/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/rss 九一星空无限 Wed, 15 Oct 2025 21:22:20 Z en /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-photo-scepticism/ /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.  Sat, 16 Mar 2024 01:08:21 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-ive-found-an-even-better-game-than-wordle/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-ive-found-an-even-better-game-than-wordle/ I’m always late to digital trends. I’ve never recorded a TikTok. I haven’t invested in Bitcoin. It was only last year that I finally stopped using an old-school paper-and-pen diary to organise my schedule. So when, at the start of this year the world went crazy for a new digital game, true to form... I didn’t. Three months on, it’s now become a bit of a claim to fame. I’m like a baker who’s never tried a cronut. A skydiver who’s never wanted to give bungy-jumping a crack. We’re in April 2022, and I must be the only journalist on the face of the Earth who’s never played a single game of Wordle. Wordle is a simple, accessible, highly-addictive online game, where players get six chances to guess the word of the day. The correct answer is always five letters long. When a player guesses a word incorrectly, but some of the letters from the word in their guess feature in the correct answer, Wordle highlights those letters. You’re assisted as you play by a vernacular process of elimination. The beauty is the simplicity. You can now play Wordle in 140 languages. You can play in Armenian, and Western Armenian. You can play Wordle in Basque, Bengali, Māori, Mandarin, or Mauritian Creole. Even Old Norse, if you so please. You can play Wordle in Klingon, sign language, and Esperanto. In the space of a few months, Wordle might just have challenged football as the single-most popular and accessible game in the whole World. And yet, I still haven’t played so much as a single round. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Jack, you’re so hip. Truly, a free thinker. I love the way you swagger to the beat of your own drum. Forget trends. Forget quizzes. A daily Word game is too nerdy for a cool cat like you. And you’re right. Except. I have a confession. I haven’t played Wordle, but I’m addicted to Worldle. You see the difference, right? Wordle/Worldle. Worldle/Wordle. It’s even more confusing when you learn that the guy who designed Wordle is called Josh Wardle. Wordle, designed by Wardle and not to be confused with Worldle. Worldle is a daily quiz game and the concept couldn’t be simpler. Basically, you get the geographic outline of a country or territory and players have six guesses to get it right. With each incorrect guess, Worldle lets you know how far away your guess is in kilometres from the correct answer. It’s a geographic process of elimination. Yesterday’s outline was kind of circular. There were no straight borders or major geographic features. I guessed Zimbabwe. Way off. Maybe it’s an island, I thought. But it definitely isn’t volcanic in nature so it can’t be too far North? Aruba! Close. Saint Kitts and Nevis? Closer still. What’s 170km east of the British Virgin Islands? No cheating allowed... Boom. Anguilla. Five guesses. Worldle clocked for the day. Take that, losers. I don’t follow trends. So when half of Planet Earth starts its day with Wordle, I start with Worldle. At least I did. That was... until I was introduced to Tradle. Ah, yes. Tradle. The daily game where you’re presented with a country’s dozen major exports by percentage. Hmm, I thought. What country exports almost 4 billion dollars of refined petroleum, 3 billion in cars, and has a surprisingly large paper and cardboard export industry. I don’t wanna brag but I got Tradle in two. Finland, of course. The more I play Tradle and Worldle, the more I think it’s an awfully good thing I got a girlfriend before this trend kicked off. But then, you know me. I’m not one to follow trends. Honestly. You’ll have to take my wordle for it. Fri, 01 Apr 2022 20:25:45 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-america-inches-closer-to-chaos/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-america-inches-closer-to-chaos/ One of my best mates in the U.S is a Donald Trump supporter, and he texted me yesterday morning to ask if I had put aside some time later in the day to get in front of the TV?  For the basketball? I asked.  “Come on... you’re supposed be a politics man!” he said.  “DJT. Hashtag 45. Trump’s convention speech.”  Got it. Of course. We got to comparing notes.  I asked him how he thought Trump was handling the coronavirus. He said he figured the case numbers were only so high because they’d been testing so many people.   What about the deaths? I said. Some reports are now suggesting 300 thousand people will die of covid-19 in America before the end of the pandemic. That’s a death toll a hundred times the greater than 9/11.   ‘We’re a big country,” he said. “300 thousand out of 330 million.”  We weren’t arguing. It was all very low key. I was just getting his steer on things and he was getting mine... after a Republican convention where speaker after speaker used fire and brimstone to paint a Joe Biden presidency as a huge threat to suburban American life.   This is a direct quote from the current Vice-President Mike Pence and his convention speech.   “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”  Three hundred thousand deaths. Hmm. But of course Pence wasn’t talking about the coronavirus. He was talking about Black Lives Matter. While the convention was underway, protestors were back on the streets after the Police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. If you haven’t seen the video, think carefully before you look it up. It’s pretty hard to watch someone take seven bullets in the back... especially when you know his kids are sitting right there.   But perhaps even more disturbing to me was the video a couple of nights later. After the Kenosha protests had turned violent the night before and some protestors had burnt buildings and looted businesses, self-appointed militia decided to join protestors and take to the streets. There were videos of police officers handing out water bottles to civilians with rifles and tactical gear. And then what do you know... a 17 year old fanatic, apparently obsessed with law enforcement, took it upon himself to shoot three people with an AR-15. There’s video. It’s chaotic. It’s awful.   And this is actually the thing I can’t stop feeling anxious about.   What’s going to happen when the election results roll in? Is it too extreme to wonder if there could be really serious violence in the streets?   