We wanted the facts and got endless entertainment

A subliminal utterance kept playing in my head as I watched hours of prediction and speculation on election night. It was the voice of Sergeant Joe Friday.

Most of you would be too young to know Sergeant Friday. Dragnet, the series in which he featured, was broadcast on New Zealand radio in the 1950s. His signature phrase was “All we want are the facts, Ma’am”.

And that was all I wanted after the polling booths closed at 7 pm on Saturday. All I wanted were the results.

Instead, every news outlet gave me proof that British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson was right: Work does expand to fill the time available for its completion. Each outlet had lots of time to fill as the vote count continued throughout the evening.

I was prepared for prediction and speculation. That is the nature of emerging political fortunes, and those offering it do so in the expectation that things will become clearer as the night progressed. It’s an unfortunate fact that clarity and New Zealand’s emerging brand of Mixed Member Proportional Representation take longer to come together than First Past the Post.

There was also a certain inevitability about the appearance of BWC graphics. BWC? It stands for Because We Can and denotes the use of elaborate studio graphic overlays that can place thoroughly urbanised presenters in territory that Indiana Jones would struggle to reach.  On election night it had TVNZ’s intrepid Jason Walls theatrically scaling the heights of massive columns and trekking along fast-moving bar graphs. TV3/Stuff may have had less grunt in the electronics department but it, too, managed to paint the floor with graphics that contained less information than the straightforward charts it also displayed.

And, although their ephemeral nature makes the information harder to assimilate, the tickertape results along the bottom of the screen were there as expected. And, as anticipated, they went in one eye and out the other.

All this paled, however, alongside the retreat into entertainment in which both TVOne and TV3/Stuff freely engaged. Such actions on both networks detracted from the serious business of the evening. TVOne wanted your election party photos, while 3/Stuff played bingo with its audience. Live crosses to election parties in people’s homes? Spare me! Continue reading “We wanted the facts and got endless entertainment” →

What makes this imprisoned paedophile so different?

I want to see the Criminal Procedure Act changed.  I want an addition to Section 200 on suppression of names, and I’ve made it easy for the incoming government by writing the draft clause.

 In proceedings related to the sexual abuse and exploitation of minors and the possession of Child Sexual Abuse Material, the name of any person sentenced to a term of imprisonment may be permanently suppressed only when the interests of the juvenile victims of the offence would be compromised by publication.

You may be able to guess what has prompted the call. Frankly, I was outraged when I saw the front page of the New Zealand Herald last Friday and the headline ‘Wealthy offender to keep name secret’.

The offender in question had been jailed for two years and five months after being found with more than 11,000 ‘objectionable publications’ depicting sexual exploitation of children ranging from toddlers to prepubescent girls. Some images were sadistic and one depicted bestiality. He was granted permanent name suppression, as were the name of his family and their high-profile company, and given a discount for making $50,000 charitable donation days before his sentencing date.

The Crown appealed the permanent suppression but last week it lost that appeal. Justice Michael Arthur’s decision said the experience of being arrested and the fear of going to prison was “stressful” for the man and had precipitated a decline in his mental health. Information put before the court showed the man had a long history of mental health difficulties, pre-dating the discovery of his crimes. Reports expressed serious concerns for the man’s mental state should he be publicly identified, and the guilt he would carry about his offending negatively affecting his family and their business. The decision supported the sentencing judge’s decision in suppressing the company’s name after ruling that publication could cause the firm undue hardship and reputational damage “because it might be unfairly linked with the offending”.

I cannot disagree more profoundly. It is yet another example of wealth proving a factor in the way the guilty are treated by the courts.

I am going to set out a number of cases where men have been sentenced to imprisonment on charges relating to child pornography and, in each case, the defendant was named. Then I will invite you to answer a question. Continue reading “What makes this imprisoned paedophile so different?” →

Beware a society that lacks clear boundaries

I am about to utter an unpopular – and to some old-fashioned – word: Boundaries. There, I’ve said it, and now you must puzzle over what it means.

Let me give you a small clue. I am not talking about the fours and sixes Glenn Phillips scored at Hagley Oval against India on Saturday. And the Concise Oxford Dictionary provides you with limited assistance with its definition of “a line marking the limits of an area”.

