/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/rss ¾ÅÒ»ÐÇ¿ÕÎÞÏÞ Sat, 05 Jul 2025 13:28:19 Z en /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-guaranteed-drama-in-gallic-sporting-endeavours/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-guaranteed-drama-in-gallic-sporting-endeavours/ Let’s be honest, so far as All Blacks tests go, this is a bit of a funny one.     If you were just weighing the odds on paper, I suppose there’s good reason why you might favour Les Bleus.   I hadn’t realised it until this week, but we’re coming off a three-game losing streak against the French, and you’ll remember last year’s first All Blacks test in Dunedin was a nail-biting one-point victory. The All Blacks didn’t scream cohesion. Add to that the fact I still don’t think we have an emphatic answer for who should start at ten, and Tupou Vai’i, surely one of the World’s best locks, is playing blindside flanker!     And yet the French are playing eight debutants and have left a slab of their elite stars back home. If it were any other test nation, I think New Zealand Rugby would have the right to kick up a bit of a fuss about the whole situation. But given the French and their history of spirited unpredictability on the rugby football pitch, it probably makes sense to secure a dominant victory before moaning about the standard of the opposition.   You can just imagine it, can’t you? No sooner would we lodge a formal complaint than a French rugby team with a prop at first five or a winger throwing the line outs would intercept an errant pass in the 84th minute or accidentally charge down the match-ending clearance kick with their replacement fullback’s face in a freak moment of sporting brilliance to pip the All Blacks for yet another famous victory.   An All Blacks test is an All Blacks test and the first of the season always gets me fizzing, but truthfully I realised I’d crossed a curious little Rubicon of sorts this week when I noted in myself an even greater sense of excitement about a completely different Gallic endeavour which happens to coincide with tonight’s game.     The Tour de France kicks off tonight. And I dunno what it is, but over the last few years it has become appointment viewing for me on the international sporting calendar. I think the romance and agony of it all is just so alluring. The way that riders slowly decay over the three weeks and more than 3000km. The way teams have to work to secure individual victories. The spectators lining the road, running with the leaders, often getting far, far closer than would ever be allowed in any other sport. The psychology of it! It’s madness. Imagine cycling for hundreds of kilometres in intense heat or over a mountain range, only to get back to your bus and know you have to do it again the next day. And the next day. And the day after that.  I honestly thought after the Lance Armstrong saga that I was done with the Tour de France. But whether it’s the Netflix treatment or the incredible, generation-defining rivalry of the World’s two best riders, I’m very much back in the saddle.  So there’s my pick. I reckon the All Blacks are well-placed to blast the French in Dunedin. But if you haven’t watched it in a while, and you want guaranteed sporting drama... hang around a few more hours tonight for stage one of Le Tour. You will not be disappointed.  Fri, 04 Jul 2025 21:30:26 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-jeff-bezos-wedding-is-an-expensive-affair/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-jeff-bezos-wedding-is-an-expensive-affair/ $82 million.    As we go to air this morning, that’s a rough estimate for the amount of cash going up in smoke as Jeff Bezos marries his bride at a star-studded Venetian affair.    Eighty-two million. And I thought my wedding was an expensive affair!  Everything’s relative, of course. $82 million represents just a fraction of the total wealth of the world’s third-richest man. To try and appreciate the true magnitude of his $300 billion estimated wealth, I put his finances into a scale that I can better understand. If every Jeff Bezos dollar was one second —so that one minute was $60, and one hour was $3600— depleting Jeff Bezos’ wealth would take more than 11,000 years.    You’re gonna think I have a particular thing for Jeff Bezos. I honestly don’t. I was one of those bagging his fiancée's space flight a few weeks ago, but I swear it’s nothing personal. I would just be so embarrassed to be spending that much money to get married in a place where it would appear a reasonable number of locals don’t want me.  I’ve spent enough time in media to know it’s hard to properly gauge these things from the outside. Protestors say Bezos has bought half the city and that his bash is an obscene example of money trumping every other concern. But the local mayor says that anyone blocking up the canals in protest or hanging out with banners and signs represents a tiny minority of Venetians, and actually the vast majority of Venetians are happy to welcome Bezos, his big bucks, and his blockbuster mates.    Consumption in these European hotspots is clearly becoming a greater sore point. The backlash to the Bezos wedding recalls the protestors in Barcelona who’ve been going around and squirting visitors with water guns to protest the impact of overtourism on housing and infrastructure in the city. Whether it’s Italy, Spain, or Portugal, qualities that made coastal European cities so romantic and alluring in the first place are swiftly destroying them in the Airbnb, cheap flights, and mass-tourism age.   