I told my friend I thought it was concerning that Donald Trump is already suggesting the election results might be illigitimate. How will his most gung-ho supporters react in November if they think the election has been stolen? How many 17-year-olds with AR-15s would take to the streets and decided to do more than just parade their guns? How many might cross the threshold and feel compelled to start shooting? Could that happen in America? Could there be a major historic civil conflict?  My mate said, ‘Well, you can’t trust the postal voting system.’  The future is uncertain for all of us but increasingly I worry that November in America has the potential to be very nasty, indeed. Fri, 28 Aug 2020 21:36:05 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-forgiving-the-mosque-attacker/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-forgiving-the-mosque-attacker/ John Milne stands on the South East corner of Colombo and Brougham Streets. It’s a noisy part of Christchurch on the main route between the port at Lyttelton Harbour and the shipping container parks in the West of Christchurch. Truck after truck after truck rumbles by. The ground shakes. It’s dusty and loud.  And John Milne stands there. High-viz jacket and wide-brimmed hat. He holds a simple hand-written sign with two words. ‘Love Everyone.’  It’s very easy in life to judge someone in a moment. I think for some of us – and I’ll put myself at the top of the list – you see someone standing on the side of the road with a sign like that, and you dismiss them, right? It’s easy to. You don’t pause and ask yourself, who is this person? What’s their story? Why are they standing on the side of the road for hours and hours every day, waving at the traffic with a sign that says ‘Love Everyone’? John was at Eastgate Mall waiting for a bus when he first heard the sirens. Police cars heaving through an intersection. Someone said there had been a shooting at the mosque near Hagley Park... and John knew it. In that moment, he knew it. He just knew his son Sayyad, was dead.  What does it do to a father when he loses a 14-year-old son? John went to a dark place. Yeah, he went to a dark place. It’s more than losing a loved one... losing a child. Losing a child. I don’t know that anyone can articulate the darkness that brings on a person, or a parent. Can you be happy? Can you be truly, properly, wholly joyful, even just for a bit? John thinks you can. That’s why he chooses, day after day, to stand on the side of the road with a sign saying ‘Love Everyone.’ Take nothing for granted. Life is short. To stand on the corner of Brougham and Colombo Streets is to believe those words.  I called him up last night, just for a couple of minutes, and asked him how he is, and how he’s doing with everything. “I know where my boy is,” said John. “He speaks to me.” John’s going to go to the Christchurch High Court for the sentencing this week. He’s already checked out the security. He feels safe. He thinks they’re all doing a great job. I asked him what he wants? What will help him? What will soothe him? A life sentence? No parole? “Well,” said John. “I’d really like to see him get sent back to Australia.” “Most importantly, it’s essential he’s never allowed out of prison.” John Milne is used to standing at busy intersections by the trucks and the muck, holding his sign. ‘Love Everyone.’ But his week he has a message to deliver in a very different setting. For this occasion, John Milne has considered his words carefully. He’s not really supposed to say what’s in his Victim Impact Statement, but he told me I could share with you this much: “I’m not gonnna’ call him ‘terrorist.’ I’m not gonna’ call him ‘Tarrant.’” Said John. “I’m gonna’ look him in the eye and say ‘Brenton, you are unconditionally forgiven.” Fri, 21 Aug 2020 21:59:42 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-lockdown-lessons-we-ignored/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-lockdown-lessons-we-ignored/ The lessons of last time were there for the taking, and yet, by 9.30pm, there were queues out the Countdown doors. The carparks were overwhelmed. People were squabbling in the aisles, fussing over who got what. It was a curious little insight into human nature, watching the pictures from supermarkets flooding onto Facebook and Twitter. Last time we were in a lockdown... the government and health authorities told us there was no need to panic-buy. We wouldn’t run out of food or supplies. Supermarkets wouldn’t close. And yet we people panic bought. Ok, so maybe they didn’t trust the government or the authorities. But you would think people would learn from their own experience. They would have known that yes, in a stricter lockdown... the supermarkets DID stay open. The supply chain for essential items wasn’t interupted. We got through. And yet.. human nature dictated that the reaction to a fast-spreading highly infectious pandemic was to go and surround yourself with lots of other strangers in a supermarket queue. We’re funny creatures. What did that last experience teach us? It apparently didn’t teach us the true value of contact-tracing. How many of us, honestly, have been logging all our public movements of the last three months? This is brutal, maybe. But I put myself at the top of the list: I think we’ve been too complacent... and honestly, a little smug. What did that last experience teach our politicians? That’s an interesting question. It obviously didn’t teach the opposition that a consistent, constructive message was of more social and political value than barking at errant passing cars. He’s tried to walk it back now, but Gerry Brownlee’s conspiracy peddling was far worse, I think, than the mistakes Simon Bridges made during the first part of the pandemic. And actually, National shot itself in the foot. It blew a significant opportunity. Because there was a scandal of sorts just a day or two after Gerry Brownlee’s intimations... a pretty grave error on behalf of the government, that deserved massive scrutiny and criticism. But much of the credibility that National’s legitimate criticisms might have had, had instead been wasted away at the start of the week.  