Blunder over the wires means weekend trolley buses will not resume. Why am I not surprised?

Weekend trolley bus operations will not resume, despite Wellington ratepayers and taxpayers paying $9 million a year to run these expensive buses seven days a week from first bus to last. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

Greater Wellington Regional Council claims it is too expensive to use the trolley buses at weekends, but it will look at the issue again in 2011. Yeah, right.

As the long-suffering readers of this blog well know, I have been banging on since December 2007 about the failure to operate trolley buses on weeknights, weekends and on most routes at most times on weekdays, despite contracts requiring trolley buses to be operated on the wired routes.

Instead, the majority of weekday daytime services are run by ancient diesel buses. Coffins and SL202s are the models. The drivers and the bus company actually prefer using them to modern trolley buses, so the trolleys are only used as a last resort, if a diesel bus is not available.

After I complained repeatedly to GWRC about trolleys being taken off the roads after the evening peak hour despite Go Wellington being contracted to run them, GWRC finally stirred, and, in the past month, trolley buses have actually stayed on the streets after the evening peaks on one night, sometimes two nights, a week.

But now it is officially confirmed that weekend trolley services will remain diesel operated.

The reason is that the clever clogs at GWRC (which pays the $9 million subsidies not to have trolley buses) and Wellington Cable Car Ltd (a city council quango which owns the overhead wires) completely overlooked the contractual requirement to operate weekend trolleys when maintenanace of the overhead was taken from Go Wellington last year and given to Transfield.

The geniuses agreed to a contract that provided only for weekday operation. When GWRC finally asked meekly why the trolleys remained in their depots at weekends, they found Transfield demanding more money to cover the costs of having crews on hand to fix the wires if they somehow fell down at the weekend.

Ergo, no weekend trolley buses.

The most ominous sentence in the piece of pap issued by GWRC announcing this decision is this: “By this time [2011] several trolley bus-specific and wider public transport reviews will have been carried out, giving us a clearer indication of the role and financial implications of trolley buses in our public transport network.”

The only way to read this is that come 2011, it will be decided trolley buses are too expensive to run at any time, despite the many millions of dollars ratepayers and taxpayers have spent these past two years to renew the trolley fleet and upgrade the overhead wires.

I give up.

Vale Janice Graham: 1999 Alliance candidate and Usenet legend

Some sad news. Janice Moira Graham, the old Alliance sparring partner of David Farrar’s — cited in my recent article about Mr Farrar’s work in Mt Albert — has died.

Jaymam alerted me to this in a comment on this blog, and he has since posted the details of Janice’s death notice, published in the Herald:

GRAHAM Janice Moira. Born 13 May 1952. Tragically taken from us 5 May 2009 at her home by the sea. An academic, community leader, generous brave and kind in adversity. Much loved mother of Johnathon, Guy and Martin. Janice will be resting at home til the service on Wednesday. Service 13 May 2009, Tilton, Opie & Pattinson New Lynn at 11am.

Jaymam has advised me by email that Janice died of an asthma attack.

This old Herald article, from the 1999 election campaign, is the only one about Janice I have been able to find online quickly.

Janice was a legend in the New Zealand Usenet newsgroups in the 1990s, posting hundreds of articles a day some days, most of them attacking the then National Government (and David Farrar, who worked for it and posted regularly in Usenet in those pre-blog days).

She strongly believed in the causes she espoused, to the point of standing for Parliament for the party that best represented her. Our democracy is as strong as it is because of energetic political activists like Janice.

Janice died far too young, only days short of her 57th birthday, the day she will be buried.

Rest in peace Janice. The denizens of 1990s Usenet will remember you fondly, much as some, or many, disagreed with you.

PANIC IN THE SKIES!! WE’RE ALL DOOMED!! PIGS FLY!!

The swine flu scare is déjà vu all over again. The media internationally and in New Zealand are beating this up the same way they did with the Y2K bug, SARS, Bird Flu, Global Warming and much more.

Scare stories suggesting many of us are doomed. Journalists meeting aircraft asking passengers if anyone on the flight had sneezed. Massively increased sales of Tamiflu. Again.

Swine flu is one of the mildest strains of the many flu strains and has spread fairly innocuously around the world a couple of times in my own lifetime. The influenza virus actually originated in birds, then spread to pigs which infected humans millennia ago.

World renowned expert Professor John Oxford, Professor of Virology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Queen Mary’s School of Medicine in London, revealed these inconvenient truths on Kathryn Ryan’s programme this morning.