Would you still go? I can confess to having visited both Venice and Barcelona during backpacking trips fifteen odd years ago, but I’m not sure I’d return anytime soon. Increasingly as I travel, I’m a little repulsed by the crowds at the absolute hottest spots. And I’m aware that like a driver complaining about a traffic jam, I’m part of the problem.  The Mayor of Venice who has so staunchly defended the Jeff Bezos wedding says he’s embarrassed by the protests. The wedding is a great source of much-needed revenue for the city, he said. Italy’s tourism Ministry put out a report suggesting it could provide the city a tourism boost of more than $1 billion dollars. It’s a great way to put Venice on the map.   I dunno. I’m not sure Venice needs to be put on the map! Maybe I’m wired differently but watching the scenes in Venice has, if anything, made me less likely to go back.  Fri, 27 Jun 2025 22:28:01 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-travelling-with-a-baby-what-could-go-wrong/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-travelling-with-a-baby-what-could-go-wrong/ Everyone says the best time to travel with a baby is before it can walk. Makes sense, when you think about it. Most toddlers, once they’ve learnt to trot around the place, live for nothing more. All they want to do is walk. In fact, if you think about it, you really don’t want to get close to even blurring the line between rolling and crawling and waddling away. The moment your child is old enough and independently spirited enough to drag themselves around, you’re done for. There is no reasoning with an exhausted one-year-old on a packed 777. You can’t calmly explain that actually the pilot has just put on the fasten seatbelt sign. You can’t even vegetate them with a screen. As the old advice goes, if you’re going to travel with a young one, you’re best to do it when they’re really young. Hold them tight and they’ll mistake turbulence for rocking. Chuck them on the boob or the bottle if their ears are popping. And hey, you’ll be at your destination in no time! Or not. As someone who usually prides themselves on embracing new experiences, even I’ll concede that as our departure date approached, I felt an unmistakably growing sense of anxiety about our journey: 24 hours to Toronto with a four-month-old little boy and his eight-year-old brother. It all seemed so easy when we booked the tickets! The stress really kicked in the moment the taxi arrived to take us to the airport. Having purchased a special travel carseat secondhand, it was a rude shock to discover that it didn’t really fit our cab like it fitted the cars in the instructional YouTube videos. Cue ten minutes of wrestling and cursing and a t-shirt neckline already drenched in sweat. Timing an 8pm flight with a baby means being at the airport at 6pm, which means getting a cab at 5.15pm. Our boy is fine in a carseat so long as he’s moving. But when it’s the beginning of a long weekend and everyone is leaving Auckland at once, nobody’s moving. You’re lucky to get more than a couple of car lengths without coming to a standstill again. By the time we arrived the airport he’d already screamed his lungs out and my blood pressure was sitting somewhere between concerning and see-a-medical professional immediately. Just 23 hours to go. I’ve travelled enough and been sat next or near enough babies to know a lot of the theory around flying with little ones, but the thing you only fully appreciate once you’re in charge is how precarious any moment of peace always seems.  They might be fast asleep in their mother’s arms as the plane taxis to the runway, but he’s never more than a little jolt away from potentially stirring and screaming. It’s like you’re cradling a pink, chubby little grenade who’s missing a pin. He might go off and it might be catastrophic. He might scream and scream until all the babies on the flight slowly tip off each other, like a cadre of car alarms at 30 thousand feet. Or he might just sleep. The potential for either option is never more than a few seconds away. Of course, some things are just destined to go wrong. The moment you put your baby in the bassinet and he goes to sleep, there will be turbulence and you’ll be forced to take him out, bright and alert as a little meerkat. The moment you successfully navigate the Row 48 bathrooms and their slippery changing table and make it back triumphant to your seat, you will recognise a familiar straining expression on your baby’s face. The moment you’re sure that your son couldn’t possibly have any more burps and you just happen to lower that spill cloth for a couple of seconds, he will make sure to exploit that sartorial weakness so before long, his dried milk can mix in with that dried sweat from the taxi, earlier on. The moment you land, you will discover there’s been a mix up with the luggage and the carseat that’ll take a long time to fix and jeopardise your connection. It will be Lord of the Flies in the customs queue, you will miss your connecting flight and the replacement will somehow fail to have to transferred the infant’s booking... so what, you ask, do you suggest we just leave him in Vancouver? Most of this isn’t any one person’s fault, but rather the inevitable hiccups when navigating the crazy logistics of internal travel. In fairness, Māni did about as well as anyone could expect of a four-month-old, but travelling long haul with a baby has certainly tested my enthusiasm for the whole new experiences thing. Sure, he might have spewed in the middle of the aisle while half the plane was watching him. He might have gone through a dozen nappies, three rompers, a cardigan and no fewer than five bibs, but next time I’ll remember that I’m the one who needs to pack extra clothes in his carry on. After it all, there we were, more than 24 hours since we left home, pulling into a quiet street in a little town on Lake Ontario. It was almost 3.30am, local time, the dead of night. Māni’s grandparents were waiting to meet their grandson for the first time. Māni’s great-grandparents were waiting to meet him for the first time. Bleary eyed and teary eyed, we hugged and cried in the warm summer air. Sons, daughters, aunties, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Four generations, together. And it was all worth it. Fri, 20 Jun 2025 21:35:43 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-what-skills-should-we-actually-be-teaching/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-what-skills-should-we-actually-be-teaching/ I still remember the exact seat where I was sitting.    