Over the last week I have been collecting some of the news stories to piece together the bigger picture, starting with Tuesday:

‘No evidence’ asylum seekers heading to NZ (stuff.co.nz)

New Zealand Immigration Minister Jonathon Coleman said there was “no concrete evidence” that the Sri Lankan people were actually trying to reach New Zealand.

“When they had a look at the boat, there was no evidence that they were truly intending to come here, so I’m sure there is a range of things that the people on that boat are trying to do to leverage their position,” Coleman said.

“While there is obviously the capacity for them to come to New Zealand, we feel in this case it was pretty unlikely that that was their intended destination.”

“The reality is that you would expect there to be things like maps on board, charts that would indicate that that was their true destination and I haven’t had any information that any of that material has been found on that boat.”

Asked why they had been holding signs indicating they wanted to come to New Zealand, Coleman said: “Obviously, if they could create a wave of political pressure to come here, I’m sure they would be pretty keen to get to somewhere but look, they won’t be coming to New Zealand.”

So on Monday night we had Key telling us these people were definitely coming, however, on Tuesday morning we have the immigration minister telling us they weren’t. What is most interesting is the last line where Coleman even suggests these people were set up to create a political storm.

Of course Key wasn’t happy about his hard-line stance being undermined by the truth so he came out with this gem (via nzherald on Wednesday):

“He hasn’t had an intelligence briefing, he’s had a briefing from his officials, there’s a difference.”

One wonders if his intelligence briefing was run by his political and media advisors… anyway… this hardline approach by Key then saw all the vested interest groups and individuals (Amnesty International, Kiwiblog, Helen Clark, etc) come out to add their 2c into the debate.

The most interesting of these comments came from the United Sri Lanka Association who claimed Sri Lanka was “as peaceful as Wellington” and “There’s no violence there right now, the violence there caused by Tamil terrorism has been quelled, it’s been put to rest two years ago.”

Well if this was the case then you would expect Sri Lanka to be somewhere near NZ in the Global Peace Index right? Last year NZ ranked 2^nd most peaceful country in the world, Sri Lanka ranked 126^th, and as for their argument it has improved, sure the year before they ranked 133^rd, but the year before that they ranked 125^th so their peace ranking isn’t improving, and it is certainly nowhere near the same as NZ.

Also by this time the Australian media commentators had picked up on the NZ asylum boat story claiming it as proof that the Gillard Government’s Malaysia Solution was working. The best of these stories was the SMH with “Message received: asylum seekers give Australia a wide berth” which claimed that the boat supposedly headed to NZ may have also tried to go to Canada!

Then yesterday the nzherald had an article about how a person who came from the Tampa has been caught up in a car rebirthing ring.  A story that was worded in such a way that it clearly made out that this guy was bad because of the country he had came from – not because bad apples can occur in any country or situation.

And now a week after the story first broke, the Sunday Star Times is claiming they have got a reporter onboard and reporting there is a stalemate going on about where these people should go… the saga continues…

Right now there is a conspiracy filled cynic in me saying the Nats and the media is feeding us bullshit. Yes there is a refugee boat in Indonesia, yes these people are in need – and we should help them!

But instead there is a whole lot of media and political spin going on to make it look like these people are evil zombies out to destroy everything we hold dear. Of course that is crap, but if you read enough stories about how these people will steal your cars, are secretly violent terrorists, and are so lazy they will use all your taxpayers’ dollars on welfare you’ll believe it right?

The contents of the story gets even more scary:

Politicians are letting foreign-owned companies covertly gather information about voters.

The websites of Barry O’Farrell, Kristina Keneally, Tony Abbott and the Greens plant spying devices on visitors’ computers, which can track them as they browse the internet.

Information gathered about a user’s online behaviour can be used to build detailed profiles to help target advertisements – a practice many believe is a threat to privacy.

