Gambling with N.Z’s future

Many years ago I was a guest of the Ainsworth Leisure Corporation in Australia. Ainsworth’s make the Aristocrat brand gaming machines at their sprawling factory in Rosebank, a suburb of Sydney. At the time I was the chairman of the New Zealand Licensing Trusts Charitable Foundation. The foundation owned and operated all of the gaming machines in most of the 26 licensing trusts in New Zealand, so in a roundabout, but unjustified sort of a way, I was seen by Ainsworth’s as a substantial customer.

The factory itself was amazing. It has a staff of 1200. At the start of the chain are sheets of flat steel which are welded together to create the shell. Once this progresses past the paint shop the technology is applied. I was particularly interested in the graphic art department where they dream up the weird and wacky illustrations that grace the machines. In another section a think-tank group sit at computer screens concocting new games to challenge existing players and attract new ones. Then there was computer chip division with rows of employees deftly assembling the driving heart of the machine. Eventually the finished product, worth about $8,000, rolls off the assembly line. It is then tested by teams of people who play the machines for hours ensuring they have no miscalculations. The coin slots are made to accept all monetary denominations. I saw some for rupees, and others that took drachmas.

The gambling bug knows no cultural boundaries.

It was almost incredulous to think that this machine, which you had seen start out  as a piece of flat steel, was now capable of making thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars for its owners. Unlike say a car that could have been made in a similar factory using the same sort of know-how and technology, which at least has a defined and more practical purpose in life.

I had lunch one day in the executive dining room with the company owner, Mr. Len Ainsworth, who back then was well into his seventies. He told me that the factory originally made dental equipment and was established by his father. In the 1950’s they decided to manufacture “these new fangled poker machines” and the business took off. They became world leaders in gaming machine technology.

He also told me of the fierce opposition the machines faced when they were first introduced, the main fear at the time being that the Mafia or a similar form of organised crime ring would move in and take over and control their operation, which is indeed what had happened in Las Vegas.

Other concerned groups envisaged the demise of the retail sector of New South Wales as the hapless citizens poured all their hard-earned cash into the bottomless poker machine hoppers. No other state in Australia was game to license the “pokies.”

According to Len Ainsworth these dire forecasts never materialised. In fact what happened was that the poker machines flourished in the chartered clubs and in turn caused the clubs themselves to flourish. Clubs are run by committees of ordinary citizens, no graft exists, other than the odd manager taking off from time to time with the buxom barmaid and a weeks machine takings. The Mafia never got a look-in.

Ainsworth’s executives took me around Sydney to view some of the bigger clubs. The great majority of patrons at these clubs were working and middle class folk, many of them retired, and the poker machine profits meant that facilities were lavish but affordable. Prices in the dining rooms were exceptionally modest. You could hardly have a meal at home as cheaply.

Len Ainsworth made the point that money is made round to go round and the burgeoning clubs needed tradesmen to erect them initially, and then to continually upgrade them. As a result the New South Wales building industry boomed. He noted too that the retail sector in the state, despite the fearful predictions, was the most buoyant in Australia.

Is there a downside then?

I am sure the vast majority of people who play the pokies do so for the sheer enjoyment of trying to outwit the machine, and are sensible in the amount they allow themselves to fritter away. But doubtless there are people who can ill afford the gamble and are hanging their hopes on taking out the jackpot. None of us can make the judgment or point the finger; what people do with their money is their business.

John Key’s bargaining with the owners of SkyCity means that New Zealand will get a world-class convention center at no cost to the taxpayer. His political opponents do see a cost however, claiming that problem gamblers will multiply. Certainly the New Zealand experience with gaming machines has not quite matched Mr. Ainsworth’s view of the world. This may be because New Zealanders don’t gamble to the same extent as the Australians so our chartered clubs haven’t benefited to the same degree.

In 2004 local authorities were given the power to control the amount of machines in their districts and since then the number of poker machines in New Zealand has decreased dramatically. There were 25,000 at their peak in 2003 down to 17,500 today.

Mr. Key says the SkyCity people can have another 230 machines if they stump up with the money for the Convention Centre.

The odds look good to me.