New flu strains go round the world every year. Thousands of New Zealanders catch the illness annually without it becoming front page news. Some of them even die of it, especially the frail elderly.

Folks, there is nothing to see here but another media and political beat-up. Time to move on.

Sigh.

Machiavellian maestro David Farrrar manipulates the media, Labour and the Greens to deliver Mt Albert to National

In the mid-1990s, David Farrar (left) was awarded the title “Master of the Net” by one of his online political opponents, Janice Moira Graham, who went on to become an (unsuccessful) Alliance Party election candidate. The two frequently duelled in the nz.politics group on Usenet, a pre-Web network of Internet discussion groups that has been fading into obscurity in recent years thanks to the rise of blogging.

Janice was exasperated that David knew so much about the Net that he was even able to set up new newsgroups. He was extraordinarily Net-literate at a time most people had not heard of the Internet, let alone went online, where David lived then just as he does now with Kiwiblog.

A former Young National’s chief, David had Net skills such that he won a job in the National Party offices at Parliament when Jim Bolger was prime minister, remaining through to Bill English’s time as opposition leader when he left to set up his Curia Market Research polling firm.

While working at Parliament, David was instrumental in setting up some of the original government websites and even writing the online biographies of past prime ministers. Online, David was as all over everything then as he is today.

It is thus no wonder that David is such an influential blogger. “Lord of the Blog” is how Cactus Kate describes him, echoing Janice’s Master of the Net all those years ago. What isn’t so widely understood is his enormous backroom political influence, in the National Party (he is its paid pollster) and elsewhere, especially in the news media.

Journalists not only read his blog avidly, they contact him seemingly daily to seek his comments on almost every subject known to humanity, allowing him to get a quiet blue tinge into print, radio and television stories usually without him being identified as the unparalleled National Party activist he is.

The fact he’s a really nice guy who gets on well with most of his political opponents helps him immensely.

Despite David’s extraordinary pervasiveness and influence, it has been recently nonetheless breathtaking to watch day by day and week by week as he single-handedly set up the Mt Albert electorate in Auckland to fall to National in the coming byelection required by the resignation from Parliament of Helen Clark to take up her very senior new job at the United Nations.

Mt Albert used to be a working class Auckland seat that always voted Labour, but in the 27 years since Helen Clark took it over in 1981, it has been steadily gentrifying and there is little working class about it today. The fact it remained so loyal to Labour during these gentrifying years is in no small measure thanks to her being one of the same arts-loving, middle class educated people as those who have moved into it during her tenure.

David quickly deduced that Mt Albert could be won by National should Labour be scared into running an unknown candidate in the byelection and the Greens be prompted into running a high-profile one to split the vote, allowing a quality National candidate to come through the middle.

In an audacious piece of political scheming worthy of Machiavelli, David floated the notion that the Mt Albert byelection would result in the return to Parliament of Judith Tizard, the Labour MP for Auckland Central who lost the seat at the general election and who was for years one of the favourite targets for the misogyny of the Blogosphere’s wingnuts (of whom David is not one, but whose blog’s comments section bursts to breaking point with their vitriol).

This notion was predicated on Labour selecting its most obvious and strongest candidate for the seat, former Oxfam boss Phil Twyford, a long-time resident of the electorate and a Labour list MP since the election.

Under the rules of MMP, if a list MP wins an electorate in a byelection, a list vacancy is created which is filled by the next unsuccessful candidate on the party list of the former list MP.

David shouted from his blog that a vote for Phil Twyford in Mt Albert would be a vote for Judith Tizard’s return to Parliament, with the remorseless suggestion that Judith Tizard was useless and voters would rebel, voting National rather than Labour to stop her returning to the House by its back door.

Judith was not the next unsuccessful candidate on Labour’s list. Damien O’Connor was, but David also reasoned that this likeable former minister (who also lost his seat in November) was assured of returning because Michael Cullen was about to resign his list seat due to getting some plum government appointments, which David also wrote about in the context of a Tizard return.

It’s probably not too long a bow to draw to speculate that National offered Dr Cullen the SOE jobs he’s just been given to encourage him out of Parliament to ensure Damien’s return and thus the certainty that Judith would be the next unsuccessful list member back.

The news media quickly picked up David’s line that “Phil Twyford means Judith Tizard” and this panicked Labour, which undertook polling and focus groups in the electorate to see whether voters would be less likely to support Labour if a Twyford victory brought Judith back to Parliament.

The polling presumably found the latter to be the case, so Phil announced he was not going to stand.

