Speaker by Various Artists

On June 27, a remarkable lineup of DJs, performers and punters will convene in Auckland for Take Me Back, a celebration of the culture around The Box and Cause Celebre, the twin clubs that defined Auckland's High Street life in the 80s and 90s. Simon Grigg, co-founder of both venues, recalls the good times on High Street.
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I remember one night about 1993, I think it was a fairly quiet early morning, mid week, I was sitting or leaning outside the door of Cause Celebre, likely on the Herald box which served a useful purpose, chatting about not very much to Roseti, our head doorman (and a gentle giant who is much missed), when two arms wrapped themselves loosely around me and a very drunk John Hurt placed a wet kiss on my cheek, shouting “dear boy, it’s been ages ...”

I’d met him very, and I mean extremely, briefly, about a decade earlier at an opening in London, and, yes, he was a wee bit pissed then too. That he remembered me was very doubtful but I guess it was one of those Cause Celebre things.

I smiled and waved him down into the darkness.

Cause Celebre and Box (it was officially just Box but everyone referred to it as The Box, so that’s what it’s become) were nightclubs. That’s what our ACC designation said, or more precisely as I recall: A venue for people to gather, drink and listen to or dance to music.

But somewhere they developed a life beyond that. There were lots of clubs around Auckland at the time but pretty much all largely forgotten, as is the way with such places. For some reason this particular one, or more correctly, two in one, seems to have a reputation that’s held and maybe even grown over the past decade. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that as The Hacienda was to Manchester, Cause Celebre and The Box have become to the Queen City.

I was rather uncomfortable writing this as it felt a little egotistical and self-anointing but on reflection I realised this club worked because it wasn’t about the owners and to celebrate it’s 20th anniversary isn’t about us at all. Ok, we were the facilitators perhaps (and wore the financial burden…because it rarely made money), but because of the philosophy we inherited and built on we were never more than part of the reason people still write about or talk about a couple of pretty dark and grotty rooms downstairs at 33 High Street in Auckland city.

Cause Celebre and The Box were really the culmination of the thing that Mark Phillips and Peter Urlich started at the legendary A Certain Bar in 1980, upstairs in an old DB pub in Albert Street. It had opened its doors primarily as a gathering point for like-minded people to hang and listen to fairly cutting edge music in a non-threatening environment. A simple concept really, but Auckland offered nothing like it before. If they hadn’t invented it at the time, it may well have invented itself out of need, because there was such a swell of energy, mostly kids (meaning 18-25), who’d come out of the punk and post punk scenes, but older creative sorts too, that needed an alternative to the booze barns and the Queen Street clubs where faceless DJs played Top 40, or bands played mediocre cover versions of those hits. The punk scene had, rather radically for Auckland, offered this freedom and it grew from there.

This alternative club scene grew rapidly throughout the decade and I found myself DJing at a few of Mark and Peter’s places simply because I had the records and enjoyed playing them to people...there were a bunch of clubs: Zanzibar, The Six Month Club, The Brat, Mantrap, Berlin and Roma, as the scene jumped from venue to venue, with an average six-month life span.

I’d left Peter and Mark and jumped into bed, if you will, with my old mate Tom Sampson, and a young DJ, Roger Perry, who’d learnt his chops from Russell Crowe at The Venue in Symonds Street. In 1986 we opened The Asylum, the first club to play House Music in NZ, and then, a year later, The Playground in Nelson Street (in what is now the two floors underneath Toto), before deciding, as the economy crashed down around us, that we needed somewhere more permanent.

The economic turmoil offered us the old Club Mirage, former home of the now penniless stockbroker set, and, after the traders’ expense accounts had dried up, almost bust.

We took it over on 9 December 1988 and reopened immediately as The Siren. The self-anointed doyens of glitz, in their mouthpiece, Metro’s Felicity Ferrit, snarled that we were the Hell Hole of High Street (their gold cards had been revoked and they were not pleased) and we used their disapproval in our advertising as a badge of honour.