What did the importance of border and quarantine controls teach us? Well... apparently not enough to make sure our frontline border workers were actually being regularly tested for Covid-19. It’s a stunning oversight, and I’m not surprised to see epidemiologists gobsmacked to learn that significant numbers of people in direct and indirect contact with people arriving at our borders haven’t been tested AT ALL... let alone consistently. Michael Morrah from 九一星空无限hub and Derek Cheng at the Herald have done some excellent reporting on this outrageous. I know this is complex. I know there is a lot of bureaucracy, and systems that have been established in short periods of time. But the government simply hasn’t been meeting its own standards in testing people most likely to have Covid-19. That a case hasn’t slipped through that crack is good luck more than anything. So here we are. Back at a heightened Alert Level. It’s by no means the end of the World. Hopefully we’re on top of it and it sounds like they’ve done a good job in testing and tracing over the last few days. But it’s worrying, and unsettling, and financially really concerning for a lot of New Zealanders. Sadly though... even if we stamp out the spread from this cluster, the virus will likely come back in some form. So then... please... let us all start to learn from our mistakes. Fri, 14 Aug 2020 22:19:08 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-major-issue-with-nationals-campaign/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-major-issue-with-nationals-campaign/ I went for a drive with my mate the other day and got talking about the election, and he made a really interesting comment.   “I’ve always voted National.” He said.   “Every single election of my life. Always. But I dunno, I just feel like they’re at sixes and sevens at the moment. I don’t think they’re organised enough to be in government right now.”  My mate is not someone who follows politics too keenly, he doesn’t swat up on the various electorates or tune in religiously for question time. I don’t know if he could tell you any policy differences between the major parties. He’s just a normal guy. A normal dad. Maybe a little conservative. And apparently, he’s voting Labour this year.  Interesting, eh? I think those of us who work in and around politics can get a bit caught up on occasion- we forget that most people don’t pay heaps of attention to policy minutiae. Most Kiwis either vote for the party they always voted for, the party which they think most closely represents their values... or they vote for politicians they kind of like. In short, they go for the vibe.   Here’s the top story on New Zealand Herald last night. I’ll read you the headline:   ‘National candidate hires QC to fight claims she has been a stripper.”  Hmm. Now to be clear... in case you’re unfamiliar with the story, this is not a fight between a potential National candidate and someone from outside the party who’s making these claims. This is an internal party matter. The fight for the Auckland Central candidacy. In an electorate where Labour and the Greens are already putting forward spirited and organised campaigns, National is cannibalising itself. Six weeks from the election and they don’t even have a candidate.  Now this feud.. as a one off... mightn’t be that much of a big deal. Especially given the left is at serious risk of splitting the vote. But when as a party, you’re trying to move on from an insanely tumultuous few months, leadership challenges, breakdowns, resignations galore... it’s hardly the sort of thing that’s gonna breathe confidence back into voters like my mate.  This election is so important. As the campaign begins in earnest this weekend, the major parties should expect scrutiny over their competing visions, but real scrutiny as well, over their capacity to deliver on their respective promises. A lot of that comes down to basic organisation.   Labour hasn’t progressed its domestic agenda nearly as much as voters were promised. You’d think for the opposition it would be an obvious and easy criticism to run.   Except that for voters like my mate... who tune in and out of the political noise... Labour at least has its party members and MPs singing from the same song sheet. And forget policy or grand visions for the coming decades... National faces a hell of a challenge convincing voters it’s actually ready to govern.  Fri, 07 Aug 2020 21:39:41 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-why-is-booze-ok-but-cannabis-isnt/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-why-is-booze-ok-but-cannabis-isnt/ I’ve had a few weeks off booze for the first time in a while. I’m not a massive drinker. But I enjoy a drink. I do. I always have. A few craft beers.. a few glasses of wine... a couple of gins of an evening. Normally I drink some alcohol two days a week. Maybe three days, some weeks? I hate feeling hungover, so I don’t go too crazy, and I like to think I have a pretty healthy relationship with alcohol. But then, don’t we all? That can be a bit of a subjective thing. Anyway, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about our attitudes to alcohol lately. I was watching Sunday a couple of weeks ago and a story about foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. I’m ashamed to say I knew next to nothing about it... I had no idea it was so prevalent, or that people with FASD have such little government support. But a couple of numbers referenced in the story really stuck out to me. First of all.. the experts reckoned about half of all New Zealand pregnancies have alcohol exposure. Half. That’s because women often don’t know they’re pregnant and are drinking alcohol in the early stages of pregnancy. But half! That’s a huge percentage.  Here’s a number that perhaps shocked me even more. The Children’s Commissioner, Judge Andrew Becroft, reckoned that if you took alcohol out of the court system... you’d take 80% of the serious violence and serious offending out of the courts. 80%. Now I’m not advocating for prohibition. God no. First of all, prohibition clearly doesn’t work. And secondly, I think many people (but not all people) can have a reasonable and healthy relationship with alcohol. Like I say, I enjoy a drink, and once a fortnight we even get a pick from Bob, our Master of Wine, on this show. But consider alcohol in the context of the cannabis referendum this year, and I think we may have one of the greatest hypocrisies of our society. It struck me actually, when I landed back home in February after summer overseas, that the very first product anyone is offered when they arrive in New Zealand.. the SINGLE FIRST items offered to them... are three bottles of gin for a hundred bucks. Sure.. Duty Free stores are the same everywhere. But most of us are so normalised to it, we don’t even blink. We just take it for granted. You don’t even have an option not to walk past the stands of grog. Hāere Mai, welcome to New Zealand. Fancy a deal on three litres of liquor? I wonder.. how many of the people who plan to vote ‘No’ in the cannabis referendum next month are totally fine with billboards everywhere shilling for booze? With ads on TV featuring movie stars selling whiskey? Who don’t