I'm about to break a Great New Zealand Taboo here - I'm going to Skite. So if you can't cope, stop reading now.
Earlier this year, I did the course in creative non-fiction writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. It was, like, OMG, SO awesome! No, really, it was, I loved every minute of it.
What I didn't know was that there is a prize for original composition, awarded each year in memory of Victoria University Press's first editor, Pamela Tomlinson, to one of the students either in this course or in short fiction writing. Today I opened a letter telling me I'd won it.
[Here you have to imagine a prolonged but inarticulate noise expressing enormous surprise, joy and excitement.]
There is just one tiny problem. I now have absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not addressing myself seriously to the writing project I focused on while I was doing the course. If there are long gaps in this blog, that may be because I am finally (after not just years, but decades of dithering around) Getting On With It.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Business Roundtable discovers new contraceptive
I see the Business Roundtable is at it again. They've commissioned a report from one Lindsay Mitchell, who is well known for being a virulent opponent of 'welfare' in general and the DPB in particular. The best way to stop young women - especially young Maori women - getting pregnant is to axe the DPB, she says.
Now I just happen to have been looking up teenage pregnancy statistics recently. Births to teenage women (aged under 20) climbed from 5,315 in 1962 to a high of 9,150 in 1972. That's an increase of 72 percent.
The DPB wasn't introduced until 1973. That was the year teenage births started to fall. By 1982, they had more than halved, to less than 4,500 - well below the 1962 number.
Of course, the number of births is related to the number of teenagers. So let's look at this another way. In the early 1970s, before the DPB, 70 out of every 1,000 female teenagers were having a child. By the mid-1980s, this was down to 30 per 1,000. It stayed between 30 and 35 until the late 1990s, then it trended down again. By 2002, the rate was at its lowest in our recorded history, at 25.6 per 1,000 female teenagers.
That's still high compared with all other developed countries except for the USA and UK. But there's no way you can argue that the DPB is responsible - or that axing it would lower the rate.
Business Roundtable members head up major companies. If this report represents what they consider to be inteligent analysis, it's a bit of a worry, eh.
Now I just happen to have been looking up teenage pregnancy statistics recently. Births to teenage women (aged under 20) climbed from 5,315 in 1962 to a high of 9,150 in 1972. That's an increase of 72 percent.
The DPB wasn't introduced until 1973. That was the year teenage births started to fall. By 1982, they had more than halved, to less than 4,500 - well below the 1962 number.
Of course, the number of births is related to the number of teenagers. So let's look at this another way. In the early 1970s, before the DPB, 70 out of every 1,000 female teenagers were having a child. By the mid-1980s, this was down to 30 per 1,000. It stayed between 30 and 35 until the late 1990s, then it trended down again. By 2002, the rate was at its lowest in our recorded history, at 25.6 per 1,000 female teenagers.
That's still high compared with all other developed countries except for the USA and UK. But there's no way you can argue that the DPB is responsible - or that axing it would lower the rate.
Business Roundtable members head up major companies. If this report represents what they consider to be inteligent analysis, it's a bit of a worry, eh.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Need cash for your hobby? Hire out women for sex!
The news flabbergasts me on a daily basis, but I plumbed new depths of flabbergastry on Sunday when I read about the former Olympic featherweight boxer who has set up a brothel to earn money for his sporting career.
Logan Campbell, according to the report, did get $15,000 funding from SPARC, but lost it because he hasn't been competing. Now he has his sights set on getting $300,000 from his "high class gentlemen's club", with its "smart, attractive girls".
"Some people on the team will not think highly of me for doing this," Campbell said. "If they saw this place and how it's operated, they'd change their mind...We don't treat them like pieces of meat."
Too right - he sells the whole live female animal.
If you're short of cash too, ladies, maybe for your education or your kids, don't rush to apply. It's not exactly a safe occupation, and class has nothing to do with it.
The classiest brothel in Melbourne, the Daily Planet, has alarm buttons in the rooms that women can press to call the bouncer. Unfortunately women only press these once they have been hit (which is not uncommon). By then the damage has already been done. There's no way to prevent women being hit even in the best run (and most expensive) brothels.
Of course, there doesn't seem to be any way to prevent them being hit in their own homes, either.
(My new Letter from Elsewhere, posted 13 July on Scoop, looks at Judge Russell Johnson's comments on "family violence".)
