Island Life by David Slack

This Saturday, probably as the rain falls and the wind blows, we'll be standing on a beach somewhere near Pakiri watching an exchange of wedding vows.

The happy couple have been living in England for the last couple of years. They thought it would be good to come back home and get married on a golden beach in the middle of summer with the sun shining and a breeze gently blowing. Yeah, as the saying goes, right.

It's for grown-ups only, though, so Mary-Margaret will be staying with Gran and Pa while we're braving the elements, or, if things go kindly, standing in sunlit dunes. Still, our little girl will be having her own fun. The circus rolled into Devonport this week, and yesterday afternoon I went around to Narrowneck to get tickets for child, grandparents and cousin. Turned out I was a bit early. The trucks and animals were all set up, but there was no tent and no ticket office. Still, where there are caged lions, there's generally a human being not far away and sure enough, I found the OSH-compliant owner in just a moment or two.

She was very nice; explained that they'd got in late the previous night, hadn't yet been able to lift the tent because of the winds; that they wouldn't be having a show until Saturday; and that they wouldn't be selling tickets in advance because the weather was too unpredictable. They don't like letting people down.

Fair enough, I said, and commiserated with her about lousy weather in the middle of summer. We got to talking about their life on the road. She said it had been a bit of a performance getting in the night before and trying to set things up the next morning in the big wind. She was looking forward to a few glasses of wine that evening.

"The only time we really have off is when we go to a café for dinner," she said.

I looked around at the trailers full of animals and said "You're farmers, really, aren't you? The only difference is that your farm is on wheels."

Yes, she agreed, that was a fairly accurate way of looking at it. "Mind you, she said, " there are some farmers having a lot more trouble with the weather than we are."

She meant the flooding in the lower North Island of course, and she said that it made her worries look like small ones.

If you've ever clicked the "about David Slack" link over there on the right, you'll have gathered that farming goes a long way back in my family. What I didn't mention in that short summary was that our farm was in Kiwitea - about ten miles north of Feilding. They've had a bit of rain lately.

Dad told us we'd be mugs to be farmers. He was very good at what he did, but he could see that it was getting harder every year to run a viable business. We took his advice. My brother became a lawyer, my sister an art teacher, and if you've been keeping up with these posts, you know my story. As soon as we'd all left home, Dad sold the farm. Within three years, farming was being turned upside down by Rogernomics, and the days of the small family farm were looking numbered.

You have to be big to be in the game now, and you have to be able to cope with some big swings in your fortunes. And boy, that's some swing those farmers have been taking down there. Whatever kind of business you're in, there are knocks and unpleasant surprises. You can be embezzled, hacked, undercut, burned to the ground, to name just a few, but what some of those people have had to deal with is on a different scale altogether.

I'm guessing the big holdings will be able to take it. With enough working capital and insurance, you're in a position to clear away the wreckage, re-build, re-fence, re-pasture and get underway again, sooner or later.

But what if you're not one of those guys? What if you're heavily mortgaged, under-insured, and can't sit out the months before you're generating any income? There'll be compensation going around, but not necessarily enough to pull every case back from the brink. And even if it did, and even with all the stoicism in the world, will it be worth plugging on?

Evidently some people have been asking that question in the last few days. Have a look at this report in the Dominion Post quoting a Federated Farmers vice-president who says the floods have been the last straw for some small farmers. He mentions farmers who've been watching the Fonterra payout dropping, who've been out milking cows at dawn each day for more than 30 years. Only a few would have been flooded, he says, but seeing other farmers affected would have crystallised what they had been considering for some time. He says they're facing the reality that small holdings are "pretty much in a sunset position."

When I was a kid, you'd often hear this exchange between farmers: "What would you do if you won the Golden Kiwi ?" - for those of you born after 1980, that's what we had before Lotto got its balls. The answer would be: "I'd just keep farming untill I'd used it all up."