have a problem whatsoever with our top sports teams  being sponsored by beer companies. Of course, cannabis causes damage too. I’m not suggesting it doesn’t. But cannabis would be much, much more regulated than alcohol is in our society. There would be no ads on TV, no billboards, no All Blacks sponsorship. The kids wouldn’t be walking past gleaming stands of cannabis at the airport, or rows upon rows of different cannabis products next to the fruit and veggies at the supermarket. Alcohol makes many people aggressive and violent. Cannabis makes them sleepy and hungry. And look... maybe you’ll say it’s because alcohol causes so much harm in New Zealand, we can’t afford any more drugs to become normalised. I’d find that argument much easier to accept if the people who so vehemently oppose cannabis legalisation put half as much effort into calling for change when it comes to alcohol, as well. Fri, 31 Jul 2020 22:10:53 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-who-should-get-the-covid-19-vaccine-first/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-who-should-get-the-covid-19-vaccine-first/ If you needed any reminder about just how well New Zealand is doing in this pandemic relative to other countries, compare the weeks of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Fauci and Bloomfield fill similar roles in their respective country’s response to covid-19. From relative obscurity, both men have become cult figures or celebrities, even, in a matter of months. But one has advised politicians who largely follow scientific advice and respect expertise. The other hasn’t been so luck. Yesterday, Dr Anthony Fauci walked out and threw the first ceremonial pitch of the season for the Washington Nationals baseball team. The stands in the baseball stadium were totally empty. Fauci and all the playing staff were wearing masks. He fist bumped the catcher. The only way anyone could watch was on TV. Contrast that with Dr Ashley Bloomfield’s afternoon. At 2.30pm at the Wainuiomata Rugby Club, Bloomfield, aka ‘The Eliminator’ is packing down at open-side flanker in the Parliamentary Rugby Team’s 25th anniversary match. You’d be hard-pressed to find a sport on Earth with less social distancing than rugby. No one will be wearing masks. And anyone who wants can turn up and watch the game on the side lines. They’re expecting a big crowd. Confirmed cases in America have now passed the four million mark. Deaths passed one thousand a day. But the U.S is ahead of us when it comes to one potentially critical measure. The U.S has already lined up hundreds of millions of doses of the covid-19 vaccine. Actually, several countries have nosed their way to the front of the distribution list for the vaccine being developed out of Oxford University. The Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, the UK, and the U.S have reportedly secured 800 million vaccines from AstroZenica pharmaceuticals, between them. Less than half that number - 300 million doses - have been promised for developing countries. That’s great, but of course it’s nothing compared to what will be needed. If you needed a reminder of just how ugly our World has become, the squabbling and deal-making over the covid-19 vaccine is set to be a stark illustration. Anyone with any sense of morality would agree that countries should be working together to work out a global distribution plan. There are different ways to slice it up… but if the World actually worked together (which I know is a fantasy) you’d think the priority would be to avert as much pain and suffering as possible. A global plan might still have America near the top of the list… but it would also prioritise countries in Latin America and South Asia that don’t have sophisticated healthcare systems and are being hammered by the virus. Global leadership has been left sorely wanting in this crisis. Every country has decided on its own response to the virus. We face a future where every country is left to fight its own fight for a vaccine. Rich countries will come first. The poor will be squeezed out. If you have a problem with that and you think World leaders should be making a moral determination when it comes to who gets the vaccine first and who has to wait... here’s a tough thing to consider: If morality has anything to do with it, New Zealand should probably be at the very back of the line.   Fri, 24 Jul 2020 21:55:14 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-government-should-be-nervous-about-judith-collins/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-government-should-be-nervous-about-judith-collins/ A couple of weeks ago when she released her book, I interviewed Judith Collins on Q+A. Collins is maybe the single-most accessible senior politician in New Zealand. We’ve had plenty of back-and-forths over the years but I can think of few times when she hasn’t made herself available for an interview. I suspect that on more than a few occasions over the years she’s actually defied the wishes of her party leader by agreeing to appear in interviews. It’s better to ask for forgiveness, than to ask for permission. That might tell you something about her personal ambitions but whether you love her or hate her, you’d have to agree… Judith Collins does well in front of the camera. There’s a reason she’s so well-known. Anyway, it’s always interesting to come off-air after an interview and consider the interesting or new bits of information that might have come up. Amongst all the questions I asked about John Key, Oravida, and Dirty Politics, I asked Judith Collins a simple question: ‘Who are your best friends in parliament?’ Her answer was really interesting. She didn’t name senior MPs. She didn’t name anyone with whom she’d served in cabinet. There were no Anne Tolleys, Nikki Kayes, or Nick Smiths. She named Simeon Brown, David Bennett, Maureen Pugh, Matt King, and Harete Hipango. Be honest… if you passed them in the street… how many of those MPs would you even recognise? It tells you something that Judith Collins’ best mates are all people who came to parliament after her. Well after her. Simeon Brown was 11 when Judith Collins first became an MP.   