The Trav

I was at our local last night. The Travellers' Rest. The name sounds like one of those appalling, '70s, faux-Spanish jobs with a stuck-on brick facade and a "family restaurant". It's not, though. The Trav is the real deal. The building is at least 80 years old, wooden, two stories and was once actually a travellers' rest being positioned, as it is, in the middle of the Waimea Plains.
It would have been a stopping off point for coaches and carts headed for Mapua and Motueka from Richmond. The Waimea River mouth at Rabbit and Best Islands is not far away and Pearl Creek on the old Rabbit Island road was once the site of landings for boats moving between Nelson, the plains, Motueka and Golden Bay.

These days the Trav is a locals' pub. Farmers and farm workers gather there for an after-work confab of an afternoon and the local community tends to congregate on a Friday evening. Local news and gossip is shared, people catch up with neighbours and business is conducted over a beer and a basket of chips or a plate of nachos. Families and couples come in for a meal. There is always a traveller or three there - usually staying in the camping ground or the motel next door. It's a friendly, convivial scene with an interesting mix of people. The local market gardeners mix with young builders, the potter and the green stone carver. Farmers chat with accountants and the guy that owns the biggest local horticultural business talks nets with the fisherman in on his four week lay over. The same scene is replicated in pubs all over the country.

I really like the way the local community gets together at The Trav. There are locals, of course, who don't show up very often - some not at all. Some don't drink, some don't enjoy the friendship of the regulars, others are just in a different circle - but going to our local was the best thing we ever did on arriving in Appleby. We made friends there, got support for our business and found all the trades people we'd ever need (except a sparky. If you're an electrician and want to live the good life - the Trav needs a sparky). By visiting the local pub we became part of the local community with all of the emotional and practical support that entails.

The Trav(or the Office as many call it) is the focal point of a number of community activities including regular community pot-luck dinners, an all-ages, all comers cricket team, fundraisers for the local fire brigade and quiz night teams who head off to support various local kids raising money for sports trips and the like. Locals gather at The Trav dressed in their finery before heading to town for birthday and anniversary dinners and it's often the departure point for van loads and convoys heading into the city for concerts and other events. Just as many birthdays, anniversaries and wakes are held at the pub itself.

Last night was a regular Friday. We'd been around the corner celebrating the return to the district of a couple friends and then popped in on our way home. Kylie, one of the owners, was - as usual - beating the boys at pool. One of the locals was fretting because his fifteen year old daughter was off to town with her friends for a big event. He was being "supported" by a bevy of local women regaling him with stories of their antics when they were his daughter's age. A bloke who lives nearby was trying to interest tour groups to pop back to his place to try some lambs' tails he was roasting on an open fire. I engaged in a conversation about our local team, the Makos, and the injustice of their pending relegation while I kept half an eye on the Manwatu/Bay of Plenty game. We discussed the poor whitebait season, the prospects for the scallop season and the pros and cons of our district council amalgamating with the city. Parents put out the word - looking for summer jobs for their kids. We introduced ourselves and included in our conversations a couple who were looking after the business of local growers who are taking a well earned holiday. It was the chatter and stuff of local community and as I paused to take it in I felt optimistic.

There is huge diversity at my local. The Trav hosts people with a range of policical and religious beliefs. But there's a certain acceptance at The Trav that allows all sorts of difference while knitting together a community that can be and has been very cohesive when it needs to be. We manage to discuss politics and religion without anyone getting too wound up. We laugh at each others' foibles without anyone getting upset. Not all of us are close friends but we are all to some extent involved in each others' lives. New comers are welcomed and accepted because they too are now "locals". And if push comes to shove we can and do band together to support those in need. That need might be something as simple as building a deck or picking up some hay. It might be planning a wedding or dealing with a family crisis. Whatever the galvanising issue there is a willingness in the community to not only offer but also request help.

It seems to me that none of this is hard. We don't struggle in Appleby to be a cohesive community and if we find it this easy then I'm sure others do too. If the communities that seem to manage this cohesiveness can do it then so can the communities that currently don't and that makes me feel optimistic.

Fit? I don't fink so.

Since the new Tory government took power there has been a lot of talk about whether or not some of its Ministers are fit to do their job.

