Speaker by Various Artists

Last week I spoke at the “Gala Dinner” hosted by the Australian Internet Industry Association at Sydney’s Luna Park. The speech followed an address given by the Federal Minister of Communications, IT and the Arts, Daryl Williams, QC, who recently took over from his predecessor, Les Patterson. Previously Daryl had been the Attorney General, where he presided over the shrinking of our civil liberties and never once uttered a squeak of protest about the unlawful jailing of two Australians in Camp X-Ray.

The Vote of Thanks was given by Ziggy Switkowski, the CEO of Telstra, who spent his mike time schmoozing the Minister and praising his firm to the hilt. The theme of last night’s event was “ENGAGE!” This morning, as I try to file this report, Telstra Big Pond has DISENGAGED. Without any warning to customers, it is “upgrading”, according to a recorded message. To converse with a live human about the problem is out of the question. Last night’s organisers wanted a few words on the “Future of Online Democracy”. This is what they got:

Last month I left Australia on a hunch, triggered by a report I saw on the web, and flew off to Bombay with one of my daughters. At the same time, an old friend from Seattle, David, flew to Sydney and stayed as a guest in the house I share with my wife, Julie, a writer of excellent repute. One night over a bottle of wine at the kitchen table, David looked deep into the eyes of my wife and, as she was later to confess, he asked her a question no-one had ever asked her before: “Hey, have you ever Googled yourself?”

Julie was embarrassed by this question and yet…. at the same time, she was excited. What could it mean? By no means a tech head, she had finally started to feel at ease with email, but was yet to set out for the wilder shores of the web.

Who’s mousing around with my wife?
David moved beside her, gently took her hand and pressed it firmly onto his expectant mouse. Some time later my wife returned from the journey a changed woman, realising that her identity was no longer confined to a single location … or nation, or category. She had become postmodern woman. Her writings, her name, her reputation, she realised, all floated around in cyberspace, unbounded. Her sense of self had suddenly become globalised. She was now a citizen of the net.

And all us of here tonight, are we too citizens of the net? Sure we are. But what kind of citizens? Are we passive… and inert, part of a vast sleepwalking target market, or are we active, globalised and engaged?

Let’s conduct a little test:

The reason I flew off to Bombay at short notice and at some cost, was to attend what turned out to be one of the most amazing events of my life. It was like a world music Woodstock without the mud, and the Nimbin Aquarius Festival without the pot. It was also like a huge anti-war moratorium, as well as corporate conference and a hint of a UN plenary session all rolled into one. On a video hook-up, the crowd was welcomed by Nelson Mandela, and … what a crowd! The event attracted over 100,000 people from 132 nations, including reps from 2,400 NGO’s …. and the delegates included some of the world’s leading thinkers, writers, musicians, social reformers, the odd Nobel Prize winner and big time politician, as well as untouchables, vegetarians and around 50 Australians.

This vast hothouse of dissent and social justice dreaming hit the headlines in the Times of India, and sparked debates on Asian TV. Let’s conduct a little test. How many of you here have ever heard of the World Social Forum?. Let’s see a show of hands. (In an audience of 400, about a dozen hands are raised.)

The Instant World Affairs Knowledge Test
How many of you have heard of another event , which took place at the same time - the World Economic Forum at Davos? (A 90% show of hands).

Even though this event attracts less of a crowd and fewer original thinkers and social reformers, your raised hands are a sign of the times. It confirms the triumph of economic man, homo economistus, who now stands proud on top of the rubble of a world at war, a world reeling from social injustice and one in the throes of an eco calamity.

In the West, the World Economic Forum is front-page news, day after day, while the World Social Forum is barely a footnote. Is this Australia in the 21st century - so multicultural in the food halls, so myopic in its global vision?

But wait – this is not a discussion about the sensibility of Australians as a whole, as a people. It is about the kind of sensibility that is being reflected back to us from our mainstream media, from our current political leadership. (Don’t worry Daryl, I won’t get started on you…)

Out in the big wide world, there’s actually something shifting in the wind, a new mood pushing at the edge of our awareness. What could it be?

Why I do not despair
Next time you’re on the net, try Googling the World Economic Forum – you’ll get almost four and a half million hits. Impressive, huh? Then try Googling the World Social Forum. What do you reckon? Any guesses? (Somebody shouts, “Two”). Wrong – in less that a second you’ll come up with about five and a half million hits – that is, outscoring the Davos event by more than a million.