From that answer I think we can probably deduce that Judith Collins has not been super-popular with her caucus mates. And yet it seems inevitable, now, with just a few day’s hindsight, that she should be the leader to seize the reigns after the Todd Muller debacle. We humans love a story, don’t we? And Judith Collins in charge just feels kind of like – gulp– dare I say destiny? In the eyes of the public, I really don’t think the Muller debacle has hurt National all that much. The party wasn’t doing great before he took over. Are they better or worse off than where they were two months ago? We’ll wait for the polls. But Collins has been decisive and swift where Muller dithered. She’s comfortable with the gallery press pack. She’s whipped her caucus into line. Anyone would think she’d been planning a shadow cabinet all of her life. I said when Jacinda Ardern became Prime Minister that I thought Judith Collins would be the most effective leader of the opposition. Not because of her new ideas or visionary policy or anything like that, but because I thought she’d do a better job than anyone else of undermining the government, and putting pressure on the Prime Minister. I stand by that.  There will be significant pressure on Collins, as well. She has baggage. The tough-woman persona will be off-putting to some voters, and attractive to others who find the Prime Minister’s constant kindness message condescending. But I thought the political commentator Ben Thomas summed it up perfectly this week when he considered the National leadership change. Yes, Judith Collins might be divisive. She might not be hugely personally popular with her colleagues. But Ben was spot on when he said Judith Collins as leader of the opposition will make the government more nervous than any other National MP.  Fri, 17 Jul 2020 21:36:43 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-todd-mullers-chances-diminishing-by-the-day/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-todd-mullers-chances-diminishing-by-the-day/ Seven weeks ago, the morning after Todd Muller became the new leader of the National Party, I said I thought he could win September’s election. Never say never, but whatever chances he and National might have had then are diminishing by the day. It’s odd really, because the playbook was pretty obvious. Muller was praised early on for acknowledging what the government had done well with the Covid-19 health response. That was a smart move. As the World grappled with thousands upon thousands of deaths, you couldn’t ignore the fact that relative to most other countries, we were doing stupendously well. The vast majority of New Zealanders thought the government had done a good job. All Muller and National had to do in the following few weeks was turn attention to the future of New Zealand’s economic recovery.   But what has become increasingly clear is that before the leadership challenge, Todd Muller and his supporters focused all of their attention and energy on the challenge itself; the seizing of power, rather than what might follow in the next few days and weeks. I find it quite remarkable, even in the uncertain world of Covid-19, that in the weeks after he took over, National wasn’t pumping out new policies, and Muller wasn’t looking to more assertively differentiate himself from the previous party leader. National has criticised the government plenty for quarantine and border restrictions, but they haven’t articulated clearly just what they would do differently. And of course any criticisms they now make are going to come with a giant footnote reminding voters that they were the ones responsible for leaking the covid-19 patients’ data.   This should have been a week for National to make hay. They should have been scoring points. They should have been crowing from the rooftops about Tiwai Point and the breaches of quarantine. But No.  The political news cycle moves very quickly. Who knows what will be sucking up oxygen in a couple of weeks? You can only imagine that community transmission – heaven forbid – would significantly change public discourse heading into September. But I still think National faces a tough ask in shifting an impression that the Party is unusually disorganised. Think about it. For the longest time, National MPs have sold their party as the efficient manager... slick, organised, united, and cohesive. I can’t imagine the row boat advertisement of a few years back working so well for them right now. The party clearly hasn’t got some of its basic systems and chains-of-command in check. For example, Hamish Walker should never have been allowed to send out a press release on a potentially sensitive issue without the explicit approval and sign-off of the leader and the leader’s senior advisors.  As soon as he found out his party was responsible for the data leak, Todd Muller should have immediately sought assurances from all of his MPs they didn’t also have the information. I can’t keep up with the number of National MPs who are standing down at this election, which, again, doesn’t help with a sense of cohesion. And if the polls are bad, there will be some list MPs and MPs in marginal seats feeling very anxious indeed. That won’t help unity one bit.  National needs to do something more basic than convince voters they should be in government. They need to convince voters they’re ready to be in government.  Fri, 10 Jul 2020 22:10:10 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-lockdown-was-the-easy-bit/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-lockdown-was-the-easy-bit/ My best mate is trying to plan a wedding. He lives in the Middle East and he wants to get married in Barcelona in October. It’s where he and his wife-to-be first met, it’s one of the World’s great cities, it’s neutral territory for both of them, and trust me when I say I really, really want to go and party with them in Barcelona.  But what would that involve?  Well, as of this week, Spain is letting in New Zealanders. So, actually, are lots of countries. They don’t require government quarantining or even isolation for Kiwis. Because New Zealand has done so well at eliminating covid-19 up until this point, we’re assumed to arrive with a clean bill of health. Someone checks your temperature, stamps your passport, and ninety minutes later you’re eating papas bravas off The Rambla. Of course, getting to Europe and getting back is a whole lot easier said than done. And the arrangements aren’t reciprocal. We have very tight restrictions on who’s allowed back in the Aotearoa, and everyone arriving here goes into government-mandated 14-day quarantine. But at what point do we lift it? At what point do we completely throw open the doors? Sure, it’s fine to plan bubbles and relaxed travel relationships with other countries that are on top of Covid-19. But America is recording tens of thousands of new cases a day. It doesn’t have a hope of achieving our government’s pre-requisite requirements for a bubble. Ever. Some of our other big trading partners in Europe and Asia are in a similar boat. They don’t have a chance of being on top of things until herd immunity is achieved or the whole World gets jabbed. Are we waiting for a vaccine, then, to immunise all New Zealanders, before we totally open up? Is that where we’ll have to be before we accept any Americans, or any Brits, without first making them sit through two weeks of quarantine?  