“Labour MP Phil Twyford will not seek nomination for the Mt Albert by-election, resolving the party’s Tizard dilemma,” said the Herald this week in a story that had David crowing with unsuppressed delight.

The effect of this is that someone Mt Albert voters have never heard of will be the Labour candidate, probably Baghdad-based UN aid worker David Shearer, who has been out of New Zealand most of the past 20 years, making it harder for Labour to retain the seat at a time National is still very high in the opinion polls.

Meanwhile, the clever Mr Farrar was also busy on Kiwiblog promoting the ideal of the Greens running their far-left co-leader Russel Norman to raise their profile, and Russel duly accepted the challenge, which David positively gloated about yesterday.

Labour leader Phil Goff was reportedly deeply unhappy at this choice of a Greens candidate because he knows full well it could seriously split the left vote in Mt Albert, absent a strong candidate like Phil Twyford, very likely allowing National to win the seat with its high-quality list MP Melissa Lee.

Chuffed at his successes, David is now off from Wellington to Mt Albert in the Blogmobile in which he and his mate Cameron Slater (the National Party blogger Whale Oil) campaigned for National around New Zealand during the general election campaign. Cameron will again be joining him for the duration.

David might not be National’s official campaign manager, but he is its de facto one, its most cunning one, a true maestro of the dark arts of politics. Mt Albert could be his greatest moment to date, and the news media and the Labour Party, even the Greens, have fallen for his machinations hook, line and sinker.

Little Olivia — star of Labour’s 1984 campaign — is real and living in London

Olivia (right) and her mother today

Exclusive

Little Olivia was the star of David Lange’s campaign for the 1984 election. Print and television ads showed the surprisingly serious three-year-old on Lange’s knee, with the message that she already owed $5000 to foreign bankers thanks to the profligacy of National’s Rob Muldoon, who lost the election to Lange’s Labour Party.

Little Olivia made such an impact on journalists like me who covered the 1984 election that, for many elections afterwards, we looked up the public debt, divided it by the number of New Zealanders and reminded the public how much she now owed. Little Olivia had become a journalistic device that kept on keeping on.

The public debt kept going up for another 10 years under both Labour and the National government that replaced it in 1990, but from the mid-1990s, it fell steadily as the government accounts moved into increasingly big surpluses.

Helen Clark’s finance minister, Michael Cullen, was regularly portrayed as Scrooge because he used the surpluses to repay Olivia’s debt rather than spend them on tax cuts, as many commentators demanded.

In today’s Dominion Post, my former colleague, political writer Dr Vernon Small again trots out the journalistic device that became Olivia. His context was Finance Minister Bill English’s announcement of rapidly rising public debt caused by the government accounts falling back into deficit (after years of surpluses) because of the present Great Recession.

“Olivia would now be 28,” Vernon writes. “It is difficult to know how a generation able to discount fears about government debt will react to the ugly forecasts in [Bill English's] May 28 Budget.”

Vernon may not know this [Update: He informs me he does] , but Olivia is a real person who portrayed herself in those 1984 advertisements. I only found this out when I met her recently. Until then, I had believed, probably like many people, that she was a child model used by an advertising agency and given the name Olivia for the campaign.

Little Olivia indeed is now 28. A lovely young woman, she celebrated her birthday the other day. She is on her OE with her Australian boyfriend, working in London where she is an architect with a great career ahead of her.

I met Olivia at a party at her mother’s home in Wellington. Her mother asked me, before the party and given my interest in politics, if I remembered Little Olivia. Of course I did, I replied. I had written about her many times over the years in the context of New Zealand’s debt. I was able to show her mother some of the articles.

“I was a Labour supporter in 1984,” Olivia’s mum told me. “The party wanted a young child to appear in advertisements with David Lange to highlight the country’s debts. We were happy for Olivia to be in them, but the people making the ads wanted to change her name to something like Barbara or Susan, because they thought Olivia was not really a Labour kind of name. We insisted that people with children with names like Olivia were supporting Labour.”

And so Olivia starred under her own name. Somehow, Little Barbara would not have been anywhere near as memorable.

• Request: Can anyone send me an image of the 1984 picture of Olivia with David Lange? I’d like to put it on this post.

Taito trial further evidence Transparency International right to declare New Zealand the ‘world’s least corrupt country’

During the term of the former Labour government, the wingnut fringe of the blogosphere daily foamed at the mouth in its portrayal of Helen Clark and her ministers as corrupt.

