Cracker by Damian Christie

I’m a bit late on this one – it’s been up since Monday – but Episode 2 of ‘This Week in TV History’ is up. Recommended for fans of ‘This Week in TV History: Episode 1’. Good Springbok Tour stuff, a great clip from Miss Universe ’92, a fantastic Avis ad from 1981… what more could you want? And yes, I’ve been listening to your feedback; next week will feature one of those great Country Calendar spoofs, other requests are in the pipeline, so keep ‘em coming. New episode up on Monday.
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The MMP referendum worries me. Not in the sense that I don’t think we the people should have an opportunity to vote on such things, but more in the sense that I have some issues with the motives of the big parties – National in particular – for pushing for change, and the ability of them, their donors and interested affiliates, to sway the outcome.

“We promised a referendum on this at the last election, and we’re sticking to our word” is the Government line. It all sounds very worthy, doing the right thing, power to the people, and all that, but you have to ask ‘why?’ Not Why are they sticking to their word, that’s a good thing, generally, from politicians, but why did they promise a referendum in the first place? It was never promised when MMP was voted in all those years ago, that we’d have a rethink a decade or so down the track, and there doesn’t seem to be any great outcry, rioting in the streets or what have you. It’s no smacking referendum.

The bottom line is that under any of the alternatives that are less truly proportional than MMP, such as Supplementary Member, or FPP, the big parties win. So for National to promise a referendum, and then make good on its promise, it’s a bit like saying “We promised to give ourselves pay rises, and by Christ, we’re sticking to that.”

I’m telling you now, and I’ve seen a few backroom letters confirming this, National will push for Supplementary Member (if they’re not already, I haven’t really looked). It has the advantages of being kinda proportional representation, so it’s not as baldly opportunistic as pushing a return to FPP, but it’s the least proportional of all the options. It returns power to the big parties. As David Farrar told me the other night, and I trust him on this sort of thing, all but one of the elections run under MMP would have delivered a single party majority Government if they had been run under the Supplementary Member system.

Let’s suppose there are other reasons to push for change – what are they? You could argue the tail has wagged the dog somewhat – maybe our big parties need to become better negotiators. Maybe with Winston gone (and hopefully forgotten) things have settled down a bit. I don’t think any of the Government’s support parties received extortionate benefits for their confidence and supply – in the case of the Maori party, any benefits were given voluntarily by National, as the numbers weren’t needed.

It won’t surprise you if I say that I think MMP has worked extraordinarily well. Okay, I too hate the fact that Winston Peters managed to strut around like a prize rooster after various elections, but that’s the price of a democracy where septuagenarians get the vote. All Governments under MMP have gone to term, and both the major parties have shown an increasing adeptness in stitching together coalitions. Most importantly, Parliament is now if not totally, then certainly more representative, both politically and socially/culturally.

The idea of MMP being some great experiment that we now get to vote on – or vote out – belies the fact that there are almost one million voters who have never voted under anything but. There is no unchanging cohort of voters who 13 years later get to decide whether their first vote was right – almost a third of voters weren’t around for FPP, and have no frame of reference. Does this mean they shouldn’t get to vote on electoral change? No, but as I said to one young man at the Backbencher on Wednesday, nor is occasionally voting to change or retain electoral law a right, or even a good thing.

I remember a political leader recently saying that his decision on altering or repealing a certain high-profile piece of legislation, would be based not on what the people said, but whether or not the law was working, and he thought it was. What’s the difference here?

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Big plug here: the lovely members of Minuit are in the process of putting together a video for their single ‘Aotearoa’, off the newish album Find Me Before I Die a Lonely Death.com. They want hundreds of pictures of New Zealanders in classic settings (the beach, skiing, on the deck, whatever) to flash on the screen, I think each person gets about half a second of screen time. I think it’s a great idea – send your pics to findmemusicvideo at gmail, you’ve got until September 18, and listen to my interview on PublicAddress Radio with Minuit here.

I know it's been about six weeks since I last wrote anything. I'm not apologising, astute readers (or at least those of you who read the last thing I wrote, and let's face it, you've had a month-and-a-half to do so) will probably realise that I've been a bit preoccupied with mortgage-financing, trust-establishing, inspecting, packing, moving, cleaning, inspecting, unpacking, arranging and rearranging to find the time for blogging. And that's just on the house front; there's been an overseas trip to plan and numerous other projects on top of the day job(s).

I've also been reading a lot – it's been nice to simply consume words for a change.

One project, which I've been working on for a few months, quietly launches today: This Week in TV History.

For as long as I've worked at TVNZ I've loved having access to the Television Archive. As I've had to explain to a number of people in the past, no, it's not all digitised in an easily accessible form where I can simply punch up any story from the past fifty years onto my desktop. Maybe one day, although I see the company's GM Technology says it's still up in the air:

We are still discussing to what extent we digitise our back archive. As a commercial organisation, we have to determine whether there is value in completely digitising the archive.