One afternoon, shortly after we’d opened, Tom and I lifted a curtain (at the back of the coat check) to find a door, which we forced open. Beyond it we found a large, musty, long sealed room (complete with an unfortunate dead cat in the middle of what would be the dancefloor) and we set about tracking down the owners. This, the former RSA basement had been shut off when they didn’t have the members to fill it anymore and they’d moved a few years earlier. We rented what was essentially dead basement space, moved the cat, painted the floor with bright red rubber based paint to give it an extra bounce, bought in a new celebrity barman, the infamous Hat, late of the Dean Martini Club, and installed a new Gavin Chilcott and Ann Sampson designed interior in The Siren.

We then made the fateful, and thoroughly unsound business decision, to allow the club to be primarily driven by the music. Both sides of the club would have an uncompromising musical policy. The Box, the new room, would have DJs, who would play contemporary and credible dance music without any demands on them to play the hits or cheese, pretty much as we’d tried to do over the previous years; and Cause Celebre, the old Siren, would feature jazz...not the soft mush that often passes for jazz, but the cream of Auckland’s jazz scene playing very late sets, often through to dawn as the 90s went on.

So through Celebre over the next years went the very young and precocious Nathan and Joel Haines, Mark de Clive Lowe, Greg Johnson & Bluespeak, Murray McNabb’s magnificent Quartets, and, as we stretched the policy from jazz, the Fuemana family, a pre-hits Supergroove, Che Fu on his own, Upper Hutt Posse, Lava Lava and dozens more. I look back with some pride at what became the epicentre of what was happening musically in our late night city (and beyond as these acts often went on to sell records around the world … in the case of Paul Fuemana, millions).

Next door in The Box, Rob Salmon, Greg Churchill and others played regular eight hour sets that are still talked about on the dance forums.

But we struggled. Tom, Ann, Kevin and myself, for the first two years also cleaned the place … night after night we’d finish at 4am and be back at 1pm the next day to ready it for the night. We loaded the fridges, cleaned the loos, we battled grumpy landlords, Auckland’s less than helpful council, and the IRD but somehow made it through.

Over the next decade or so a culture built up around the club. Our door policy was simple: if you understood you were in … we had a personality code rather than a dress code and women were, and this was as important to us as the music, hopefully made to feel safe. This all attracted the cream of the creative industries in Auckland, many of whom, the writers, the musicians, the TV people, the designers and so on, and the people who wanted to hang in that sort of atmosphere, made this their second home at night and on weekends.

Writer Chad Taylor commented recently that he used to give out the phone number at Cause Celebre as a business contact.

And the touring artists and actors could be found here … seeing Tom Jones at the bar buying David Soul a drink didn’t really draw much comment.

But mostly it was about the music and the extended family it drew. High Street became quite the centre of something rather special for a while, and it was in an era where the most munted punters seemed to get was a beer or two too many, or a joint too much. In those rather more innocent years there were few green kids seen staggering up the stairs, as you find in the more drug-swamped later years of Auckland clubbing.

In a decade the real only violence we had inside were a couple of scratching fracases between hairdressers over girl, or boy, friends. Aside, of course from the big one which involved a member of The Stray Cats, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Barnes’ sister.

Somewhere around 1991 UK style mag, I-D, named Cause Celebre and The Box as one the world’s best ten clubs. We smiled. Take that Felicity Ferrit.

Twenty years after we opened, like Woodstock, the number of people who claimed to have spent just about every hour we were open there seems to be on the increase again, which is fine with me. Whatever, but over the decade or so it mattered it was home to literally thousands of people including the regular crew who were waiting outside on Friday or Saturday night and stayed on the dancefloor until we closed at six am. Some of those haunt this forum.

I guess it has a legacy, but mostly I just like the pictures or the stories you hear….like this one from Tom Sampson:

I remember the night that Kenneth, whose claim to fame as an amateur actor and professional barfly was that he knew Harvey Keitel, came to us one night to pass on that Harvey had asked if we could tell our barman Kurt to please refrain from yelling Yo! Iris every time he went near the bar, as the Taxi Driver references were passé in 1990.