“The difference between playing the stock market and the horses is that one of the horses must win.” – Joey Adams

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Reigning in the warriors

Osama bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia, but not of Saudi stock. His father was from Yemen, a desperately poor neighbouring country, looked down on by the Saudi’s, and his mother is thought to have been of Libyan extraction. This meant that his family was not socially acceptable to the Saudi aristocracy, but nevertheless the elder bin Laden made a fortune as a building contractor, getting important government contracts because of a close personal friendship he had struck up with the founder of Saudi Arabia, Abdel Aziz al Saud.

Osama was one of 52 children; his father had ten wives and died - probably of exhaustion - when the lad was just 13, leaving him an $80 million inheritance. It seems that with prudent investments Osama increased this fortune to $250 million and then went terrorising in Afghanistan at the behest of the American Central Intelligence Agency who were backing the Mujahedin against the Russians. Two points to ponder here. The CIA probably have little intelligence and the Mujahedin regarded themselves as freedom fighters not terrorists. But then what’s in a name?

Quite a lot actually; the Mujahedin later morphed into the Taliban

Young bin Laden saw the fight to the end; the Mujahedin won against all odds. The odds were improved in their favour a little though by the billions of dollars the CIA covertly provided. After the conflict Osama moved back home to Saudi Arabia where he offered the ruling Royals his expertise and his band of highly trained freedom fighters to ward off the Iraqi’s who had invaded Kuwait. He was furious when his offer was spurned by the Saudis who instead invited the Americans on to their soil to initiate the gulf war.

Osama noted that the American soldiers smoked pot, had pictures of naked women in their barracks and played rock’n’roll music. Even more degrading to his Muslim sensitivities was the fact that they brought women soldiers with them, mainly as drivers, and they wore battle fatigues with shirts undone enough to reveal cleavages. He began to understand why the Mullahs in Iran had declared America to be “the great Satan.”

When bin Laden began to publicly denounce the Saudi regime for their lack of Islamic purism they banished him to Jidda. He fled there and went to live in the Sudan where he used his wealth to build roads and set up military training camps for young rebel Muslims. After outstaying his welcome he moved these camps to Afghanistan.

In 1993 eighteen American soldiers, who were part of a humanitarian mission to famine-struck Somalia, were killed by street fighters in Mogadishu. It was suspected that some of bin Laden-trained Afghani’s were involved and the end result saw America withdraw from the area. This reaction, it is said, was the turning point in bin Laden’s career. Noting that the Russians could be humiliated in Afghanistan and that the “soft” American were driven out of Somalia simply by an assault by a ragtag bunch of street fighters, he concluded that that superpowers were vulnerable and that a holy war, Moslems against Christians could see a victory to the side that on paper anyway, seemed least likely to win. 

It was hoped that his assassination in Pakistan at the hands of America’s superbly trained Navy Seals would see the end of his reign of terror, but his legacy lives on in the hearts and minds of the tens of thousands of dissidents that have been indoctrinated through his training camps over the years and who will continue to do battle in his memory.

The Obama administration were cock-a-hoop over his death and were reluctant to admit that his successors killed their ambassador and three of his aides in Benghazi in September last year and even went so far as to blame a you-tube video maker for the assault on the embassy refusing to admit that it was a well-planned terrorist attack which they ought to have foreseen and repelled.

Incredibly, they are now on the verge of stepping in to offer aid to the rebels who are attempting to topple Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, despite these people in the main being of Al Qaeda descent.

For many strategically-placed Americans, war is an aphrodisiac. Huge shifts of resources with total disregard for efficiency and all paid for by government-funded cheap debt does wonders for their vital military-industrial complex. We’ve recently been told of the billions of dollars that the CIA delivered in suitcases to Hamid Karzai’s corrupt regime in Afghanistan.

Obama came into power looking for all the world like a peacemaker. He was going to talk the Iranians out of becoming a nuclear power and close Guantanamo. Instead his drones continue to roam the skies over Pakistan indiscriminately killing insurgency leaders and often innocent bystanders in the process and therefore undoubtedly creating a succession of suicide bombers for future missions.

These are not holy wars.  Holy men on both sides of the religious divide would quickly point out that waging war and killing innocent people is not part of either doctrine.

Christianity is pretty clear on this. Forgive those who trespass against you, it declares. If someone strikes you, turn the other cheek, is a further instruction. And the founder Himself said: “Love your enemies.”  I gather Islam and the Koran express almost identical sentiments.