For them, farming wasn't just a job; it was a way of life. I think that's what struck me about the woman at the circus. Some people just like working with animals and taking the weather and whatever else happens in a day in their stride. No matter how tough it gets, they'll generally just say: "Yeah, well, you've just got to be philosophical about it." Stoic.

I can remember Dad talking that way, and it impressed me that he didn't let anything perturb him. I see the same thing in the mates of my own age who are still farming; but they go at it differently. They've been through that economic upheaval, and they know they have to be all business. One of them got kidded a long time afterwards for mentioning once that he was having a tough day because one of his labour units had busted his leg. Don't read too much into that. He's a fair employer and he's doing well. But he drives a desk now as much as he drives a tractor, and it doesn't take nearly as many people to run the operation.

Getting to where he is from a standing start today would be hard, though. Outside of sharemilking or inheriting the land, I don't see how you'd go about getting into a farm of a viable size unless you'd accumulated a LOT of capital some other way first. If you do go in with debt to the eyeballs, it might turn out fine. But if something comes falling out of the sky like the rain of the last couple of weeks, you're in terrible trouble.

That might help explain a story in today's Herald about a shortage of young farm workers. It seems the problem's not so much with keeping them down on the farm; it's getting them down there to start with. Maybe we're running short of the stoic type. I wouldn't panic just yet about running out of steaks, but you might be justified in getting nervous if they all decide to become speechwriters.

A friend emailed me a nice recollection about a movie a while ago. If you were going to the movies in 1949, you might have seen it when it came out - Magic Town.

It's about "Grandview," a small town that's an exact statistical microcosm of the United States. The citizens' opinions match perfectly with Gallup polls of the entire nation…

…a pollster (Jimmy Stewart), secretly uses surveys from this "mathematical miracle" as a shortcut to predicting public opinion. Instead of collecting a national sample, he can more quickly and cheaply collect surveys from this single small town. A newspaper editor finds out what is going on and publishes her discovery. The national media descend upon the town, which becomes, overnight, "the public opinion capital of the U.S." The citizens of Grandview become self-conscious because they are now "the perfect barometer of national opinion." They begin to feel a heavy responsibility, knowing that what they say will be listened to throughout the world. They arrange to collect their own survey, "The Official Grandview Poll," but with the proviso that "reference libraries" be provided at every polling booth. Because the issues are important, they believe people should be informed.

With this new sense of responsibility, and their heightened interest in the issues, the townspeople's views soon diverge from those of the rest of the country. The climax comes when the town announces the result that 79 percent of them would be willing to "vote for a woman for president". This is taken as such a preposterous departure from conventional opinion that they become a source of national ridicule.

Yet which opinions are more worth listening to? The conventional opinion of the time, offered in response to questions from the Gallup poll, that people should not support a woman for president, or the very different view the citizens of Grandview finally came to, when they thought their opinions would actually matter, and after they had had a chance to re-examine their prejudices and preconceptions? Those considered judgments were, indeed, unrepresentative of the views of the rest of the country. But then again, the rest of the country had not really thought much about the question.

At the risk of labouring the point, an informed opinion is, in my view, desirable. That was what I was getting at in my last post. According to my inbox, a lot of people liked the idea. Others didn't much care for it.

"You just don't get it, do you" thunders angry young lawyer of Auckland, who informs me that the vast majority of the audience are upset at the "constitutionalisation of affirmative action". Rather a bold interpretation, I'd have thought. That many? And all about that particular aspect of a complex tangle of ideas and arguments?

Well, maybe. I can't claim with certainty that he's wrong. But nor do I think he can say with assurance that he knows that for a fact. It's a bold person who claims to know the thinking of such a substantial proportion of the voting public. I prefer to start with known facts, and let the discussion build from there.

As I wrote last week, the people I've been listening to have been enthusing about what they've heard of Don Brash's speech for many different reasons. Yes, two words do come up repeatedly: "had enough". But as they proceed to explain what it is they've had enough of, I start hearing about things that don't necessarily echo any particular proposition that appeared in the speech.

