The Latest from Opinion https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/ NZME 2024-03-28T09:15:12.306Z en Jack Tame: Well wishes for the Princess of Wales https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-well-wishes-for-the-princess-of-wales/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-well-wishes-for-the-princess-of-wales/ Just before 6pm Friday local time, Kensington Palace published a rare video of Catherine, Princess of Wales. Having taken a few weeks to process and digest the news in private, and having taken time to tell her children, she announced to the World she is being treated for cancer.   Apart from that, we don’t have a huge volume of information. We don’t know much more except she says she received the diagnosis after tests following abdominal surgery in January. She has begun receiving preventative chemotherapy.   First of all, hearing those words is a shocking and affecting experience. For anyone who has had friends or family with cancer – and I would suggest that’s most of us – it snaps you right back to your own experience. At a really basic human level, I think many of us feel a real sense of empathy for what Kate and that family must be going through.  Personally, I found my thoughts drifting to the issues of the last few weeks: The internet conspiracies about Princess Kate’s health and whereabouts and the now-infamous doctored family photo.   I also found myself trying to imagine all the complicated dimensions that being a prominent royal adds to this situation. You would think that the privilege of that position will afford Kate the very best medical care. But at the same time, there is an extraordinary level of public attention that will come with this experience. Even before this announcement, medical staff in the U.K were trying to illegally access Princess Kate’s health records. That’s tough.  And finally, my thoughts settled on Kate’s health in the broader context of what the Royal Family is going through right now. Both Princess Kate and King Charles are now being treated for cancer. It must be a huge stress on the family... and I am acutely aware that Prince William is sitting there in the middle, trying to support both his father and his wife as they are undergo their treatments.   I think everyone will be wishing them a speedy and full recovery.  2024-03-22T22:55:52.000Z Jack Tame: Photo scepticism https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-photo-scepticism/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-photo-scepticism/ I am not someone who really cares for the royal family. It’s not that I have anything against them per se, it’s just that Royal gossip’s not really my thing.  But even I have to admit... when a 'Kill Notice’ flashed across newsroom wires around the World because the big news agencies had just realised that Princess Kate’s photo had been doctored, even my usual royal ambivalence was defied.  My Dad loves to tell you that digital photos aren’t real. Unlike film, which uses light and chemicals to relay an image onto a physical medium, digital photos store information using numerical values, ultimately conveying a hyper-accurate representation of a scene.  You don’t have to be a coffee table philosopher to determine that the image of Kate and the royal children was not a very good piece of photoshopping. And with the power of however many million internet sleuths unleashed on the investigation, things only seemed to get more suspicious.  One user found an image taken last year at an event in which all the royal children were wearing the same outfits as in the doctored photo released this week. The palace said the photo was new, but could it actually have originated in November?  And the next day, when a snapper published a photo apparently showing Kate and her husband in the back seat of a car, internet uses seized upon what they thought were irregularities in the background of the image. It made for a compelling argument. Who could be sure what to believe?  Surely the easiest way to quash the frenzy would have been for Kate to make a public appearance, but of course the Palace says she is recovering from abdominal surgery and but for her short apology for the doctored image, the PR machine has stayed quiet.  The purpose of publishing the photo was to stop the wild speculation and conspiracy theories brewing online about Kate’s whereabouts. It could not possibly have had a greater opposite effect.  But it struck me in the fallout... We might look back at this moment as a charming little episode in the annals of technology. As AI technology accelerates and supersedes stuff like manual photoshopping, we’re at the very end of a period where this kind of amateur error is possible.  Regardless of who publishes it, any time we see a photo published anywhere, we will have to have a little sliver of scepticism in the back of our minds.  Is it real or is it fake? Most of the time, we will never truly know.  2024-03-16T01:08:21.576Z Jack Tame: The news organisation cuts are devastating https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-news-organisation-cuts-are-devastating/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-news-organisation-cuts-are-devastating/ It was an awful day in my household and office yesterday, as TVNZ joined its free-to-air mates at Warner Brothers Discovery in announcing massive cuts to news gathering operations.  My wife Mava is a reporter on Sunday, and for many, many years I’ve worked with the teams on Sunday, Fair Go, Tonight, and Midday. They are my colleagues and friends. As anyone in any industry who has gone through a restructure or been made redundant will know, it’s a personally devastating thing to experience.  Perhaps I’m biased, but I do think the news business is a bit different to other businesses. I think it contributes to the strength of our democracy and the vibrancy of our society in ways that can’t be measured on a balance sheet. I think it celebrates and reflects us, and I think well-resourced journalism is our single most effective check on power.  When it comes to the TV business, it’s clear the traditional economic models are no longer fit for purpose. In the digital age, traditional TV plays a less prominent role in our lives than it once did. Advertising dollars move from the telly to the likes of Google and Meta, instead. The gazillions they make in profits are mostly shipped offshore.  Of course, people in my industry should have seen this coming. And for the most part they have. I’m not saying there aren’t things they couldn’t have done differently, innovations they could and should have made, but ultimately the force of those digital giants is irrepressible. Trying to save free-to-air commercial TV, with quality news, current affairs, and local programming, in a country with five million people... is like trying to bail out the Titanic with an empty ice cream container. I’m not aware of any comparable broadcast markets where they’ve managed to pull it off.  TV and moving pictures still have a certain magic. Radio has intimacy. But TV is the only medium where you can both hear the crack in the politician’s voice and see the flash in their eyes when a hypocrisy is exposed. At moments of national or international significance... natural disasters, pandemics, we can get information from several sources, but for the collective experience, we still turn to telly.  And there is an extra power that comes with TV currents affairs. Think about the kinds of stories that have been exposed in New Zealand. I remember as a kid in Christchurch, when the doctor Morgan Fahey was exposed by TV3’s 20/20 for sexually abusing his patients. I was eleven years old and I remember it. It was profound, devastating journalism... a story which has stuck in my head for more than 25 years.  Consider Kristin Hall and Sunday’s extraordinary recent investigation into emergency housing in Rotorua. News reports about that issue popped up from time to time on various news websites, but it took moving pictures, careful storytelling, meticulously-produced, expensive current affairs, to drive home the full scale and significance of those abuses. It took the power of telly to affect change.  If we value these things, one way or another we have to pay for it. From a purely economic perspective, if the commercial model is broken, the only other real viable option is a regulatory response.  Of course I’m biased, but I’d argue the value of journalism should be measured in more than dollars and cents. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think a number of newish, small, independent, digital outlets fills the gap left by the shows that are dying. I think I’d be more open to that argument if the overall number of journos in New Zealand wasn’t massively, steadily dropping.  The traditional TV companies might be poor, but without something meaty in place of Newshub, Sunday and Fair Go, our society and our democracy are poorer too. And by the very nature of the work they do and the vital stories they tell, we will never know what we have lost.  2024-03-08T20:37:38.000Z Jack Tame: Life with a wedding ring https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-life-with-a-wedding-ring/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-life-with-a-wedding-ring/ We made it.  Hurrah. My wife and I celebrated the one-month anniversary of our wedding this week. A meagre milestone relative to many other relationships but a month married is a month married and so far at least, it’s been great.  It also means I’ve crossed the one-month threshold for life with a wedding ring.  I must admit I was a bit torn at first about whether or not a ring was for me. Like many of his generation, my Dad never wore a ring. When my siblings and I questioned him about it as kids, we’d joke that no ring would fit around his salami fingers, but he’d always counter by proudly stating that men shouldn’t wear jewellery.  The words must have stuck for, because but for an ill-advised few months in fifth form where I wore a beaded surfer necklace and an oversized chunky goth ring with a demon’s face and two large protruding horns, I’ve not worn more than a watch.  My boss put his ring finger on the scale by telling me you can’t trust a married man without a wedding ring. But when my wife said it was up to me but at the very least she thought I should try it, I ordered simple gold band.  I’m not gonna lie, it was weird at first. It reminded me strangely of having braces on my teeth for the first time, in that all of a sudden you’re going about life with a little piece of you that’s artificial. The morning after our wedding, I woke at dawn and went for a swim. And even though the water was still and calm, I pinched the fingers of my left hand together, paranoid that somehow my ring would slip off and be lost on day one.  I tested it this week, travelling. I fly fairly regularly for work and pride myself on being very organised when it comes to the security scanning – my laptop is always out and ready to go. But having left the ring on my finger, I was alarmed when metal detector buzzed. Oh no, I thought. Don’t tell me the ring is going to ping me every time I pass through security for the rest of my life. I tried again on the return journey. Wore the ring. Didn’t change a thing. No beep. No hold up. No drama.  I fiddle with it. I turn it on my hand and every day or two slide it off to check if my finger hasn’t yet grown too fat. And every now and then when I see my hand, I get a good feeling. That’s right, I think. I’m married.  