It was 20 years ago, and I was primed for one of the key exams in my tertiary education. I’d passed Teeline shorthand at 40 words a minute. 50 words, 60 words, 70 words. To progress on my journalism course and ultimately earn a degree I had one final challenge: I had to pass a Teeline shorthand exam at 80 words a minute.   We learnt Teeline from a wonderful tutor, a woman named Julie with exacting standards, a wicked sense of humour, and a way with words. She’d peer over your shoulder when you were tracing out different characters.   “That’s a squitty-looking outline,” she’d say with a wry smile.  The moment I realised I’d passed 80 words a minute, I walked up to the front of the class and kissed her on the cheek. It took five months of work with daily lessons. I drilled myself with cassette tapes at home. But in a stuffy room on Madras Street, finally, I’d done it.  But here’s the crazy thing. That was the very last time I seriously used Teeline shorthand. That’s no reflection on Julie. She was an amazing tutor, and shorthand skills had been fundamental for journalists for however-many decades. But back in 2005, what no one had apparently stopped to consider was whether those skills would be necessary in a world on the cusp on smart phones. What’s the point in trying to keep up with shorthand when your phone can record a verbatim interview and even transcribe it in real time?  Since our son was born, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about my shorthand experience in the context of AI. And I kept returning to a fundamental question: what skills and knowledge should we actually be teaching our kids?   In the UK, surveys have suggested that 90% of university students are using AI to help with assessments. I’m frankly surprised it’s not more. But educators around the world are trying to grapple with how to get around the likes of Chat GPT, Claude, and DeepSeek in assessing students’ learning. So far at least, technology which purports to scan students’ submissions for signs of AI is having mixed results at best. Many assessors are advocating for a complete return to in-person exams with hand-written essays.  And yet in stewing over this, I couldn’t help but wonder if in some ways that misses the point. It’s like long division in the age of the calculator. Sure, it’s a nice-to-know. But be honest. Do you actually use it? How many of us actually need manual long division skills in the modern age? What’s the point in rote-learning historical dates when they are but a Google away? What’s the point in learning where to place a semicolon when you can always spell and grammar check your work?  When it comes to AI, instead of trying to work around it, I wondered, are we not better just to fully embrace it and try to teach our kids how to maximise the utility of the technology?   Ultimately, two points have given me reason to pause. First of all, it occurs to me that we’re not very good at foreseeing what skills will and won’t be relevant in the workplace of the future. It was only a few years ago that everyone was urging young people to drop everything and learn how to code. Now, coding jobs are among the first ones being gobbled up generative AI.   And it’s easy in reflecting in my Teeline shorthand example to miss the even greater lesson. It’s true, Teeline skills haven’t been necessary or helpful in my almost-twenty years of journalism. But what has been helpful is the discipline that experience taught me. What has been helpful is the organisation skills, the accountability, the professionalism. In learning Teeline, I learnt shorthand. But more importantly, I learnt how to learn.  Whether it’s through long division, historical essays or anything else... surely that is the skill should aspire to educate in our kids.  Fri, 13 Jun 2025 21:55:52 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-trump-and-musks-alliance-is-imploding-in-the-most-spectacular-fashion/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-trump-and-musks-alliance-is-imploding-in-the-most-spectacular-fashion/ Who could possibly, in their wildest dreams, ever have imagined it?    Who could possibly have foreseen that the world’s wealthiest man and the world’s most powerful politician might blow up their bromance in the most spectacular fashion? Elon on Don? Feuding? Nooooo. Say it ain’t so!    The curious thing is the pair of them do have a few qualities in common. Hypocrisy, for starters. Having pledged many dozens of times to pay down his country’s debt, Donald Trump pushed forward legislation that will actually grow the debt by an estimated NZ$4 trillion. Having pledged to cut waste from the same government’s spending, Elon Musk heroically cut support for HIV-positive mothers while simultaneously taking billions of dollars in subsidies and contracts that benefit his own companies.    