The likes of Kate Wilkinson, have clearly shown they're out of their depth.

Paula Bennett and Judith Collins have so far toed the party line and really only initiated the sort of populist agenda on which their party was elected - boot camps and container prisons. Neither has shown they have the vision needed to be truly effective ministers.

Bill English, while probably a very good Minister of Finance (depending on your economic views, of course), has exposed the self righteous, born-to-rule mentality that is the underbelly of modern Tory outfits.

There are several National ministers who are simply doing what all Tory Ministers will do and probably doing it competently (again depending on your political views) and there are those such as Phil Heatley and his Hoki quota - a stupid, ideologically driven move that reeks of the old boys' club and gins with the Talleys (Open Country, anyone?).

And then there is Anne Tolley. It seemed she'd been in the chair for seconds before she poured millions into private schools while gutting long standing and valuable community education courses nationwide. Now, we know that Tories hate any kind of adult, community or further education that isn't focused on producing factory fodder. Some of us are old enough to remember the attacks on the WEA. A conspiracy theorist might suggest that this attitude has to do with keeping the prols in their place but I couldn't possibly comment. I am, however, gobsmacked by Tolley's latest cock up. The link at the top of this post refers to Tolley backing out of plan to cut 770 teachers from our educational workforce. Many will view this as a good decision but let's look at the process. Tolley is quoted as saying she backed out of the plan at the last minute when she realised that it referred "actual" - well - people. I'm not sure what she thought cutting staff must have meant but you've got question her competency - and her motives.
She has clearly said that she has promised to carry through on a commitment to cut $50 million from the education budget. I'm not sure where she intends to make these savings but an amount like that has to affect staffing levels at some point. So we can start to come to some sort of conclusion about her fitness to do her job:

Either Anne Tolley is willing to gut education to reach her budgetary goal, in which case she’s leaving an appalling legacy behind her;

or she’s not competent enough to read the difference between actual cuts and cuts to recruitment.

I am sadly afraid it is probably the former but if not it has to be the latter.

Either way - like too many of her colleagues her fitness for office has to be questioned.

Now it's a Campaign

I'm just going to keep pointing them out and maybe someone will take notice. They probably won't.

Samantha Hayes last night in Nightline: "[Kanye West] should of..."
It's not local usage. It's not a debatable grammatical point. It's not some arcane aspect of English grammar that nobody cares about. She just wasn't speaking English.
It might not be her fault. She would have been reading an auto-cue. I don't know which reporter wrote the story.

Dominic Bowden on TV1 this evening: apparently someone sent Patrick Swayze's family "Well wishes".
No such expression, Dominic, so it's meaningless.
When you've been communicating as long and as well as Clive James or Margaret Mahy you can start inventing aspects of our language. Until then stick to speaking it......properly.

I like telly. I like Dominic and Samantha. But they are professional communicators so I reckon the ability to speak English is a job requirement.

Talking Good English

I'll keep this short, I promise.
I am no pedant when it comes to language. I acknowledge and even celebrate changes in the way we use and speak English. I don't buy the argument that the way New Zealanders speak English is somehow inferior to the way our British cousins speak our language. I've accepted that we don't pronounce L any more and that in New Zealand women and woman are pronounced the same way.

I have to draw the line somewhere, however, and the I've decided the line will be drawn on the ground where professional language users meet their public. Malapropisms from reporters on the TV and radio news - people who ought to know better (or at least have superiors who ought to know better).

Tonight it wasn't even a Malapropism because the word the reporter used didn't actually exist. I've linked the story. Notice how she twice says "a fluent". She means effluent, of course. It's not a mispronunciation so much as a reinvention. The way she says the word suggests she would spell it with an A. She has no idea what she is saying.

Last week it was reporter who (once again) misconstrued the meaning of the expression "lucked out" so that she said the opposite of what she meant to say. I heard "overtly" used instead of "overly" this week. John Key makes that mistake, as well.
Other recent examples: the oft misused "hypo" when she probably meant "hyper";
"illusion" used instead of "allusion" (although that might have been
pronunciation); "less" when she wanted to say "fewer"; a news reader, a reporter and a radio presenter all misusing "literally"-one actually said, "he was literally expiring from fatigue".
That is not only about as clumsy as a sentence can get but - unless the subject was dying - also patently untrue. I heard all of these instances in the last ten days.