Logan Campbell, according to the report, did get $15,000 funding from SPARC, but lost it because he hasn't been competing. Now he has his sights set on getting $300,000 from his "high class gentlemen's club", with its "smart, attractive girls".
"Some people on the team will not think highly of me for doing this," Campbell said. "If they saw this place and how it's operated, they'd change their mind...We don't treat them like pieces of meat."
Too right - he sells the whole live female animal.
If you're short of cash too, ladies, maybe for your education or your kids, don't rush to apply. It's not exactly a safe occupation, and class has nothing to do with it.
The classiest brothel in Melbourne, the Daily Planet, has alarm buttons in the rooms that women can press to call the bouncer. Unfortunately women only press these once they have been hit (which is not uncommon). By then the damage has already been done. There's no way to prevent women being hit even in the best run (and most expensive) brothels.
Of course, there doesn't seem to be any way to prevent them being hit in their own homes, either.
(My new Letter from Elsewhere, posted 13 July on Scoop, looks at Judge Russell Johnson's comments on "family violence".)
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
How to destroy jobs
I see yet another bunch of public service jobs is being eliminated - 60 jobs are to go in biosecurity because the volume of work is currently down, due to recession. (Great post on this at The Standard.)
Now I've always understood that one of the very few ways the gummint can make a real difference in a recession is by (a) employing more people - so cheap insulation is a really good idea - and (b) keeping on the people they already employ.
But no, it seems Mr Key and Co know better - they believe it's more important to slash public spending by cutting programmes and axing jobs all over the show.
Quite how this helps, I'm not at all sure, because all those public servants were spending the money they earnt buying things and paying taxes will now have to stop all that and instead get by on the less-than-subsistence level income provided by their former employers (if they can get it, that is - two-income families are the norm, but if one becomes unemployed the other is pretty unlikely to get a cracker).
Isn't that exactly what helped make the Great Depression so bad???
Now I've always understood that one of the very few ways the gummint can make a real difference in a recession is by (a) employing more people - so cheap insulation is a really good idea - and (b) keeping on the people they already employ.
But no, it seems Mr Key and Co know better - they believe it's more important to slash public spending by cutting programmes and axing jobs all over the show.
Quite how this helps, I'm not at all sure, because all those public servants were spending the money they earnt buying things and paying taxes will now have to stop all that and instead get by on the less-than-subsistence level income provided by their former employers (if they can get it, that is - two-income families are the norm, but if one becomes unemployed the other is pretty unlikely to get a cracker).
Isn't that exactly what helped make the Great Depression so bad???
Friday, July 3, 2009
still asking after all these years
I went to the demo in Parliament's grounds for pay equity on Tuesday. It was cold, of course, and damp rather than wet, but there was a great turn-out of angry women, and men, of all ages and stages. I enjoyed meeting up with two die-hard feminists of my vintage, with their equally staunch daughters alongside them. But we did wonder whether, in another twenty years' time, they'd be standing there again with THEIR daughters, still demanding equal pay for work of equal value.
The lack of this is the biggest reason for women getting paid less than men for similar levels of work. One woman who spoke was a teacher's aide, helping children with special needs in the classroom. She does an absolutely essential, highly skilled, demanding job - but unlike the teachers she works with, she is employed on an annual basis, gets no pay in the holidays, and gets precisely 44 cents an hour above the minimum wage. (See her whole speech here - in post for last Tuesday.)
Teacher aides were one of the groups the axed Pay and Employment Equity Unit had been working on. But just as they got to the point of proving precisely how underpaid these women were, it was all stopped. Can't raise women's wages, eh. There's a recession on. Well, as Green MP Catherine Delahunty said: recession is no excuse for oppression.
Still, it was heartening to see the Dominion Post run a photo of a protestor about my age on its front page. She was holding up a placard with a classic feminist cartoon (I wonder if the photographer was so taken with it because he'd never seen it before? Come to think of it, I haven't seen any women's by-lines under photos, ever). It shows a little girl and boy peering into their nappies, and saying, "Oh, that explains the difference in our wages!"
The lack of this is the biggest reason for women getting paid less than men for similar levels of work. One woman who spoke was a teacher's aide, helping children with special needs in the classroom. She does an absolutely essential, highly skilled, demanding job - but unlike the teachers she works with, she is employed on an annual basis, gets no pay in the holidays, and gets precisely 44 cents an hour above the minimum wage. (See her whole speech here - in post for last Tuesday.)