When, last September, the independent agency Transparency International declared that New Zealand was the least corrupt country on Earth (equal with Denmark and Sweden), the blogosphere’s far right went into apoplexy.

An article I wrote on Transparency’s report attracted scores of hysterical comments. The nastiest of all New Zealand bloggers, Fairfacts Media (who specialises in misogynist attacks on Helen Clark and vomiting bigotry at Muslims) even complained to Transparency that its facts were wrong. Of course, he got nowhere because the facts are incontrovertible.

This week, former Labour MP and minister Taito Phillip Field has gone on trial for alleged corruption in the course of his public office.

This is not the place to debate the merits or otherwise of the case against him – that is for the jury to decide, so please, no comments about this case.

But what the trial shows, yet again, is why Transparency International was able to declare New Zealand to be the least corrupt country of the 180 it ranked.

Field is on trial not because New Zealand is corrupt, but because it is not. Our law enforcement agencies prosecute any public official against whom evidence of corruption is found. This happens so rarely (no sitting MP has previously been charged) because, with extremely few exceptions, our public officials are overwhelmingly and demonstrably not corrupt.

Some countries have the best police force money can buy and public officials and politicians who make as much if not more money from kickbacks as from their salaries. Try to bribe a New Zealand police officer or public official and you will almost certainly land in the dock. Ask for or accept a bribe and you will also almost certainly land in the dock. We all know that, so even those few of us who would contemplate offering a bribe hardly ever do.

As I said in my September article: You can’t possibly do better than be the least-corrupt country in the world in Transparency International’s list. We are not number two, we are not number three, four, five, six or seven. We are at the very top. No country scores better than New Zealand for being less corrupt. Not one.

Top of Transparency’s list is a very good place to be indeed. Well done New Zealand.

TV3 beat-up on Maori names for the North and South islands misses many interesting (and historical) points

Normally, TV3’s 6pm news is more professional than the competing One News bulletin. Though obsessed as much as One with endless, mindless “live crosses,” 3 News more often than One leads its bulletins with “hard news” rather than some celebrity event or a beat-up of a minor crime story. It even still has an informative business news segment, something One dropped some years back.

Sadly, last night’s 3 News lead story, on the Geographic Board’s announcement that it was looking at formalising the names of the North and South islands and adopting alternative Maori names, was one of the shoddiest beat-ups it has broadcast in a long while.

Seemingly designed to whip up the talkback hordes, the item started by saying that “the same organisation that ruled in favour of an ‘h’ in Wanganui” was investigating Maori names for the North and South islands.

The North Island could be renamed Te Ika a Maui (The Fish of Maui) and the South Island Te Wai Pounamu (The Water of Greenstone), it was breathlessly suggested.

It even trotted out Wanganui mayor Micael Laws (see my article on him) to attack the proposal as “stupid,” with the caption under his picture insisting Laws was “NOT speaking from “WHANGANUI” (to use the same form of the caption as appeared on screen).

The online text version of this pathetic piece does not capture the bigotry of what appeared on screen. Both are here on TV3’s website, with a link to a video version from the text one. If you missed it, enjoy.

The facts behind the story are actually much more interesting. Unlike our country’s official name “New Zealand”, it turns out that the names “North Island” and “South Island” have never been officially recognised in legislation. They have simply come into general use over a long period, despite the islands being given only Maori names on early European maps.

It seems our use of North and South for our main islands is on almost a similar (non) legal footing as “Aotearoa,” which many of us have used for years as an increasingly fond alternative to our country’s legal name.

According to the Geographic Board’s media release, the board was asked in 2004, by long-time campaigner Keith Darroch of Christchurch, to rename the South Island “Te Wai Pounamu.”

Says board chairman Dr Don Grant: “The board’s view was that replacing the name ‘South Island’ was not appropriate, but that alternative Maori names should be collected and considered for both the North Island and South Island, as a related pair of names.”

It also wants to formalise legally the names “North Island” and “South Island.” It has embarked on a consultation with iwi to get opinions on what Maori names should be used as alternative names for the islands. This consultation is because Te Ika a Maui and Te Wai Pounamu have not been the only names Maori have used for the islands (just as Aotearoa is not the only name Maori have used for New Zealand), though they are the dominant ones.

A fascinating backgrounder on this issue has been published online by the board. Among other gems, it says Captain Cook used, for the New Zealand maps he drew, names that he gleaned from the Maori he met during his voyages here in 1769, 1773 and 1777 — “Tovypoenammu,” Cook’s spelling of Te Wai Pounamu, and “Aeheinomouwe,” his spelling of what might have been “He Ahi No Maui” (A Fire of Maui) or “He Hi No Maui” (A Thing of Maui).