Another common quality? The speed with which they both go nuclear. In the space of a few hours we had Trump threatening to cut SpaceX funding, Musk threatening to decommission the rocket used to get US astronauts to space, and an accusation about the Epstein files made without any evidence, which nonetheless, I thought the White House was notably less-than-emphatic in denying.    In my view, Elon Musk has been heading for a fall for a long, long time. I think his behaviour is erratic. Whether it’s Nazi salutes or his public statements, I think he seems unbalanced. I think the reporting about his drug use is consistent with his appearance at the White House and the fact he’s in multiple custody battles with multiple women over children he’s barely spent any time with says an awful lot of awful about his character. And while, sure, at his best, he has achieved some extraordinary things, you only need to log in to X to see that one of the most productive human beings in the history of our species is these days dedicating an obscene amount of his time and energy to juvenile posts, lies and conspiracies on social media.    Unlike Trump, Elon Musk isn’t charismatic. He isn’t funny. The more people see of him, the less they like him and his products. And despite his threats to start a third political party and take down Republicans who support the President’s bill, he doesn’t have anything like the pulling power or cult support of the President. In April, Musk poured almost NZ$50m into a single judicial election in Wisconsin and his candidate lost. If anything, Musk’s money and his support hurt the guy’s chances.  Who knows where this feud is headed? Maybe they’ll cool off and make up in a few days. Regardless, there will only be one winner. It won’t be Elon Musk.    Fri, 06 Jun 2025 21:59:50 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/francesca-rudkin-mcclures-ai-deepfake-bill-is-a-common-sense-move/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/francesca-rudkin-mcclures-ai-deepfake-bill-is-a-common-sense-move/ It’s not often you will hear me unreservedly champion an ACT policy, but I am all in when it comes to their concern and policy response to sexually explicit deepfakes.   The US and UK are leading the way with legislative changes on this, New Zealand law lagging well behind.   ACT MP Laura McClure has prepared a bill to restrict the generation and sharing of sexually explicit deepfakes. Recently she announced "The Deepfake Digital Harm and Exploitation Bill expands existing legislation around revenge porn and intimate recordings, and ensures that those who produce or share deepfakes without consent face criminal accountability, and victims have clear pathways to seek redress and removal of harmful content." This is a common sense move in a tech area which is so fast moving that we’re always playing catch up. Once upon a time we warned our children about nude pics. When it became apparent some just couldn’t help themselves, the recommended advice became that if they were sending pics, they should avoid showing identifiable features – you know, like their faces. The imagery that technology can now create in mere minutes far exceeds the considerable peril posed by the consented nude pic. Kiwi born Bloomburg journalist Olivia Carville has dedicated her career to unearthing the dark side of tech and the internet, and in her recent podcast Levittown focuses on the rise of deepfake pornography, and the battle to stop it. In the podcast she tells the story of how photos of young women were doctored without their consent, they were then shared on a website where men were encouraged to discuss what they would like to do to these women. It’s all a bit much for a Saturday morning I know, but it’s a fascinating podcast worth listening too, and even though it’s a New York story it has a crazy New Zealand twist to it. The point is though, the harm and trauma that comes from sexualised AI deep fakes is real and impactful, and victims must have legal grounds to do something about it. But it’s also about public clarity and drawing a strong line under what not acceptable. It’s thought 90- 95% of online deepfake videos are non-consensual pornography, and around 90% of them feature women.  McClures bill is a member's bill at this stage, but she has written to the Minister of Justice urging that the bill is adopted as a Government bill.  I hope they take her up on her offer.  Fri, 30 May 2025 21:48:14 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-should-superannuation-be-means-tested-too/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-should-superannuation-be-means-tested-too/ It’s one of the curious things about the structure of modern liberal democracies.  Whether its sharemarkets or political cycles or even media coverage, a lot of the big forces that shape our society are influenced by short-term incentives.   It gets us into all sorts of pickles. Take the Three Waters and the crisis with water infrastructure in New Zealand. The main reason we find ourselves with a vast infrastructure deficit is because for decades, heaps of local councils haven’t properly invested to maintain the pipes. Why didn’t they invest? Simple. Investment takes money and money means rates. And with woeful levels of engagement with local body elections, big rates increases and pledges to spend millions on water infrastructure that no one could see or appreciate weren’t exactly vote-winners. Councillors who wanted to be re-elected have been incentivised to defer spending for the future. Someone else’s problem. Predictably, of course, it snowballed. I think we risk the same thing with the aging population and the future of superannuation in New Zealand. We know that in a few short years, as more baby-boomers retire, the cost for superannuation combined with the impact of an older population on the health system is going to massively increase pressure on the Government books.   