Yes, some people are well-briefed and have reached a considered opinion that chimes with the arguments Dr Brash has been making. But tell me that everyone's up to speed with this, and I'll play you ten minutes of talkback radio.

I promise you this: when you sit down to write a political speech, you have in mind the sound grabs that will be running on the TV news that night. But don't take my word for it; click here now, read the speech with that in mind, and tell me you don't see them. There's a considered speech in there, but there's also a loot-bag full of lines for the media to take home from the party. Try these, for example:

We are one country with many peoples, not simply a society of Pakeha and Maori where the minority has a birthright to the upper hand, as the Labour Government seems to believe.

For 20 years now, mischievous minds have been interpreting the document in ways that they envisage will suit their financial purposes.

You can't write a political speech without being aware that lines like that will be picked up by the media, played, and potentially taken out of context. The material he uses to substantiate those lines is quite strong, and quite specific. But take the sound grabs in isolation, and what do you get? Official declaration of open season on this bloody treaty carry-on.

Russell tells me one of our readers liked the quiz, printed it off and took it down to the pub to put to his mates. I understand their response was a good deal more pithy than "we object to the constitutionalisation of affirmative action."

None of this should be surprising. TV news doesn't handle the serial story very well. If it bleeds, as they say, it leads. Long-running stories just tend to piss people off. So it is with Treaty stories. That story's been running for years, and they still haven't got the bad guy. You see people complaining, but you don't see them in front of the Tribunal working through evidence, and you don't see them negotiating with the government on the way to a settlement. You see them taking a case to court to argue about application of the Treaty, but you don't see the evidence being presented and the submissions unfolding. What you get are sound grabs and faces. Angry white faces arguing with angry brown faces. Then you see the government handing over a big cheque. Then you see more angry faces. Then you see another cheque, then more angry faces, and so on. You forever get the trailers, you never get the movie. Unless you read a bit further, listen a bit more widely, you're left none the wiser. An elephant, it seems, is soft and mushy.

One reader argued it was sufficient for the much-vaunted silent majority to "intuit" that the whole arrangement was wrong, even if they couldn't explain why. I think I'd prefer to live in Grandview. Until someone can give me hard data that suggests otherwise, I'll stand by my proposition that there are people cheering for Dr Brash's soundbites whose point of view is informed by scant solid material.

I don't accept the argument some people have made to me that everyone is "happy with the treaty settlement process" and that their concern is in fact with such issues as the broadening ambit of the Treaty, or preferential treatment based on race. I don't think we've come anywhere near that far yet. I do accept, though, that those issues need to be debated. I've had some thoughtful emails about them. One offered this:

For many Maori the contemporary role of the Treaty is a shield against majoritarian abuse (the original conception of the Tribunal - the Motunui pollution case, for example) and, flowing from that work, a form of leverage in political, bureaucratic and social debate and an organizing device for the formulation of policy in all three areas.

That leverage was almost entirely absent pre the 1970s but was increasingly and sometimes spectacularly successful (the fisheries settlements) after that time. In light of such success it is hardly surprising that it has become the weapon of first rather than last resort. Power gained after so many years without it can be intoxicating. If it works..... keep on doing it.

And the Treaty has had a great deal of utility not just for Maori, but for politicians (both National and Labour, bureaucrats and the Courts as a way or organizing and thinking about how to respond to all sorts of issues.

A generally accepted and understood rationale for that wider use has, however, lagged way behind.

The roadrunner has gone off the cliff and there is no credible supporting ideology or explanation beneath him. Whether one can be constructed before the roadrunner meets his usual fate......?

And another offered this:

I work in medical research funding…All funders (Govt, universities, charities) pay the same ($25,000 p.a.) for PhD scholarships. The HRC now offers a $5,000 tangata whenua grant to Maori PhD scholars, in addition, so that they can return to their homes during vacation. It's not means-tested. Non-Maori do not get it. That's a 20% margin over other NZers. In the greater scheme of things it's nothing; to one of our impoverished students it's a fortune.