This is why I do not despair about the state of the world, despite the calibre of the people who are now ruling it. (Relax, Daryl …) At the grass roots level, most people seem to realise that it is not just an economy we actually live in, but a society.
So how come the global sample of Social Forum awareness is so much out of kilter with the awareness of it in this group? A minute ago you were all riding high, imaging yourself to be worldly wise and informed citizens served well by your media – but no – a huge event of global significance passed you by, glued as you are to the information systems controlled by homo economistus, our non diverse and highly homogenised corporate media.

Laughing all the way to internet kiosks
Most of us live inside our own cultural ghettos, myself included, and we’re often not even aware of the fact. The great gift of the web for the citizens of the world, as well as a considerable number of the poor who manage to find their way to internet kiosks, is that millions of people now have the opportunity to break out of their information prisons, to burst their bleak bubbles of bias, conformity and illusion, to confront and interact with an array of alternative viewpoints, to defy the editors, the subs, the media magnates …. to enter a rich, wild , uncharted territory, that can help us act locally and engage globally.

The only role Government needs to play to preserve the net’s freedoms is to support the provision of ubiquitous broadband for all and sundry as quick as possible.

Future threats and challenges which will continue to cause endless arguments, such as spam, porno, hackers, privacy, viruses, copyright and the free software movement. Sometimes the concerns are justified, at other times they are exaggerated, often by fat cat operators whose history of exploitive practices is coming back to haunt them.

The rush to share music files is not just about price, it’s about the desire for individuals to express their own taste, to customise their own playlist and to resist the stale paradigm of one package suits all.

You can’t go surfing in Singapore
Some governments are desperately trying to keep the lid on the net. I hear that downloading an MP3 music file in Singapore will land you in court with a $10,000 fine. A few weeks ago at the Cathay Pacific airport lounge in Hong Kong, my daughter logged onto hotmail. Every time she started to enter a swear word, the text turned into gobbledygook. She tried every filthy phrase she knew, and gave up – fuming: “I mean, Dad, how can I write to my friends without swearing”? Actually, I was thrilled at this effort to extend her vocabulary, and tonight I would like to express my gratitude to Government of Beijing.

When broadband is ubiquitous and wireless is the norm, the net will become a dangerous placed for politicians, I’m happy to say.

Even with the humble phone-line connection, the small mountain town of Blackheath, NSW used the net to mount a public protest big enough to rescue its famed swimming pool from the dark intentions of the local council.

And what about Korea? In December 02, the country’s national elections transformed the entire political landscape overnight, owing to the advent of webocracy .

Keep in mind that over 70% of homes in South Korea possess broadband, compared with less than 5 per cent here. Over 10% of economic activity is related to IT - one of the highest levels in the world. Young people get just about all their information from the web, according to the New York Times, not even bothering with TV. They just download the programs.

The Beleaguered Bloggers of Baghdad
The voice of this New Korea is the web based Ohmy News, arguably the world's most domestically powerful news site. It was online organising that swept Korea’s new president into power, Mr Roh - who is apparently the world's first political leader to comprehend HTML coding. (How about you, Daryl?).

In South Korea, the citizens of the net are credited with “jolting the country into switching from conservative to liberal, from gerontocracy to youth culture and from staunchly pro-American to a being deeply ambivalent ally - all seemingly overnight. (New York Times, March 6, 2003). Welcome to Webocracy.

Since launching my own modest and totally uninfluential website two and a half years ago, one of the things I’ve discovered about the relationship between the old media and the internet, is the number of major stories that break online long before they ever pop up in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, or our TV news.

Well over a year ago it was obvious to any netizen – if not to Howard, Bush and Blair - that many of the claims about Iraq’s arsenals were a load of hogwash. It was circulated on the web over a year ago that the documents provided to the UN by the United States suggesting that the African country of Niger sold uranium to Iraq had been faked. Who by? It will probably be the web which reveals the culprit.

Talking of uranium, it was also the web that first displayed the documents revealing that when the Swiss technology giant ABB won a deal to supply North Korea with two nuclear power plants, one of its board members was none other than Donald Rumsfeld. In the year 2000, ABB reportedly netted $200 million from its contract with North Korea.

Today, the most up top date and insightful reports from Iraq come not from mainstream media, but from the citizen bloggers of that beleaguered land. If you haven’t seen it, check out Baghdad Burning. It adds an element to the web which is often lacking – humanity, grace and passion.