Teacher aides were one of the groups the axed Pay and Employment Equity Unit had been working on. But just as they got to the point of proving precisely how underpaid these women were, it was all stopped. Can't raise women's wages, eh. There's a recession on. Well, as Green MP Catherine Delahunty said: recession is no excuse for oppression.
Still, it was heartening to see the Dominion Post run a photo of a protestor about my age on its front page. She was holding up a placard with a classic feminist cartoon (I wonder if the photographer was so taken with it because he'd never seen it before? Come to think of it, I haven't seen any women's by-lines under photos, ever). It shows a little girl and boy peering into their nappies, and saying, "Oh, that explains the difference in our wages!"
Sunday, June 28, 2009
From the earth
When I visited my friend Kath on Thursday, her husband gave me a bag of fresh veges from their garden - baby sprouting broccoli stems, a cos lettuce, and some baby beetroot. I served the broccoli on Thursday with a beef casserole and mashed potatoes - we had Rae to dinner. The cos lettuce made a delicious little Caesar salad for my dinner on Saturday - Harvey had a cheese omelette. Today I cooked and peeled the beetroot and am about to turn it into soup - as luck would have it, there's a very good recipe in the latest Cuisine, which friends gave me for my birthday. It gives me great satisfaction to make this gift of veges into such nice food. Harvey used to grow a good range of fresh stuff for us, but that was at Farm Road, when he was well. We don't have the scope here, and anyway he's not able to garden any more. I do have a few pots of salad and herbs, but I'm not very good at keeping them going. Right now they're almost all in need of replanting, but it's been too cold and miserable to get out there. I'm obviously not a real gardener like Harvey - which makes me all the more appreciative of bounty from people who are real gardeners.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Do children need breakfast?
This post sits oddly beside the last one about eating in Melbourne, but here it is.
A startling headline appeared in my inbox this week: "Providing breakfast in primary schools – is it the right way to start the day?"
The Health Research Council is helping to fund a study into "the effect of a free healthy breakfast on primary school students and their learning ability, academic performance, and nutrition".
It will look at the Red Cross Breakfast in Schools programme operated by New Zealand Red Cross and Progressive Enterprises. It's been running for two years now, and it gives all decile one primary schools in the country (the schools in the poorest areas) the opportunity to offer their students a healthy breakfast at the start of the school day.
In 2002, a National Children’s Nutrition Survey showed that almost one in five children aged 5-14 years did not regularly eat or drink at home before leaving for school. I know some teenagers hate eating breakfast, even though they need it so much - partly because it means they have to get up slightly earlier. But younger kids both need and want breakfast. The prospect of so many kids trying to cope with school without anything to eat first is awful.
Dozens of other surveys ram home the real problem: not enough money for food, after paying for the inflexible basics of rent and power (and we all know how much that's gone up by). In 2002 one in five households with children said they could only sometimes afford to eat properly.
And that was before the recession and the huge rise in unemployment.
That's why the programme is aimed at the poorest schools. The research team hope that if they can come up with clear proof that the breakfast programme is good for children's learning, this will back up "wider implementation of breakfast programmes as a means to improve the school achievement and health of vulnerable New Zealand children".
It's incredibly sad that in a country which is supposed to be such a great place to bring up children, there are so many poor kids that the Red Cross and a supermarket chain have to come up with school breakfast programmes.
But it's even sadder that precious health research funds have to be spent on proving that children do better at school when they get breakfast than when they don't - yes, really! - in the hope that this programme will get the funds it needs to reach all poor kids.
Why isn't it good enough just to prove that they aren't getting breakfast because they're too poor?
A startling headline appeared in my inbox this week: "Providing breakfast in primary schools – is it the right way to start the day?"
The Health Research Council is helping to fund a study into "the effect of a free healthy breakfast on primary school students and their learning ability, academic performance, and nutrition".
It will look at the Red Cross Breakfast in Schools programme operated by New Zealand Red Cross and Progressive Enterprises. It's been running for two years now, and it gives all decile one primary schools in the country (the schools in the poorest areas) the opportunity to offer their students a healthy breakfast at the start of the school day.