The ring still feels new. It still feels novel. But a month in, it feels good.  2024-03-01T20:21:37.000Z Jack Tame: First year free deserves to go https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-first-year-free-deserves-to-go/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-first-year-free-deserves-to-go/ I never thought the previous government’s fees-free education policy made sense.  I’m on the record from the get-go. I didn’t think it was a well-designed or considered policy. At an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, the policy was expensive. I felt there were other priorities. The more cynically minded might even suggest that fast-tracking a fees-free education policy was a decision made with an impending election in mind, rather than the stated educational outcomes.   The goals of the policy were to increase access for students from poorer backgrounds, Māori and Pasifika, and to improve educational outcomes. But short of a Scandanavian-style tax system, I actually thought New Zealand’s interest-free student loan scheme is pretty good. It strikes a fair balance and the barriers to access are low. And for every poorer student brought in by fees-free and who otherwise might have missed out on higher education, there were obviously dozens if not hundreds or thousands of middle-class kids who would’ve gone to university anyway, and now enjoyed an additional subsidy.   Instead of a blanket fees-free policy, the previous government could have considered so many alternatives:  - Increasing scholarships for students from poorer backgrounds, or for students from low-decile schools.  - Re-introducing the 10% bulk payment incentive to student loans, whereby anyone who paid off more than $1000 in a voluntary payment, had ten percent of that payment matched by the government.  - Means testing first year fees-free students.  - Making the third year of an undergraduate degree fees-free, so students were incentivised to finish.  - Greater assistance to students with cost-of-living support.  Instead, although they held off making additional study years fees-free, the previous government stuck with their scheme. And the results have been damning.    The total number of fees-free students has been decreasing. From the get-go, overall enrolments fell short of what was promised. Fees-free students have been dropping out. What’s more, the New Zealand Herald revealed over summer that the number of decile 1 first-year students has halved since the scheme began. The number of first year decile 10 students has increased by 40%. So much for improving access for students from poorer backgrounds.   I was surprised National stuck with the scheme during the election campaign. But now at least, the government is moving to change the policy to make the final year fees-free, as per New Zealand First’s election policy.   I note the Tertiary Education Commission acknowledged this week there was no discernible evidence the policy has increased access to low-socio economic groups. The policy has failed in its stated objectives. It’s a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. It deserves to go.  2024-02-23T20:34:46.000Z Jack Tame: I've had my AI 'wow' moment https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-ive-had-my-ai-wow-moment/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-ive-had-my-ai-wow-moment/ "Saturday Mornings with Jack Tame on Newstalk ZB is a captivating blend of insightful conversations, engaging interviews, and thought-provoking discussions. With Jack Tame at the helm, you can expect a refreshing take on current events, combined with his unique charm and wit.”  But hey... don’t take my word for it. Take Chat GPT’s. That’s what happens if you tell the world’s best-known generative artificial intelligence bot to write a few sentences in order to convince someone to listen to this show. Pretty good, eh?  I’ll be honest though, I was impressed by GPT when it was released, but not totally wowed. It seemed to get a lot of pretty obvious facts wrong, even when correct information was readily available on the internet. And I know these are relatively early stages in AI, but still, you’d think if Wikipedia has the real answer, Chat GPT wouldn’t make it up.  The ‘wow’ moment with AI came for me yesterday. Open AI, the company behind Chat GPT, released a video generating model called Sora.  You write a command, and working off your words, it generates a video clip up to sixty seconds long based on the detail and information you provide it.  The examples released by Open AI are… extraordinary.  Working off just a few lines of text, the model creates hyper-realistic video images. In one, a woman walks down a Neon-lit Tokyo Street, the light bouncing perfectly off the little puddles underneath her black boots. In another, a Victoria crowned pigeon twitches and shifts before the camera. In maybe my favourite example, two tiny pirate ships keen and tilt in the churning, swirling black of a hot coffee.  Are all of the videos perfect? No. With a keen eye, you can notice some little imperfections. But from a visual effects perspective, they are probably more advanced than most movies just a few years ago. And here’s the thing; they were created in just a few seconds.  I don’t profess to fully grasp the true capacity and risk of artificial intelligence. Obviously, it’s going to be disruptive, but sometimes it’s hard to distil the hype. But Open AI’s Sora programme was a wow moment for me. It’s amazing to me that a technology can create something so impressive, so realistic, both out of nothing, and out of everything. And again – in just a few seconds.  And all I could think as I scrolled through the examples —the woolly mammoths lumbering through a snowy meadow, the movie trailer with a space man in a red wool helmet, the aerial shot of waves crashing against the California Coast, a homemade video of people in Nigeria thirty years in the future— all I could think was if this is where the technology is now, just imagine where it’s going to be in five years.  2024-02-16T20:34:41.000Z Jack Tame: Artists are brilliant https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-artists-are-brilliant/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-artists-are-brilliant/ Of the many, many, many things I’m bad at... perhaps in no department am I more lacking than in artistic talent. I am a truly appalling artist. I have no vision. I have no voice. I can’t sculpt. I can’t mould. I can’t paint. I have the sketching ability of a lesser-developed primate but without the novelty factor. I am a terrible artist.   And so it was curious series of events this summer that led me to find myself with a head torch and overalls, dragging myself through the dank, dark, crawl space below the floorboards of one of New Zealand’s premier art galleries.    My friend, Mike, was preparing for a show. And with his centrepiece installation in mind, he needed volunteers to drag themselves on their knees and their bellies, as he worked to reinforce the gallery floor.    I’ve never really watched an artist at work. But Mike’s work makes him a bit unique. His studied engineering and worked as an engineer, before following his artistic passion to Columbia University. We met in New York. Now he uses his engineering skills and artistic talents to make big, bold, sometimes provocative public works. His most recent big work was a playground in Melbourne’s Southbank featuring huge boulders perched precariously on tiny little trollies. He reverse engineered a rubber compound to look just like the bluestone slabs which pave much of Melbourne’s city. When you look at the playground, you see rocks on wheels on concrete. But it’s all an illusion. A playground which looks dangerous, but isn’t.   I remember Mike explaining to me the initial concept for his new show. I remember him developing it, tweaking it as he went. Watching him prepare meant bearing witness to a man repeatedly solving the kind of problems most of us would never even conceive of.   How do you get a thin sheet of extremely rare, extremely expensive marble from Australia to New Zealand in one piece? How do you suspend hundreds of kilograms of steel in the air in a building with very few structural components? How do you get a giant palm tree through a not-very-giant door?   Mike’s show opened last night.   It features a series of crazy drinking fountain sculptures, with what Mike insisted had to be chilled, filtered water. Room temperature? Puh-lease. There’s a space with a table placed below a continuous drip from the gallery ceiling, some ten metres up. The drip falls down to a yellow dish cloth, which over time leaks a thin stream of water, feeding a plant. It’s very clever.    And the piece de resistance of sorts: In the centre of the gallery is an 8 metre-high real, living palm tree with an NBA regulation basketball hoop. The backboard is a stunning piece of blue marble which looks like the sky. The hoop is entirely functional. You can dunk it, if you’re athletic enough. You can swing from it. At the show’s opening, people took shots and played pickup.    As I studied Mike’s creations, I felt a weird mix of bewilderment, admiration, and envy.    They were brilliant. Fantastic, in the true sense of that word. But not only could I not build any of the works, I simply couldn’t conceive of them in the first place. I’ll tell you what though, for those of us bereft of any artistic skills, it is one of life’s great pleasures to see and appreciate in a friend a talent you admire.    2024-02-09T21:07:17.000Z Jack Tame: We should celebrate more milestones https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-we-should-celebrate-more-milestones/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-we-should-celebrate-more-milestones/ The big news from my summer this year, is that I got married last weekend.  Well, technically actually that’s not correct. My wife, Mava, and I were legally married back in May. But last weekend we had a little wedding. The white dress, the tux, the families in from different parts of the country and the World, the hair, the pocket squares, the petit fours, the rings, the champagne, the stress.    Mava chose to enter to a beautiful song by Bon Iver. I chose to enter to – who else? -  Kanye West. I’m not gonna bore you with all the details in the World except to say it was so good. So good. So special. The stress of the lead up melted away. Mava and I felt present. And more than anything, we felt incredibly loved.    And although truthfully I’m feeling a bit emotionally depleted, I’ve found myself this week reflecting on a couple of things about our day.  There are two vital elements in a wedding. One is obviously that you make a profound commitment to someone else. You solidify and formalise the bond and the relationship between the two of you.   The other is that you do it in a room full of people who are important to you.   I know this is a bit of a cliche, but one of those things... I really want to do again.   Modern life is tricky. We’re all on different orbits. In different countries. Different cities. Kids, jobs, career trajectories: we’re all at different ages and stages of life. But what a privilege it is, a *rare* privilege, to pull the handbrake of push the big red button, and get all of those planets to line up together, if only for a night. How amazing it is to look around a room, to recognise all the faces beaming back at you, and know that you and each of those people have a special connection.   Culturally, I reckon we can sometimes be a bit lousy at celebrating milestones. Getting married has made me determined to do better, to have more parties, to break the glass and hit the red button again.  