2 posts tagged “national government”

[Cross-posted] This week, for those of you who follow me on Twitter, you will have noticed that I blacked out my avatar in protest of the amendments to the Copyright Act 1994 in New Zealand. The new law—to come in as ss. 92A and 92C—essentially (and I am highlighting only the negative bits here) gives copyright owners the opportunity to make an accusation against a netizen, with the ultimate result being that that person’s internet connection is severed. The opponents to this are touting it as a ‘guilt by association’ principle. The other provision is that anyone who provides internet services becomes an ISP under the law. Even Mr Stephen Fry, the world’s most famous Tweeter, has joined the protest by blacking out his avatar.
   You would think that given my background in fighting piracy I would be all for it. But it is unworkable. I don’t believe in the idea of guilt before innocence. If I find our copyrighted work on a server somewhere, there are already very useful provisions for getting it off, whether one is in the US or in New Zealand. I know, and I have used them, and I get results within a week. The proposed law, as far as I can see it, doesn’t work.
   However, the National Government has no intention of listening to the protest and has indicated, by my reading, that it will allow the new laws to come into effect—even though the EU and the UK have rejected similar laws. The Hon Peter Dunne MP, leader of United Future, is one of the few who have actually said anything against the amendments. (Mr Dunne’s position is protecting authors is OK, but that these go too far.) But the plan for National is to see how it all goes.
   This is a major shortcoming and backs up all my accusations about National lacking a vision. Government, as its all-too-green MPs are going to find out with this law alone, is not a forum for policy experiments. Nor are laws ways to test the waters with the public. When the sections are repealed, as they only must, someone will claim to be a hero or heroine, when the reality is that the party will simply look slow off the mark.
   Juha Saarinen at The Techsploder suggests that the government is not going to listen because:

The reason our politicians won’t listen is because they’re concerned about New Zealand having signed various WIPO treaties and that the country might not get a free trade deal with the US unless the entertainment industry that vigorously lobbies the US Trade Representative gets its way. If that’s the case, then we the voters should be told and not have our sovereignty being sold down the river on the sly like this. Incidentally, my understanding is that the local rights holders people are not in favour of the law, but have to toe the line laid out for them by their overseas masters. Too bad, if that’s true.

   It probably is. What we do have is a government that functions at an operational level, as I have been trying to say for years about the John Key-led bunch.
   I have nothing personal against the Prime Minister, and I will even say he is far more personable in real life than he appears on television—the same can be said of his deputy. However, actions do speak louder.
   Remember when Key, then leading the Opposition, tried to paint himself the local equivalent of a Cool Britannia leader by holding an under-40s’ party in Auckland, inviting trendy types to be seen with him?
   When Labour refused to meet with HH the Dalai Lama during his New Zealand visit, Mr Key decided to stay away, too. Because it was safer, never mind the principles of self-determination.
   When I said it was terrible that the politicians all got a 4 per cent pay rise on the first Monday Key and his MPs took office, nothing was done until President Barack Obama suggested his administration should not get raises. Key didn’t seem to realize it was a good idea till Obama suggested it. A principled stand, or one that looked good that he felt he could pinch? (He said it ‘showed leadership,’ when a two-month delay showed anything but.)
   I’m not sure what Key’s policies really are, even though he is in government, but he looks like a political kleptomaniac to me, ready to get on others’ bandwagons rather than come up with initiatives of his own. I do not mind this too much—but where does he stand?
   Right now the agenda seem to be technocratic: the support of Red China (as I bore witness at the Minister of Ethnic Affairs’ splendid New Year function a few weeks back) and, if Juha is right, support of the United States’ trade policies.
   I have long been pro-American, in terms of the traditional principles of the US, and my family has a long history Stateside, but I will not support any legislation that weakens the freedom of New Zealanders. Such a law would be anathema to Americans, so how would abuse of New Zealand freedoms be appealing to a trade partner? Unless, of course, the government sees New Zealanders’ rights as below that of a foreign country’s—Labour allowed Red Chinese “diplomats” to push our own cops around to bar people they didn’t like, and National, it seems, are quite happy to put New Zealanders second to American trade lobbyists.
   Regardless of who is in the White House, New Zealanders do not enjoy their sovereignty being sold out by their elected officials.
   The American trade lobbies, even in the entertainment industry, should know that copyright law in New Zealand is actually superior already to what they enjoy in the United States, and the mechanisms for pursuing pirates are already workable if they simply had the skills to use them.
   A blanket guilt-before-innocence principle—something that any American would regard as unconstitutional, or perhaps the principles of the Bill of Rights no longer matter to lobbyists these days, when it comes to non-Americans—is not the way forward in this country.
   We had Labour passing ex post facto laws and rules against satire, now we have this. There’s not much difference between the two in their understanding of democratic government.
   But visionless governments cannot see beyond the arguments of their own citizenry. Insistent that pursuing failed technocratic policies is the only way out of a recessionary mess—when sparking innovation and creating jobs are clearly more beneficial—democracy and giving New Zealanders a “fair go” may well take a back seat under Mr Key and his ministers.