The old-fashioned concept that I am discussing in this commentary refers to limits, or the rules that societies impose on behaviour and communication in order to stop their members slipping back to a life that Thomas Hobbes described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

Every society has them. Most societies – not only Christian – generally hold at least four of the Ten Commandments as immutable: Thou shalt not murder, steal, bear false witness, or covert your neighbour’s house/wife/animals. Others move, alongside changes in the social fabric and beliefs over time. There would be a lot of dead people, for example, if adultery still saw miscreants stoned.

Each society has expectations of how its members will behave and those presumptions are not limited to what we might generally term criminality. They extend to the ways we interact with our fellow beings.

Some of these social boundaries are defined by law. In a democracy these laws are seen broadly as reflecting the limits that society wishes to see imposed on itself, although increasingly polarised politics may interfere with that notion. In autocracies such laws are used not for a common good but to confine and control populations.

Other boundaries, however, are tied to the presumption that the rights we claim come with responsibilities. The Golden Rule had been around a long time before Jesus proclaimed that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Boundaries are about reciprocity: We observe them in order to also protect ourselves.

The problem with these boundaries, however, lies in how they are defined…or more to the point, not defined. Many of society’s limits are ‘understood’ as the rules we learn as children, as we enter society and interact with other members of it, and which unique circumstances create by forms of common consent. They are open to interpretation, and misinterpretation. Continue reading “Beware a society that lacks clear boundaries” →

Home-invading Hipkins crosses dangerous threshold

Candidates have always been ready to play fast and loose with reality, only too happy to accuse their opponents of having lost their grip on it. Now, however, the reality stakes have suddenly got a lot higher than the true cost of promises. Artificial intelligence is robbing the electorate of the ability to determine what is real and what is not.

Last week an attack ad was released by the right-wing lobby group, the Taxpayers’ Union, depicting Labour leader Chris Hipkins as a home-invading thief. It showed him kicking down doors, frightening an elderly woman, shocking children as he disrupts a family dinner, and stealing fistfuls of cash.

NewstalkZB’s Heather de Plessis-Allan, a steadfast observer of Keep Right signs, thought the ad was “brilliant”. Her Canterbury NewstalkZB stablemate John MacDonald, on the other hand, found the ad “disturbing” because it was authentic enough to trigger adverse psychological reactions in anyone who had been subjected to a home invasion. Their NZME colleague, Shayne Currie, wrote in his Media Insider column that the ad was “part of an increasingly personal and somewhat hostile election campaign”. However, he said on Ryan Bridge Today that, of course, it was labelled as AI and was “plainly satire”.  Across on RNZ, political scientist Claire Robinson told Guyon Espiner it was “confronting” and clearly was not satire because it was devoid of humour and commentary.

Claire Robinson raised the issue of the ad’s AI disclaimer and questioned whether it was some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card (my words). The ad contained this written disclaimer: “The following is an AI-generated fictional dramatisation. It is not real footage”. However, that text is on-screen for less than three seconds and I can tell you that sitting on my couch watching a 32-inch (80 cm) screen, the fine text passes me by. The voiceover says simply: “This video contains AI”.

At the beginning of this month the Advertising Standards Authority issued guidance notes that covered, among other things, the use of AI in advertising. It advised that disclosure should be considered when AI is used to:

  • Create a realistic person who does not exist
  • Replicate or imitate a real person’s likeness or voice
  • Depict events, experiences or outcomes that did not occur
  • Create product imagery that materially differs from the actual product
  • Present AI-generated content in a way that consumers may reasonably assume reflects a real person, event, experience, endorsement or demonstration.

The note goes on to state that disclosure does not remove an advertiser’s responsibility to ensure that advertising is truthful and not misleading. If AI-generated or AI-assisted content creates a misleading impression, the fact that it has been disclosed as AI-generated will not, by itself, make the advertising compliant.

The Taxpayers’ Union ad may have complied with the letter of the code but was it within the spirit of the guidance? I think not. Continue reading “Home-invading Hipkins crosses dangerous threshold” →