As with Cook’s maps, many other early European maps of New Zealand used variants on today’s spelling of Te Wai Pounamu as the name of the South Island and variants of Something-of-Maui for the North Island.

The two dominant Maori names for the islands were used with North and South on official government maps until the 1950s, after which they stopped being used. The board’s research has so far not uncovered why that happened.

TV3’s best efforts to the contrary, there is clearly no issue here worthy of a racial debate as has erupted over the spelling of the city of which Micael Laws is the mayor.

All the Geographic Board is doing is undertaking a process by which the names North Island and South Island will be legally formalised, and alternative Maori names acceptable to Maori will also be adopted.

The consultation to get such a consensus is welcome because it shows the board is not assuming that Te Ika a Maui and Te Wai Pounamu should be used merely because they are so entrenched as the Maori names for the two main islands. For example, “Aotearoa” was used historically by some Maori as the name of the North Island, not of the entire country.

At the end of the process, there will be no legal requirement to use the chosen Maori names.

Says Dr Grant: “Alternative naming means that either the English names or the Maori names could be used individually or together. This differs from dual naming where both names are used together in official documents, such as maps.”

As a fascinating historical footnote, it also needs stating that the British settlers who moved to New Zealand after the signing of the Treaty in 1840 adopted their own names for the two islands. They called the North Island “New Ulster” and the South Island “New Munster.” Those names long ago fell into disuse.

If Micael Laws thinks it is “stupid” to adopt Maori names as alternatives for our two big islands, maybe his mana will be restored by asking the board to reinstate those “historical” names New Munster and New Ulster as further alternatives. After all, he bases his demands for retaining the spelling “Wanganui” on what he claims are historical grounds.

Fiji. Not the way the world should be. But not wise to send our troops there, either

One of the many nice things about our prime minister, the nice Mr Key, is that he is refreshingly candid in many of his public utterances. He does not seem always to parrot the “key lines” provided to politicians by their advisers to keep them “on message” and he often says what he thinks in response to media questions, rather than give a vague answer that means little to anyone.

Given this, it is likely that our defence establishment would have suffered spasms yesterday when Mr Key told TV One’s Breakfast show that he would consider sending New Zealand troops to Fiji if the situation there got worse.

“If it was part of a multi-lateral effort to stabilise peace in a dangerous situation in Fiji of course New Zealand would consider that,” he said. “It’s very concerning in Fiji … I think it’s tragic actually.”

What is happening in Fiji is indeed tragic, but the biggest tragedy that would follow any despatch of New Zealand troops to Fiji would be the massacre that would befall the New Zealand troops. Fiji has the South Pacific’s most hardened military (it is why the UN keeps hiring them as peacekeepers around the world) and would be more than a match for our troops.

Mr Key has probably forgotten the reaction of our defence chiefs to the 1987 order of then Labour prime minister David Lange to send our most able troops – our SAS – to Fiji to seize control of an Air New Zealand 747 jet taken over on the tarmac at Nadi airport by a deranged man.

At the time of the hijack, Fiji’s military had just staged its very first coup, overthrowing a newly elected government not welcomed by the military.

Our defence chiefs stalled and stalled sending the SAS to the aid of the jumbo jet, arguing that our boys would be massacred by their Fiji chums, who would see the arrival of New Zealand troops as an act of war.

Eventually the standoff was solved when one of the pilots smashed a whisky bottle over the deranged man’s head, rendering him incapable of further threats, and the jet was able to resume its flight safely.

It is difficult to know what to do about the crisis taking place in Fiji. Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama, the head of the Fiji military and since 2006 his country’s self-appointed prime minister, lacks political strategy as a strong suit, but nor is he some deranged tyrant.

In 2006, he overthrew the elected government of prime minister Laisenia Qarase, whom he had ironically installed after suppressing the 2000 coup fronted by businessman George Speight. Behind Bainimarama’s coup was a move by the Qarase government to pardon those responsible for the 2000 coup. In the latter, elements of the military attempted to murder Commodore Bainimarama and it has been reported that he ordered those who were caught to be shot summarily without any due process.

Bainimarama’s main gripe seems to be the 1990 constitution, largely authored by New Zealand’s own former governor-general, Sir Paul Reeves. That document, with its race-based parliamentary electoral system, entrenched ethnic Fijian dominance of the political system and further penalised the large ethnic Indian population, who are responsible for most of Fiji’s economic strength but whose members are not even allowed to buy the land their homes and businesses sit on.