A story too shocking to tell over dinner
The most exciting aspect about engaging the world through the net, is to enter a space of creative collaboration. Here’s my final example:

At the end of last March, during the early stages of Operation Enduring Freedom, a bomb exploded in Shua’le, a poor, Shia Muslim suburb of Baghdad. The blast killed 62 residents and maimed many more, most of them women and children. The journalist, Robert Fisk, rushed to the site and found the scenes of pain and suffering to be among the most appalling he had ever witnessed. Fisk visited a two-year-old girl, Saida Jaffar, who lay in a dilapidated hospital swaddled in bandages, a tube into her nose, another into her stomach. “All I could see of her”, he wrote, “was her forehead, two small eyes and a chin. Beside her, blood and flies covered a heap of old bandages and swabs”.

The Pentagon maintained that the blast must have been caused by Iraqi anti aircraft fire, while the locals said they saw an American plane overhead and a sliver of silver. Fisk managed to get his hands on a smoldering fragment of the bomb, which displayed a 12 digit serial number, as well as another number, ending 96214. Fisk published these codes in his UK newspaper, The Independent, available Online. Hours later, the citizens of the net had sourced this missile to a plant in McKinney, Texas.

The bright lights of dark Gods
This plant is owned by the one of the world’s biggest arms suppliers, and a favourite of own Defence Force, Raytheon. I clicked on its homepage and found that Raytheon’s business goal is “to provide superior solutions for customers”. The superior carnage at Shua’le was apparently caused by a missile known in the trade as Harm, a High-Speed Anti-radiation Missile. It carries a warhead designed to explode into thousands of aluminium fragments that spare buildings and destroy humans – which is why Iraqi doctors reported such horrific injuries On its website, Raytheon’s stated major value is to, “Treat people with respect and dignity”.

In case you were wondering about the origin of the word Raytheon, it means “light of the Gods”. Sure … but what sort of Gods?

With another click of the mouse, I discovered that one week after the superior solution was dished out to the people of Shua’le, the then chairman and CEO of Raytheon, Daniel P Burnham was actually in Canberra, Australia, where he addressed the National Press Club. In a copy of the speech provided on Raytheon’s home page, Mr Burnham boasted that “even just a few years ago, the level of accuracy of Raytheon’s missiles, would have been considered pure fantasy”.

As far as I can ascertain, during the question time, not one member the Press Club audience was discourteous enough to ask the Chairman of Raytheon how he felt about the accuracy of missile 96214.

However, L and G, it is still not too late to engage the arms industry. Rayethon’s earnings for 2003 topped $US18 billion. It also turns out that its Chief Technology Officer, Terry Stevensen, will be appearing Canberra on Feb 24/25, to speak at the annual conference of the Australian Defence Magazine.

No doubt he will be promoting Raytheon’s new internet powered, Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System, also known as NetFires. This unleashes a product that possesses an all too human sounding personality. It’s known as LAM, which stands for a Loitering Attack Missile. Perhaps one of you media people here could get yourself to Canberra and ask the Technology Officer what proportion of Raytheon’s massive revenue has been earmarked for the survivors of the missile attack on Shua’le?

Long live the web, ladies and gentlemen, for providing the information for this speech. The revolution in online democracy is only just beginning.

This article was first published on Richard Neville's web site. It is reproduced by permission.

Economics. No, no, wait. My interest in the subject, like most people, lies mostly in the effects of financial theories on your common and garden citizen, ie me.

My contribution to a BBQ conversation on such a topic might amount to questions such as why, when we're being encouraged to save for our retirement rather than speculate wild-eyed in investment properties, are savings taxed but capital gains not? Or why is my credit card company increasing the percentage of its fee for processing foreign transactions? Because they're doing more than ever, I was told. Forgive me, but surely that's the point of margins: 1% of 100 is good but 1% of 1000 is better, so upping your sales is the goal? Of course, 1.5% is much more better. Greed is indeed grand.

I feel similar misgivings whenever numbers and promises are mentioned in the same breath. Like when news came last week that Australia had signed a "free trade" deal with the US.

The media's thankfully generally painting it as a Clayton's agreement, the free trade deal you have when you don't have a free trade deal. Lower tariffs on Australian manufactured goods and an opening up of markets in agriculture, primary produce and the like. Of course, Australia, er, sugared the deal for the Americans by ring-fencing some industries and allowing for long lead-in times in others.