The morning after our celebration, I woke before dawn. I was exhausted, running on fumes, but still buzzing. Before my wife stirred, I kissed her on the cheek, walked down to the beach and slipped into the water. I lay, floating on my back, bobbing in the tide, processing everything.   I felt so warm. So content. So lucky. So loved.  2024-02-02T20:48:41.000Z Wilhelmina Shrimpton: Timing really is everything https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/wilhelmina-shrimpton-timing-really-is-everything/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/wilhelmina-shrimpton-timing-really-is-everything/ I want to talk about timing, because it really is everything.   It can be the difference between whether you say or do something, and it can be the difference between whether you don’t.  It can shape opinion, and it can morph public perception.  The timing of an announcement or an incident can also dictate how it’s received.   I think we’ve well and truly seen the importance of timing when it comes to our politicians and their mental health struggles.   I know that Francesca Rudkin spoke about this on last week’s show following the shoplifting allegations against Golriz Gharahman, but the headline is back in the spotlight after former Labour Minister Kiri Allan opened up about her mental health struggles after allegedly drink-driving and crashing her car last year.   Like Golriz, she resigned from her role, and like Golriz, she’s due to have her day in court after being charged over the incident.   In her first interview since the crash Allan says she’d returned to work to deal with a change in Labour’s policies after a ‘mental health break’ … and admits she got to a point where she “decided she wanted to take her life” the night of the incident.   Now before I continue, I think it’s important to remind everyone that both Golriz Gharahman and Kiri Allan have said that their mental health struggles are not an excuse but an explanation for what happened.   Even so, they both faced a mound of criticism that mental health had been used to try and manage the PR disasters.   There are of course a lot of similarities between the former politicians’ stories, and while I applaud them for openly sharing their struggles, I wonder whether the timing of that was what threw many Kiwis.   Perhaps if they’d laid that bare when they entered politics, or when the first signs of trouble began to emerge, then many may have been more willing to accept the explanation. Or perhaps, by speaking openly about it earlier on, then the incidents may not have even happened and they’d still be sitting in the beehive right now.   I realise that’s all very well in theory but in practice it seems to have become increasingly obvious that as a government, and also as a society, we haven’t created an environment where people feel comfortable enough to come forward without judgment.   This was evident in a LinkedIn post I read last week after Golriz’s shoplifting allegations emerged, which stated that people with mental health struggles shouldn't bother getting into politics or positions with a public profile.   Not only is that discriminatory and completely unfair, it also doesn’t bode well for democracy, swiftly eliminating 31% of Kiwis who in the latest New Zealand Health Survey said they live with moderate to very high levels of psychological distress.   My fear is that although we’re seeing an increase in conversation and campaigns about mental health, that isn’t translating into an understanding or acceptance of the issue.   Kiri Allan said in her latest interview that if she looked at how her mental health may have impacted the way she operated, that it was her responsibility to manage that aspect of her life, and that she didn’t do that well.   She’s right. But there’s also some responsibility on our friends, colleagues and employers too.   And to bring it back to timing, maybe if we walked the talk we saw in all of those mental health campaigns then it would never be an awkward time to speak out.   Both Kiri Allan and Golriz Gharahman are now paying the price for their mistakes - as they should.   Both have valuable lessons to learn. But so do we.  2024-01-26T20:40:02.000Z Francesca Rudkin: Are we too hard on politicians? https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/francesca-rudkin-are-we-too-hard-on-politicians/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/francesca-rudkin-are-we-too-hard-on-politicians/ This week I found myself wondering if we’re too hard on politicians? Is there enough support for those who choose to go into public service? And why do we forget they’re human too?   When we see some of politics’ most passionate, talented, hard-working participants, some touted as potential leaders, hit mental health road bumps which often derail their careers, you’ve got to wonder if it’s worth it.    This time last year our then Prime Minister called a press conference and announced she didn’t have enough energy in the tank to do the job well and was resigning. She wanted to spend more time with her family.   It was a shock, but not surprising. It had been a brutal, unprecedented 5 years at the top for Ardern, and would have taken a toll on any leader.    This January we have another surprising resignation of a high-profile politician, for quite different reasons. In the case of Greens MP Golriz Ghahraman it was due to allegations of shoplifting, for which she has now been charged.   Ghahraman did not offer an excuse —and rightly so, as there’s no excuse for illegal behaviour— but she did try and offer an explanation. An extreme stress response to her work and unrecognised trauma contributed to her irrational behaviour – basically, it was down to her mental health.   As I know from hosting Summer Mornings this week, some of you feel empathy for Ghahraman, appreciate her hard work, and wish her the best in dealing with her issues. Some of you believe that mental health is just a convenient excuse.   I think it’s both. We need to differentiate between a person’s mental health crisis, which deserves our compassion, and their actions, which can be inexcusable. It is possible to hold both thoughts at the same time.  What we don’t want though is for the mental health ‘excuse’ to become an easy PR solution to a problem, because it’s really important people —from all walks of life— share their stories to destigmatise mental health issues.  What intrigued me this week was when Ghahraman’s Green Party colleagues and former members of Parliament spoke out about the stress, violent and sexual threats, and the challenges of being a politician, but especially a female politician.   Abuse has always been a part of being a politician. Talk to any politician and they will tell you about some of the crazy abuse they have received over the years, but you get the sense from those in the business now that it’s worse.   Why do people feel they have the right to abuse and threaten politicians?   If you don’t like their policies, don’t vote for them. There is never any rationale or excuse for sexual or violent threats. We must differentiate between the person and the politics, and at the same time offer better support for those who decide to enter public service.   This needs to come from both the party and Parliamentary Services. The last thing we want is for our politicians to become unreachable and untouchable due to a fear of the public, or for good, capable people to decide to avoid public service altogether.    2024-01-19T21:21:27.000Z Jack Tame: The Christmas Reset https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-christmas-reset/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-christmas-reset/ It was left to my wife to break the bad news.  Our boy was sitting patiently in the back of the car and as we made our way across town, she gently asked him about the letter which we’d just discovered he’d written to Santa.  “When did you write it?” She asked.  “A couple of weeks ago. I didn’t tell you, cos it was going straight to Santa.”  “Fair call. Good thinking. Who helped you do it?”   “My Kaiako... my teacher.”  “And... um... What did you ask for?”  “Oh, nothing major,” he said. “The standard. A Rubik’s cube. Some stuff for his Beyblade spinning tops. Oh, and you know... a dog.”  “A dog?” Asked mum.  “Two dogs,” replied our boy. “So, they’ll always have someone to play with even when I’m at school.”  Nothing stokes the magic of Christmas like watching it through kids’ eyes. Nothing kills your dream of two new pet dogs like Mum gently explaining that Santa called her on the phone from an unknown number to double-check the pets would be ok... and unfortunately, our family just isn’t in a position where we can have two new dogs, this year.   What am I looking forward to this Christmas? I’m looking forward to watching his face when we finally let him loose on the non-canine gifts sitting there, tantalising and mysterious, under the Christmas tree.   I’m looking forward to cracking the click-clack Tupperware and hoeing into my mum’s Christmas baking. I’m looking forward to knocking around on guitars, cold drinks in the summer twilight, and turning off all of the notifications on my phone.   I’m looking forward to meeting my new nephew, baby Freddie, for the first time. I’m looking forward to playing with his older brother and sister, who are at the age where all they want to do is a bit of rough and tumble. We’ll play Jonah – an old favourite where I crouch on one side of the lounge, and they try to run past me and score an imaginary try on the couch, only for me to pick them up and tackle them to the carpet. My nephew will no doubt ask me to string him like a pig... holding him from the ankles and dangling him upside down. A great way to wind up a four-year-old just before bed.  This is our last show morning for 20203. It’s been a year. For me, 2023 started for me with a 2000km road trip across South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique, and is ending in Nelson. We’ve had an election. Natural disasters. Wars. World Cups. Somewhere in there, I asked my partner to marry me.   For me, this time of year is when we bank all of that. A time to exhale. To reconnect, reset, recharge and go again. And for all the peripheral stress, nothing else comes close.   Dogs or no dogs, I love Christmas.  2023-12-16T02:45:26.000Z Jack Tame: New experiences https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-new-experiences/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-new-experiences/ New experiences make you feel young.  At least, that’s what I told myself as I slipped into a gown, folded my pants and shirt into a plastic container, and followed the technician through the big double doors.  It took me almost 37 years to get my first MRI. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but even though I’m pretty good with claustrophobia and that kind of thing, I still felt a little blush of nerves, the hesitation of the unknown, as the giant machine shifted me into position.  The technicians had advised me not to move. So of course, just as soon as the machine began scanning my insides, whirring and beeping around me, I developed an itch right on the tip of my nose.  I breathed through it as best I could and by the time, I was ready to be extracted, 40 minutes later, I swear I was almost about to doze off.  If new experiences make you feel young, my MRI results did not. Reasonably advanced arthritis. Various tears and bits of damage to body parts with long names. A bone spur steadily nibbling away at the already-reduced cartilage in my hip. Not the end of the World, but also not the kind of ailments that will ever improve. The pain I have been feeling in my left hip isn’t going away. When it comes to the sports I love to play, there are some tough decisions that lay ahead.  