Treasury has been warning about it for ages. There are going to be fewer of us of working age supporting more of us who are retired. And yet since the advent of KiwiSaver, there have been very few big steps to address the fast-approaching meteorite.   I’m pleased to see the Government move on Kiwisaver contributions in the Budget this week. It’s well overdue in my opinion, and although it’ll be a burden for a lot of businesses in the short term, I’d personally support steps that encouraged a greater rate of retirement saving in the future.   It occurs to me that a massively underrated component in the Australia vs New Zealand equation is superannuation. Saving for super is compulsory in Australia. But not only are wages higher across the ditch, in six weeks, the compulsory employer rate goes to 12%. I’m not suggesting we instantly introduce a 12% rate here – businesses would be driven into the ground. But it’s interesting to note that in Australia, for most workers, the tax on employer contributions is much lower than that in New Zealand. In the next few decades, Australians are set to retire with hundreds of thousands of dollars more than their New Zealand counterparts.   I turn 65 in 27 years. I have no expectation that superannuation in its current form will exist by the time I get there. I have a sense of fatalism about the whole thing. It feels inevitable that I’ll be paying for older generations to enjoy universal super, only for the settings to finally change once I’m on the home straight to 65.   I do find one thing about the Government’s move this week particularly curious. They’ve opened the door to means-testing KiwiSaver. Those who earn more than $180,000 won’t receive the Government contribution.   I don’t claim to know what the best solution is. But there will be many working New Zealanders wondering, this week... if means-testing KiwiSaver benefits is acceptable, why shouldn’t superannuation be means-tested too?   LISTEN ABOVE Fri, 23 May 2025 21:54:36 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-auckland-fcs-hustling-has-paid-off/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-auckland-fcs-hustling-has-paid-off/ 210 days ago, I was blinking into the sun at Go Media Stadium as Auckland FC strode out onto the pitch for their first-ever A-League game.  The club was owned by a billionaire and the team’s style of play wasn’t immediately alluring – the very first goal in the club’s professional history came courtesy of an opposition player. I knew about two of the players and had to keep cross-checking the action on the pitch with my gameday programme.  Upon reflection, there were plenty of reasons why Auckland FC might not have taken off with fans quite as they have. And yet here we are, seven months on, in the semi-finals of the A-League. The crunchy end of the season for the team that has consistently drawn the biggest crowds in the competition. I can confirm I’ve crossed a sporting threshold this season. As much as I love the Crusaders, Auckland FC in my sporting priority each and every week.  I’ve talked before about how the club really nailed the matchday experience. And let’s not kid ourselves and imagine the season would have been quite the same if they hadn’t been winning. But given they started from nothing, it’s also notable the extent to which the club has actively tried to build and nurture a fanbase. It cannot be easy to snap your fingers and try to build a culture and fanbase overnight. But the club has held however many meet-and-greets. They’ve had an enduring outreach programme with local football clubs. They ‘ve held training days for kids and even made an appearance at my mate’s local school fete last weekend. They’ve had autograph sessions and sponsor gigs and even shipped the regular season trophy around corporate offices in downtown Auckland – including this one!  As an organisation, Auckland FC has hustled. And I think the same attitude permeates into their style of play. The players run hard. They try hard. And it’s paid off however many times this season when the team has scored a goal in the dying seconds of a game to snatch a draw or even a win. I read an interview at the start of the season in which the players talked about their backgrounds. Apart from the captain, Hiroki Sakai, no one was a big league superstar, and honestly, they knew it. They were professional footballers, sure. But no one was signing perfume deals and earning half a million bucks a week. They had everything still to prove and the only way to do it was through graft.  By the nature of an inaugural season, everything Auckland FC has done this year has been a first. But knock-out football is a different kind of pressure. It’s a home-and-away semi, of course, with the away leg first. Part of me feels a bit anxious about that. Was it really in our interests to have a full week off before getting up for a critical match in opposition territory?  Sport can be glorious, and sport can be cruel. Winning the Premier’s Plate does not guarantee anything at this stage of the season. But like so many others, in a few short months, I’ve come to feel a deep affinity for this team. I now know the respective club histories of players who were effectively strangers in October. I know our defence is our greatest strength: Paulsen, Hall, Sakai, Smith, Pijnaker. That Louis Verstraete blends a technical finesse with an enthusiasm for a 50/50 physical challenge. That Francis de Vries will always whip in a ridiculously good delivery and Guillermo May is just waiting to lash it in with that left foot.  