That merits debate.

I think Colin James has analysed the context of this "preferential treatment" debate nicely. He argues that:

To a classical liberal all citizens are equal -- but only in the formal sense of individual equality before the law. Group rights are anathema and so are laws or government actions directed at groups….

…Social democrats think citizenship entails the ability to participate fully in the economy and society. For this, disadvantaged groups need active government help through workplace laws and education, health, housing and welfare.

Social democrats also think there are group rights and think in terms of helping groups…

I know which side I take. As a letter writer to this morning's Herald reminds us, there are all kinds of groups with their hands out that need to be tidied up. Once those Maoris have been taken care of, we can move on to those whiners in their wheelchairs. And let's not forget those grannies who've stopped working and expect a pension each week.

There's plenty to debate here. Let's engage in the debate with facts.

That tramping noise you hear is the sound of thousands of National party voters heading home. Their man has pushed the right button and they're saluting him.

Shame it had to be THAT button.

I've written quite a few speeches for politicians about Treaty issues. Politicians approach this topic with more care than just about any. You draft and you redraft. And everyone wants to have a go at it. Remember the Sesquicentennial in 1990? The Treaty was 150 years old and everyone was coming to Waitangi. I spent much of that January working on speech drafts. One for the Prime Minister, one for the Queen.

This is how it works when everyone wants a piece of the action:

The process started out in the best possible way; the PM invited a few esteemed friends - Sir Ken Keith, John McGrath and Alex Frame among them - to a meeting to talk over ideas for the speeches. We looked at themes, issues and messages and talked about history. They were marvelous people to work with: thoughtful, insightful. You couldn't have left that meeting without feeling positive about the Treaty and the legal and academic work that was being done to consider its ramifications.

If there was one overarching idea that we settled on, I would say it was this: you can't have unity if you fail to recognise and act upon injustices.

I went away, wrote the two drafts and then circulated them. My desk soon started filling up with annotated pages from every corner of the Beehive. Everyone had their two cents to put in, and it added up to several dollars' worth. No-one seemed too bothered about what we wrote for the Queen's speech, but they all had wildly varying ideas about what the Prime Minister should be saying. I immediately discarded a suggested opening sentence from one senior bureaucrat which ran to 128 words. Other contributions were more difficult to deal with. Some made valid points, but strayed too far from the theme of the speech. Others tried to hijack the theme of the speech altogether.

I redrafted a second and third time, and re-circulated the drafts. Things started to get testy as certain factions perceived that other factions were holding sway. My eight pages of A4 were turning into a tug-of-war rope. Significantly, I found myself incorporating most of the ideas Margaret Wilson was advocating. She had the clearest understanding of what the speech needed to be achieving, and as the process dragged on, she finally said "Look, don't feel you have to accommodate everyone. Write a new draft, and just give it to Geoffrey." I did. He liked it. He made his usual embellishments and adjustments, and we were done.

If you watched the speeches live on TV from Waitangi, you'll recall that this was one more day at Waitangi that didn't go altogether well. Someone biffed a wet T-shirt at the Queen; the speeches were delivered to an audience that included several hundred chanting and heckling protestors. The only pleasant surprise I got during the whole afternoon was to hear the words of the Queens' speech being offered largely in the form I'd submitted them, but with the inclusion of one very nice phrase. The Treaty, she said, had been "imperfectly observed." I love the British way of dealing with difficult matters.

But the bigger surprise came a day or two later. I got a call from a lawyer I knew who was a partner in one of the big Wellington law firms; the kind of person I would have confidently predicted would be voting for the National Party to which Winston Peters then belonged. It would be fair to say that the speeches took the liberal position that you would expect of a Labour administration, and yet he wanted me to know how much they had impressed him.

I wonder what he made of Don Brash's speech.

Working on a sample of friends, family and acquaintances who have offered their unprompted point of view to me in the last two weeks, the answer is, I'm disappointed to report: Loved It.

