The buck stops where exactly?

The relentless push for value deducted continues unabated in Godzone. We shouldn’t be surprised as we have elected a Government that cares only about feathering its own nest and despises everything that is good about this country.

Sooner or later their arrogance is going to result in some much more serious social consequences than we have seen hitherto.

As a New Zealander you would not be alone feeling you were under attack (or at least your way of life was) from all sides. It is quite exhausting trying to keep up with all the mayhem these jerks are causing. Let’s take a look at what is under threat.

The Economy:

 I find it rather ironic how a Government that focuses so much on the financial bottom line makes so many brain-dead short term decisions that don’t stack up economically. The most glaring example of this of course is the asset sales circus.

I don’t think I have seen a single commentator regardless of their political persuasion that has said selling these assets is a sound decision for the economy. Even the government hasn’t said that. If you look at what they have said I think you will find they have actually avoided that question instead relying on the ever-present TINA for an explanation. But of course there is ALWAYS an alternative.

If it wasn’t so tragic I would find it funny how they like to tell us they have no other way of getting out of debt than to sell the family home. As any fool knows when you sell a major asset; unless you have a cunning and foolproof plan to earn far more than you have been earning up to the point when you sold it, that asset will never be yours again. If the asset is merely a trinket, that is of no importance. However if that asset is a business in a market that provides an essential product or service, you will miss out on all those earnings for evermore.

It is also an extremely unwise move to allow strategic industries to fall into the hands of foreign powers. There are fewer industries more strategic to a country than the energy industry and the potential exists for us to be held to ransom over products that have been made with our resources in our country.

In a move that typifies the arrogance of this Government, Jianqi has announced a measure he calls a guarantee and which he would like us to think precludes that happening. Unfortunately our too often too compliant media have helped him in this regard by not exposing the package for the cynical sop it is.

His idea is to offer an incentive to Kiwi buyers. (That’s the millions of Mum and Dad buyers we are always hearing about who are champing at the bit to buy up huge chunks of companies they already own). His shonky smoke and mirrors deal is that those among the Kiwis who buy shares in these power companies will be up for an incentive bonus of extra shares if they hold onto them for (possibly) three years. As this is an incentive it means there is no compulsion involved and therefore no guarantee. Furthermore you and I will finance the cost of these extra shares and after the three years has passed and the punters have received their bonus shares they will have much more financial incentive to quit them to the highest bidder. But the media are all t5o busy breathlessly announcing a ‘guarantee’ from the Prime Manipulator to either notice or bother to tell their readers that this is all simply an elaborate illusion that belongs on stage with Paul Daniels or Derren Brown rather than masquerading as news in the nation’s papers.

The Environment:

Rapacious money men are attacking our land on almost every imaginable side. Jianqi and Aimless Adams are collaborating to allow almost every variety of planetary parasite access to our waters, mountains, farmlands and scenic delights to do with them what they will. Aimless seems to have dropped the second ‘d’ from her surname but the horrors she is contemplating would make even Morticia squirm. Make no mistake none of these projects they are contemplating ‘green-lighting’ are going to make any meaningful difference to our economy in a positive sense.

As always it will be the wealthy foreign companies and a few privileged and already very wealthy Kiwis that will benefit. No doubt our useless Government will limit the liabilities of these outsiders so they can walk away with very little responsibility for any damage they might cause much as those responsible for the Rena disaster have.

Give these guys another three years and we will have oil wells off the Taranaki, Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay coastlines. Huntly, the Coromandel and the West Coast will be turned into giant honeycombs and Fiordland will be owned by Disney.

The Press/Media

As witnessed during the 2011 election, this Government is not fond of anyone who might wish to tell it how it is rather than how they would like to spin it.

We saw bizarre Government favouring decisions from Ombudsmen, High Court Judges and newspaper editors. Wasn’t that lucky for a government who didn’t want the truth to get out?

And just to make absolutely sure no truth seeps out into the awareness of the public they made good and sure by closing down TVNZ7, the only television channel that dared to question what they were up to and had the audacity to run programmes that didn’t always show the Government as an infallible and beneficent force.

Radio NZ will probably be next because the Natzis all avoid going on there as much as possible while meantime basking in a confrontation-free zone on commercial radio stations such as Newstalk ZB.

Some breaking news today is further proof they don’t want us to have access to any news programmes that actually attempt to find the truth. I read this morning that TVOne ‘s documentary programme Sunday, is to be cut back to a 30-minuyte format so we can all ‘enjoy’ the latest incarnation of New Zealand’s Got Talent. Apart from Q & A which is on during daytime, Sunday is about the only remotely serious news programme on the Channel and they want to cut it down so we can see more formulaic enfranchised crap instead. Marshmallow TV for marshmallow brains. Fortunately not every person in New Zealand has a brain that would be better used by being stuck on a fork and held over a flame. A great and encouraging example is Wellington alt-country outfit The Beens who sum up the Government we currently have in a great song called Not My Problem which you can find at http://thebeens.bandcamp.com/track/not-my-problem. I shouldn’t think it will get any airtime on any of the radio stations the Government approve of, but it deserves to go to number one for the sentiments it expresses. It’s also a good piece musically and the vocalist reminds me of Graham Parker.

I could go on about the numbers of Kiwis chasing greener pastures across the ditch, the underfunding of the health system, the rising unemployment figures and the widening gap between rich and poor.