Am I being pedantic? Overly sensitive? Doesn't it behove a professional communicator to use the language properly? I know that "properly" is always going to be subjective but aren't there some standards worth preserving? Too many rhetorical questions?

I think there are some standards worth preserving. I believe that some words change their meaning over time and that's the nature of language. I don't believe that "illusion" will ever mean "allusion". You can tell from the elements of my style that I'm no Strunk or White but I don't believe "a fluent" will ever be commonly used as a term meaning "that which flows out".

Messy Connections

I wasn't surprised at the result of the referendum. New Zealand is a conservative country and the issues in this debate were well and truly obscured by a concerted effort by the No Vote campaign.

However, I was frustrated at the media's slack back-grounding of the participants in the debate.
The Yes Vote was publicly backed by any number of public, non-profit organisations with clear agendas and open processes. The No vote campaign on the other hand was quite dishonest in its agenda and connections. And New Zealand's media made almost no attempt to clarify that for the voting public.

It isn't hard to articulate the organisational agenda behind the No campaign but journalists seemed to ignore it completely.

First, Focus on the Family. Sounds fairly benign if a little conservative, yes? Well, benign if you think that an anti-gay agenda, campaigns for the teaching of creationism in schools, a concerted anti-liberal agenda and support for the reintroduction of corporal punishment in schools is benign.

A leading campaigner for the No vote is Sheryl Savill, who is 2IC for the Focus on the Family New Zealand operation. Despite their denials, it is plain that the New Zealand office have close connections with their American parent group which has supported their Kiwi colleagues with over $1 million in the past six years. FoF in NZ is a branch of an ultra-right-wing, christian, fundamentalist lobby group intent on de-liberalising society.

The other leading player was Family First. Prominent No Vote campaigner,Bob McCroskie, is a member of this christian group. Like FoF, Family First sells itself as just a pro-family group but it is plainly in the fundamentalist camp with all the attendant anti-gay, anti-liberal agenda. They also have quite a strong pro-censorship agenda (despite an ironic support of the campaign against the Electoral Reform Bill on the grounds it suppressed free speech!). McCroskie is a broadcaster on fundamentalist radio station, Radio Rhema (as was his close friend and FoF's boss, Tim Sisarich).

Larry Baldock was a principle organiser of the petition to force a referendum on the Section 59 Amendment. He and Savill were a double act in the last stages of the campaign. Baldock has led the mis-information campaign claiming to have a list of parents who had been arrested or harassed by the Police but which he never revealed.

Both of the groups above speak out against 'liberal values' and 'liberal culture'. Both actively lobby for policies that reflect "christian" values. Both can easily be read as anti-abortion and anti-gay, anti-welfare state and pro-censorship.

So the No Vote campaign was led by a ultra-right, fundamentalist christian cabal and the media said absolutely nothing except for a small piece buried in the middle of the paper at the end of the campaign. I believe New Zealand voters would have reacted differently to the campaign if they were fully aware of the roots of the campaign.

I suspect that part of the reason for this pathetic showing by our journalists is the strong connection between FoF and FF, media and our government.

Former All Black Michael Jones, TV1 weather presenter Jim Hickey and former What Now? presenter Anthony Samuels are Family First board members. Families Commissioner, Christine Rankin, is a Family First supporter and her For the Sake of Our Children trust is pretty much a fundamentalist organisation - she is a confidant of Social Welfare Minister, Paula Bennett (Jones is also a very public National supporter). More FM radio announcer, Simon Barnett, was a vocal No vote campaigner with strong fundamentalist connections.

I just know that if the Yes Vote campaign had had this sort of underlying agenda or even a "dodgy" connection we would have heard about it.. ."Yes vote campaigner once a member of radical lesbian student group" etc etc.. In fact we did hear about it from the loony, talk back media within their constant refrain of "political correctness gone mad". They painted the Yes campaign and Bradford's original bill as part of a liberal agenda.

Unfortunately, I think that the main reason we didn't hear about the No vote agenda is because too many of the media are too close to the protagonists. I also think that they're skittish about "criticising" fundamentalist christian groups who will then claim discrimination.