Bainimarama, who like almost all of Fiji’s military is an ethnic Fijian, claims he wants to adopt a racially neutral electoral system where each person would have one vote of equal value to everyone else’s. That sounds laudable and he appears to have significant support from Fiji’s ethnic Indians. But he keeps putting off the date of the promised elections, now scheduled for, wait for it, 2014.

On Easter Thursday, Fiji’s Court of Appeal ruled that the 2006 coup was unconstitutional (by its very nature, any coup must be unconstitutional). Bainimarama responded by having his figurehead president, Ratu Josefa Iloilo, sack every single one of the country’s judges, abolish the constitution and impose strict media censorship.

This is the latest crisis in a country that has experienced so many crises since that first military coup 21 years ago and the problem seems intractable.

While Bainimarama is not, as I stated above, conducting a reign of terror against the Fiji population and while he does, at least on the surface, appear to have some laudable aims, such as bringing in one person-one vote, he does not, as Barack Obama conceded recently about the American military strategy in Afghanistan, have an “exit strategy.”

Thus Fiji drifts from day to day and crisis to crisis with its economy ever weakening and facing the very real threat of external economic sanctions if Bainimarama does not quickly agree to a speedy election. Bainimarama himself is reportedly in fear of elements of his own military, some of whom don’t much like his stated aim to give Indians equal voting rights with ethnic Fijians.

The Easter Thursday Court of Appeal decision, though immediately quashed by dictatorial fiat, may yet be the catalyst that brings this tragedy to a head with some kind of satisfactory outcome for all involved. I certainly hope so.

Indulgences we can do without

Climate change has become the fastest-growing global religion of our time. By the week it takes on more features of the age-old theistic religions but without the moral, humbling faith of those religions.

Buying some air tickets recently, I was bemused to see Air New Zealand offering me the chance to pay extra for wind farm carbon credits or to plant some trees to offset the alleged environmental damage of the flight.

What tripe. Air travel is one of the marvels of this technological age, not a curse on the world. Selling “carbon offsets” is nothing more than a resurrection of the religious “indulgences” sold by churches in Europe 1000 years ago, whereby those who had “sinned” could buy an “indulgence” from the church to cleanse the sin.

Even the language of Air New Zealand’s website is nakedly religious – it talks of “pastoral” tree planting. Bless me Father, for I have flown.

Wind turbines are a fine way to generate clean electricity but we shouldn’t be praying before them as if they are some latter-day Cross.

Trees are vital to the environment, because, as they grow, they turn the carbon dioxide we humans breathe out into the oxygen we live by as we breathe in. The scientific evidence now is that the minute increase in the tiny amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (CO2 is less than 400 parts per million) is helping trees and other plants to grow faster, which will be of major benefit to the planet and to the economy.

But it is scientifically absurd to be told we should pay to plant a tree as penance for taking a flight that gets us where we want to go in a small fraction of the time we used to endure by horseback, foot or sailing ship.

My bullshit antennae is really bristling with these indulgences.

A load of rubbish set to become an issue with the likely demise of supermarket plastic bags

There’s been quite a fuss this past week about Foodstuffs (umbrella group for the New World, Pak’n’Save and Four Square stores) planning to charge customers 5c from August for each plastic bag their groceries are packed in.

Whether this is a genuine environmental move by the group (whose stores are owner-operated), or just a cynical cash grab, is a matter for your own opinion, but there is one overlooked issue.

From my unscientific observations around the country, most of our household rubbish is put into these supermarket bags (which most of us seem to keep somewhere in the kitchen for this purpose) before the filled and closed bags are put in the yellow plastic kerbside rubbish collection bags here in Wellington or in wheelie bins in places like Auckland.

Using supermarket bags this way is a form of recycling in its own right and makes the rubbish disposal system cleaner.

In our house, we already use canvas bags for most of our shopping. They are sturdier and hold more goods than the flimsy plastic bags supplied by supermarkets and are obviously better for the environment because they can be used again and again and again.

But we still try to get a few supermarket bags each week as we need them for the kitchen waste tidy, which would get filthy if we simply put the rubbish into the tidy before putting it into the yellow plastic council bag.

If supermarket plastic bags get banned altogether (as some activists want and which seems eventually destined to happen), households would still have to buy such bags to put in our kitchen tidies. Not all of us fertilise vegetable gardens with our rubbish. Some rubbish needs to be put out for collection.