I think I’ve still got one of Harvey’s credit card receipts tucked away somewhere…

For a Government of the Right, this present one is certainly no great shakes at economics. Good government should create certainty – not uncertainty. Uncertainty has real economic effects: and the revisiting of the Waterview Tunnel project is exactly the sort of Government-created uncertainty that we could do without in the present climate.

By announcing a review of the tunnel, Stephen Joyce immediately put the future of over 550 houses at risk. The total value of these houses is over $200 million – the amount of “wealth” that is burning while the Government fiddles the books.

And what a lot of fiddling! How did the original $2 billion price tag become almost $3 billion within the last six months? Having done cost-benefit analysis for major projects myself, I know that costings of this kind are always hairy.

The Government claims that “financing costs” have escalated. Financing costs are the cost of acquiring the cash to pay for the project. They can fluctuate even when the cash costs of the project do not change. For example, if interest rates on your home mortgage increases, then although the original price you paid for the house is still the same, the cost of financing it has gone up.

Governments fund projects in a number of ways: through borrowing, taxing or “printing money”. Each method has an implicit cost associated with it. While these costs can vary over the business cycle, and a project which looked a good idea in a low interest environment can become untenable when interest rates rise, I am at a loss to understand how with the current exceptionally low interest rates, there could be such a large jump in financing costs.

Another argument used by Mr Joyce to pour cold water over this project is the expected increase in Government debt. Indeed, it is the debt-bogey that has seen Bill English (possibly) killing the second round of tax cuts. Let me be clear: I do not think New Zealand has a Government debt problem.

The worst case scenario is as I understand it, a debt to GDP ratio of 45%. This is not a high figure – especially when implementing a fiscal stimulus. Gordon Brown’s rule of thumb for England prior to the financial crisis was 40% and Mr Brown has certainly exceeded this as England rolls out its stimulus package. The Maastricht Treaty, which sets out the rules under which the EU countries operate, require debt to be less than 60% of GDP.

Moreover, recall that one of the mainstays of this Government’s fiscal stimulus strategy is infrastructure spending. The effect of the tunnel on employment is an added benefit that is surely a counter-point to whatever added cost of financing is claimed by the Minister.

While I am sympathetic with the Greens' principle of spending on public transport rather than building new roads, it is misguided in the present context. I agree that if we were planning the Auckland transport system de novo, we would have a much greater component of public transport. We might not have even started the Western Ring Route. However, this is not the case. We have already built 90% of the route. Not to complete it would possibly lead to greater emissions as vehicles are forced to take longer routes and are stuck in traffic jams. The power cable under the Cook Straight might be the most expensive part of the electricity network – but it’s also the most valuable.

While promising to complete the review in April, we are well into May and the residents of Mt Albert are still to see the report (or Mr Joyce come to that). Government is not about the arbitrary use of power nor the mischievous use of economics. It is about responsible, serious and considered decision-making. If the Minister wants to scuttle the tunnel, let him be open about his reasons.

Rhema Vaithianathan has a PhD in economics and teaches Public Economics at the University of Auckland. She also practices as an independent economic consultant.

What is it about whisky that inspires such fervour? Robert Burns was so enraptured by the spirit as to once write: “Oh whisky! soul o' plays and pranks! Accept a bardie's gratefu' thanks!” Author Ian Banks loved the drink enough to travel the whole of Scotland in search of the perfect “dram”. People take their dram so seriously that in 1908, a Bill in UK parliament was passed which actually defined the process that makes a Scotch Whisky.

Ratified in 1988, the Scotch Whisky Act states scotch must be distilled at a Scottish distillery from water and malted barley, matured in Scotland in oak casks for no less than three years, and must be bottled at no less than 40 percent alcohol by volume. In short, you should know that you’re drinking the good stuff. It’s the law.

One weekend recently, more than 1200 people from all over the country gathered at the Christchurch Convention Centre to nose, taste and discuss the drink, as part of the second Dramfest whisky festival.