What button has he pushed, exactly? In my assessment, it's this: vague notions that the Treaty process is out of control; that it's costing a fortune, that the country is being held to ransom by an endless list of Treaty demands; that Maori receive preferential treatment in countless aspects of daily lives.

I believe the technical legal term for these propositions is: Baseless unsubstantiated assertions.

I've been finding it frustrating trying to discuss any of these issues without turning things sour.

The last time it seemed this tricky was the winter of the 1981 Springbok tour. I don't know if we're any better or worse than any other nation at this, but it seems to me that we can't debate the tough issues well. We have a tendency to trade assertions and keep stating our intractable positions in increasingly loud voices.

Or we just clam up, which is what I seem to have been doing in the last few months. I wonder why that could be. I used to feel much more able to debate an issue than I feel with this one.

It has slowly dawned on me that I haven't had the solid facts at hand to to aid my argument. And so, readers, I've prepared a web page to aid the cause. If you click here, you'll find something that may help you, just as it's helping me, to engage in this debate with a little factual support.

It's a pop quiz, but it's also a collection of material and links to help people get an accurate sense of proportion about some of the issues Dr Brash has alluded to.

I think we need to recognise that what we see at the outset of the Treaty claim process is a far cry from what we see at resolution.

I think we need to recognise that it is Parliament, in the end, that always has the final say in legal matters, which means control is, and always will be, in the hands of the voters.

I think we need to recognize that this Government, and indeed the one that preceded it, has actually been achieving measured and effective results, which settle long-standing injustices, which aim to reconcile opposing views and which seek answers to issues that cannot be resolved with simplistic responses.

For the last ten years, I've been reading the speeches Don Brash has written, and admiring his clear and logical expression of good ideas. I really didn't think that the first time I went to write about him, I'd be finding fault with one of his speeches. But there is much fault to be found here, not so much in the logic of the speech, but in the emotional response he has sought out and provoked.

The tub's being thumped and people are getting a bit excited. We need to get a sense of proportion.

Fancy running an online business? Like to become an electronic Arkwright? Very good idea. You can go to the gym while everyone's at work, you can walk down to the beach when your brain slows down, and you can visit the Letterman site any time you like. I've been doing it for almost a decade, and you'd have to prise the mouse from my cold dead right hand to disconnect me now.

If you live in New Zealand, though, you might want to make one small change to your life before you open up for business: move to another country.

Oh, alright, it's not that bad, but there are moments…there are moments…

If you're a customer at speeches.com (and if you are, thank you once again for choosing us) you'll see that we gladly accept Mastercard and Visa and charge you in US dollars. We do this because 7.6 times out of 10, that's where you come from.

Here's where it gets interesting. I'd have liked to have been able to offer just such a system from the day the website began. But in 1995, when I first opened a credit card merchant account, the best you could do was to get your customer to fill in the online order form, take their credit card number from that order, ring up the bank and get an authorisation, write out a voucher charging them the New Zealand dollar equivalent of the US dollar rate that was quoted on the site, take it to the bank, and wait for the occasional disgruntled email from a customer who was bewildered by the figures on their credit card statement.

Worse, they didn't get access to the site (for this is what we sell) until I'd received and processed the order. People want to be able to tap in their card number and get what they've paid for right away. So I kept looking for a better alternative. Back then there was no IBill, no CCBill, no WorldPay, nor any Internet card processing entity like that available, however I did manage to track down a division of AT&T in the US that was just getting underway. It would provide a 900 number that would issue your customers with a password for instant access and charge it to your phone bill.

It was great. As soon as I hooked up to the 900 number system, sales rose. It came at a price, though. Instead of credit card commission of around 4%, you paid 20%. And it was primitive by today's standards; there was a guy in Florida who you'd email once or twice a week to get an update on sales. Still, it was the right step in the right direction. That particular operation grew up to become IBill, and a whole host of other entities like it sprang up as well.

Back in New Zealand, though, things moved more slowly. I'd keep asking the banks the same question: "Can you do real-time credit card processing?"