So how are these politicians being evil and spying on you? By using tracking cookies to identify user behaviour. The same type of cookies this site and just about every other site on the internet uses. The cookies that provide information that allow web developers to focus on what works and doesn’t on their sites and improves usability and content delivery.

But this logical explanation is far too simple for the SMH to handle. Instead, we have a fantastic media beat up.

Oh and by the way, SMH is spying on me too with five cookies of their own and a multitude of images from six off-site and off-country servers. Pot, Kettle, Black.

It would have been hard to avoid Bobs on Bikes if you watched the news the other night, it was the lead item, and despite other years fully uncensored. I guess TV Standards have really gone out the window now.

Anyway the article that has been linked to go into this in a good amount of detail of the back story. But this is the key message.

But where many of us will have felt distinctly ill-used in being shown this item was the bit right at the end when Close Up disclosed that the woman was here to participate in porn king Steve Crow’s annual Boobs on Bikes event.

So just as with Readers and Writers Week, the Ellerslie Flower Show and a conference on mental health, during which the media quite rightly features visiting foreign luminaries, now it is perfectly normal for visiting porn stars to get on the media circuit.

Because it wasn’t just Close Up giving the porn business oxygen. Over on TV3′s Campbell Live, they were featuring Lisa Lewis, a young woman who got a teeny bit famous for agreeing to read the news topless on an obscure TV channel, and who now calls herself a porn star.

Call me a prude, but when did we stop treating commercial pornographers with suspicion, and regarding strippers and porn stars with regretful – if fascinated – pity? Suddenly they’re newsmakers as of right.

News and current affairs reporters do have to cover other events that run close to the bone for some people, like the Hero Parade, or an artwork or movie that has offended some religious faith or other.

But that’s not about money or exploitation, but, in the case of Hero, a community celebration, and in the art world, a genuine controversy. Take it or leave it.

There’s no denying porn folk – the very fact they exist in little old NZ – give us a frisson. Even if it’s a frisson of horror, that’ll lift telly news ratings every time.

And every extra piece of publicity of the event gives Steve Crow just a little more free advertising for Erotica. From a marketing perspective the man is a genius. Even if half his empire is now in liquidation.

Front page of the Herald website this morning. Seems someone doesn’t know what John Key looks like.

The quake struck at 9:22 pm, and the epicentre was located in Dusky Sound at the south-west corner of the South Island. Its magnitude of 7.8 makes its size comparable with the Buller (or Murchison) earthquake of 1929 and the damaging Hawke’s Bay earthquake of 1931.

Now 7.8 is huge, it is the same size as the quake that struck Sichuan, China in 2008 and bigger then the earthquake that hit Kobe, Japan in 1995. At first it was assigned a size of 8.2 and it sent a small tidal wave across the Tasman that hit parts of Sydney. But you knew all that right? Because the media reported it right? No? Oh.

In fact the New Zealand media and civil defense response to this whole event has been really poor. On Wednesday night I got the majority of my news through Twitter (around 35 updates per second at times) and any major development would break on that at least 15 minutes ahead of any news website. To make matters worse after the earthquake a Tsunami warning was issued for NZ. This was not reported on the news until around 10.30pm at which point it had been canceled (however they reported it as valid).

Within minutes of the quake the news media also had reporters on the scene ready for life crosses and the like right? No. Because this wasn’t Auckland it was obvious not news. In fact the following morning the Herald was still reporting that the quake was only 6.6 and no mention of any Tsunami. Now one could partially forgive the news media for playing down the issue given that it happened in a very remote area of the country and that no one was killed or injured.

True, however this is not something to be sneezed at. We were very lucky this time, and by playing it down the news media is not helping. Because if another quake strikes sometime in the future and hits a more populated area how many people will just attempt to carry on as normal even if something is seriously wrong?

For the aussie take on the quake check this out: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25787792-421,00.html

In particular:

“The Australian Bureau of Meteorology said small tsunamis, followed by unusual current movements, were detected at Spring Bay in southern Tasmania at 10.05pm and Port Kembla, south of Sydney, at 10.06pm.”