The next morning, I went to the optometrist. The news didn’t get much better. I swear I was reading every line on the chart, and he was saying, ‘Good.... good... good!”  But then after he’d trialled me with various exercises, the optometrist turned his chair towards me and explained it was time to consider reading glasses. Again, hardly the end of the World. But a first for me.  ‘Really?’ I asked. Surely, I thought, he’s just trying to swindle me for a fancy pair of designer specs.  “There’s been a decline since your last check.” He said.  “Not a massive decline, but a decline.”  He showed me again what it felt like with corrective lenses over my eyes. The letters on the chart were clearer.  I thanked him, limped out and squinted at the sales rack to try and work out if any of the glasses there would suit my face.  Yesterday morning, I woke up to a text on the family group chat. Overnight, my sister had had her baby. A boy. Her third. Fit and healthy and doing well. I had that primal response. A photo of a child, hours old, whom I’ve never met, and whom I already love so much.  It’s funny, one minute you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. And then you realise you don’t. The thing that makes this tolerable is knowing that at least someone else does.  2023-12-08T21:10:09.000Z Jack Tame: Crocs are back in fashion https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-crocs-are-back-in-fashion/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-crocs-are-back-in-fashion/ Fashion.  It’s not a subject I can profess to knowing an awful lot about, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the ebbs and flows of what’s hot and what’s not, it’s that you can never rule anything out.  No matter how unfashionable something is, no matter how objectively horrible it looks, at some point it will be in.  It’s easy to forget, once upon a time codpieces were the height of sophistication and taste. It happened with sneans, sneakers and jeans. And even though it would seem very unusual by today’s standards to see a group of young men loping around with their pants halfway down their thighs and their underwear sticking out, low-riding was until recently very fashionable and sadly given the cyclical nature of fashion, it’ll probably be fashionable again.  This brings me to Crocs. I’m hardly the first person to notice the popularity of the plastic-y modern clog. But I’ve been struck by the way in which Crocs have crossed from being a sort of ironic haha-I’m-wearing-ugly-shoes option for middle aged people who wanted to wind up their teenagers, to a shoe which is actually cool, cool. Crocs have been worn by popstars and Hollywood heartthrobs. For several years now they’ve been the boot of choice for the likes of Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and fashionistas at openings in fancy art galleries.  Nowhere is this more obvious than with kids. I was standing at the bottom of a large and slightly intimidating slide at a West Auckland playground last weekend, waiting for my stepson to come on down. And kid after kid after kid whipped off a pair of Crocs and threw the shoes to the bottom of the slide, least the rubbery soles stunt their momentum on the way down.  The way kids wear them, of course, is with Jibbitz. Jibbitz are little charms that you can attach to a pair of Crocs in much the same way as you might wear a charm on a charm bracelet. It’s a way for kids to further personalise their Crocs and distinguish their pair from everyone else’s. Fashions come and go but one thing that has never changed in the schoolyard: shoes are still the ultimate status symbol.  But of course, as is the danger with in-demand fashions, there are inevitably downsides to the popularity. At least one New Zealand school has introduced a complete Crocs ban. Several others are banning the Jibbitz charms as kids argue over them.  There’s always the risk you might push a trend too far and get caught out as the fashion tides change. Ugly is trendy, I get that. But I must confess to wondering how far the concept reaches after being confronted this week by an ad for a Croc accessory I’d never seen before.  Croc Nuts. The perfect solution for that hard-to-buy-for person in your life, this Christmas. For those who are familiar with Truck Nutz, it’s more or less the same concept. A pair of gleaming metallic testicles which you can clip to the back of your Crocs to swing around in the breeze as you go about your business.  Taste may be in the eye of the beholder. But let this serve as a reminder to all of us: in fashion, you can never rule anything out.  2023-12-01T21:10:20.000Z Jack Tame: It's A Done Deal https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-its-a-done-deal/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-its-a-done-deal/ We can dispute when the counter should have started – election night or the official results – but I suspect the waiting game will soon be forgotten as the new government is sworn in and the house sits in urgency.  At first blush, I actually think the biggest winner of the three parties is National. Perhaps you’d expect nothing less from the highest-polling party, but there’s no doubt Christopher Luxon and his team were negotiating with a couple of wily, smart operators. And at the conclusion of negotiations, almost all of National’s policies remain on the table. They haven’t had to sacrifice their babies.  Sure, there’s the foreign buyers’ tax. But given the scrutiny over the projected revenue numbers during the election campaign, I’d suggest National was none too bothered to have that policy tossed upon the bonfire. They can blame Winston Peters. Give him the win. And yes, it means a gap in revenue that will need filling, but something tells me National would much prefer that than monthly updates on how much the foreign buyer tax revenue was falling short of projections.  There are some significant visable wins for NZ First: The $1.2B infrastructure fund – ka ching - the various gender and Māori language provisions, and a Covid inquiry. I think Winston Peters is a really good choice for Foreign Minister and Shane Jones is exactly where he wants to be with fisheries and regional development. NZ First will be really pleased.  I think we’ll have to wait before we can properly assess the scale of ACT’s wins. There will be no Treaty referendum, and if it so chooses, it’ll be easy enough for the National Party to drops its support of a treaty principles bill straight after select committee. It’ll be interesting to see whether scrapping the Māori Health Authority, co-governance provisions, and changing various Māori names might take some of the heat out of that issue for the time being.  Compared to NZ First, ACT has certainly taken on less-flashy ministerial positions. And again, we probably won’t be able to assess the true impact of the deal until we see how much regulation David Seymour can cut as the new minister, or how much Brooke van Velden can shake up workplace relations, or exactly what the new Arms Act will look like. In ACT’s coalition deal, it struck me that in many areas there are less concrete commitments, but that perhaps those commitments cover broader areas. The words explore, examine, and consider are sprinkled throughout the document. Listen to this, for example:  In consultation with the relevant Minister, carry out regulation sector reviews, which could include the primary industries, the finance sector, early childhood education, and healthcare occupational licensing, in each case producing an omnibus bill for regulatory reform of laws affecting the sector. Maybe I’m being a bit of a bush lawyer here, but that theoretically has the potential to be enormously consequential. It also has the potential to change basically nothing. They haven’t even agreed with certainty what sectors will be reviewed.  From Christopher Luxon’s perspective, I thought the Deputy Prime Minister split was a pretty elegant solution. But the real test of a coalition is not the detail in the deal, but the behaviour of the parties and the management of relationships when inevitably they disagree.  2023-11-24T20:26:40.000Z Jack Tame: The Christmas Cake Curse https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-christmas-cake-curse/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-christmas-cake-curse/ I love Christmas cake.  Not any Christmas cake. Not every Christmas cake. But my mum’s Christmas cake, for whatever reason, gives me so much joy.  It’s not that her cakes are crazy-fancy or anything. She uses store-bought mixed fruit. They’re not iced and there’s no surprising secret ingredient, but for whatever reason Mum has mastered the perfect Christmas fruit cake. They’re moist. They’re dense. They’re heavy. They’re a highlight of a Tame family Christmas.  Perhaps it all just comes down to practice. She used to make ten or twelve every year and give them as gifts. But the moment I get home every summer, Mum has a couple of cakes waiting on the bench, and I carve off big hunks to eat while standing in the kitchen. Sometimes Dad eats it with blue cheese.  But however well Christmas fruit cakes hit my taste buds, they also hit my stomach. Is it a PH thing? I dunno. Maybe the mixed fruit starts to ferment or sour in my gut? It doesn’t happen to anyone else. Not another soul. All I know is there is a direct correlation between my eating mum’s fruit cake and no one wanting to be within a twenty metre radius.  “Oh GOD! What IS that?! Is something dead?”  “Get the children! Ahh!”  “Burn our clothes! Burn our clothes!”  I don’t know exactly what happens, but somewhere deep inside me there is a chemical reaction of sorts. I’m the first to admit... it’s just awful. Putrid. The smell will curl your ears. The moment a bit of cake hits my stomach it’s like that scene from Titanic.  “Are there any survivors?”  Call it the Christmas Cake Curse.  My mum flogs herself with Christmas baking. Mince pies, shortbread, mars bar slice, Russian fudge. It’s too much! We can’t fit all the baking in the cupboards. We’ve had to establish a Tame family Christmas baking spillover zone. And yet for all the abundance, all of that choice, my favourite Christmas treat just happens to be the one that’ll end up peeling the paint off the walls.  Baking is an act of love. Baking, when you know how it affects your son, is an even greater act of love.  But the greatest act of love this summer will be my noble decision to take a piece of fruit cake and politely excuse myself, outside.  2023-11-17T20:47:52.000Z Jack Tame: The 2023 election was the "Anyone But Labour" vote https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-2023-election-was-the-anyone-but-labour-vote/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-2023-election-was-the-anyone-but-labour-vote/ The results are in. Not the final, final results. The super-dooper recounted and not-subject-to-further-legal-challenge results. But as final as results are going to be for a bit longer. And on the numbers released by the Electoral Commission yesterday, I think we can reasonably dub the 2023 General Election the ABL-Vote.  ABL. Anyone. But. Labour.  The left has gone more left. The right has gone more right. Winston Peters and New Zealand First have hoovered up whatever remains, and we wait to see what kind of deal might be struck between the governing parties.  