For the purist, there is only one way to consume whisky, and that’s the single malt: whisky made at a single distillery, from a single type of malted grain. If you’re a purist, the very thought of mixing it with anything other than perhaps with a dash of water is tantamount to sacrilege. Indeed, for this total whisky novice, the world of whisky seemed intricate and strangely involved.

You had to know the ages, the places where the whisky was distilled, the age of it, even the barrels it was kept in could make a difference. You had to understand terms like “peated” and “full-bodied”. When you nosed the whisky, you had to think about what the scents reminded you of- what foods would go best with it.

Apparently, the rule is that every sip should last in the mouth for as many seconds as there were years. Some of the whiskies were over 40 years old. That’s a lot of savouring. But I wasn’t going there just to drink. No, I was going there to learn, and observe. This was going to be an interesting two days.

Saturday, 2pm. Already, the crowds were stretching out the door and beyond. These people clearly wanted a drink. A cursory glance revealed there to be a substantial number of beards, moustaches and thick accents. Bagpipes from the Saint Andrews’ School battalion played throughout the hall. More than a few people wore kilts.

It struck me that — with its multiple stalls, its bustling crowds, and the overheard discussions about “who” to see next — this wasn’t so much a big day out for whisky lovers but the Big Day Out. Like the Big Day Out, there were marquee names — Glenfiddich, Johnnie Walker, Glenfarclas — alongside the niche products.

Just as well, then, that Dr. Bill Lumsden, master distiller of Glenmorangie, was present to provide some perspective on the whole event. Lumsden’s love for the drink began as a student, when someone handed him a glass of single malt, “which just happened to be Glenmorangie, so I guess it was fate that I would one day be their chief distiller.” An affable, well-attired individual, he worries that sometimes consumers don’t always have the right priorities.

“I think one of the biggest mistakes a drinker can make is judging the quality of the single malt by its age,” he says. “When I began my work as a distiller 24 years ago, I felt a lot of the whiskies I encountered were made in an almost ‘passive’ way. I’m a passionate believer that aging is one of the worst guidelines of quality. Some of the most painful places I’ve been to have been in the United States, where the customers will only ask about the age of the whisky. There are a lot of old whiskies that are very good, but there’s just as many that are just dry and tasteless.”

Finding the perfect blend is an art—and a science—so it’s no surprise that Lumsden’s doctorate is in chemistry. It’s something Lumsden and his team have to work on every day, even if, technically, they won’t see the true fruits of their labour until a good decade afterwards. “I’ve tried to take the whisky back to how I remembered it, when it was richer and more powerful.”

He’s also here, obviously, to drum up business. The whisky market has exploded in the Asia Pacific regions — Lumsden has just been at a similar event in Tokyo. Where once it was floundering behind the hated Cognac (in these circles mentioning the word “cognac” is like mentioning He Who Shall Not Be Named), these days whisky is an ‘aspirational’ drink for the affluent middle class of Asian countries, which see it as both a sociable, conversational drink. “One of the things that surprised me is the number of young people in countries like Thailand or Singapore who have moved to single malt, which was traditionally the drink of your father or grandfather.”

Whether the worldwide recession will put the brakes on this development remains to be seen, but right now, business is booming. The single malt, which is the choice for most of the discerning drinkers here, accounts for only ten percent of overall whisky sales. Yet Lumsden isn’t worried about how people drink their whisky, as long as they develop a taste, and find one that suits their own lifestyle and personality. Whisky, says Lumsden, must reveal itself.

“There needs to be smoothness and almost a delicacy that lingers as it stays in your mouth. Don’t go for whisky that’s too challenging, find something a bit softer, and do your research beforehand. And if you must prefer your whisky on the rocks, don’t be afraid to consume it that way—it’s no longer an offence punishable by death.”