The Geonet report, very detailed now, however this took nearly two days to become fully up to date: http://www.geonet.org.nz/news/article-jul-16-2009-fiordland-quake-biggest-for-80-years.html

At least they get how serious it was

“the remoteness of the epicentre, means that New Zealand has been very fortunate – if this earthquake had happened anywhere else it would have caused huge damage”.

And some more details on the “non-existent” tsunami

A small tsunami was generated by this earthquake, with the tide gauge at Jackson Bay, near Haast, recording a wave of 1 metre (peak to trough). An Australian gauge located out at sea, south-west of New Zealand, also detected a small wave some time after the main earthquake, which may have been generated by a landslip into the sea.

1 metre is pretty big. Not huge. But still big.

The USGS website is where I got a lot of information from on the night. It updates a lot faster than Geonet: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2009jcap.php

Also Tsunami info through NOAA: http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/?region=0

National Party tertiary education spokesman Paul Hutchison said students should be able to decide for themselves whether they wanted compulsory membership of student associations.

“I’m aware there are concerns by some that say there isn’t strong accountability for the money they get,” he said.

“All the time, I hear murmurings of there being inappropriate usage of student levies by the unions.”

It was important that accounts were “absolutely transparent” to show that each student dollar was being spent well on students, he said.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/4707318a6530.html

Dr Hutchison has stated three times this year that he wants to see Students’ Associations become voluntary. Yet it is not a National Party Policy.

For the record Dr Hutchison and National:

• Students’ Associations are incorporated.
• They are required to be externally audited.
• They are required to be registered with the companies office
• They are required to hold AGMs and keep their books open.

So where is this inappropriate use and mismanagement? The reality is there isn’t any. If there was there would be lots more cases of fraud. Which there isn’t.

Coming back to the one in 10 year storm idea. Compare these two police media release pages. The first is for yesterday. The second is for July 10 2007. One year ago. Where we got hit by a very similar storm which took out power up here for two days. 48 hours. Not 3. And that was a year ago, not 10.

26 July 2008:

10 July 2007:

***Urgent Media Release***

There have been reports in the Media about the evacuation of Whangaparaoa.

There is NO Evacuation of Whanagaparaoa.

However, I think I may have no have worked out where the confussion arised from. At 10.30am the Whakapapa Ski Field at Ruapehu was evacuated due to the storm. Reading more about it you can see why:

Between 10am and 10:40am the wind speed went from 0 to 100kph and it’s now sitting at over 200kph. Our extremely hardy road crew are currently out being blasted by wind and snow as they fit chains onto all vehicles to get the public safely down the road.

Now I can imagine that the media would of probably just confussed the word Whakapapa with the word Whangarparaoa quite easily. One is a ski field on Ruapehu which often gets hits by snow storms. The other is a peninsula north of Auckland with lots of homes on it. Given the storm would of been bad at both areas a mix up in words is not supprising at all.

I am a strong believer in the fact that you go to University to learn and get an education that will better you and the country. I do not believe that you should have to distract yourself away from studies to do part time work to support yourself financially. If the Government wants an knowledge economy of the future they must first fund it.

What I propose is a Universal Living Allowance for all fulltime students as follows:

• To qualify you must be enrolled as a fulltime student in a course with a minimum length of 6 months.
• The student allowance rate should be set at the same amount as the dole.
• Once you have completed your first year on the USL you can only qualify for subsequent years if and only if you pass 75% of your papers in your previous years.
• USL should only be available to undergraduate and honours students. Any research driven post-graduate qualifications should be paid for through scholarships.
• Only University and Polytech students in a recognised post-secondary course should be eligible.

Now I have no idea of how much this would cost. But this is what this country needs. Hand ups to those who deserve it, not hand outs to those that don’t.