These are the things that stand out to me:  1) Labour’s vote has almost halved on the result three years ago. Maybe it’s the polling or just the general widespread sense of dissatisfaction with the government, but I still think we haven’t paused and considered the scale of that reversal, enough. They received 50% of the party vote in 2020. I get it. It was an extraordinary result for an extraordinary political moment. But in just three years they’ve shed almost half of that support Almost a quarter of all New Zealand voters have left them. And as if that weren’t painful enough for the party’s members, what is there to show for that historic majority government?  2) With just over 38% of the vote, by National’s traditional standards, this is not an impressive election result. It was enough. And it only needed to be enough. But if you take out the 2020 drubbing, this year’s result was the lowest party vote result for National for more than 20 years. But for 2020, the last time they were lower than 39% was the 2002 election.  3) Both the Greens and Te Pāti Māori are celebrating their largest-ever caucuses. A big part of their success is surely the ABL factor. Anyone but Labour. But I also think they ran the two best campaigns of the election. The Greens were super-disciplined. They put out well-constructed policies early in the campaign, soaking up a lot of political discourse before the other parties switched into campaign mode. Te Pāti Māori understood better than any other party except for maybe New Zealand first, how to mobilise their supporters.  4) I think ACT will be a bit disappointed by their final numbers. Of course, the result is great by the party’s traditional standards and winning the Tamaki electorate was a huge boon symbolically, but compared to where they were polling a few months ago, it’s a notable drop.  5) New Zealand First’s result marks a masterful sprint to the electoral finish line for our most experienced and seasoned politician. Winston Peters saw the space opened up by National’s dithering and seized it. The party didn’t confirm its policy platform until well after voting had already opened but their supporters don’t care. New Zealand First might have been largely absent from politicial discourse for most of this parliamentary term, but their result goes to show how important timing and momentum are in a political campaign.  So what happens now? Negotiations will be fascinating. My impression is that David Seymour will be intensely focused on achieving policy concessions. I suspect New Zealand First will be less interested in big, meaty, high-workload Cabinet portfolios, but I could be wrong.  I think the triumphant reaction from the Greens, while understandable at one level, shows they’re completely focused on themselves and are deluded about the constraints of opposition. No one seems to note that a record election result for the party isn’t actually worth that much if you’re languishing in opposition, and the governing parties are pledging to restart oil and gas exploration, delay emissions pricing on farms, and even scrap the Zero Carbon Act.  I think Labour’s totally adrift. And I think the new Prime Minister has his work cut out. The ABL factor will give him a honeymoon glow for a bit, but this is still an incredibly tricky economic and political moment, and if this election has shown us anything it’s how quickly voter sentiment can change. Three’s a crowd and managing relationships between ACT and New Zealand First is potentially complex. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and the next government will know they can only trade on being Anyone But Labour for so long.    LISTEN ABOVE 2023-11-03T20:27:54.000Z Jack Tame: Stories are what gives sport its magic https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-stories-are-what-gives-sport-its-magic/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-stories-are-what-gives-sport-its-magic/ “Historically, the All Blacks haven’t faced too much adversity. But here it is. The team is at odds and ends. The players are being criticised. The coaches and their bosses are being hammered in the press.  Maybe they will falter. Maybe we’re watching the unravelling of a once-mighty team. Maybe Silver Lake has bought a dud.  Or maybe, through whatever changes are necessary, and through the pluck and determination of a unit that can only be truly tested when its back is against the wall, the All Blacks will find a way to rise up.”  Those were the words of famed rugby analyst Jack Tame on a radio station called Newstalk ZB, shortly after the All Blacks had lost a home series to Ireland for the first time.  15 months on, I’ll be honest, my thoughts have been a bit muddled this week.  Yes, I can rationalise that we’ve improved massively since that last encounter with the Springboks back in August. A 28-point deficit? Surely that won’t be repeated. I can rationalise that we’re fit. We’re coming off a slightly longer break. We’ve weathered the Irish storm. Our set piece is a thousand times better than it was, we’ve barely lost a lineout in the tournament and our outside backs are maybe the most exciting in World rugby.  Buuuuuuuuuut, still. South Africa. They’re good.  I feel for Dane Coles missing out. For years he’s defined what a hardy, mischievous hooker should be. I’m not bothered by the locking decision either way - Retallick to start and Whitelock on the bench - except to say that Sam Whitelock is a titan of a leader, and I can’t imagine a Rugby World Cup victory without him playing a massive role, whether off the bench or in the starting 15.  Buuuuuuuuuut, still. South Africa. Gulp.  The Springboks have named a 7-1 split. Seven forwards on the bench. That’s a gamble.  Gambles can backfire.  But if there’s anything… any one thing that can push the All Blacks over the edge… that can propel them to Word Champion status… That can secure a record fourth Rugby World Cup… It’s the story.  It’s that doing so will be the pièce de résistance… the cherry on top of the whole Ian Foster fiasco.  I was not someone who thought Ian Foster was the best man for a job. I’m still not! But I also think he’s been treated woefully over the last few years. And in the midst of a pretty awful situation, I think he acted with dignity and grit.  Finishing up as the coach of the World Champions wouldn’t just be an incredibly satisfying conclusion to his All Blacks career. It’d be a hell of a middle finger to the haters.  And I can never underestimate the power of stories in sport. Stories are what give sport its magic. I want to finish with another quote of mine from last year:  “Maybe it’s lunacy to even ponder a World Cup victory next year. But crazier things have happened in sport.”  “Often the greatest sporting narratives are those in which an athlete or a team overcomes adversity. Victory against all odds.”  I said my thoughts had been a bit muddled this week. My head and my heart in a furious battle. But the closer we get to kick-off, the more clarity I have.  Ultimately, I do know what I think. I think I was right to maintain that sliver of optimism even during trying times. I think the All Blacks will win.  2023-10-27T20:53:08.000Z Jack Tame: The mystery of the missing F-35 https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-mystery-of-the-missing-f-35/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-mystery-of-the-missing-f-35/ What’s the worst thing you’ve ever lost? Car keys? A wedding ring? Your dignity, perhaps?  I’m not really a loser. Well, I’m a loser. But I’m not a loser of things. I’m not a misplacer. At least not yet. Against the odds, I’ve managed to go several years with the same pair of wireless earbuds without any major incident. And but for a very occasional misplaced bikelock key, perhaps my worst-ever losing of something was when I foolishly parked a rental car in a Las Vegas casino’s underground carpark and spent about 2 hours walking the rows trying to listen for the bleep’bleep.  Certainly I’ve never lost anything that comes close to an F-35 jet.  This for me was the stand out story of the week. Not the election campaign or the U.N General Assembly. The mystery of the missing F-35.  It started on Tuesday, when a sheepish young man made a call to 9-11 asking if there had been any reports of a plane crash. He’d ejected, he said, while flying a F-35B Lightening II jet.  Why exactly did he eject? We don’t really know. But he was only a mile from Charleston International Airport – an airport I’ve flown in and out of before – and he ended up parachuting down into someone’s suburban backyard.  This is only a hunch, but if he was the one who hit the eject button, I’m guessing that pilot is feeling just a little sheepish. Because despite his ejection, the plane continued flying. Not just a few miles, but a full hundred kilometres.  The F-35B is the most advanced fighter jet in the U.S military arsenal. It can take off and land vertically. And apparently the jet’s capacity for stealth shouldn’t be underestimated. Because maybe the most extraordinary thing about this whole situation is that it took more than 24 hours to find and report the debris field from the crashed F-35.  To be clear – it didn’t go down on the battlefield. It didn’t go down in the ocean. A $170m fighter jet went down in a field in South Carolina and it took the mightiest military with the most advanced technology more than a day to find it. Forget transponders or radar or GPS, at one point the military was asking the public to call a special hotline with any information. 0800-missing-jet-who-am-I-speaking-with?  You see, this is why I never believe in deep state conspiracies. As seductive as it might be to imagine an all-powerful government pulling the wool over our eyes and manipulating the global order, people always underestimate the incompetence factor.  If America’s military can lose a state-of-the-art fighter jet in their own backyard, what hope do any of the rest of us have for our house keys?  2023-09-23T01:17:41.000Z Jack Tame: A new high in reality TV casting https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-a-new-high-in-reality-tv-casting/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-a-new-high-in-reality-tv-casting/ Maybe I’m just too close to it, but my sense is that a big slab of the New Zealand public is thoroughly sick of the election campaign already.  People are done. They’re fed up. They’re spent. And for the days of the week in between significant sporting fixtures, they’re dead keen for a different kind of contest that doesn’t seem so negative and bleak.   And this morning, I’ve got the answer. Before I share it though, you’ve got to understand, I’m not usually one to gush about reality TV. It’s not that I’m too cerebral or hoity-toity. It’s not that I spend my evenings annotating James Joyce and listening to Baroque compositions in a leather armchair, it’s certainly not that I don’t own a TV. It’s just that sometimes I find some of the shows a bit formulaic.  This one will be different. On Monday night, a new season of Celebrity Treasure Island begins, and as much as I’m excited about the comedians, and the middle-aged sporting stars, one celebrity contestant in particular marks what I think is an extraordinary new high in reality TV casting.  Competing in the Papura team and raising money for I Am Hope, is none other than Tame Iti.  Yes, that Tame Iti. Tame Iti of the discharging-a-shotgun-at-Waitangi Tame Iti. He of Te Urewera raids. Tame Iti, former member of the NZ Communist Party. Former champion wrestler. Tame Iti, actor, artist. Tame Iti, lifelong Māori rights activist.  This is what makes New Zealand great. Only in New Zealand could a person like Tame Iti, with his extraordinary life and history, be happily cast in a survival reality show alongside the former captain of the Warriors.  