Mixing whisky in cocktails is also no longer “punishable by death”, apparently, given the popularity of the stalls offering whisky mixers. Purist whisky- lovers may have been shaken, or even stirred by the stalls but there was no denying their popularity. However, the cocktails are merely a sideshow to the main event —similar to the Ferris wheel at the Big Day Out. If you consume the cocktails too quickly, it creates the same giddiness as the big Wheel. The wash of colour and noise continued, but now it was time for the more concerted part of the programme—the master class sessions.

As I walked up the stairs to the convention’s centre second floor, it became apparent that I was in a more rarefied atmosphere. I chose an audience with co-director of Douglas Laing & Co, Stewart Laing. Stewart’s father founded the company in 1946, and, Stewart is a man who can measure his history by the casket: Apparently, his father left behind a black book that documented dozens of yet to be bottled blends from obscure distilleries. He still hasn’t found it, acquiring it now would be akin to procuring the Holy Grail.

Speyside’s Finest was more than 41 years old, while Port Allen was a victim of the 1982 “night of the long knives”, when more than 25 distilleries across all of Scotland were closed for “economic” reasons. We were not just tasting whisky. We were tasting history.

What struck me most was the intense concentration of aromas. These whiskies were alive. And they were having a strong effect on us punters, who sat in quiet contemplation, together in a “friendly glow”. As each whisky seemed to hit with more effect than the last, I became thoroughly overwhelmed. I decided to settle down and prepare for the next day. It was best not to overdo things.

Maybe it was the fine weather, maybe it was the fact that some were still feeling the effects of the previous day, but Sunday began more sedately. Rather than beginning with a bang, the crowds accumulated slowly throughout the day, with people more inclined to amble from stall to stall. There were more younger people, specifically younger women, in the crowd too. If organiser Michael Fraser Milne wanted the event to demonstrate that whisky was no longer a grandfather’s drink, then today was the proof.

Whisky is a drink with a strong sense of place—the best tasters are able to determine not just the brand, flavour and type, but the actual location of the original distillery. Head of Adelphi, Alex Bruce’s job is to find the best of the best. Bruce explains:

“There’s a saying in the industry that ‘wood makes the best whisky’, in that the last stage, the actual distilling, and the casks it’s kept in is very important. However, there are so many variations that can occur in between—you notice that certain whiskies have a more peppery taste because of the wash that comes into different distilleries.” Bruce searches high and low for the best whisky. “We struggle to get more than forty or fifty different casks in a year, solely because we’re very particular about what we chose. A lot of people would think we’re mad to travel all over the world to search them out, but we’ve never been about selling in large quantities.”

But wasn’t everyone here at least a little mad? The search for the perfect dram is an obsessive quest, one that can take half your life, or longer, if you’re less fortunate. So we have to thank the organiser, Michael Fraser Milne, of Whisky Galore, for assisting so many people in their quest. He paid for many of the stars to come here out of his own pocket, and although he had the help of dozens of volunteers, he was the man in charge. Trying to catch up with him throughout the day proved a mission, solely because he had to be everywhere at once.

Not that you could miss him — even amongst the throng of people, he was a striking figure, with perhaps the most impressively artistic handlebar moustache on display. A short, stocky man, with boundless enthusiasm, he was master and commander

“If I were to do it again, I would get someone else to help me”, he chuckled. “But it’s been amazing. We got twice on the door sales that we expected. I’ve been to whisky festivals in London, Paris, Edinburgh, Glasgow, but some of them have been less about the whisky and more about the surrounding attractions. If I had any aims for today, it would be these: whisky is fun, whisky is not for old pipe-smokers, and it’s here to stay. And the crowd is here prove it.

“Nearly ten or fifteen years ago, there were several writers who predicted the demise of the single malt. They couldn’t have been more wrong, and really, it’s only going to get better and better over the next two decades, as the demand increases, and we find new ways to produce it.

“If we have any competition, it’s from the white spirits, such as vodka, and of course there are very good white spirits, but so much of that stuff is bottled one day and consumed the next. What this event is about, more than anything else, is to educate people how to drink whisky. You wouldn’t believe it, but I think people are drinking smarter. New Zealand whisky drinkers are particularly discerning. ”

As I walked out of the Convention centre on Sunday with the rest of the smart, discerning drinkers, dazed, bewildered and still buzzing, Robert Burns’s lines came to mind.