They'd keep telling me the same thing.

"Not yet."

"Too expensive."

"Not enough demand."

Finally, though, just a little while before Flying Pig took off and eVentures soaked the local punters, we got some action. BNZ and ASB both set up real-time online credit card processing services.

Better yet, one of them set up a system that was straightforward to deal with. Do a reasonably quick bit of coding, and you're in business. Unfortunately I discovered this only after first signing up with the other one.

So now I'm rolling along happily with BNZ Buyline, but there's still one part of the job left to be done, and that's the problem of charging the customers in their own currency.

So I asked them: "Can you do charging in US dollars?"

They'd keep telling me the same thing.

"Not yet."

"Too expensive."

"Not enough demand."

But then it happened. MultiCurrency options! Twelve to choose from! You can see me here burbling about it like a happy child at Christmas.

But Christmas doesn't come every day of the year.

I don't especially care to complain about this because at least BNZ have actually managed to offer this service, which is more than any of the others have bothered to do, and they're nice, helpful people running the service.

Trouble is, it aint working properly.

It times out. Quite a lot. This is not something you look for in a real time credit card processing service.

I've had to write in a couple of extra layers of processing to handle this so that, whether or not Buyline is down, things still go on working as usual for the customers - no, Mr Hacker, I won't tell you what they are - so you might say that I'm not inconvenienced.

But that's not exactly true. I had to rewrite a big chunk of code just before Christmas last year to change the way I hooked into Buyline, in order to help them take some load off their server. I could have done without that.

It's simply wrong in principle that a product should be quite so flawed. The reason, as far as I can gather, is one that should make senior people in the BNZ abashed. The system is running on old hardware, using old software on an old platform, coded in a language that no-one on the staff there today is able to deal with.

Anyone would think they were short of dough.

Now, one problem doesn't really constitute a substantial impediment to E-commerce, but I offer this as just one example of something that looks more to me like a systemic shortcoming in New Zealand.

Where's the forward thinking?

We've watched a fairly unedifying property boom unfolding over the last couple of years and all the banks have come up with plenty of money for that. Nice and easy. No thinking required. Done it before. Just clip the ticket on a whole lot of people getting greedy and stoke up the whole engine a bit more.

And don't get me started on Telecom.

Us electronic Arkwrights don't count for much in the eyes of large enterprises here, nor, I would argue, in the eyes of an army of Wellington bureaucrats - sorry, analysts - principally because they see us making only a tiny proportion of the GDP.

Well, fair enough, we might not all be bound for glory. But Amazon and Google were small once. We have a dollar pushing US 70c and that's too tough for a lot of our exporters. But guess what? Some of the little guys are coping with it pretty well. I've been pedalling hard for the last couple of years to expand the product range and lift revenue. That's given me a lot more room to move when the dollar goes up, and I'm not the only one.

In the long run, isn't it a better scenario for the economy to comprise a large number of businesses that can trade competitively even when the dollar is high?

We know that we're tyrannised by distance. How smart is it to make it hard for the very businesses for whom distance causes no problem?

I don't dwell on this much, but sometimes it just gets to me a bit. And when that happens, I go to the gym, or visit Letterman, or take a walk down to the beach.

Thanks to the example of Joseph Goebbels, we know that the Big Lie is a thing of evil.

But what about the rest of the items in the propaganda toolkit? Are they all evil too? Don't think so. Everyone has the right to argue for their cause. The question is, how far can you go?

Take the Big Promise. What's not to admire about someone who can make a gob-smacking promise and then deliver on it? Ted Turner promised the UN a billion dollars, and as far as I know, he made good on the deal.

The thing is, though, a Big Promise generally earns that description by promising the scarcely possible. Which brings us to this week's Big Promise by Sir William Gates, epoch-making entrepreneur, towering public figure and chronic emitter of vaporware.

Under which category should you file his promise of a Spam-Free World in Two Years? I'm inclined to put it in the Scarcely Possible and Most Likely Just Talk category. Aardvark has a clear-eyed assessment of Gate's proposals here. What I'm interested in is the thinking behind the promise.