In Wellington it’s ironic that the yellow council bags are plastic anyway but there’s another issue. A new Wellington City Council bylaw that took effect late last year requires us to “put your recycling in plastic supermarket bags so it doesn’t blow away, with paper and cardboard in one bag and everything else in another.”

These plastic bags then have to go into the small plastic recycling bins we put outside the house each week with the big yellow plastic rubbish bag.

Recently the council proposed replacing the bins with official (and charged-for) plastic bags but the hypocrisy of this quickly led to that plan being dumped.

But it still leaves us with a requirement to use supermarket plastic bags even to wrap our recyclable rubbish. With the days of supermarket bags likely to be numbered, we need to find a smart, clean way to replace them for their very practical household use of smartly and cleanly bagging our rubbish.

Caveat emptor rules the skies as Air New Zealand quietly adds surcharges to its published online fares

Air New Zealand is quietly adding taxes and surcharges back on to its advertised transtasman flight costs from Wellngton.

When I flew to Sydney and back in January, I was delighted – and blogged about it – to discover the claimed online Air New Zealand price was the full cost of the ticket. No taxes, fuel surcharges or anything else were added after I booked the ticket.

The month before, we’d been stung by a Pacific Blue flight to Brisbane and back, where the advertised online price was almost doubled by unheralded taxes, fuel surcharges and other costs (especially for the return trip) after we booked.

Needing to go to Melbourne briefly, we recently booked tickets online with Air New Zealand, accepting its advertised online cost of $296 each one way. But the moment I accepted this, an extra cost for numerous taxes of $64.80 was charged (none of which was for the airport departure tax, for which you pay another $25 at the Travelex booth).

Given this airline has been advertising its online bookings as having “No Hidden Costs” and given when I used it to go to Sydney so recently and the published online price was the actual fare charged, I am not impressed.

With the lack of competition on transtasman flights from Wellington to Sydney and Melbourne, I have never expected actually to be able to buy fares like those advertised this past week and today in the DomPost, for $199 to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane on Air New Zealand.

If anyone has clinched such a deal I’d love to hear about it.

Pacific Blue only flies transtasman to Brisbane from Wellington. Qantas seems to be all but giving up transtasman services from Wellington (as it is about to abandon New Zealand domestic routes in favour of its “budget” subsidiary Jetstar). So Air New Zealand is in a powerful, near-monopoly position from the capital and can charge accordingly. That’s business and good on them.

Nonetheless, under the Fair Trading Act, travellers should at least expect to pay no more than the price stated on the airline’s website for the flight they want to book, not be slugged unpublished extras once deciding to book that flight.

The fine print of today’s newspaper ad (print edition), states: “Return government & airport taxes will vary.”

Well might they vary, but Air New Zealand knows full well what these taxes are, and was including them in its published fares as recently as when I last travelled in January. It should continue to do so.

Hurling tomatoes at the celebthority in the pillory

The Tony Veitch affair is the media at its worst and the media as it now is. Welcome to the media future, today.

Veitch was a minor media person, employed part time to read the sports segment of the awful bulletin that passes for the “news” at 6pm on One.

When the story of his assault on his former girlfriend, Kristin Dunne-Powell, appeared in the Dominion Post last July, I rambled:

The media makes somebody a celebrity. The celebrity is happy to pocket the hundreds of thousands of dollars that results from the media attention. The media discovers a transgression by the celebrity, and throws the celebrity to the lions to the cheering of the mob and the baying of the media pack. It happens over and again, here and overseas. In the Veitch affair, the 6pm news became the ultimate in obscene reality television, the bulletin’s presenters sitting in their own Big Brother house as viewers voted in online polls to decide if Veitch would be ejected. And he was.

When Veitch pleaded guilty yesterday in the Auckland District Court to a charge of assault, the media boasted he was “the biggest show in town.” The court was packed, standing room only, with reporters and other media people there to cheer at Veitch’s public humiliation.

Yes, this is a news story, but it is not, by any means, the most important news story of the day, week, month or year, which is how the media have been treating it. The coverage palpably revelled in journalists and “celebs” kicking Veitch while he was down, the way he admitted kicking his girlfriend while she was down.

I am glad I am not actually working as a journalist at the moment. This kind of celebthority roast is what made me seek my living elsewhere, after the serious news stories I was writing about issues and events that actually mattered were not being published, while I was expected to write gushing pieces about Judy Bailey losing her job and Charlotte Dawson having a mermaid tattooed on her waist.