Fellow Voxer Bridget’s post on Sir Edmund Hillary’s passing expresses what many New Zealanders are feeling today.
   Not only has a great man left us, but the idea of a living hero has died with him. Our role models are far and few between, she argues, and she is right.
   I cheekily suggested that the only person who comes close to being a patriot is Peter Jackson, the filmmaker, for his resistance to relocate to Hollywood and his insistence on making his movies here.
   He is deserving of the title of a role model, though because of the time-frame of his success, he might not be regarded in quite the same heights as Sir Edmund—yet.
   Jackson is a paradigm-shifter in so far as he proved that New Zealand is capable of multiple Oscar winners that find mainstream audiences globally, but he is not one who proved that New Zealanders could make films. Earlier directors who did depart for Anglo–American shores did that.
   One could say that Sir Edmund Hillary was not the first man who proved that Kiwis could climb mountains, but it may be right for us to view his accomplishment with eyes opened more widely.
   In 2000 it would have been within the realm of imagination for a filmmaker to start something domestically. Maybe our imaginations would not have said anything at the level of a trilogy of Tolkien adaptations that would wind up doing a clean sweep at the Oscars, but we would have said it was possible to start mainstream film-making. Martin Campbell, for instance, was thinking of making Vertical Limit here.
   In the 1950s, with plenty of loss of life in other attempts, Edmund Hillary and his expedition proved what was considered impossible up to that point. 
   The prior loss of life is what adds to the heroic image of Sir Edmund Hillary, succeeding where human endeavour could not before him.
   So without Sir Edmund and if Peter Jackson does not qualify as a hero (though still someone to be hugely admired and respected), to whom do we turn today?
   As Bridget points out, the tall poppy syndrome is alive and well, and Sir Edmund might have been an exception in New Zealand as someone who could be considered a national treasure in his lifetime. Even if the syndrome is extinguished, Sir Edmund lived through years when it was rife. You literally had to do something as grand as climb Everest to get past it. And since 1953, we haven’t lauded anyone for their accomplishments to the same degree. We didn’t send a man to the moon, and we didn’t invent the internet. The slacker quiet-man mentality of the boys from Flight of the Conchords is disturbingly close to the national psyche on numerous levels.
   Hillary and Tenzing Norkay’s sons might have scaled Everest in tribute to their fathers, and that is no small feat, but just like the Fantasy Island TV remake, no matter how much better you do it, people remember the original more.
   I suppose, too, with the advances we have made in the last 50 years, there are fewer things we are calling ‘impossible’ unless we begin to think in greater mental leaps—maybe solving how UFOs supposedly get across light years in limited times, ending the dominance of the internal combustion engine as our way of getting around short distances on Earth or curing HIV and Aids.
   Institutionalization and politicization may have seen to our inability to really drive forward humanity, even if some geniuses out there may have worked out most of these problems.
   Sir Edmund Hillary reminds us that we can dream of the impossible and steadily work to achieve our goals.
   He may have scaled Everest in 1953 but he first became interested in mountain climbing before World War II, in the mid-1930s as a teenager. We are talking a 20-year dream that he steadily accomplished.
   There are no quick fixes. Bridget’s words: ‘In this age of google, paparazzi and cellphone cameras, sometimes it feels like there aren’t many heroes left: our sports stars peddle drugs and hook up with girls whose artificial breast size is greater than their IQ, our politicians lecture earnestly on the perils of violence then resort to fisticuffs if their moral highground proves shaky, that is when they’re not defrauding immigrants or getting let off from speeding tickets. Church ministers get a television audience and suddenly it’s Harley Davidsons and overseas travel.’
   All of these people she talks about are short-termers, people who are quite happy with flash-in-the-pan moments in the mainstream media, praised as though they were latter-day Hillarys deserving of our attention.
   In reality, no parent in their right mind would want their kids admiring any of these idiots.
   The paradigm-busters are there, bubbling under. New Zealand is an inspirational place so it is hard not to come up with a dream and to accomplish it. However, whether these people have a chance to surface given government policy or institutionalization or the tall-poppy syndrome or the foreign-owned media is another matter. They might even bugger off overseas as so many have done before them.
   We need to encourage them to come forward as individuals and know they will not be laughed at or ridiculed for having a dream.
   God knows that vacuum exists now more than ever.
   And we already know this. In fact, the National Government told us so in 1999, just before the General Election. The document, Bright Future, makes interesting reading in 2008 as we are reminded of lost opportunities. Of course, it was regarded as politicking back then and the programme was cancelled. On Google’s first results’ page, this PDF hosted by the UN is the only remnant of the brochure, whereas in 1999 it was stored domestically as well.
   In essence, Bright Future spoke of the need to foster innovation and to champion individuals. The tall-poppy syndrome, it argued, should die.
   Anyone who knows me know that I would not campaign for National—at least not the National in its present form—so please don’t read this as a National Party campaign advertisement.
   It needn’t have mattered if Bright Future came out of the Legalize Marijuana movement.
   It begs the question, regardless of the source: who is ready to shift paradigms? Or, who is prepared to make a Hillary Shift, one that shifts paradigms from ‘impossible’ to ‘possible’?