Still, they agreed to some things. As I turn over the chicken and call for my third glass of the supermarket special sauvignon, I might throw in the hubbub a few curve-balls, whatever they are non-figuratively speaking.

First of all, why has free trade taken on a kind of neo-hippyish vogueness, as if free trade were akin to free speech, and we are unshackling ourselves from the yoke of some new political oppression? The truth is, while it may (big emphasis) boost the Australian economy by $A3 billion a year, perhaps $A160 million for farmers in its first year, the deal's about political expediency. Don't come back without a deal, the trade reps were told. And this is the absolute best they could do in an election year for George W.

What's the real price, though, of such a deal for New Zealand? We can have none of the sway and swagger that a 20 million population-strong sabre-rattling mate of the US can bring to the table.

Even in Oz, film and TV types are worried about whether local quotas will survive the FTA. "Both sides are claiming victory; it makes us very nervous," Australian Writers Guild Megan Elliot told The Australian. Given how little local stuff appears on screen here, perhaps US TV networks will take pity on us in the wake of a free trade deal and offer to fund some. On the other hand, fewer homegrown reality TV shows? Oh dear, how sad.

What about drugs, I hear you ask. Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, something like what Pharmac does here, is under threat. Under the FTA, massive US drug companies have won a right to review decisions made by the PBS advisory committee. Some worry that they will successfully lobby to have their patented drugs subsidised rather than cheap generics and the cost to the public may rise. This bulk-buying of common medicines is a mainstay of public health systems across the developed world, but the pharmaceuticals lobby thinks it is a protectionist menace. Just "a few tweaks" of Australia's patent laws could banish low-cost generic drugs from existence.

US lawmakers are on to the high price Americans pay for drugs. The Guardian cites a letter by 17 members of Congress: "We are deeply opposed to the trade office being used by the US pharmaceutical industry to achieve its strategic objective of raising worldwide drug prices to the level now paid by US consumers." The US government has pledged to scrutinise such "protectionist" schemes. Says The Guardian:

It shows how far the debate has drifted when you think that Washington once spent its time trying to lower the costs of the one in four prescriptions that are not filled because US citizens cannot afford to buy the medicines they need. Now, the problem is seen to be not high prices at home, but low prices overseas.

Speaking of patents and intellectual property, another thing that was won for the US was changes to Australian copyright law. The FTA now promises stronger protection for copyright holders. They will be able to use "an expeditious process" to order ISPs to take allegedly infringing material off websites they host. They can now demand harsher penalties for cracking technological protection of material. Copyrights can be extended even further, violating the notion that artists are handed a temporary monopoly to get some payback for their hard work before public interest demands access for further innovation. Bring on the DCMA, or not.

Stanford prof Lawrence Lessig argues that the US has demanded, through a series of trade agreements:

…stricter protection for intellectual property internationally than US law would allow domestically. (Fair use, for example, is mandated by our constitution but invisible in these agreements.)" When the US was poor, it stole the intellectual property of Dickens and other artists without paying for it.

"We didn't call it stealing, but they did. We called it a sensible way for a developing nation to develop. Eventually, we saw it was better to protect their rights as well as ours -- better because we had rights to protect elsewhere, too. But we only imposed this burden on ourselves when it made sense to do so. Until 1891, we were a pirate nation.

Things have changed. Now that we're the world's leading exporter of intellectual property, we're also the most self-righteous about the importance of protecting it globally. Indeed, we can be vicious in our self-righteousness -- threatening trade wars with developing nations for the crime of being just like us.

Countries should enforce US copyrights only when the US stops massively subsidising its other industries, argues Lessig, increasing the coverage as it decreases the size of its pork barrel. Fat chance.

OK, it's an odd little place.

Ka Tiritiriotemoana - also known as the Southern Alps - are the eastward backdrop: there are swathes of bush in a thousand shades of green & bronze sweeping down to the settlement, and wide stoney ironsand beaches and the Tasman sea as the foreground. A large lagoon to the northern end and an iconic but now despoiled bluff to the south.

Sandwiched inbetween - a gazillion sandflies, and us.

I've lived here for nearly 30 years. I've got to know the moods and tides and hazards of the place. I've seen a lot of people come and go - some to another area, some to the grave - and learned that Okarito seduces folk. You can be a German guild-trained carpenter & joiner, travelling through on your journeyman year - and you wind up with your NZ wife & daughter in your home here. You can be an internationally-renowned photographer who camps on the beach in 1975 - and a couple of decades or so later, has a wonderful partner, home & business high on Kohuamaru. You can be a a very well-regarded psychiatrist, who began tramping in the general area in the late 1940s, and decide to retire here.