Fortune! if thou but gie me still

Hale breeks, a scone, an' whisky gill,

An' rowth o' rhyme to rave at will,

Tak a' the rest,

An' deal't about as thy blind skill

Directs thee best.

Matthew Littlewood

I had big plans for how it would be driving back into Wellington. I imagined tearing down the Ngauranga Gorge, fighting its counter-slanting incline, to catch the first glimpse of the harbour and then the city, all to a carefully chosen selection of tunes on the iPod. As it happened, we drove into town listening to the Black Caps being pulverized by the Indians, interrupted by a brief moment when I tried and failed to make the iPod work, and accordingly spent more time fiddling with buttons than taking in the view.

Fortunately, this was not a portent of things to come. Even if all one’s carefully laid plans go astray, there is still something very powerful about coming home, especially to such a vital and beautiful city as Wellington. The combination of lovingly-restored villas nestled in green trees, as if dropped there by helicopter, all overlooking a blue harbour is enchanting; especially, as they say, on a good day. Whatever else one might say about the place, it wears its heart on its sleeve, and it is not coloured beige.

My wife and I have spent some time catching up with parents and grandparents and generally reacquainting ourselves with our old/new city. I experienced a thrill of pure joy – like a warm glow moving up my spine to emerge as a smile – walking down Cuba St in the sunlight, looking in at the shops and cafes, and checking out Slowboat Records and Real Groovy. I don’t doubt there is a honeymoon element to this sensation – which is sure to wane as I get accustomed to working once again – but it is good while it lasts.

For the most part I have, happily, not been struck by a crippling concern at how much smaller Wellington is than London. In many respects, this is a positive advantage. The population seems still to be fairly diverse and the cafes, bars and restaurants (my main judging criteria) still seem excellent. We have been doing a spot of house-hunting and a striking feature of walking through a succession of brightly-painted wooden houses is the quality of the stuff on the bookshelves: either Wellingtonians are very well-read indeed or real estate agents advise vendors to borrow some great library books.

Wandering through town, I figured that it doesn’t so much matter how many bars and restaurants a city has, but how many it has that you want to, and can practicably, visit. London has innumerable eateries, most of them chains and many of them disappointing. There is effort, travel and often lengthy advance booking or queuing involved in enjoying the hidden (but genuine) gems. In practice, say at the end of a busy week, this can create the incentive to settle for mediocre fare at a local outlet, and I have done this many a time.

I will do it less here, as eating excellent food in Wellington seems altogether to be a more straightforward proposition. I would be happy to work my way through virtually every place on Cuba St – from the cafes, to the bars, to the Malaysian restaurants (the street may yet come to be known as Little Malaysia). I suspect the same is true of a lot of theatre and music events; less choice, but overall a good-quality field to choose from. One might think of this distinction in terms of restaurant menus. London offers a very large and inconsistent menu, with some of the best dishes available (and prices to match), as well as a lot else. Wellington gives you a much smaller menu, most of which is fairly tempting.

What is not so tempting is Wellington’s daily newspaper, which is even less scintillating in hard copy than on the Stuff website. At a casual glance, it is difficult to see what, if anything, the poor old Dominion Post aspires to be. It does not reflect the vitality, wit or intelligence of the city, it is unconvincing as a national newspaper of record and its stories appear mostly to be written by the Associated Press or borrowed from an overseas newspaper.

I am sure there are good economic reasons why – with some notable exceptions, such as Simon Collins of the Herald, aside – the best NZ journalism appears to have gravitated to feature magazines, on-line projects or overseas locations. But if one of the underlying reasons is the difficulty of making money in the modern newspaper business, the DomPost is not alone.