In 2002, a National Children’s Nutrition Survey showed that almost one in five children aged 5-14 years did not regularly eat or drink at home before leaving for school. I know some teenagers hate eating breakfast, even though they need it so much - partly because it means they have to get up slightly earlier. But younger kids both need and want breakfast. The prospect of so many kids trying to cope with school without anything to eat first is awful.
Dozens of other surveys ram home the real problem: not enough money for food, after paying for the inflexible basics of rent and power (and we all know how much that's gone up by). In 2002 one in five households with children said they could only sometimes afford to eat properly.
And that was before the recession and the huge rise in unemployment.
That's why the programme is aimed at the poorest schools. The research team hope that if they can come up with clear proof that the breakfast programme is good for children's learning, this will back up "wider implementation of breakfast programmes as a means to improve the school achievement and health of vulnerable New Zealand children".
It's incredibly sad that in a country which is supposed to be such a great place to bring up children, there are so many poor kids that the Red Cross and a supermarket chain have to come up with school breakfast programmes.
But it's even sadder that precious health research funds have to be spent on proving that children do better at school when they get breakfast than when they don't - yes, really! - in the hope that this programme will get the funds it needs to reach all poor kids.
Why isn't it good enough just to prove that they aren't getting breakfast because they're too poor?
Monday, June 15, 2009
Eating my way round Melbourne
I've just had five days' holiday in Melbourne, thanks to the kindness and generosity of three friends - one of whom gave me the airpoints, one of whom came to stay with Harvey while I was away, and one of whom had me to stay in St Kilda and took me with her and her little dog (in a doggie pushchair - don't laugh, it meant she could take the dog into the markets and on the trams, and it was amazing how many people came up to talk about it!) to all her favourite food haunts.
I'd already been to the Queen Victoria market. This time we went to Prahran Market (almond croissants, prawns, ham on the bone, Tuscan bread), and South Melbourne Market (dim sum, Greek honey cakes, ready-to-cook kofta, a huge Turkish bread for $2, two cheeses for $5, paella for lunch). We ate at Kamel (modern Turkish), the George at St Kilda (modern Italian - cauliflower pannacotta - trust me, it was superb), Richmond Hill Cafe (Venetian custard fritters with poached quince and cinnamon icecream), and the inimitable Brunetti, the original one in Carlton, a huge, bustling, heartwarming pasticceria.
It wasn't quite as indulgent as it sounds, we shared most things (cheaper, plus it meant we could try more...like five of Brunetti's tiny sampler cakes for $1.80 each). Why, oh why, did the blinkered NZ Governments of the 1950s keep out Italians, Greeks and anyone else who didn't meet their rigid criteria for immigrants who would "fit in"?
Never mind, a new Sunday City Market has just opened down on Wellington's waterfront, alongside the existing fruit and vege (and excellent lamb, bread, sausage, cake, jam, etc) market next to Te Papa. It'll make the already dire parking hassles even worse, so I think I'll haul my faithful shopping trundler (naff, but a necessity) onto the bus when I get the chance to go and explore it.
I'd already been to the Queen Victoria market. This time we went to Prahran Market (almond croissants, prawns, ham on the bone, Tuscan bread), and South Melbourne Market (dim sum, Greek honey cakes, ready-to-cook kofta, a huge Turkish bread for $2, two cheeses for $5, paella for lunch). We ate at Kamel (modern Turkish), the George at St Kilda (modern Italian - cauliflower pannacotta - trust me, it was superb), Richmond Hill Cafe (Venetian custard fritters with poached quince and cinnamon icecream), and the inimitable Brunetti, the original one in Carlton, a huge, bustling, heartwarming pasticceria.
It wasn't quite as indulgent as it sounds, we shared most things (cheaper, plus it meant we could try more...like five of Brunetti's tiny sampler cakes for $1.80 each). Why, oh why, did the blinkered NZ Governments of the 1950s keep out Italians, Greeks and anyone else who didn't meet their rigid criteria for immigrants who would "fit in"?
Never mind, a new Sunday City Market has just opened down on Wellington's waterfront, alongside the existing fruit and vege (and excellent lamb, bread, sausage, cake, jam, etc) market next to Te Papa. It'll make the already dire parking hassles even worse, so I think I'll haul my faithful shopping trundler (naff, but a necessity) onto the bus when I get the chance to go and explore it.
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