So for me to view an old item at the moment, I have to search the database, which gives me a text-based summary of the item, when it was broadcast, who the reporter, producer etc were, and most of the time what shots are in the story, sometimes even a summary of what is said. I then call the incredibly helpful staff of the archives in Avalon, they locate the item in the library, dub a copy either off video tape or in some cases a transfer from the original film negative, and send it in the mail to me, within a few days. It's not immediate, it can often be difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, but I still feel incredibly privileged to be able to view it at all.

And that's why I came up with the This Week in TV History project. Often the only archive material we get to see on TV has been edited down to a few seconds, and voiced over by the presenter or journalist to illustrate a point in a contemporary story. Programmes like The Way We Were and The Unauthorised History of NZ are great, but the footage is again usually presented in a montage, and in the case of the latter show, intentionally difficult to distinguish historical fact from fiction. I wanted to be able to show the best bits of classic television, in relatively big chunks, largely unmolested..

Anyway, go and check it out, the first week includes a great Dylan Taite item from 1987 about the phenomenon of people putting water-filled 1.5l soft drink bottles on their lawns to stop dogs from defiling them; Labour's 1972 campaign ad for Big Norm Kirk, and the day Thingee's eye fell out featuring some great improv from Jason Gunn. We're starting with a month's trial, and I guess if there's enough interest, we'll keep going from there. Who knows, it might even reach the big screen in some form one day, but I'm just happy to be able to have an excuse to keep digging through the best bits of the last fifty years of TV.

[EDIT: Broken links are fixed (D'oh) and also I forgot to add that if anyone has suggestions/requests for clips they want to see, by all means, send me feedback or discuss in the system below...thanks!)
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When you fly every week, you start to notice the little things. On the "ingredients" section of the little bags of lollies Air New Zealand gives out: "Contents: Jelly-Shaped People". Okay, I thought, maybe for some people the idea of eating babies in any form is sufficient reason to drop the name "Jellybabies", but surely they should be "People-Shaped Jellies"?

Say what you want about Taekwondo champ Logan Campbell opening a brothel to fund his Olympic bid, but at least he knows someone’s rooting for him.

(Sorry, I thought of it yesterday and had to get it out there. On with the blog.)

A couple of years back I stumbled across a site called White Whine – essentially a list of things that white people complain about. One favourite includes:

“Oh perfect, Ben Folds is playing a show in my city while I’m on a business trip in Hawai’i. Goddamn it.”

The sub-title for this blog could very well be an entry on that site:

“Do you know how hard it is to try and buy a first home in the current market?”

Yeah I know, tough life. People are dying, ethnic groups are revolting, and here’s me with the most bourgeois complaint since “Oh great, so now John Key has closed off the Cook Islands tax loophole” (which was admittedly only yesterday, but surely that won’t make him happy with his big business mates, will it, or is having a haven in the Cook Islands like, sooo 1995?). I realise there are bigger problems, but as I said almost four years ago in this blog (any newbie blogger calling me part of the MSM can suck my history) if I was starving in Africa, I’d be blogging about that. As it is, I don’t have flies on my face, so I’m going to complain about the OCR and stuff.

The first house buying thing has been an interesting experience. The massive crash in interest rates suddenly made the whole idea more do-able, even if the banks' equally sudden need for 20% deposit put up a few obstacles for creative hurdling. Everyone thinks it must be a great time to buy, and it probably is if you've got a million or so to spend and can sit around waiting for a mortgagee sale.

But in the first-home range (which in Auckland apparently goes into the $600,000s, at least according to some optimistic real estate agents), there doesn't seem to be much downward movement, and over the past few months, there’s been a decided lack of stock.

Attractive properties are being pounced on –one that listed and had its first open home on Sunday was gone by the time I called to make an offer on Monday morning. This creates pressure which works in everyone's favour but the buyer. A number of houses due to go for auction in a month's time sold less than a day after listing, under a multiple offer situation, where each prospective buyer puts in his or her 'best' offer, and the vendor negotiates with the highest. The pressure of making an offer after having only the briefest look at a house, and still missing out time and time again is quite depressing – and not helped by people saying "what a great time to be buying!"

Then there’s the open homes. Month after month of having the guts sucked out of my weekends (yes it's fun, but so's ten pin bowling, and I wouldn't sign up to do that between 12 and 3pm every Saturday and Sunday for the foreseeable future), racing from one suburb to the next in carefully scheduled 15 minute intervals. I’m sick of leaving my shoes at the door, of sneering at bad furniture, tasteless art and books neatly left open on muffin recipes in the kitchen. And, in one house, an amateur attempt at a 'Body Shots' photo on the bedroom wall which the owners hadn't thought they should take down. They really should have.

After missing out at one auction, and a few unsuccessful offers elsewhere, we found a house we liked the other night. Another auction.

Auctions, I have to say, are not for the faint hearted. This was a long drawn out process – even after all the messing around to get started, the false stops and so forth, even when I was sitting at the winning bid after about five minutes and it was “going twice”, things were stopped. The real estate agent then approached me mid-auction, and suggested upping it a bit to reach the vendors’ reserve. In case you’re not aware how auction rules work, if the auction doesn’t reach reserve, only the person with the highest bid has the right to negotiate with the vendors after the auction. To bid against yourself when you already have the winning bid is just throwing away your bargaining power, basically.

