Fr Robert Sirico (yes, I asked who?, too), came here on a whistle-stop tour (or a mission from Michigan), to tell New Zealanders what to do about their economic situation, and to discredit clergy criticism of the Government. Maybe he’d also received one of Mike Moore’s speeches.

Fr Sirico, from Michigan, tells us that our domestic purposes benefit subsidies divorce. To take the financial considerations out of divorce we should scrap the benefit. A ‘free market free of government intervention’ wouldn’t pick up the pieces, says Fr Sirico. ‘The church must assume the role of the state in providing support for the needy.’

I thought the church was already having to do this – and barely keeping up with the overflow.

There are days when I think it’s the way I read the papers: do these aforementioned people only appear not to be making any sense? Are their words misrepresented, or placed out of context?

Sometimes when reading the news I feel like citoyen of Nancy who has been caught failing to wear his seatbelt while driving. He has a choice of punishments – a 150 franc fine (c’est irritable!), or a carnival-like trip in a car that rolls over and over (c’est magnifique!)

Trying to grasp some of the statements by those personages listed above leaves my head in the same state as the rolled-over Frenchman: Dizzy a la Gillespie.

Or alternatively, reading the news is sometimes like trying to read in the bus on winter nights. Citibus now appears to be saving power: the internal lights are so dim you can hardly see the bell-pull.

Or worse, it’s like trying to figure out whether the graffiti on a billboard in Cumberland St is the beginning of a theological statement, or the end of a philosophical one.

With the enigmatic simplicity of a speech-writing computer program, the writer has writ: ‘I AM.’

 

From the French road safety campaign recommending
that men should drive like women....

 The version of this column that appeared in the newspaper had two proofreading errors in the first paragraph alone. Probably the worst place to have errors; the current edition of one of my books has a similar problem: a spelling mistake in the first sentence!

 AI provides us with more information about the speech-writing program (which I seem to have inaccurately named):

This historic moment took place in 1993 when New Zealand computer programmer and satirist Simon Kember created a software program called ‘The Politician’ (sometimes referred to as the Automatic Speech Writer) and distributed it to members of the New Zealand Parliament.

The 1993 Speech-Writing Software

Long before the advent of modern generative AI like ChatGPT, Kember coded a text-generation algorithm using a specialized vocabulary. By selecting certain parameters, the software would automatically string together political buzzwords, policy platitudes, and rhetorical filler to generate complete, grammatically correct—yet entirely hollow—parliamentary speeches.

Public Reception and Parliament's Reaction

Kember designed the program as a satirical critique of the repetitive, focus-grouped, and formulaic language used by contemporary politicians.

• The Distribution: Kember sent floppy disks containing the program directly to various MPs across the political spectrum.
• The Irony: While intended as pure mockery, several parliamentarians and their staffers reportedly admitted that the program was surprisingly accurate and hilariously indistinguishable from real political rhetoric.

This 1993 stunt remains a legendary piece of early New Zealand computing history, demonstrating that the anxiety—and humor—surrounding automated political speechwriting began decades before the modern AI boom.

I’m not sure why I thought Jenny Shipley’s quoted speech was particularly unsound: compared to those we hear from the minor parties these days (the Greens at the moment are suggesting nationalising all supermarkets) it makes enough sense to sound feasible.

 As for Australians laughing at Kiwis accents, I can remember in the 1960s when members of a Sydney orchestra came over to play for a nationwide tour of the NZ Opera Company’s production of Die Fledermaus. The leader of the orchestra had an accent so strong that I initially thought he was a foreigner. I haven’t been able to discover who the Australian linguist was, sadly.

 AI also gives us more detail about the Nancy road safety campaign:

‘This scenario was a highly effective road safety campaign rather than a literal ‘pay or go to jail’ criminal punishment.

In Nancy, France, local police and road safety authorities utilized a rollover simulator (known in France as a voiture tonneau). Drivers caught without a seatbelt were given a creative ultimatum: they could either pay the standard 150-franc fine or agree to experience the rollover simulator to understand why the law existed.

• The Ultimatum: Instead of simply writing a ticket, officers gave unbelted drivers a choice. If they chose the simulator, they would get inside a modified, secured car cabin that safely but aggressively rotated 360 degrees on an axis.
• The Goal: The exercise was designed to vividly demonstrate the violent forces of a crash. Experiencing how difficult it was to stay positioned—even at a slow, controlled rotation—convinced many drivers that they would be severely injured or thrown from the vehicle in a real accident.
• The Outcome: Most drivers chose the simulator over paying the fine, and the shocking physical experience proved far more memorable and educational than a standard traffic ticket.’