The resident population is in the mid-30s. We live in a kind of building gaggle that straggles round the two main sealed roads. We get upwards of 25000 motor vehicles through a year. We provide for them, their occupants, with a camp ground, and public toilet; a motel and various
Rental properties, and a Youth Hostel, and a couple of lowkey very environmentally-conscious lagoon tourism businesses.

Cool eh - but- other people see the place and dont think, Ah tranquility. They think, Money to be made here. Look at all that unoccupied land...

The fact that most of the land isn't suitable for building upon (it's wetland, or vulnerable to sea erosion, or home to the Okarito brown kiwi, as well as a host of other creatures) doesn't seem to deter these people. They don't appear to consider beauty, or fitted-scale operations (i.e tiny here). They don't appear to consider that humans are temporary transient beings and don't have an intrinsic right to befoul a place, and - especially- that tourist & housing booms - bust. They bulldoze ahead.

I was thinking all this crappy stuff (it's an old thought pattern here - us locals have been trying to protect what we consider to be a place for all Aotearoa-New Zealand for years) when there was a knock on the back door.

It was a dark & stormy night - no, really. The rain was slashing down. I didnt expect anyone. And when, in answer to my "WHO IS IT?" a voice I didnt know yelled back "Helen! You dont know me! But Bill of Spinal Dogs!" I knew the worst. William Gruar? HERE? Ogawd, the man was an icon in his own way. Right in there at the beginning of BLERTA; a practical builder and landsman; a mechanic and a maker of beautiful things, and an anarchist. And - not least - the author of "Spinal Dogs."

I really hope that I wont - any of my family wont - have an accident or event and become paraplegic. But - if it ever happens - my book of choice to read or offer for that position is Spinal Dogs. It is flatout noholdsbarred sharingly caringly(sort of) & searingly honest.

Last time I saw Bill it was at "Going West" in the Waitakeres in 1997. We read: we had a few drinks: I watched, and I learned that some of the things I had imagined about a paraplegic character of mine were right, and some I'd have to research further. As Bill said, We own this condition-

There was no bloody way he could get up my backdoor steps or my frontdoor steps (without a hoist) so Helen and I sorted out umbrellas and trundled out to the machine parked in my driveway. A Mitsubishi Canta (known in Japan as a GUTS - which is why Bill bought it, doing everything via the 'Net) modified for hand control of all the foot pedals. and with a stark interior: 3/4 bed; tiny galley; wheelchair, and Bill's selfdesigned extremely tested -"Y'know, did a really good demonstration, self on a dunny in France with *good* glass of wine, and took it round Europe. Only problem – hauled hunks of plaster out of an old bathroom wall in England, suckers were that tight"- shower & loo stand for paraplegic people.

And the driver's bench seat with Bill, half a leg missing since I saw him last, his face furrows deeper, darker, more saturnine, but his wit & mind as sharp, glittery yet profound, as in 1997.

Well, we spent about 3 hours drinking a litre of vodka with a tomato juice concoction and we talked the past, the present, and what may come. Helen was also an original member of Blerta, and had come to Okarito in the late 60s and loved it, and she had joined Bill as a travel companion.

At one stage I sort of pinched myself - like, BLERTA were myth in my youth & here I am, drinking vodka with them?!

At another, as lightning & thunder really started cracking round - hoowee, what are the conductance capacities of a GUTS?

And after Bill & I had talked at length about process, writing, publishing and - particularly with self-publishing - promotion of work, and the vodka was finished, and I had his 2 -new to me- works autographed with wondrously vodka-manipulated words & writing, I limped awkwardly back to my home, leaving them a key.

Next day was bright, clear, calm - Okarito is often like that. Helen had crept in and boiled a jug, made coffee,& left a note. They were headed north to catch up on others of BLERTA's crowd of mates (oddly, one of them was the son of my well-beloved erstwhile neighbours. the late Gordon and very much alive Esther Nicholls, who were building their house here the same time I started mine.)

Some people do the best whatever their circumstances. They tread as lightly on the Earth as possible. They are creative, congenial, and kindly.

And then there are the others.

...oooOOOooo...

'Cleared'. 'Saint Tony', 'BBC in crisis'.