A genuine holy war would be a worldwide war against poverty and injustice, against bigotry and mistrust. It would have the potential to stop terrorism in its tracks and could change the world forever.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for the people who make the decisions, east or west, to grasp the mantle.

“The most persistent sound which reverberates through men’s history is the beating of war
 drums.” - Arthur Koestler

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It’s about time we abolished MMP

A Jewish name for God is “I am.” When Neil Diamond, a Jew, sings “I am, I said”, he is actually singing out to God. A sagacious barman at the Heritage Hotel in Hamner Springs when Aaron Gilmore asked him: “Do you know who I am?” might well have responded: “yes, you are someone who thinks he’s God.”

This week’s Listener editorial said Gilmore’s sins read like a checklist of New Zealanders’ pet hates: immodesty, name-dropping, being over-bearing with service staff, failing to front up when you’ve made a mistake, blaming your mates, qualifying your apology.

Despite this, I was prepared to forgive him his trespasses. Many people say things they regret the next day after a few drinks and Gilmore is only human after all. Subsequent revelations about past indiscretions however were unforgivable and there would have been a huge sigh of relief at National Party headquarters when he finally fell on his sword

Democracy was supposed to be about electing people by a majority vote, but the list system produces a cacophony of humanity with few responsibilities and is I suspect peppered with people who have bludged their way on to the party register by fair means or foul.

Oh how I long for the good old days before the insidious MMP system of governing was instigated; when the two-party system was clear-cut and MP’s on both sides of the house were decent and dependable.

In 1972 Ben Couch was selected to contest the Wairarapa seat for National. I was a member of the local executive of the party at the time and it fell to me to take Ben Couch down to meet the Prime Minister.

Ben, ex All Black and Maori All Black, was a shearing contractor and lived at Pirinoa. He told me he would get a lift into Featherston where I could pick him up in the main street at around 2 p.m. so we could meet the Prime Minister at 3. The Prime Minister was John Marshall. He greeted us warmly and invited us to sit with him in comfortable lounge chairs around an ornate mahogany coffee table. Pleasantries were exchanged and tea was served.

I vividly remember Ben and me holding the exquisite Royal Doulton china teacups with our little fingers perched at right angles looking for all the world like this was a natural pose and one that we were used to daily. I was a shade disconcerted though when John Marshall kept referring to Ben as Mr. “Cooch” as in the grass, rather than “Couch” as in the sofa we were sitting on. I was wondering whether I should correct the Prime Minister over his grammatical failings when Ben came to the rescue and suggested that he could call him “Ben.” The PM responded and allowed that if we liked, we could call him “Jack.” We thanked him graciously for encouraging the informality of the gathering, but I noticed we both continued to call him “Sir.”

And this was some years before he was knighted.

After about half an hour of small talk our allotted time was up and the “Jack” wished Ben well in the upcoming elections and we were on our way back over the hill. I offered to drive Mr. “Cooch,” a name which from then on I took great delight in calling him, back to Pirinoa, but he insisted that I need only drop him off in Featherston at the Martinborough Road intersection and he would hitch-hike back home.

As I watched him walking off down the road I couldn’t help but think what a wonderfully egalitarian country we lived in. The greasy butcher and the Maori shearer had just had afternoon tea with the Prime Minister of the nation and to cap it off the shearer was now hitch-hiking back to the lanolin-scented shearing shed. A society where Jack is as good as his master, or in this case where the workers were as good as Jack.

Ben didn’t win his first election, but did so the one after, in 1975. By then Sir John Marshall had been dethroned as National’s leader, quite possibly because of his inability to correctly pronounce surnames and Rob Muldoon had assumed his mantle. Muldoon recognised Ben’s talents and soon had him in cabinet. In the interim the Beehive was built and Ben rang me from Wellington one day and said that I must come down and see his new office. Ben was Minister of Maori Affairs and when he invited me into the new abode I was spellbound by its magnificence. I have been into a number of minister’s headquarters since, but I think the decor of the Maori Affairs office surpassed them all. Native timbers and ornate Maori carvings interspersed with contemporary Maori art, all done with pronounced panache. As Ben proudly showed me around the suite I recalled the day we went to see the previous Prime Minister and I suggested to him that from the shearing shed at Pirinoa to this magnificent office in the Beehive was one giant leap for mankind. It would have sounded even more profound if Neil Armstrong hadn’t used a similar expression some ten years previously.