I know how lucky we are to have had this season. How good it is for NZ football. And seven months since that first game, with the knock-out stages upon us, I know we can win.  Fri, 16 May 2025 21:29:35 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-eyewitnesses-to-history/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-eyewitnesses-to-history/ The centre of the world.   It’s a funny concept, really, because on a planet with 8 billion people, the world’s attention never settles on any one event or thing for much more than a moment. Most of the time you would probably argue that the world’s attention is divided and scattered. It takes an historic moment, something really big, truly significant, to hone those 8 billion sets of eyes to one point. And to be there in person, to actually experience it for yourself is to be an eyewitness to history. I met a guy who was on his OE in Europe in 1989 when he woke up one morning and heard maybe something was stirring. He hustled to a train and ended up with his photograph in the New York Times, tearing down the Berlin Wall.    Truthfully, I can’t compete with that. But by the nature of my job, I guess I’ve been fortunate to witness some reasonably significant events, first hand.    I sat there as Pope Francis addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. I’ve seen Presidential inaugurations, Obama speaking on the mall. I was there in the room in 2016 when Donald Trump strode into a Philadelphia arena and formally accepted the Republican nomination for President of the United States.    Something tells me that despite our geographic isolation, New Zealanders are good at sniffing out big historic moments. It could be a regal one – a royal wedding of a funeral? It can be a tragic event like witnessing the 9/11 attacks.    Sport can be a good one. I saw Leo Messi score for Argentina at the opening game of the 2014 Football World Cup. That was special. And I was sitting on the finish line when Usain Bolt won the 100m at the Rio Olympic Games.    Sometimes it takes luck. Sometimes it takes money. And sometimes it takes an exclusive kind of privilege that almost none of us will ever have.   Take a papal conclave. There might be 1.4 billion Catholics on the planet, but only those cardinals who were in the room will ever truly know what it was like to be a part of that conclave. Just being outside in St Peters Square would be an incredible experience; the moment everyone saw the white smoke. But just imagine being inside. If you were to divide the number of followers worldwide by every man in that room, there are more than ten million Catholics for each individual cardinal. But only those cardinals will know what it’s like to be there in person, to see the votes tallied, to hear the new Pope choose a name.  The world’s attention might have been focused on the Vatican, waiting for the smoke, but for this moment, only a tiny few were there. 133 eyewitnesses to a moment in history.  Fri, 09 May 2025 21:37:21 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-nothing-lasts-forever/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-nothing-lasts-forever/ I was taken aback by how long it had been since I’d last come to town.   It’s amazing how time creeps up on you like that. One minute you’re at Grandma and Grandad’s place every few months, knocking around with your siblings. The next you’re going through Grandad’s drawers, packing him a bag of his most precious possessions. The next, you realise it’s three years since you even drove down his street.   State Highway One was an absolute shocker. I was driving the old straight line, heading South from Christchurch. Rolleston, Dunsandel, Rakaia. The storm was fierce. There was surface flooding and the rivers were up which obviously made things worse, but some of the potholes were so large they could’ve swallowed the irrigators that usually crawl the paddocks on either side of the road.     Those irrigators have brought a lot of prosperity to mid-Canterbury. But not on Grandad’s street. His place was an old state house on what Dad always called the wrong side of the tracks. Given the main trunk line cuts right through the middle of town, it’s a literal thing in Ashburton.  Dad reckons the family moved in in about 1967. A two-bedroom place, clad in a shocking baby blue, an 85m2 state house, on a 900m2 section. They don’t do property like that anymore. The Tames had arrived from UK a few years earlier – migration had cost them everything they had. By the early 1980s, on his limited income, Grandad saved up and for $21,500 he bought the house from the government as a home for life. He spent his working life slowly chipping away and paying off the mortgage. The quarter acre dream.   Grandad always had an amazing garden. He made the most of all that space. There were vegetable beds and fruit trees, a huge compost heap. Flowers out the front. Harakeke. We used to play games of hide-and-seek and go-home-stay-home before retiring inside for luncheon and tomato sauce sandwiches and vegetable soup. At home, our parents didn’t put salt in our food, and it was always a thrill to eat a hot lunch prepared by someone less concerned by cholesterol readings.    The neighbours back then were mixed. I remember Grandad telling us once that if we hit the tennis ball over the fence it was best to just get a new one. I doubt the Police were strangers to the neighbourhood. Inside, I used to curl up in Grandad’s La-Z-Boy and read Grandma’s gossip magazines by the fire. On the times we stayed over, I read old Biggles stories. We’d all get covered in Labrador fur. They had a faux grandfather clock in the living room with a mechanism that filled every silence. Click, click, click.    