So of course I said “no thanks, we’ll talk after the auction.” I’m told across town that night, a buyer in Ponsonby upped his $900,000 bid first to $905, then $910, then $915 to reach the reserve while the auction was still going. I would’ve thought someone with access to a million bucks might’ve had slightly more sense.

Anyway, the auction resumed, and apparently the “going twice” was just a figment of my imagination as we started again, while the real estate agent went to seemingly. every. single. bloody. person. and asked them one. at. a. bloody. time if they wanted to bid against me. Just in case they hadn’t realised that’s how an auction works, ya know. Finally it was apparent no-one was interested. The vendors dropped their reserve, so the house was ours at the fall of the hammer.

Well not quite. The shitter about buying a home is that, unlikely putting a frock on layby, you can't really go in and try it on, take your friends for a look and so forth before it's all paid for. A late night drive-by doesn't really do the business when what I really want is to try out the shower pressure.

Any number of friends said to me "most people spend more time buying a pair of shoes than they do choosing their new home – their biggest asset." And that's pretty true. I spent more time trying on Nikes last week than I did poking around the foundations of the new place.

So it’s not Ponsonby. It’s not Grey Lynn, it’s not even Point Chev or Sandringham. No, as one preferred suburb eventually gave way to its slightly-further-out-neighbour and every suitable house promised to come with a view of the new Waterview-Mt Albert motorway, priorities shifted and dreams were adjusted to meet realities. It’s a nice suburb, but one that only seems to ring bells with other people who have recently bought or are looking for their first home. Most importantly, it’s a nice house that’s been well looked after. The only downer? Knowing that if I’d managed to negotiate better, they might’ve thrown in the Body Shot too.

What possible purpose could a Coroner's inquest do in the Bain case?

Was there some money left over from the trial or something?

Does the Bain trial prove re-runs can actually be very popular?

Will the rekindling of tensions in Korea mean a new series of M*A*S*H, or just more re-runs?

How happy must Richard Worth have been to hear the Bain jury had come back early?

How hard is it to find someone willing to f*** for a job these days?

If you had to: Tony Zappia or Richard Worth?

When will I get bored with my iPhone?

What am I supposed to do with Friday nights now that NZ's Next Top Model is over?

Is that the saddest question ever written?

Where's Winston?

How long and expansive is this new Mt Albert motorway that it seems to go through the front yard of every open home I visit?

Does anyone else think Melissa Lee sounds like a visiting rock star when she mentions how she hangs at St Lukes Mall, Kingsland cafes, Gribblehurst Park?

When said she expected to come second in Mt Albert, was she actually being optimistic?

How happy must Melissa Lee have been to have Richard Worth taking the heat for a change?

Finding it hard to stay scared about Swine Flu?

Everyone back to buying cage-reared bacon again?

Has Susan Boyle set a new lap record for Rags-Riches-Rehab?

When we get our new Supercity, can we make our new Knights guard the main gates?
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*Not in any way affiliated with 20 questions the game, or Metro's** '20 questions.'

**Metro is a very good magazine though, and you should buy it not least of all to read my interview with 'Green' Dean Williams, former RNZ and bFM environment presenter who is now doing interesting stuff in Cambodia.

I went to the hikoi yesterday.

I don't have much to report really. I went down there lugging a video camera for my TV work, a mini-disc recorder for the radio show (there will be a piece on the hikoi this weekend), and my trusty Nikon just for fun – and for the blog of course.

Everyone I spoke to was friendly and happy to talk to me; I interviewed everyone from old white Remuera ladies and hippie types to police, patched gang members and veteran activists. Each gave me the time of day.

So I was surprised to turn on National Radio (sorry, radionewzealandnationalsoundslikeus) yesterday afternoon and hear one of the panellists say the following:

"Anyone who was there or had a look at it from a spectator point of view as I did would be a little bit terrified, because it looked to me more like a power grab, because it was certainly an in-your-face type march, these wasn't [sic] peaceful citizens, these were threatening people… and there were plenty of flags there but no New Zealand flags.

No surprise perhaps to find out that the panellist in question was NBR's Nevil Gibson, who I haven't heard much from before, but clearly isn't exactly breaking the mould of NBR's grumpy old white men. Having just been there, I couldn’t understand how his experience could have been so different from mine.

By "threatening people", did he mean Maori? Did he mean Maori performing haka as they walked? By "these wasn't peaceful citizens", did he mean the sum total of zero people who were arrested? Or the people the police were referring to when they told me "no, we've had no problems, everyone's [all 7000 of them] been very well behaved."

And why did he expect the protestors to be waving the New Zealand flag?

Nevil Gibson then went on to argue the merits of global warming. I found another radio station to listen to and everyone, apart from grumpy old Nevil, was happy.