Ben and I were both teetotalers so we toasted the new office with a celebratory cup of tea, cocked small fingers and all.

The great aspect of Ben’s selection and then election was that he came from a reasonably conservative electorate populated predominantly with white Anglo-Saxon voters. And, as we now know, this was no aberration. Some twenty years later Georgina Beyer again showed that Maoris don’t need to have separate seats or the MMP-inspired Maori party to get into parliament. They just need the confidence of the electorate. Skin colour and hereditary characteristics have no bearing, and nor should they.

To a great extent the running of this country has now been taken out of the hands of ordinary New Zealanders. Many cabinet ministers are actually list MPs themselves and the Aaron Gilmore’s of this world sneak in to parliament thanks to a flawed system of government that should never have been introduced.

The shearers and the sausage makers, it could be argued, have lost their influence entirely.

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” - Margaret Thatcher 

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Advocating for the status quo

In 1995 I was a Masterton District Councillor and we discussed whether or not it might be feasible for our council to take over the role of the regional council. There were two reasons for this brain fade. Councillors always love more power and we considered that we had enough expertise within our ranks to discharge the role that the men and women in the red brick building down the road were fulfilling.

But the second reason was more compelling. We were the collection agent for the Regional Council rates. These were separately itemised on the invoices we sent out, but most people just look at the bottom line of their rates demand and we were getting the blame for the regional council rates as well as our own.

So we sent our chief executive Bill Flannery down to the regional council to size up the situation. He came back with some sobering news. The Wairarapa manager of the Wellington Regional Council, Colin Wright, told him that his council collected $4 million annually in rates, but spent $9 million back in the Wairarapa.

“Best to leave well alone.” was Mr Flannery’s wise counsel.

That was nearly twenty years ago. It’s easy to imagine then that the gap between income and expenditure has increased to the $11 million the Greater Wellington Regional Council now calculates.

I stepped down from the district council in 1998 and was elected on to the regional council where I served three terms. I saw first-hand the generosity of the council towards the Wairarapa. A few weeks after I joined the regional council we had a devastating one-in-one-hundred year flood when the Ruamahunga River nearly overtopped the sewerage settling ponds at Homebush. The flood protection regime put in place following that event cost the regional council millions. Apart from the myriad of other roles they play, they have bought us, and are still paying for, a brand new trainset and have provided a subsidised suburban and inter-urban bus service for our district.

In a nutshell, we have been spoilt rotten.

The government is encouraging change. But then they always do. They are like our 1995 district council - only more ambitious. The Local Government Minister has said however that the status quo is an option.

So why isn’t the Wairarapa united behind that option?

Let’s examine the alternative. A combined Wairarapa council, also taking on the regional council roles sounds quite exciting, but is it really. How would this work out?

Who for instance will lead us? If the three current mayors throw their hats into the ring I have a sneaking suspicion that genial Carterton mayor Ron Mark would romp home. He is universally admired, has a high national profile, is articulate and has an ethnicity factor that has always appealed to the Wairarapa constituency. Think Ben Couch and Georgina Beyer.

I have no problem with that, but the next step may be a hurdle for some. Neither Carterton nor the South Wairarapa will want to be ruled from Masterton. Local government will need to be centralised on Carterton and I have no doubt Carterton is geared for this. The sparkling new “Holloway Boulevard” and the award-winning Events Centre will become the new centre of the universe for the Wairarapa. David Borman’s splendid new town square may end up sitting in front of an empty town hall building. Masterton will simply need an office to collect rates and give out dog collars and there is probably spare space in the library for these activities.

But Masterton has spent a small fortune, no; make that large fortune, on infrastructure projects over the last few years. Most of the towns roads have been dug up to replace water and wastewater pipes and many of our streets have new kerbs and newly hot-mixed footpaths. The multi-million dollar sewerage scheme is about to be commissioned and Riversdale has its toilets all connected and up and flushing.

How will its citizens feel if they find they now have to contribute towards the same exercise well overdue in the other districts in the Wairarapa?

Personally I like the super-city option, but most people are sceptical. I gather the two Hutt’s don’t want a bar of it, Kapiti is suspicious and only Porirua is keen to bite the bullet.

It may be forced upon us of course; The Local Government Commission will have the final say.

In my view then the best option for us may well be the status quo. Perhaps we should all take our regional council subsidised train to Wellington and say so.