These headlines from the Evening Standard, Daily Express and The Sun, respectively, set out how Tony Blair has been found to be so clean that he might squeak when he walks. The Hutton Inquiry established to investigate the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly found the British PM to be whiter than white and sent the BBC back to journalism school.

Dr Kelly was the source of a controversial story run by the BBC last year which made assertions the Government had "sexed up" an intelligence dossier released in September 2002 to convince the British public of the threat from Iraq. The BBC report stated the dossier included a claim that Saddam Hussein was able to launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, despite the Government knowing it was wrong.

Dr Kelly was outed as the source - and it was revealed he had an unauthorised conversation with another BBC reporter - after appearing before a parliamentary committee. Feeling the pressure from his employer, the Ministry of Defence, to answer questions regarding his conduct and following a public humiliation at the committee hearing, he took his own life in July.

For those people new to the story, the Hutton report must seem pretty unequivocal. Blair cleared, BBC criticised, Government exonerated and the Ministry of Defence rapped over the knuckles for not telling Dr Kelly he was to be named. The dossier was good, the war on Iraq was justified, end of story.

However, it's not that simple.

The BBC is heavily criticised in the Hutton report, and Today reporter Andrew Gilligan is being singled out, not because the claims were wrong but, because of shoddy journalistic practices, they were not proven. Gilligan's notes from the Kelly interview were found to be unreliable. His broadcast was unscripted and his notes were not checked by his superiors. The BBC governors were censured for not fully investigating the story when the Government complained.

Lord Hutton found Gilligan's claims to be unfounded. True. But he went on to say this: "It may be that when Gilligan suggested to Dr Kelly that the dossier was transformed to make it sexier, Dr Kelly agreed. It maybe that Dr Kelly said that Alastair Campbell (the PM's director of communications) was responsible for transforming the dossier."

It was the uncertainty in Gilligan's notes that proved the key point. Imagine if he HAD taken proper notes and instead of using the words sexed up had used something less dramatic, like over-egged. At least one high-profile British politician, Robin Cook, mourns this point (in an article on the pay-only part of The Independent's site).He says: "If only Mr Gilligan had been content to report that as a straight story, he would have made a valuable contribution to the case against the war."

Listening to the coverage of the Hutton report yesterday, from the report itself, to the debate in the Commons, to the radio panel discussions later, I became increasingly frustrated.

It started with Tony Blair. In his trademark style, he brushed aside Mr Howard's reference to the Prime Minister's denial to journalists on July 22 that he authorised the naming of Dr Kelly. This is despite Sir Kevin Tebbitt, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, telling the Hutton inquiry on October 13 that the prime minister chaired the meeting at which the naming policy was taken.

Speaking in a careful and controlled manner in the Commons, only raising his voice to speak over his crowing supporters, Mr Blair declared triumphantly: "The allegation that I or anyone else lied to this House or deliberately misled the country by falsifying intelligence on WMD is itself the real lie."

Mr Blair also ignored calls from Liberal Democrats leader Charles Kennedy and Mr Howard for an independent inquiry into the basis for war.

I heard three interviews with Government bulldog John Reid, the health secretary, who was sent out to tackle TV and radio. When pressed on matters in the future - such as what should happen to the BBC board or why the evidence presented in the dossier was so wrong (in reference to the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq) - he pointedly refused to answer. He told interviewers that these things were matters for other people (maybe that's why they sent out the health secretary and not, say, the Minister of Defence) and "today, of all days" it was a matter to reflect on the findings of Lord Hutton and for the Government's detractors (including the BBC) to apologise.

On Newsnight, a well-watched BBC television programme, Mr Campbell took presenter Jeremy Paxman to task over the BBC's lack of apology for what it had said about the Government and him in particular. Any talk of weapons of mass destruction was deflected by statements the former spin doctor that he "wasn't in the Government".

Guitar-playing Tony Blair might be striking up some celebratory chords, but they are pointedly ignoring the whole fact there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and their intelligence is clearly wrong!

Hutton's remit was extremely narrow and it did not suit his inquiry to cover every point. He had a duty to the Kelly family to try and discover the reasons for the suicide and a duty to the Government to test the claims in the BBC story. He did not have a duty to discover if the Government was justified in going to war.

The reason why Britain has been going mad about this inquiry, which ran from August to October last year, is because it dealt with issues regarding the war on Iraq. Between a million and two million people marched through London in February last year to protest against the war so you can imagine the Government went to extraordinary lengths to convince the public that Iraq was an imminent threat.