Had I still been a journalist, I suspect I would have been forced to write about the unfortunate Veitch and his unfortunate ex. To be part of the media mob hurling tomatoes at the celebthority in the pillory.

Never again. Please.

Grasping US lawyers want to sue airline for Captain Sullenberger saving everyone aboard the plane that came down in the Hudson

Captain Sullenberger

New York law firm Kreindler and Kreindler is signing up passengers from US Airway’s Flight 1549 to sue the airline for the “trauma” of their lives being saved after Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger heroically put the Airbus A320 they were on safely down in the Hudson River after both its engines were knocked out by a flock of Canada geese on take-off from New York’s La Guardia airport last month.

I can’t imagine anything that could better demonstrate the depravity of the American legal system than this.

All those 150 passengers and five crew were dead the moment the plane hit the geese moments after take-off. Until then, it was regarded as impossible to survive such an incident over a heavily built-up area like Manhattan. Even the air traffic controller dealing with Flight 1549 believed everyone aboard was doomed.

Yet Captain Sullenberger was able calmly to glide the powerless A320 down to a perfect landing on the Hudson. It wasn’t the “textbook landing” some ignoramuses have claimed as a landing like that is not in the textbook. And the jet floated. Only one person, a crew member, was injured. Some passengers did not even get wet, being able to step off the plane’s wings onto rescue boats.

America’s legal system has bizarre features that encourage litigation for damages real or imagined, but even so it is hard to imagine how the airline could be liable in the circumstances for the massive damages being sought by these grasping lawyers.

The airline was not in any way responsible for this mishap. A flock of geese flying into both engines of a jet and disabling them is, to use the insurance term, “an act of god” if ever there was one. It had never happened before.

Captain Sullenberger saved all those people by his incredible flying. He is America’s hero and deservedly so.

Nonetheless, some passengers seem to think their miraculous escape entitles them to a goldmine.

The airline has sent the passengers a letter of apology, a $5000 cheque to assist with “immediate needs”, reimbursement for their tickets and a promise to be upgraded to first class on flights until March 10.

But one of the passengers talking to the grasping lawyers, Tess Sosa, who escaped with her husband and two small children, told the New York Post that US Airways were seeking to “exonerate themselves as much as they can” by offering passengers “a small token”.

Others, however, insist they are just grateful to be alive. One, Dave Sanderson, said the airline had “treated me like gold since the incident”.

Only in America. Jesus wept.

DomPost’s Swazi army story reeks of compost, but the clothing firm’s great gear is well worth buying

Thursday’s DomPost has a front page splash screaming Army shifts $2m contract to China. Well no. The army has done no such thing.

The article is about the fabulous Levin clothing maker Swazi Apparel losing its contract to make wet weather gear for the New Zealand Army to China.

However, the very fine print, and Morning Report, revealed that the army contract is actually held by the Australian firm Yakka, which subcontracted it to Swazi.

It is actually Yakka which now plans to subcontract the order to China.

The most astounding thing — apart from the deliberate misrepresentation in the main front page story of what is truly the ComPost — is that an Australian company can use the Closer Economic Relations tender system to undercut New Zealand companies to win a contract for the New Zealand Army (which it is entitled to do under CER and good on it), but then still do a ticket-clipping deal with a New Zealand firm to make the wet weather gear for less than the tender price.

Obviously the size of the clip has become bigger for Yakka now by dumping Swazi for a Chinese sweat shop.

Melamine as the main ingredient for your boot-linings, officers? China has a good line in that major ingredient of plastic.

How could this happen? Under CER, Australian and New Zealand companies have equal access to each other’s markets, including government contracts. It works well for many of our companies. But the goods supplied must be mostly made in either country. How could Chinese-made clothing come under the New Zealand-Australia Closer Economic Relations Agreement in a contract for clothing for the New Zealand army?

My first thought is that this could be due to our free trade agreement signed with China last year. Someone will know. Charles Finny?

Full marks and very best wishes to Swazi’s colourful owner Davey Hughes for being so philosophical about this absurdity, and vowing to restructure his business to ensure none of his staff lose their jobs as a result.

Verily does Swazi deserve all the business all of us can put its way. Please go to its website now and place your order for its fantastic gear.

Summer’s lease hath all too short a date

Suddenly, it is still dark at 6am. There is a distinct autumnal feel to the dawn air, and dew coats the car, the plants in the garden, the deck and the clothes we forgot to bring in from the line the night before.

To my astonishment, the calendar tells me that Sunday is March 1. Truly is quite a good Wellington summer almost finished its lease.