I don't really care what an individual believes or in which building they choose to spend their religious days. I do care when these individuals are involved in campaigns against the secular, liberal society that has taken so much blood and sweat to build. For, heaven's sake (intended) it is this liberal society that provides their freedom of worship and belief in the first place.

And I think that when that agenda is so clear it's time journalists and editors manned up and took them on - or at the very least did their job.

Titles

Just a quick one as I watch the Sirs and Dames getting Sired and Damed.
The context for non-New Zealanders is this: at some years ago our government of the time replaced our British honours system with one of our own. Part of the process of building a national identity I suppose. The current government which won last years election decided to reinstate the royal titular system of knighting Sirs and Dames. They offered the individuals who had received the equivalent New Zealand honours since the change the right to be knighted. Around 60 took the opportunity. Another dozen or so decided they would rather keep their New Zealand honour.

So, today the 60 lined up and knelt before the Governor General, received the sword to their shoulders and arose Sir or Dame Someone.

I can't help feeling a little insulted. I mean, aren't these people disrespecting us a bit?
Their country has awarded them the highest honour. Well, not the Order of NZ because that's only 20 people at any given time, but the next highest. We've said (and rightly so for they are a marvelous bunch) "we honour you with our highest accolade".
And they have essentially said "No, thanks, I'll take the royal one".

I don't want to disrespect them. We hold most of these people in high esteem. They have achieved more than I ever will. They deserve to be honoured. I just can't help feeling a bit....annoyed. I want to say "What? We're not good enough for you?"

I'm probably being irrational but there you are.

Ruck 'em!

I can't help but think there is huge missed opportunity in the debate surrounding the way Paula Bennett is bullying two women who have gone public with their criticisms of the government’s cuts to the Training Incentive Allowance.

If you're out of NZ or under a rock - our Minister of Social Development released details of the two women's benefit incomes (although it seems she got the numbers wrong) in response to their criticism. She is now unrepentant and her PM is backing her.

There's an issue around the appropriateness of a Minister of the Crown releasing personal details relating to the benefits paid to clients of her department without first seeking their permission or informing them of her intention. There's also a question about whether her actions amounted to a breach of the Privacy Act. She may also have misled Parliament (or the public) with her explanantions about whether or not she got advice before acting.

Predictably the blogs and news reports have veered from "she's a bully" to "bloody beneficiaries". I will be very interested to see if Labour's complaint to the Privacy Commissioner bears any fruit. I find the beneficiary bashing side of it all so reminiscent of a by gone era (Muldoonism, anyone?) but I am much more interested in the continued lack of informed debate.

I say lack of informed debate because not one media type has made an effort find out and explain exactly how our benefit system works or to find out how successful such support of education and training for beneficiaries can be.

I posted Elsewoman's comments about the DPB earlier. Such information would really help people understand that there simplyaren't the imagined hoards of solo mums out there trying to rip off hard working tax payers.

I'd also like to see some discussion of studies from Europe and Scandinavia that indicate the more support we provide to recipients of a range of benefits the less time they continue to draw that benefit.

But none of this will see the light of day in the New Zealand media. I don't know why. I suspect it's because the system is now simply not up to the research and investigation required to write such an article. News rooms are getting smaller and younger. There's neither the resources nor the expertise. Nor, I uspect, is there a will. Most journalists are just as prejudiced and uninformed as the rest of us and to begin the process of writing such an article one would need an open and enquiring mind and some knowlege of the issue to start with.

That's a shame. The vitriol about beneficiaries in comments to news stories and blogs is so 1970's. With a bit of help from media outlets we could at least progress the discussion.

I don't think Bennett intended to progress anything. She's now feigning horror at the level of abuse these two women have received but she'd have to be a moron not to have foreseen it. No, it was just old fashioned bullying from her. She didn't like being put on the spot and being accused of pulling up the ladder (she sold herself as a success story solo Mum in the election) and she went ad hominem on their arses. As she said on the telly - it was “a bit of a lesson for what happens if you go out there and put your story”.

And since no one in the news industry is interested in getting their eye back on the ball, the only option we're left with is to watch the other team play the woman. I have to admit I'm kinda enjoying watching a Tory sweat at the bottom of the ruck but I would really have been interested in seeing more of the broader game plan.