A recent article by former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson suggests that newspapers – which traditionally derived their revenue from sales, subscriptions and advertising– are, in the brave new webby world, over-reliant upon advertising; a situation he thinks is unsustainable. His answer (ironically available on-line at no cost) is to charge for on-line content – a scheme readers will remember failed with both the New York Times and the New Zealand Herald – but only once there is an accepted "one-click [payment] system with a really simple interface" to facilitate on-line impulse purchases. I hope he is right and that such a micropayment system arrives soon: I would be delighted to pay a fair price for access to a quality national (or even local) newspaper. I think newspapers are the sort of institutions you only really miss when they are gone.

In the meantime, I will continue to get my news from around the world for free and focus on the bright side. I get to read the Guardian and the New York Times on-line while living in a lovely harbour city, instead of reading Stuff and the NZH on-line from my desk in London. It seems like a fair trade-off to me.

You don't often hear from us. I'm one of the people who manages the machine that digests forms and sends out cheques (and takes your money, of course).

The reason you don't hear from us much is because we aren't allowed to talk to you much. We're only allowed to speak through our "corporate communications" in case we say something the wrong way. Because if we fumble our message a bit, The Media tend to leap on our every stuff up and blow it up into a Big Deal. So I'm afraid that means you get a bland, partially digested diet of wank words and bullshit most of the time. But I'm sure most of you realise that.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that we have noticed that times are getting hard. We aren't smugly sitting here in our ivory towers, gazing out at you poor souls in the private sector thinking "phew, at least my jobs safe". That's for two reasons. Firstly, it isn't. Our jobs I mean. Probably more secure than many of yours, but we do still worry. But mainly it's because most of us do actually give a shit.

What we tend to do (certainly for our first few years in the public sector) is think of great ideas to make our systems more efficient. Often we'll find a sympathetic manager and say "why don't we do X? That would make things easier / cheaper / faster for people".

Then we hit the problem. You see, we're drowning. Our collective heads are almost disappearing under the waves because of lots of well-meaning law and process that has actually resulted in a bad outcome. These things were done with the best of intentions, based on good theory. But when coupled with media serving people with the attention span of a goldfish, have ended up making it impossible to actually get anything done.

On top of that, we've seen lots of Head Office bloat in the last few years. Rooms of endless meetings going on and on about "Vision" and "Strategy" ... interesting how the best private sector firms don't stuff around with all that. I have a feeling that we felt a bit inadequate because we didn't have all the things that CEOs in big private businesses get to play with - you know, HR strategies and Corporate Compliance units. We just had a thing called The Law, which we have to carry out.

I saw this thing in a book once about how people in the institutional banks in the UK used to get posted if they weren't doing too well: FILTHK (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong). I have to wonder if people who fail in the private sector sometimes end up being posted to Wellington (and it is a noticeably Wellington issue...). To be clear, I don't think these people are malicious or stupid. I just think they are, well, a bit distant from reality. They've started to believe the management books and "Best Practice" guides.

I've got dozens of examples from my own place, but, as I'm terrified of being identified because Talking to the Public is a Bad Thing, I'll have to cover my tracks a bit.

We have a surplus of lawyers in NZ. In most countries they are kept busy suing Councils for footpaths that trip people up - and you can't do that here, so they have to find something else to do. It seems they tend to end up in the public sector, over analysing statutes and interpreting them in the worst possible way (because many of them have never worked in the real world - they come straight from law school). Acts get over analysed, and rarely with any thought as to what an ordinary person would think. And because it's not The Done Thing for a government department to end up in Court to clarify a legal point, the theoretical "legal opinion" tends to be accepted and not tested.

For example, the Official Information Act was designed to make sure that public servants can't cover up when they stuff up. Or that the truth be revealed so that we can all make the right decision.

It has clauses that say (and I'm converting to plain English because you know what laws read like...) "stuff need not be released if it would mean public servants would feel they couldn't have full and frank discussions".

After the lawyers end up stuffing around with it, this means that everything is discoverable. So we end up either a) writing 'draft' on everything (this makes it less likely to be released) or b) not saying it at all.