Grandad lived in that house for 55 years. He raised his sons there. He lost his wife, there. When it finally came time to leave, my cousin found his war medals, hidden away in a clothes drawer.    When I came around the corner, the rain was pelting the windscreen. It took just a moment to get my bearings. The little place next door was gone. A similarly vast section, where once there was a humble cottage, it was filled now with a tidy row of modern units.  But there was Grandad’s. Some of the baby blue cladding was missing. The harakeke and the flowers at the front had all been ripped out. I’m sure the veggie patch is done. But the house was still there. Tired, but still there.  Nothing lasts forever. I can’t say with certainty when I’ll be back. But I know one day I’ll come around that corner, and Grandad’s place will be gone too.  Fri, 02 May 2025 22:10:08 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-my-verdict-on-becoming-a-one-car-household/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-my-verdict-on-becoming-a-one-car-household/ I had a funny entry in my calendar this week that took me a moment to decipher.   ‘Mava 1C anniversary’ it said.    My heart skipped a beat. Anniversary?! Oh, hang on. No. Stand down.    Forget romance. What my entry was telling me I’d just reached the anniversary for this very radio show, in which I’d shared with you our decision to become a one car household.   We made the call at the start of 2023 because Mava had an old dunger that needed to go, and in theory it didn’t seem necessary for us to replace it. Sure, it was convenient having two cars. It was what we’d always been used to. But with a bit of coordination and organisation, we reckoned at the very least, moving to one car was worth a crack.    We’re now more two years in, and we are still a one-car household. But in other ways, our circumstances have changed. For starters, there’s now four of us – Me, Mava, our eight-year-old, and our 10-week-old baby. That means a baby capsule AND a booster seat. And we’ve upgraded from my oh-so-cool, grey Toyota Corolla to an oh-so-cool white Toyota Corolla. You could say I’m on a coroll.   Every household and every family is different, and there are things that make our set up easier and things that make it harder. For starters, we live really centrally, which certainly helps. But we also have kids. Kids who have appointments and sports and playdates with their friends. Kids who need to be in different places at the same time.   The way it works is that I default to not taking the car. About 80% of my journeys, I ride my bike. When it’s really heavily raining, I take the bus to work or catch an Uber. When Mava isn’t pregnant or carrying a newborn baby, she rides her bike too.   The Uber thing is actually a big one. Again – easier when you live in a big city. But when we became a one-car house we told ourselves that we wouldn’t feel guilty spending on Ubers if the pair of us had a clash in our schedules or a thunderstorm was rolling through. It didn’t take a Nobel-winning economist to work out that a few big Uber journeys in rush hour traffic probably still wouldn’t come close to what we were spending on insurance, parking and petrol.   That was the theory. In practice it’s been a comprehensive money-saver. Last year we spent about $300 on Ubers. Compared to the price of buying and running a second car, it’s nothing. The hardest thing for me has been when plans change at short notice. One of us is out with the car and the other’s waiting at home, but then the first person gets delayed. And even though I know I have to look at the overall spend rather than one-off journeys, catching a $40 Uber when previously we might have driven still feels a bit galling. So, two years on, what’s the verdict? Sure, it takes marginally more coordination than it did with two separate vehicles, but if anything, it’s honestly been easier than I imagined. I’ve actually noticed that subconsciously, I often don’t even consider taking the car for most of my journeys. The biggest challenge is organising around a clash in our schedules. But there are surprising benefits outside the obvious: I LOVE not having to faff around so much with parking. I’m not saying our set up is right or will work for every household and family. Of course not. You do you. Although, our really good friends are a three-child house in a suburb much further out, and they manage with one car just fine. But not once in the last two-and-a-bit years has either of us doubted the decision. It’s cleaner, and even if you don’t care about that, it’s certainly cheaper. New Zealand still has one of the highest rates of car ownership in the World. I’m convinced it doesn’t need to be so. Fri, 25 Apr 2025 21:31:30 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-miracles-and-mysteries-much-closer-to-home/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-miracles-and-mysteries-much-closer-to-home/ The pictures made it look like a parody.  Eleven minutes after taking off from a West Texas launch site, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space capsule touched down with its all-female celebrity crew. Bezos opened the capsule door and greeted his fiancé. One by one the women filed out, each in their snazzy blue, flared space outfits. Having technically been in space for just four minutes, the popstar Katy Perry knelt down and kissed the ground.    