“Future shock…the shattering stress and disorientation we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” - Alvin Toffler 

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Re-evaluating a past preoccupation

Last week I emailed Paul Henry. In the subject line I put “Airbrush industry” and then advised him that against all odds I had bought a copy of the latest Women’s Weekly and noted that it had two attractive young ladies on the cover alongside a man who looked like him, only much younger. “Was he perchance,” I wanted to know, “related?”

Paul responded quickly. The gentleman in question he said was in fact an older man who he often uses as a stunt double. And anyway, wasn’t I a regular reader of the New Zealand Women’s weekly?

This last comment had some validity.

Some years ago my daughter, who has a curious sense of humour that she must have got from her mother gave me a subscription to the New Zealand Women’s Weekly for my birthday. She was not urging to get me to in touch with my feminine side; to be perfectly honest I brought the gesture upon myself. For years I had been voicing my concerns that my wife had refused to subscribe to any of those weekly periodicals designed for the female of the species and as a result had left me totally bereft of important information about the rich and famous of the world that these essential magazines impart. When Tom Cruise broke up with Nicole Kidman I didn’t even know they were married and up until her tragic car accident, I had never seen a photo of Princess Di.

And so every week the plainly wrapped periodical used to arrive in my letterbox addressed to Mr. F. R. Long. I suspect it was the only Women’s Weekly in the country sent out to a male. I devoured its contents thoroughly and after twelve months I was pretty much an expert on the royal family, most film stars, various musical performers, a few sporting heroes and knew the intimate personal details about all our nations TV presenters.

A cursory glance at its quaint regular feature Over the Teacups clearly identified that radical feminists were not its target market. Eventually I tired of it and I cancelled the subscription when Wendy’s generous gift expired.

And so I reacquainted myself with the magazine after seeing the cover portrait at the checkout section of the supermarket. I have known the Henry daughters since they were toddlers when Paul used to live firstly in Carterton, then Homebush and then around the corner from where I live in Lansdowne. There is some saying about chrysalises eventually turning into beautiful butterflies and I guess this applies here, though I can’t recall Lucy, Sophie and Bella ever resembling caterpillars. Sophie opted out of being photographed for the publication saying she prefers to shun the spotlight.

So not all daughters take after their father.

The headline for the article read: “My girls saved me” and I scoured the text expecting to find that the three young women had collectively jumped into an IRB at Piha and rescued Paul from the raging surf or something similar, but there was no such episode. In fact the headline, which was italiscised, didn’t relate to anything in the article at all and I can only assume a half-awake sub-editor withdrew a section unaware of its relativity.

But The Women’s Weekly was like an old friend.

The information it imparts is priceless. Well not quite; I did pay $4.20 to access it.

I saw for instance that Gail from Coronation Street, five times married in that role, has got married for the second time after her first husband was caught cheating on her. She said she could barely function when she found out. Her Street roles obviously didn’t prepare her for real life. An old joke says: white is the symbol of happiness - that’s why the groom always wears black; Gail’s wedding dress was silver and I not sure what that implies.

Halle Berry meanwhile thought she was going through the menopause, but discovered that she was in fact pregnant. Now that was something I really needed to know and I’m so grateful that the magazine was able to disclose this.

Speed-dating expert Verity Molloy, in a list of dos and don’ts for young ladies seeking a lifelong partner, advised not to show too much cleavage on the first date. “Give them a hint,” she says, “but not the full rack.”

I found out that Kerre Woodham is apparently now Kerre McIvor; I’m not sure if the change came about by deed poll or by marriage - and a woman with the unlikely name of Wendyl Nissen is both an expert on old fashioned cooking and the Agony Aunt. With a name like that, in any other publication she would be editing the motoring page.

It would be great if in a future edition she is shown getting married to Jeremy Clarkson.

Over the Teacups still flourishes and even has an archival section so you can see what pointless anecdotes previous generations had submitted.

I’ve only skimmed the surface. Prince Harry, Margaret Thatcher and Drew Barrymore all featured and I was amazed at the intimate information about these people and many others that was divulged to take my general knowledge to previously unimagined heights. I’m now thinking of auditioning for Millionaire Hot Seat.

But try as I might, I couldn’t for the life of me find the name of Paul Henry’s stunt double.
  

“Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.” - Jane Addams

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