It certainly ain’t Jianqi’s problem; but it’s all building up to a big one for us.

The media don’t even qualify as medium

Some will see this week’s blog as the ravings of a curmudgeonly old fool and maybe they are. However I suspect many will share my feelings of disquiet over how we are served by our media.

The standards of professionalism in print media have all but vanished. I could and have filled an entire blog with examples of grammatical incompetence and such errors occur daily in almost every newspaper or online news service. My wife recently asked me what they teach at journalism school these days. I was the wrong person to ask; because I have never been there, but it is abundantly evident correct spelling and grammar are not on the menu.

To be fair, many of the errors we see should rightly be blamed upon the sub-editors. They are the ones paid exclusively for the purpose of picking up such errors and correcting them along with ensuring the story is appropriately titled and reads as if it was written by somebody who actually completed their schooling.

It is conceivable our journalists were always this bad and that it is only the sub-editors who have let their standards slide down the gurgler. I always felt outsourcing their role to ‘subbing hubs’ rather than having the work done onsite where the journos who wrote the stories are based was bound to cause problems.

Bad grammar and poor spelling are not the only shortcomings of the print media however. For example where has investigative journalism gone? And worse still, how many times do you get to the end of a story and find the writer has left out one of the key ‘Ws’?

I am probably a real thorn in the arse of some of the newspapers because I notice shit, but I don’t think I’m alone. Far too often I get to the end of a story and have an obvious question about it that was clearly never asked by the reporter.

A minor example is a story that appeared this week in SunDead about a spate of burglaries in Mount Maunganui. We heard how the burglars had been brazen enough to enter properties while the residents were sleeping and nick off with their stuff. One interviewee said, “...they come in while people are home, if the back doors open they will walk in while people are in the house.” When somebody says something like that, you would expect the interviewer to follow up and ask if the doors were left open or unlocked in each of, or most of these burglaries. In which case the solution is pretty bloody self evident and it is not a big heart-wrenching story about poor burglary victims so much as one about a bunch of careless nitwits.  It might be the former but thanks to sloppy reporting we will never know.

We also encounter factual carelessness where sometimes only half the story is given rather like a quote taken out of context and on other occasions the information is just plain wrong and ill-informed.

A recent story in SunDead told us how “Four men accused of murdering Tauranga man Gary Kimura elected trial at their arraignment in the High Court in Rotorua today.” Not like they had any choice! I think the reporter’s crayon must have broken before he or she could get out the words ‘by jury’ or ‘by judge’, but it might be simply that they didn’t understand what was going on in court and are completely ignorant of court proceedings.

A recent headline that breathlessly told us how a bloke had escaped jail on his 10^th driving while disqualified conviction turned out to be nothing of the sort. The judge had simply delayed sentencing to get some more reports in.

The Sun isn’t the only culprit whose reporters seem to lack what it takes to be a journalist. Their arch-rival the Waste of Times is not much better. The rest of the APN stable aren’t much better and you won’t see any better performance from Fairfax either.

The malaise that has infected our print media is able to jump species and has also infected broadcast media (or was that the other way around?). In any event it is now par for the course to see spelling mistakes in on-screen captions and you simply cannot rely upon a single fact you are not well versed in through your own experiences.

A recent example was when the Broadcasting Standards Authority fined Don McDonald for bringing a complaint against One News. You might recall Don complained over an item about a young Canadian girl who had discovered a supernova. The item said it was 240 light years from earth, but in fact it was 240,000,000 light years from earth, which I am sure anyone would agree was an inaccurate report. However the BSA seemed to think the facts didn’t matter because it was a feel good story and really about the kid finding the supernova rather than the supernova itself. On that basis I could broadcast an item saying I had built a 4000 metre replica of SkyTower out of Lego when in fact I had only built one 4mm high. But hey what the heck it’s a feel good story and it’s actually about me building the thing. Never mind it is a million times smaller than we told you.

What inspired this piece today was the recent descent of National Radio which usually delivers good programming. Two recent ‘news’ items have got up my nose on this station and one has even prompted me to lay a complaint about breached broadcasting standards.

The first item was on the news during checkpoint where they told us KFC’s Double Down Burger is coming back. Hello? I thought National Radio was a commercial free zone. The return of a disgusting chemical and fat laden excuse for a burger is not news. It is advertising. There are no redeeming social features to the Double Down – not that I’ve ever eaten or seen one, or even wanted to. It is not crucial to the economy; it does not even have a human interest angle. It is just free advertising for a foreign company who should be paying for a slot on commercial radio instead.

However the absolute nadir was reached this morning when Morning Report ran an interview with the parents of the triplets that dies in a fire in the Doha shopping mall. The poor bastards couldn’t get more than two words at a time out between sobs and the whole performance was absolutely awful. I deem that sort of shit ‘churnalism’ with no mitigating aspects at all. I can’t for the life of me imagine what useful purpose it served. It was tacky, tabloid audio voyeurism or auteurism or whatever the audio equivalent is. I don’t know whether the family sought this interview or not, but I don’t believe it makes any difference if they did. Any decent programme producer would have said ‘we ain’t running that’. But then I guess decency is another standard that has gone by the wayside for many. Anyway I logged my complaint, but after Don McDonald’s experience I’m not holding my breath.