To be fair, Celebrity Treasure Island has consistently set the standard for entertaining New Zealand telly. I know there will be some people rolling their eyes but trust me - that’s only because you haven’t seen it. The thing that makes the show so genius is how it has become such a glorious reflection of our culture. The cast is always diverse. They’re always characters. And as much as they each want to compete to win, the programme as a whole never takes itself very seriously. It’s incredible self-aware and self-deprecating. It’s moving. It’s emotional.  If you do decide to do it, to get yourself in the mood, watch Tame Iti’s Ted talk on Youtube. It’s a simple speech called Mana: The Power in Knowing Who You Are. It’s the most moving and affecting Ted talk I’ve ever seen.  So that’s my recommendation for you this week. If you feel like the election campaign has turned into a daily exercise in talking down New Zealand, give Celebrity Treasure Island a crack.  Tame Iti, artist. Tame Iti, activist. Could he soon be Tame Iti, Celebrity Treasure Island champion?  2023-09-15T22:06:15.000Z Jack Tame: The tui are back for spring https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-tui-are-back-for-spring/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-tui-are-back-for-spring/ I had this amazing little moment one afternoon this week, when for the first time this winter... I threw open the doors of my deck, sprawled out on the couch nearby, and basked in the sunshine as it spilled through onto my face and neck.  Isn’t it amazing what a difference a few days of sunshine can make?  My God.  I know that there are parts of the country that have had it a whole lot sunnier than Auckland these last few months but I cannot recall a winter in my part of the World that has felt so wet and so grim.  The sunshine brought with it the first blossom of Spring.  I’ve got a Taiwan cherry tree in my backyard, and it’s been heavy with red and pink flowers.  And as much as I love the blossom, the tūi loved them more.  They’re always darting in and out at my place, hopping between branches of the different trees, calling out to their mates before hustling off for the next feed.  And tūi really do hustle, don’t you think? They don’t really glide as such. And even when they’re parked up, they always seem have a bit of a boisterous temperament.  Tūi are so beautiful. I love how understated and yet sophisticated their colours are, the black and green, and bronze, with that extraordinary irredescent shimmer, as though every feather has been lightly glazed. Tūi almost twinkle.  Some of the tūi who turn up at my place are perfectly turned out. Some have that slightly shabby appearance, as though they’ve gone to sleep with wet hair and forgot to check the mirror in the morning.  I’ve never heard them sing so much in my backyard as they have been these last few days. There was barely an instance when I looked up at that cherry tree and didn’t see a tūi drinking in the blossom, and calling out to his or her tūi mates.  Is this middle age? I dunno. But I’m at the age and stage where I get it. I get it. I get the native birds thing in a really big way. Lying on the couch in the sunshine, watching the tūi drink and sing out to the neighbourhood just made me feel so content.  ‘What can I do to steal a few more of these moments?’ I wondered.  I can’t do anything about the weather. I can’t compel the sun to shine.  I picked up my phone and googled three words. Predator. Free. NZ.  My brand new rat trap arrived the next morning.  2023-08-25T21:31:03.000Z Jack Tame: Football's popularity is rising https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-footballs-popularity-is-rising/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-footballs-popularity-is-rising/ The hosts on Fox Sport Australia were bamboozled by a question earlier this week.  What’s the biggest winter sport in Australia?  Is it Rugby League and the excellent entertainment of the NRL? Is it Aussie Rules? Or could it now, be football?  Sadly, it goes without saying that it isn’t rugby, and I’d suggest that even when the Rugby World Cup kicks off, only so many Australians will even realise it’s on.  At a time when all sorts of different things are vying for our attention, the Matildas’ semi-final in the FIFA World Cup obliterated TV ratings records. In Australia, it was the most-watched TV event in more than two decades.  The key with football is the low barrier to entry. Grassroots participation isn’t totally dominated by one gender. You don’t need money to have a kick around with your friends. And you can explain the key rules in just a few sentences: Your team has to get the ball in the goal and stop the other team from getting it in yours. Only the goalies can use their hands. You can challenge the ball, but you can’t tackle people.  That’s it. Sure, there’s an offside rule and passback restrictions but the basic rules are stunningly, beautifully simple. And even the way they’re enforced allows the game to flow. No one agonises over taking a throw-in from the exact mark.  I don’t want to pick on rugby, but the contrasts are stark. I’ve watched, played, and loved rugby all of my life. But there are still infringements at the breakdown that leave me totally confused. Sometimes even the commentators don’t understand what’s happened.  Football’s making a play at the moment into markets where historically it’s been a bit of a second-tier sport. At the same time as its recording record ratings in Australia, arguably the greatest footballer of all time has chosen to eschew the Saudi clubs to play in the United States. The average ticket to Lionel Messi’s first game for Inter Miami was selling only for $NZ 1200. The crowd included Serena Williams, LeBron James, the Beckham family, and Kim Kardashian. It was more than a football match – it was a cultural event.  It’s fair enough to expect that when the World Cup hype has died down a bit, the buzz around football in Australia will die back a bit, too.  Personally, I think it’s only a matter of time. It won’t happen overnight. Rugby, rugby league, and netball, will all still hold a special place in New Zealand. Basketball will continue to go from strength to strength.  But fast-forward a few decades from now. I reckon football will be the most-played sport, the most-followed sport, the most popular sport in New Zealand, too.  2023-08-18T21:30:18.000Z Jack Tame: Ruling out NZ First now would martyr Winston Peters https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-ruling-out-nz-first-now-would-martyr-winston-peters/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-ruling-out-nz-first-now-would-martyr-winston-peters/ There was an air of inevitability around the polls this week. It pays to be restrained in putting too much weight into any one poll, but the trends are what matter and the trends are suggesting Winston Peters and New Zealand First might break 5% and make it back to parliament.  All manner of pundits have come out and suggested that Christopher Luxon should make a call and do what he’s refused to do in the race so far, follow in John Key’s footsteps and rule out working with New Zealand First after the election.  I think Luxon’s best opportunity has passed. Back in May, I wrote that the National leader was strategically well-positioned to rule out Peters, so long as he managed the process as delicately as might be possible. He’d need to be respectful and deferential to New Zealand First’s supporters, explaining that it was less about the party’s leader and more about forming a simple, clean, two-party coalition to counteract what he continues to describe as a potential ‘coalition of chaos’ on the other side.  Given Winston Peters’ and David Seymour’s open distain for each other, the ‘coalition of chaos’ barb is now much better suited to the centre-right block.  Think about the reaction if Christopher Luxon ruled out working with New Zealand First, today. It’s not impossible it would have the desired effect from National’s perspective, but it comes with much greater risk than when New Zealand First was polling at 3%.  “Why have you ruled them out now, when you’ve been asked so many times over the last few months?”  “... Ahhh... because for the first time it actually looks like he’s gonna’ get in?”  It would martyr Winston Peters. It would play into the narrative that the major parties were colluding to exclude him and New Zealand First from parliament. It would breathe oxygen into his campaign and potentially galvanise his support base.  If Luxon had ruled out New Zealand First while they were polling at 3%, it wouldn’t have mattered if none of those 3% changed their minds and the vote was essentially wasted. But it potentially would have stopped new supporters from coming across in the subsequent months and deciding to back Winston Peters.  Now the party’s hitting 5%, and it’s a totally different equation.  2023-08-11T21:51:54.000Z Jack Tame: Kiwis stepped up for the FIFA Women's World Cup https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-kiwis-stepped-up-for-the-fifa-womens-world-cup/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-kiwis-stepped-up-for-the-fifa-womens-world-cup/ For all the angst heading into the tournament, Kiwis have absolutely stepped up for the FIFA Women’s World Cup. I’ll admit I was a bit nervous for the tournament’s local organisers as kick-off neared. There wasn’t really much buzz. No real sense of occasion. And I worried that for what is a massive tournament in the context of global sport – arguably the biggest tournament ever hosted on New Zealand soil – we might show ourselves to be a bit miserable. Don’t forget, just days before it officially began, FIFA’s boss Gianni Infantino paused a press conference, picked out the New Zealand media in attendance, and made a direct plea down the camera barrels for their audiences to get out and actually buy tickets. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t feel that was necessary with the Australians. The nature of the tournament meant that some of the pool games were the likeliest to have small audiences. It’s an exciting time because there are games almost every day, but if we’re honest, Zambia vs Costa Rica is unlikely in this part of the World to drum up the same kind of enthusiasm as it might elsewhere. Once you get to the knockout stages, the drama is greater, the games are closer, and it’s reasonable to expect the crowds are consistently big. But get this. Of the twenty-four pool games played in New Zealand, the average crowd was more than 21,000 fans. More than half a million total fans. That’s fantastic. For the big games we’ve had record numbers in attendance. But even Zambia vs Costa Rica drew more than 8000 people to Waikato Stadium. And anyone who has attended a game will attest to how much fun it’s been. I live within walking distance of Eden Park. Fans are constantly making their way to the stadium with flags and face paint and jerseys for their respective countries. It feels properly global in a way that few events here ever do. We should thank the Football Ferns for their part in this. That opening night was thrilling. Although they didn’t progress to the knock-out stages, they played a major role in igniting our collective excitement. But it’s funny, I went back and looked at that Gianni Infantino press conference, where he effectively begged Kiwis to go out and buy football tickets. He said one extra thing I hadn’t noticed at the time.   “Do the right thing.” He needn’t have. My experience at the FIFA World Cup is that fans haven’t attended out of charity. They haven’t attended out of a sense of duty to try and promote the women’s game. They’ve attended because it’s been really exciting, skillful, high-drama football. We might have left the ticket-buying to the last minute, but there’s no doubt New Zealanders have wanted to be there. Now, we’re at the knockout stages. Some of the biggest names in World football are struggling or have already been knocked out. The tournament feels like it’s anyone’s. And I for one, don’t want it to end. 2023-08-05T01:37:08.000Z Jack Tame: It really puts our other problems in perspective https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-it-really-puts-our-other-problems-in-perspective/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-it-really-puts-our-other-problems-in-perspective/ Have you ever been to the Hanmer hotpools? They were my first hotpool experience. North Canterbury. And they hold a bit of a special place in my heart.  What about Polynesian Spa in Rotorua? Think about how it feels to walk into the hot pools. You dip a toe or a foot, you kind of brace yourself as you wait to adjust to the heat. And then, how you ease yourself in. How you move slowly, you find a spot to sit down and slip beneath the warm water. They gently do their thing, easing and relaxing your muscles. For some people the warm water gets a bit much. Maybe it’s my ice-cold heart, but I can only last so long in those hot pools before I start sweating, and I need to jump out and refresh. The hot pools at Polynesian Spa range from 36C to 42C. Hanmer is similar. And so is the ocean, off Miami. Yeah... the ocean. Preliminary data this week recorded the ocean temperature off Florida as a little over 38C. That’s a full 10C warming than the ocean temperature in Fiji in the heart of summer.  No wonder the U.N. Secretary General says we’ve reached a Global Boiling Point. That does sound bad. I’m sure there will still be many people who dismiss the words as alarmist or hyperbole, but those affected by the extreme weather in the northern summer this month might beg to differ.  July was certainly the hottest month globally since records began. Climate scientists reckon it was probably also the hottest month in the history of human civilisation. 100-to-120 thousand years.  Wildfires in North America, heatwaves across Europe. How crazy were the pictures from Rhodes in Greece? This week saw the largest evacuation in the country’s modern history. I think my favourite – if that’s the right word – extreme weather event of the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, was the insane hailstorm which struck Northern Itay, just outside of Milan. The region had been sweltering in an oppressive heatwave, when black skies brought with them hailstones as large as tennis balls. As they started to melt in the warm air, the little cobbled Italian village streets were turned into rivers of melting ice. It was crazy. Anyway.  I don’t know about you, but much of the time I find I subconsciously put the climate issue to the back of my mind. Or if not the back, at least the side. I make a few measly sacrifices. I ride my bike. I try to limit how much meat I consume. But honestly, a lot of the time life just gets in the way and a lot of my thoughts are consumed by other things. But then a week like this will snap me back at attention. The hottest month in human civilisation. I don’t mean to dismiss inflation or crime, the state of our education system, or the Football Ferns’ chances of making the playoffs. But you’ve gotta say, it really puts our other problems in perspective. 2023-07-28T21:42:10.000Z Jack Tame: As fans, we never know https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-as-fans-we-never-know/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-as-fans-we-never-know/ Amidst all of the amazing sporting action we’re being treated to at the moment, I’ve been mad for the Tour de France. I was sucked in by the Netflix series following last year’s competition, and I’ve keenly prioritised watching the highlights over the last few weeks of racing. The Tour is almost over and the final result is essentially a foregone conclusion. Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard is about to back up his win last year and ride to glory along the Parisian streets. For most of the tour, the racing has been incredibly close. Vingegaard and his arch rival, former Tour champion Tadej Pogacar have been duking it out, blow for blow. Their teams have been heroically positioning them for the gnarliest climbs, and towards the end of these  gut-busting stages, they’ve been taking turns attacking and trying to out-sprint each other, high on alpine passes. But the Tour took a turn in the individual time trial, a really short race – just 22kms - in which riders race solo. After two weeks of utterly brutal racing, in which you’d expect all of the riders to be wrecked, Vingegaard blasted away his competition so comprehensively, that he admitted even he was surprised by the stats on his power-meter. Against the best riders in the World, in a race lasting only a fraction of the time of previous stages, he beat Pogacar, his next closest competitor, by more than a 1’30”. ‘How did he do that?’ I found myself wondering in awe as I watched the race. Seriously. How... did he do that? It is a decade now since Lance Armstrong finally came clean. A decade since he sat on the couch with Oprah and admitted he was a cheat. In the time since, riders in the Tour de France have performed differently. For starters, most of them have bad days, which didn’t used to happen. But the subject of doping hangs about the Tour de France like a mist in the Pyrenees. To most of us mere mortals, they all seem extraordinary. How anyone can put their body through so much pain, day after day, is superhuman. And as much as I love the competition, I can’t help but find myself pausing and reflecting a little more on the word. The impact of doping is multi-faceted. The riders who are clean, who were literally in primary school when Lance Armstrong competed in his last Tour de France, are constantly forced to justify themselves and their performances. They know there’s little they can do to convince the sceptics. Jonas Vingegaard says he’s been tested four times in the last two days. He’s being filmed the whole time he’s off the bike for two different documentary series. He’s not failed a test, and the mere logistics of doping would make it impossible for him and his team. He’s asked repeatedly about doping, and he’s emphatic. “I wouldn’t take anything I wouldn’t give to my daughter.” I hope he’s right. His team has pointed out that unlike his main rival, he hasn’t competed in other gruelling competitions so far this season. His preparation was solely focused on the big kahuna. It’s entirely predictable that as the Tour continued, he’d slowly grind down the more exhausted riders. But a real tragedy of doping is that as fans, we never know. Given the history, we can never be 100% certain of anyone in the Tour de France. And as much as you can suspend reality a bit and soak up the day-to-day racing, any especially notable performance and those invasive thoughts come crashing back. Superhuman? Or superhuman? 2023-07-21T21:40:35.000Z Jack Tame: Sometimes you have to make unpopular calls https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-sometimes-you-have-to-make-unpopular-calls/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-sometimes-you-have-to-make-unpopular-calls/ I was driving about some of the outskirts of Nelson this week and it took me a bit of time to notice it. Since my last visit to the region earlier this year, several of the large billboards that had been hammered up on the sides of the road to protest the Three Waters reforms have been removed and not obviously replaced. I don’t know if it’s a Nelson thing or if the billboards have just been moved to another location, or if their removal is symptomatic of something greater nationwide. But at the very least, it’s been my observation that much of the anger around Three Waters has dissipated since Kieran McAnulty took over the portfolio and the government reset the plan. I’m not saying Three Waters isn’t still contentious. There are still public meetings and roadshows and Facebook groups spilling with fury. I’m just saying it’s not nearly as contentious as it was 12 months ago. And even though the new ten-entity plan doesn’t make anything like the financial savings that were initially promised, the government has correctly bet that it can push ahead with a version of Three Waters without it being the single issue that costs it the election. In six years, I can think of few other significant reforms in which Labour has pursued a vision over short-term political popularity. Auckland’s Light Rail project might make the cut, except –like Three Waters– I suspect the project is probably more popular and less contentious than some of the pushback would have us believe. The nature of political leadership is that sometimes you have to make unpopular calls for the greater good. As much as voters have a collective wisdom, they’re also human. They’re motivated by short term incentives. Everyone wants more for less. I suspect that many of those who vehemently oppose Three Waters, for example, have also railed for decades against the rates increases that might have gone some way to developing water infrastructure and removing the need for the reforms in the first place. If you’re only prepared to make popular decisions, then what is the point in leadership? It’s not really leadership, is it? It’s just focus-grouping. Polling. Instead of laying out a platform, debating its merits, and pursuing a distinct vision, you might as well just have a smartphone app or a website on which everyone votes on every little policy so that you can be sure you never fall afoul of the masses. I’m not remotely surprised by Chris Hipkins’ captain’s call on tax, this week. The Prime Minister has made it clear from day one that his absolute priority is winning the election. But I do wonder if somewhere on the ninth floor, at some point, Labour’s strategists find themselves in an existential bind. If the cost of winning an election means sacrificing your political vision, then what’s the point in winning? 2023-07-14T21:32:38.000Z Jack Tame: Distracting kids on road trips https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-distracting-kids-on-road-trips/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-distracting-kids-on-road-trips/ The drive was only three hours but we knew we’d have to distract him. It’s not his fault! 6-year-olds simply do not have the biologicial composition for sitting still in place for more than about 14 seconds. And even a relatively simple drive, Auckland to Rotorua, is an almighty test for the first weekend of the school holidays. When I was a kid, my parents used to try and placate us with food. Ahead of a long drive, my three siblings and I would climb into the back of the family van, each of us with an ice-cream container full of Uncle Toby’s finest highly-processed treats. It was like a Tame family version of the marshmellow test. My sister and I would try and drag our respective treat boxes out until we’d made it most of the way to our destination. Delayed gratification. My little brother would be finished his by the time our van reached the end of the street. The first ‘are we there yet?’ came before we’d even cleared the Bombay Hills. Although I’d encouraged Mr Six-year old to plot our remaining journey time on the car’s Google Maps, it became clear he didn’t understand how to read the column with the hours remaining, and to everyone’s grave disappointment - “It says only nine more minutes!” - had been solely focusing on the minutes column for our procession down the Southern Motorway. My wife introduced a game of Hoiho. If you see a horse, you yell ‘Hoiho!’ If you see a paddock of horses, you say ‘Pataka.’ Everyone keeps tally of their total horses, until a player sees a cemetery, ‘Urupā,’ and gets to choose what other player’s horses get scratched.   Mr Six-year-old was an enthusiastic participant. A little too enthusiastic, if anything. Cows? “Hoiho!” Deer? “Hoiho!” Vegetation on distant hillsides? “Hoiho! Hoiho!” And it quickly became clear that what maybe he lacked in horse-spotting skills, he made up for in cunning. “Hoiho!” “Where?” “Oh back there around the corner. You missed it.” Finally, somewhere just south of Huntly, we resorted to technology. Not a screen, but my noise-cancelling headphones and a series of children’s podcasts, about things like why cheese is smelly and why fish can open their eyes underwater. It was a good call. Mr Six-year-old was chuffed. He asked to pause Hoiho and seemed to relax back into his seat and watch the Waikato countryside drift past. The only problem with the noise-cancelling headphones setup is that even for the quietest among us, it can be very difficult to regulate the volume of your voice. My wife would just be dozing off when she’d be wrenched from her slumber by someone screaming in the back seat. “Unpause. Hoiho! Ok, pause again.” The rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference. I dunno if Albert Einstein had a brainwave moment in describing the theory of relativity. But part of me wonders if he took a family trip to Rotorua with a six-year-old in the back. I figured three hours was gonna’ be a long time for him. But the person most relieved when we reach our destination wasn’t Mr Six-year-old. It was me. 2023-07-07T21:32:13.000Z Jack Tame: There's no such thing as a free lunch https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch/ Sir Isaac Newton missed a trick. Albert Einstein did no better. Archimedes was good, sure. But he still failed to describe one of the most obvious principles defining almost every aspect of our mortal existance: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. So far as I’m concerned, the Theory of No Free Lunch applies to every aspect of our lives. It’s the rule of payoffs. The rule of compromises. Sure, you can drive a massive V8 that sounds awesome and goes like the clappers, but it’s probably gonna’ be terrible for the environment and a nightmare to maintain. Sure, you can have a meaningful, purposeful, nourishing job, but you’re probably only going to earn a 50th of the salary of someone trading derivatives or trafficking weapons for a living. But perhaps nowhere is the Theory of No Free Lunch more applicable than at lunch. Sure, you can have a fast, convenient, delicious meal, but it’s probably not gonna’ be very healthy. You can enjoy a highly-nutritious, wholesome, plant-based dish, but it’s probably not gonna’ be quite as tasty or convenient as some other options. Think about how we use salt and sugar. Up to a point, is it too cheeky to suggest that every sprinkle makes a dish both a bit more delicious and a bit less healthy? There are very few unicorns when it comes to the Theory of No Free Lunch, which is why I for one am not surprised in the slightest at the news on Aspartame. The World Health Organisation is reportedly preparing to define the artificial sweetener as a possible human carcinogen. Aspartame is the miracle ingredient that makes things like Diet Coke, toothpaste, and sugar-free chewing gum delicious. Sure, you’re not consuming good old-fashioned sugary calories, you’re not rotting your teeth and clogging your arteries, but there’s a cost to that deliciousness that has to be paid somewhere. You can’t have something for nothing. We have to wait a couple of weeks for the final WHO report, but that it’s taken this long to define aspartame as possibly carcinogenic is yet another great example of how stunningly little we seem to actually understand about the science of nutrition. Aspartame is in 6000 products worldwide. It’s been studied and studied and studied. Diet Coke is 41 years old! And yet if the reports are true, it’s taken until 2023 for the WHO to finally decide aspartame meets the carcinogenic threshold. The good news, if there is any, is that it’s likely you’ll need to consume a huge quantity of the stuff for it to have a significant effect. I don’t think anyone is suggesting aspartame is on the scale of leaded petrol or tobacco. I occasionally have a diet fizzy drink. I used to be addicted but I weaned myself off it for exactly this reason. I figured it had to be bad for me, somehow. But really, the thing for me is chewing gum. I chew gum like an Australian cricketer. And will this news stop me? Of course not. Because like I said... it’s not news to me. Whether carcinogenic or something else, for sugarfree gum to taste that delicious, I’ve always known there had to be a cost. I knew, and I will always know, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. 2023-06-30T21:31:43.000Z Jack Tame: This whole thing says so much about human nature https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-this-whole-thing-says-so-much-about-human-nature/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-this-whole-thing-says-so-much-about-human-nature/ I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been utterly compelled from the very start. I first read about the missing Titan submersible a few hours after it was publicly reported missing, and I’ve been hanging on every update ever since. That’s not to say I ever thought there might be a happy ending to the whole saga. This is perhaps a confronting thing to say, but in that vessel, at that depth, at that location, an instantaneous catastrophic implosion was a preferable alternative to one in which the occupants suffered over days or were conscious of what was happening. I just think –more than any other news story in recent memory– the whole thing says so much to us about human nature. First of all, the occupants themselves. Curious, daring. Fantastically wealthy. Was anyone terribly surprised to learn they were all men? And what does it say about our species that for those people who can afford it, of all the oceans in the World and all the incredible things to see, they chose an already extremely well-documented shipwreck that happens to be in a very tricky and unpleasant stretch of water. When you think about, a trip to a wreck where 1500 people died and you can still catch glimpes of shoes in the sand is a pretty morbid. Did the tourists really want to see the Titanic? Or did they just want to be able to say they’d seen the titanic? For us, watching from the outside, that a search for five men could engross the World says so much. We are utterly compelled by the horrors of the deep. We compelled by exploration. By hubris. By the faintest hope of an extremely unlikely rescue. We picture ourselves in that situation. Would I go in that submarine? What would I do now? Human beings aren’t even-handed in their interest or attention. Sadly, we don’t give nearly the same resource or news coverage to sinking migrant ships filled with poor and nameless people, missing in the Med. Is it just? Of course not. Ultimately though, nothing in this saga said more about human nature than the CEO of Oceangate, who died with his vessel. Stockton Rush was smart and resourceful enough to build a device which could make it kilometres below the surface of the ocean, but not wise enough to heed the warnings of myriad experts and engineers in what is a very small community. Ultimately every dive was a game of Russian roulette. As the film director James Cameron noted, there is something awfully poetic about the whole situation and its parallels to the original Titanic disaster, in which a captain blithely ignored warnings and steamed into the path of icebergs. Ultimately Stockton Rush will be remembered for publicly courting attention and media, boasting of his creation and lambasting his critics, only to perish by the flaws of his own design. There’s one word for it: Shakesperean. 2023-06-23T21:21:54.000Z Jack Tame: Wasting 10,000 litres every day is the most profoundly selfish thing I can imagine https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-wasting-10-000-litres-every-day-is-the-most-profoundly-selfish-thing-i-can-imagine/ https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-wasting-10-000-litres-every-day-is-the-most-profoundly-selfish-thing-i-can-imagine/ I think it rates as among the single most selfish acts I can ever recall. A North Canterbury farmer, disgruntled with his local council over the water connection rates he’s being charged for an as-yet uninhabited subdivision, has decided to launch a protest against the Waimakariri District Council. In a part of New Zealand where droughts are common, and where water access is an especially contentious subject, he’s been pouring 10,000 litres of drinking water down the drain, every day. 10,000 litres. It’s like leaving a shower on for eleven or twelve hours every day. I’m sorry, but that’s not a protest. That’s environmental vandalism. It should be a crime, as far as I’m concerned. The whole situation is yet another reminder of why New Zealand councils all need to introduce water metering. I know it’s a contentious subject, but it’s outrageous to me that people like this farmer can so wilfully waste a precious resource without any financial impact. At the moment, we have a bit of a hodgepodge patchwork of water metering for different councils across the country. Some regions and cities have metering, where you’re charged relative to your usage, but many still don’t. They rely on connection fees or other forms of rates to try and finance the pipes and infrastructure. The value of metering is pretty obvious. Water metering also helps to detect leaks across the pipe network. People who are charged by their usage as opposed to their connection are incentivised to be more thoughtful about their water use. When the Kāpiti Coast introduced water metering, Stuff reported that water usage dropped 25%. That’s massive! Not only did it save the resource, it meant the maintenance on the region’s water infrastructure could be deferred for longer because the assets weren’t being hammered so hard. New Zealand lags embarrassingly compared to other countries. when it comes to water metering. It’s commonplace overseas. By the year 2000, two-thirds of OECD countries had water metering for more than 90% of their single family homes. Imagine what that number is today! Fiji has water metering! The Ivory Coast has water metering! The main criticism of metering is usually that water is a human right and metering will impact poorer families. I think we’re sophisticated enough to introduce targeted support for those people, like we do for other things. I get that it’s not a vote winner. But water metering seems an obvious thing for the new Three Waters entities to standardise across New Zealand. The thing about that farmer’s protest is that, in a way, I agree with his gripe. He says he’s protesting an annual water connection fee for sections that haven’t yet been built on. Instead of that fee, I think a per-litre charge would be much more effective tool. It’s a shame they can’t retroactively introduce it and charge him an absolute premium. Wasting 10,000 litres every day is about the most profoundly selfish thing I can imagine. 2023-06-16T21:33:20.000Z