I feel the same about space tourism as I do about climbing Mt Everest. In the broadest possible terms, the idea is really appealing. I’d love to go to space! But as it stands today, actually appreciating how much resource is involved, and the extent to which money rather than talent is the only thing separating anyone from the loftiest heights... I can’t bear the thought. We all know Jeff Bezos isn’t spending billions upon billions to push the boundaries of scientific understanding. He’s going as a vanity project. It all feels a bit gross.    Perhaps when space tourism is a little more normalised and they can achieve economies of scale, I’ll quietly eat my words and find the whole thing a little more palatable. But for what it’s worth, I’d hand my explorer-of-the-week award not to Katy Perry and Jeff Bezos’ other half, but to the crew of the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Falkor vessel, who just captured the first ever footage of a colossal squid in its natural environment.   Colossal squid are the largest invertebrates on the planet – 500kgs without a spine! And yet for all that science has achieved, we know remarkably little about them. It’s only a century since the species was first discovered, and we know most of what we know about them today because of their predators. Sperm whales, in turns out, are much better at tracking down colossal squid than we are.   600m below the surface of the South Atlantic, somewhere off the coast of the Antarctic South Sandwich Islands, in an area so remote that the next closest humans were on the International Space Station, the group of scientists used an unmanned submersible to film the most extraordinary footage of a juvenile colossal squid. Forget anything that Katy Perry or Jeff Bezos’ wife-to-be might be seeing out the window of their shuttle; set against the absolute black of the deep deep, the squid was purpleish and orange, elegant, brilliantly, beautifully alien.  Isn’t it amazing that our species can send a rocket with a popstar to space, and yet it’s taken us until 2025 to actually record an Earth-based tentacled beast that can grow as long as a bus and weigh as much as a cow?   I just think it’s such a timely reminder. For whatever fascinations and discoveries await us in the infinite depths of the cosmos, there are still so many miracles and mysteries much closer to home, in the infinite depths of the real blue origin.  Fri, 18 Apr 2025 22:12:53 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-an-anticlimactic-end-to-the-treaty-principles-bill/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-an-anticlimactic-end-to-the-treaty-principles-bill/ In the end it was kind of an anticlimax.    After almost 18 months of anger, obfuscation, hīkoi and haka, and hundreds of thousands of submissions, the Treaty Principles Bill was voted down in fairly emphatic style. I suspect the majority of New Zealanders are so over it.    Looking back, I’d say David Seymour and ACT largely got what they wanted. Te Pāti Māori were perhaps even greater political beneficiaries. And the whole saga will endure as a bit of a stain on Christopher Luxon’s tenure as Prime Minister. It was telling that once again, just as for the first reading, this week’s vote was scheduled for a time when the PM wasn’t in the house. I think being there and suffering through it would have shown greater leadership.   I watched the speeches in Parliament and thought David Seymour was right in his observation. Almost none actually considered the substance of the government’s defined Treaty principles. Like most of the debate outside of Parliament, they were all emotion. At times, I think what was supposed to be a constitutional debate was boiled down to pretty a basic and unedifying level: pro-Māori vs anti-Māori!     Personally, I tried to engage with the detail of the bill in good faith. I think one of the most underrated qualities in people is a genuine capacity to think critically or even change your mind. It’s a curiously strange thing these days to come across someone who doesn’t instantly default to their team or side.    It seemed to me though that there was a fundamental problem with proposed principles. They didn’t accurately reflect what the Treaty actually says. Te Tiriti specifically guarantees Māori tino rangatiratanga. It has, if you like, a Māori-specific carve-out that did not appear in ACT’s interpretation. In my view, that absence was absolutely critical.  Many of the bill’s opponents accused ACT of a cynical approach to the debate. I can’t speak for the party’s motivations, but I do think the most honest approach would have been to define the principles by what is clearly said in the Treaty, rather than what anyone thinks should be said in the Treaty.  And that leads me to my final point: the Treaty is clearly an imperfect document. The English and Māori versions say different things. There is no returning New Zealand to 1840, and in the context of the modern day, it’s clunky. I do think David Seymour’s broader desire about more purposefully defining the Treaty’s application and meaning in modern New Zealand, is a good one (or at least worthy of more consideration). For example, I wonder if 200 years from its signing, New Zealand should aspire towards developing some sort of a written constitution underpinned by the Treaty, that gives it better and clearer effect in the modern World.    I think the Te Tiriti o Waitangi / Treaty of Waitangi was meant to unify New Zealand. If we’re honest, this debate probably had the opposite effect. But I still have faith that once the dust settles, we can collectively find a way to constructively have these conversations and move Aotearoa forward.    Fri, 11 Apr 2025 22:06:46 Z