The public's cynicism was borne out by evidence given at the Hutton Inquiry, of which two points stood out to me.

Jonathan Powell, the PM‚s chief of staff, said in an email to the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, on September 17 that the dossier, as it stood then, did not demonstrate Iraq was an imminent threat.

In a cynical use of the media two days later, Mr Powell asks Mr Scarlett and Mr Campbell "what will be the headline in the (London Evening) Standard on day of publication? What do we want it to be?"

That headline on September 24 read "45 minutes from attack". Mr Blair said in his statement to the Commons yesterday: "Only in retrospect, has history been rewritten to establish it (the 45-minute claim) as the one crucial claim that marched the nation into conflict. Yet that was the headline they obviously wanted to appear on that crucial day.

It's time for the people of Britain to find out, through an independent inquiry, whether the Government was justified in going to war with Iraq.

Well, I sent off the second Dimmer album for mastering this week. Letting go of baby. The record is called "You've Got To Hear The Music" - six words, just like "I Believe You Are A Star". I like the symmetry even tho' I often tell people the title and they stare at me all blankly like I've just said "Now That's What I Call Music Vol. 7" or something - but to me there's resonances and ambiguities within the title that totally capture the spirit of the record.

I wrote most of the songs in a month last year. Personally that's almost unheard of. "Smoke" off the last album took about four years to write. I've been privy to many a sudden arrival, but often there's struggle, tangents, and blind alleys, where you poke around in every corner except the right one. Then one day you find the thread and it all falls into place. It's a magical, ecstatic time when you finally discover how that tune really goes.

Many songwriters talk of fully formed songs floating around the ether and how it's just a matter of hooking into them and letting them arrive. I think craft and the writer's instinct have a lot to do with it as well but I like the romance and mystery of such a notion. Free your mind and your ass will follow. Unclutter all those internal dialogues and external buzzes and you tap into what is always there. Sourcing the Great Lost Moments In Rock - you've just got to hear the music.

I wrote a little mantra that I'd look at every morning before I started writing. Stuff about not second guessing what came out - if it felt good, it was, if it was true then don't waste time trying to say it in a 'better' or 'cleverer' way. I think over the years I've tried to make my music as elemental and honest as possible and while I realise that the word 'honest', when applied to commercial pop music, has be one of the most bandied about and abused terms in the history of all communication, it really is true - you learn that concerning yourself with other people's expectations or worrying about whether your music is 'right' or whatever is a waste of everyone's time. Those efforts sound like efforts, and they'll always carry a whiff of fraudulence or contrivance. (Then again I knew that when I was fifteen but sometimes you have to make the journey to realise you were right all along.) You can't guess. You just have to hear what's inside and somehow let it come out.

Similarly I can't see the point in obscuring or complicating music that already expresses a base emotion . It's like the soccer players say - a two yard tap-in is worth just as much as a 30 yard screamer. No amount of metaphor or candyfloss can ever enhance the hard won, quintessential truth. Help. Let's Get It On. A Love Supreme. Musics and lyrics with a haiku-like economy and directness where you know exactly what that person is saying.

It's what I've always loved about blues and gospel music, how so often their ageless, universal themes seem to boil down to the one blunt truism - that we'll always be revelling or struggling within the consequences of the choices we've made. It's all evolution. It's just the consequence. Getting what you give.

That whole idea of karmic come-around was totally confirmed for me at my father's tangi three years ago. He always had a lot of time for kids. He taught Maori to the local children on the Taieri, but he also had a wonderful sense of fun and mischief that every eight year old could relate to. Just seeing the response and faces of those dozens of children who turned up over those sad few days made me feel so proud of my old man. You can't bluff kids, they know , and no amount of fake or bluster will ever divert that ultimate reckoning where you finally have to face up to the impact and ramifications of the way you've behaved and what you have or haven't given. We all get to face the music some day. (I suppose death too is the great reminder of how much the good things count. Life can't be all Faustian thunderclaps and dischords - sometimes you've just got to ... well, you get the picture.)

It brings to mind a conversation with my good friend, Dimmer drummer and video-maker extraordinaire, Gary Sullivan. We were talking about Orson Welles' "The Third Man" a classic that I somehow have never managed to see. "It's really great," said Gary in his rolling Southland burr, "but you've got to hear the music."

He talked about zithers but I was only half listening.

You've got to hear the music.

Now there's a title, I thought.