Public figures feel driven to make Big Promises in a way the rest of us never do. They worry about things that bother us less: maintaining profile; out-doing the competition; feeding the ego; waxing the legacy; feeding the ratings; or maybe just pumping a little life into your polling. Also: if they're not preoccupied with those things, there's usually a clutch of handlers who will be.

I got my first experience of this when I was working in the Prime Minister's office. If you were watching the polling for the fourth Labour government - rocketed spectacularly through 1984 to 1987, melted down around 1988, flat-lined soon after - you'll recall that by 1990, things were looking pretty dire.

The economy was tanking. Unemployment was getting to numbers that people hadn't seen in more than a couple of generations.

On the 9th floor of the Beehive, where hope springs eternal, we remained faintly optimistic in the face of dispiriting evidence to the contrary. Even so, we had our doubts when we had a visit one day from some highly-regarded PR people who'd come down from Auckland to show us a way out of the woods.

"You've got to do something bold," they said.

"It's got to have real impact," they said.

"Here's what you do," they said. "You go out and you promise to halve unemployment in three years."

I remember some blinking, I remember some raised eyebrows, I remember the odd sharp intake of breath. I don't remember anyone pounding the table and saying "Brilliant, mate!" There might have been some coughing.

It should have died there but, well, the thing survived. And like that little skinny creature with the freaky head in Alien, it was soon screaming around the building and colonising the apparatus of government. It was only a matter of time before it got to the Prime Minister.

Geoffrey Palmer is one of the smartest people I've ever met. He knew it was drawing a long bow to make a promise like this, and he knew that several dozen economic indicators would have to do a quick U-Turn to make the Big Promise a reality, but he also knew what the Cabinet and the Caucus and the polls and the Press Gallery were saying: We Had To Do Something.

Thus is the most frail kind of Big Promise born: the act of desperation.

You have to kid yourself into this kind of thing: it's worth a try, might as well give it a shot, you never know, nothing to lose. This thinking comes to you readily if you've been a follower of horses. How everyone else talked themselves into it, I'm not sure.

So imagine my surprise when the Big Promise turned out to be a great big hit. The polls turned around right away, unemployment was down to 1% within a year, and the election that November was a landslide for the Labour Government. I stayed on for a few more years, then left to set up Amazon.com. Would you like a Tui?

Conclusion, then: people will see through the Big Promise if it's really an act of desperation.

As far as Big Promises go, they don't get much bigger than the one JFK made: a man on the moon by the end of the decade. In its own way, it was a kind of desperate act: he was worrying about being outflanked in the cold war. But it didn't play that way. It didn't have desperation written all over it; it looked and sounded inspired, and it galvanized people. It captured their imagination.

Inevitably, Dubya's people tried out a spacesuit on their guy last month, and then appeared to forget about it in the State of the Union speech, presumably because it didn't focus-group well. It probably only just counts as a Big Promise, anyway, because it expressed its measurable goals with almost lawyerly caution, relating them mainly to going back to the Moon. In other words: No pain, no gain.

So. Does the Gates one match any of these categories of Big Promise?

Well, it's hardly an act of desperation.

It sets a clear, measurable goal - spam-free in two years - so it fits the pain/gain requirement.

In its way, it's even quite inspiring and it could well galvanise people. Promise a spam-free world and you will capture their imagination.

But here's the cute thing about this guy. As usual, he's promising to make it happen, but you know that when it does, it's more likely to be achieved by some smart people who don't work anywhere near Redmond. By doing this, he's getting talk focused on achieving a king-hit against spam, and he's promising a lot of muscle, for which we may turn out to be grateful. And, of course, he's dressing himself in the clothes of the good guy. I just have the feeling that the solution, when we get it, will come from somewhere else.

I'll be glad to be proven wrong, though, and I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. Mr Gates, if you can rid the world of spam within two years, I will go back to using Outlook as my mail client. Promise.