This means nobody in, say, the NZ Police can ever write down an argument that might be true, but is a bit contentious. For example, the statement "Were illicit drugs decriminalised in a carefully regulated way, it would free up 4000 police officers, halve the prison population and destroy the power base of organised crime in NZ" would never be put in a document even if just for discussion, because it contradicts policy and the media would have a field day with it. Quite rightly, because it needs to be discussed. It becomes an unwritten truth, one of those things that we Can't Do Anything About, so we roll our eyes and carry on beating our heads against an impossible problem.

Another good example is all the law around careful management of public money. Great intentions, but combined with a culture that says "the auditor is always right [and believe me, they're not most of the time - if you can't do, teach. And if you are really crap, become an auditor] then you end up in a situation where stupid rules are put in place so that rather than have someone take responsibility for a decision, a committee is formed and reports are written. This means there's a thing called an 'audit trail' so you can completely fail to identify who stuffed up if something goes wrong.

We call it "all hold hands and make a decision".

I recently heard of a situation where a project was completed ahead of schedule, on time and under budget. Much of this was that the person running it didn't bother waiting for pointless meetings and reports. Instead he just got on and did it, thereby saving the taxpayer two hundred thousand dollars. The audit report on the project flagged it as being very "high risk" in a number of areas. The best bit was the audit report was completed after the project was finished! So they knew it had worked at the time of writing! Did this guy get a medal for being pragmatic and sensible? No, he gets called in for a Stern Talking To. Will he ever try and do anything like that again? I doubt it. And we're all poorer.

Here's one of my favourites. There was an article in a law newsletter recently that held up a case of a sacking by the IRD as a perfect example of how to get rid of a useless employee. I'm guessing they went through committees and panels to appoint him in the first place. I expect there were several people who thought he shouldn't have been hired, but they hired him anyway, because after all they'd followed "The Process".

Reading between the lines, when they realised he simply couldn't do the job they started The Process of sacking him. It took three years, and then another four years in court. Eventually he lost. But this is held up as the perfect way to sack someone! If it had been the private sector he would have been out on his ear and awarded a few grand by a tribunal. On our side of the fence we spend (I'm guessing) hundreds of thousands of dollars on The Process, because the CEO (and minister) might get beaten up in the press over the payout.

When we buy stuff, there are laws to say how it must be done. These have been around for years. They were designed to reduce the cost of stuff ups. Interestingly, what they've done is replaced the chance of a cost blow out with a guarantee of spending far more than necessary on paperwork and "Governance". In the private sector, a typical project budgets 15 - 30% of cost for management and administration.

In the public sector it starts at 30%. Because the rules a blindly applied, it means there's a minimum set of paperwork for everything. These aren't meant to be applied across the board, but woe betide you if you get caught out trying to save some money and then an Issue arises. Years of habit and cover-your-arse have developed a generation of public servants who live by meetings, committees and reports. And a bunch of auditors who NEVER say "it was pleasing to see that processes were not followed unnecessarily, thereby saving the taxpayer X million dollars".

So here's the thing my fellow citizens. In a democracy you get the government you deserve.

There are lots of us that want to get on and make things better. But we're never going to do it while these beat-ups carry on. When people like the over-worked probation officer who decided that William Bell didn't need to be closely monitored (let's face it, he was just a drunk on parole after his first offence...) stuff up, bear in mind that that event is going to result in a plague of new paperwork that probably won't make any practical difference. When you call for "consultation" or "inquiries", all that happens generally is that several millions of dollars are spent and everything just stops.

You need to let your MP know that you don't believe the headlines that are written by a copywriter in Australia (have you noticed how the headline often contradicts the story?) and that talkback is a minority of nutters that don't represent your views.

Because only when the normal, sane, silent majority of sensible Kiwis make themselves heard will we start to unravel all the crap law and policy that has built up like fat in a middle aged artery over the last twenty years. We need to be able to sprint at the moment, and it just ain't happening.

Now I just need to wait while they hunt me down...