And what if a vaccine doesn’t come about? It’s no guaranteed silver bullet. How long do we wait until we just say... this is no longer feasible? Helen Clark, Rob Fyfe, and Sir Peter Gluckman published a really interesting paper for Auckland University pushing for more conversation clarity on New Zealand’s exit strategy. It made simple, sober, reasonable points. To be clear: No one sensible is suggesting we throw open our borders now. No one sensible is suggesting we rush this process. But we do need a plan. It should cover off timelines and different scenarios: What we’ll do if we can access a vaccine and what we’ll do if, gulp, we can’t. I’m realistic about the wedding in Barcelona. So is my mate. October’s coming about fast. But our focus shouldn’t just be on the next three months. It should be on the next 18 months. The next few years. Compared to much of the World, New Zealand’s has achieved incredible success in controling coronavirus. But it’s oddly a blessing and a bit of a curse. Shutting down was the easy part... reopening is much more complex. We need clarity and vision. We need a plan.  Fri, 03 Jul 2020 22:03:23 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-is-winstons-time-up/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-is-winstons-time-up/ As an eleven-year old boy, I remember driving back from my standard four school camp at Okains Bay on Banks Peninsula. I was listening to a scratchy AM radio. It’s funny how these moments stick with you – I think I was just really excited to be allowed to sit in the front of our family van and I craned my neck to listen to the radio news as we slowly crawled back into reception. The news was all about Winston Peters. He’d just been sacked from cabinet. The coalition government was in tatters. Dad spent much of the drive home explaining to his exhausted son what all of this actually meant. That was 1998. 22 years ago. Peters had been a high-profile minister and MP for years at that stage already. When the next election rolled around, there were many who thought he was done in politics... New Zealand First slipped under the five percent threshold... but would you believe it, Winston Peters held his Tauranga seat by a margin of 63 votes. Love him or loathe him, Winston Peters is a survivor. THE survivor. One of only a few New Zealanders who need only be introduced by their first name. But here we are, three months from the 2020 election. 12 weeks today. And New Zealand First is polling at less than 2 percent. To me, that was the most interesting number in Thursday’s ONE 九一星空无限 Colmar Brunton Poll. I know, I know... Polls are polls. But whereas every other party in parliament could spin their number as a relative success, New Zealand First is flopping about on shore, trying desperately to get back in the soothing waters of five percent.  I’m not going to rule New Zealand First out. Hell no. But presuming Labour don’t offer them a lifeline in Northland, which I don’t think they will, the party faces a massive challenge if it’s to be back in parliament come October this year. Depending on how the next few months shake down, we could reasonably expect Labour to drop a couple more points, and National to gain a couple more. If the Nats had a really disastrous time of things and were languishing at 30 percent, say... that might encourage a few blue voters to vote New Zealand First as a check on the left. But if National is anywhere near that 40% mark in the polls, which seems more likely, I think fewer National voters will be tempted to cast a ballot for Winston.    Of course, there will be opportunities to make noise. But some of those traditional bastions of New Zealand First populist rabble-rousing aren’t available in the same way they usually are. There’s not much point in rallying against immigration when our borders are closed. And I’m pretty sure everyone is onboard with buying local!  If there is one issue yet to be sorted that has the potential to be red meat moment for New Zealand First voters, it’s probably the government-organised deal at Ihumatao. We know Labour’s MPs, the Kingitanga, and Fletchers are pretty much there, but that New Zealand First will not be happy about using taxpayer funds to sort it out. Maybe kicking up a fuss will buy them one or two percent. Or hey... maybe the Nats will offer Winston a deal in Northland. Matt King sits out and Shane Jones, presumably, wins the seat. Maybe Tracey Martin scores an upset in Ohariu. There are definitely paths to another term. But for all Winston Peters’ bluster, there is still no escaping the blunt truth of his predicament. He is 75-years-young, leading a party polling at under 2 percent. For all the things New Zealand First has achieved in coalition – and they’ve had more their way than any other party, including Labour – Winston Peters hasn’t yet been able to substantially progress his efforts to move Auckland’s Port. Even though the average voter mightn’t care that much... the Serious Fraud Office is still investigating his party’s foundation.  We are 12 weeks from the election and you’d be a fool to rule out the survivor. But how many lives does this cat really have? Fri, 26 Jun 2020 21:59:54 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-trade-off-with-armed-police/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-the-trade-off-with-armed-police/ Police are right to worry about their safety on the job and the shooting in West Auckland yesterday is an awful reminder of the risk every officer faces and the stakes when something goes wrong. Of course there is never a ‘good time’ for Police to be ambushed and killed. We’re fortunate these events in New Zealand are relatively rare. But the timing of this tragedy is especially pertinent. With ongoing protests around the World about Police brutality and racial profiling, and fresh off the back of the Police Armed Response Team trial here, it adds another layer of complexity and tension in the debate about arming more of our Police. I went through hundreds of pages of documents released to journalists under the Official Information Act and a couple of things about the Armed Response Team trial were very clear. The trial was rushed. It was poorly planned. From an academic perspective it was woefully designed. And the communities affected most by officers with guns on the beat weren’t consulted. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there shouldn’t have been a trial. Or that a better balance couldn’t be found between making Police officers and the public safe. Because Police do face risks. Here’s what the Auditor-General said in the official report into gun buyback scheme. “There is no reliable picture of how many newly prohibited firearms, magazines, and parts remain in the community.” When I went to the Police National Headquarters and interviewed Police Commissioner Andy Coster last week, he told me frankly that no one knows how many illegal guns are still on New Zealand’s streets. Imagine knowing that in the back of your mind, as you strapped on a blue vest and headed out on the beat. It would hardly inspire confidence. Police deserve to feel as safe as is possible. The Public deserves to feel as safe as is possible. Of course there are mixed views on both sides, but generally when it comes to the debate over arming Police, the perceived safety of one party comes at the expense of the other. Many Police want to guns in order to feel more safe. Many people, especially in Māori and Pacifica communities, feel less safe when Police are armed. Here’s a line that stuck out to me from those files we obtained on the ART trial. It’s from the Evidenced Based Policing Centre: “There is an intrinsic trade-off between the issues of police safety and public trust. Police are feeling more threatened on the job and require means to effectively protect themselves. However, this need must also be weighed against how changes to the way police are armed will affect public trust and confidence.” Now we don’t know much detail about the West Auckland shooting and I don’t want to speculate. It’s possible that if the officers were armed, the outcome would sadly have been exactly the same. It’s also possible the person responsible didn’t use an illegal gun. We don’t know yet. But I do think we have a responsibility as a society to continue conversations about how best to strike the balance between making Police safe and making the public safe.  The problem with the ART trial wasn’t the question of whether we should have specialist armed units to respond to gun crime. As yesterday’s event sadly proves - that’s a legitimate question that deserves careful, informed consideration and scrutiny. The problem was the process. I think the way it was rolled out actually let down officers on the front line. In scrapping ARTs, there is a risk that the central issue in question has been pushed off the table as well. And no one in any profession deserves to die on the job. Fri, 19 Jun 2020 22:02:55 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-tearing-down-statues-isnt-the-answer/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-tearing-down-statues-isnt-the-answer/ ‘Only bad people live to see their likeness set in stone.’ That is among my favourite Lorde lyrics. If it’s were 100% true then it’s really bad news for former All Black flanker Michael Jones, whose magnificent likeness stretches out for a try outside the entrance to Eden Park . It’s really bad news for Richard O’Brien, the creator of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I reckon his Riff Raff statue is maybe the best thing on Hamilton’s main drag.  Of course no one is suggesting we do anything to the Iceman or to Richard O’Brien, yet. But times change. I suppose a few hundred years ago it would have seemed crazy to some that in 2020 we would rip down a statue of Captain John Hamilton. Of course it would seem just as crazy to others that we would even name a city after him in the first place. Sadly, I don’t think pulling down statues stops us from being racist. I also don’t think that repeatedly being confronted by an idealised glorified likeness of someone who raped and murdered your ancestors is a way to feel like you haven’t been born into a society that is systematically pitted against you. Both of those opinions can exist. I actually quite like Tame Iti’s solution, which was maybe inspired by the former Communist countries that in the last 30 years have gone through a bit of an internal rebranding exercise. The former Communists and Soviet Union LOVED a good statue. In Hungary once, I went to an amazing park where all sorts of brutalist statues that were ripped down at the end of communism have been stored, grouped, and arranged as an artistic attraction. There are statues of Lenin and Marx, and castings of Stalin’s boots. The park’s official slogan says it’s dedicated to the victory of democracy over dictatorship. Anyone monitoring Hungary’s current political trajectory will sadly note that neither removing the statues from their original locations, NOR preserving that history, has done anything to stop the rise of a new totalitarian regime.  But that’s Tame Iti’s solution. Tear down colonial monuments, sure, but don’t destroy them. Chuck them in a park instead. Maybe flesh out the little plaque or blurb a bit as well.  My opinion is this: History is nuanced. It’s messy. It’s complicated. And so are people. No one anywhere is 100% good or 100% bad. Who deserves to stay and who deserves to go? Would we erect a statue today of someone who murdered people or promoted racist ideas? I certainly hope not! But judging by the Facebook comments of the last few days, dragging down a slab of concrete and metal may even fuel racism as much as anything.  If I can offer any advice… it’s this: Read. Don’t take your sense of identity from whatever bronze figure is plumped up in your city. Read. History is far more complex and important than any long-dead man with seagull shit on his head will ever be able to convey. Fri, 12 Jun 2020 21:20:08 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-no-reason-to-be-optimistic-for-the-us/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-no-reason-to-be-optimistic-for-the-us/ I watched an incredibly disturbing video last night and I can’t stop thinking about it. You may have seen it on the news last night. The video shows a line of Police in riot gear marching forward along a footpath. A tall man wearing a surgical mask strides up to them. He has short grey hair and according to news reports this morning, he’s 75 years old. Anyway, he walks up to the advancing Police and waves his phone at them. He’s not touching them or physically threatening him. He actually has a bike helmet in his spare hand. But two Police shout and shove him back. He stumbles, falls, and there are two cracks. One as the bike helmet falls from his hands. The other as his head smacks into the concrete. The person filming is only a few metres away. The man lies motionless and immediately you hear people calling out. ‘He’s bleeding from the ears! He’s bleeding from the ears!’ The man is bleeding from the ears. You can see the blood, pouring out. It’s not dripping. It’s a steady thin stream, like from a faucet on a low strength, and blood is quickly pooling on the footpath. His hand, holding his cellphone at his side, goes limp. Do the officers immediately support him? Check his vitals? No. They walk past him. A couple of Police officers look like they want to kneel down and help, but they’re stopped by their colleagues. No one in a group of twenty or thirty gets down and offers immediate first aid to an unarmed elderly man who has clearly just suffered a serious injury. Working in my industry you can become a bit numb to watching violent footage, but I’ve found a lot of the pictures out of America this week really upsetting. To the video of the man bleeding from the ears, you can add the video of the unarmed protestor with his hands in the air, in the middle of an interview, being crash-tackled by riot police with batons. You can add to that the video of the woman being beaten and whipped about her legs. Blow after blow. Baton on flesh. She’s not armed. She’s not fighting. She’s grossly outnumbered. She slowly lowers herself to the ground. Police brutality in America is news but it isn’t new. Racism and the grossly different policing of African American people and white people... is news but it isn’t new. I was living in the U.S and reported on the protests after Trayvon Martin was shot dead, and the Ferguson unrest after Mike Brown was killed. The difference this time is that with Trump in charge, Police feel totally empowered in their violence. And for every Police officer that kneels with protestors or really genuinely wishes to de-escalate a situation or confront racism within a force, there is another who feels he has a right to beat and maim the people he purports to protect, or to push his knee into the throat of an unarmed, handcuffed, gasping man. How will this end? Is there reason to be optimistic? I do not feel hopeful for America. I think Trump will either continue to stoke tensions and encourage the Police to be more and more violent to the point that many people will die. Or, just as sadly, it’ll fizzle without achieving change that is so desperately required. There may be protests around the World, but if you consider the injustices of recent history under successive Presidents, very little at a systemic level has actually improved for Black Americans at the hands of Police. In the noise and struggle of modern life, Americans and those of us who care have not yet maintained the collective outrage and momentum this cause deserves. And where will that leave us? Where will that leave the protestors bleeding from the ears? Where will that leave black Americans at the wrong end of the Police baton? Waiting for another beating. Another alleged murder caught on camera. It will make the news, sure. But it won’t be anything new. Fri, 05 Jun 2020 21:27:03 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-todd-mullers-maga-hat-exposes-our-selective-outrage/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-todd-mullers-maga-hat-exposes-our-selective-outrage/ I have a Make America Great Again hat. I bought it as a souvenir at a Donald Trump rally when I was a correspondent in the U.S covering the last election. I went to heaps of those rallies, for Trump and all the others. At events for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama, I also bought souvenirs. I even had a Jeb! Bush yard sign for a while, but it didn’t seem worth keeping. Often when I’m somewhere new I buy silly little souvenirs. When I was in China on assignment in 2008, I bought Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book. I bought a mug from the military shop at Guantanamo Bay prison camp, having just returned from filming the prisoners inside. On the times I’ve visited parts of Cuba proper, I’ve taken photos in front of the ‘Patria o Muerte’ signs (Patriotism or Death). I have printed out the pics of Hezbollah posters I took in Lebanon. I have photos and fridge magnets from the West Bank, Turkey, and Pakistan. Was displaying the MAGA hat in his office the best idea Todd Muller has ever had? Maybe not. Did he handle it well? Not really. I understand some people think the hats have come to represent white supremacy. But the guy obviously bought it as an innocent souvenir. And if a political leader having a campaign souvenir from his time travelling in the U.S on official business is truly as upsetting for some people as they say it is, may I gently suggest they probably aren’t the sort of person who would vote for Todd Muller at the best of times. I have a Make America Great Again cap. It’s a memory of a crazy story I covered. I think we owe Todd Muller the benefit of the doubt. Besides, if Donald Trump upsets you, just wait until you hear about the leaders of some of other big trading partners. Were the people upset about a MAGA hat marching outside parliament when Jacinda Ardern didn’t forcefully condemn Muslims Uighurs being kept in re-education concentration camps by the government of our biggest trading partner? Funnily enough, no. Wait until you hear about how many immigrant families Barack Obama deported, or how many innocent people were killed by his soldiers in the Afghanistan surge he ordered. Would there be similar outrage if Todd Muller had a HOPE poster in his office? Something tells me there wouldn’t. We’re all hypocrites. Outrage is selective. Personally I’m much more concerned with the fact we’re staring down mass unemployment and a generation-defining economic crisis than the fact Todd Muller has a Trump hat. And honestly, I think most New Zealanders are with me. That’s why, on Monday night on Q+A, I didn’t ask Todd Muller about his hat. I asked what his economic plan was. It wasn’t an unexpected or unreasonable subject – he’s the one who rolled his party leadership and wants to be Prime Minister on the basis of his economic vision. So, every time he tried to deflect the conversation, I brought him back. When he didn’t answer the simplest questions, I didn’t give him a free pass to talk about whatever he fancied. I pulled him up. That’s my job. You might not like conflict, but my job and the job of other journalists is not to kindly let politicians talk about whatever they want for as long as they like. It’s not to give any leader a free platform for their empty phrases and platitudes. Our job is to try and scrutinise any political leader who sits with us, no matter what party they represent. Do I always get it right? Of course not. On multiple occasions when I’ve interviewed Jacinda Ardern, I’ve been accused of being too tough on the Prime Minister. I’ve been called a shill for interviews with members of The Greens, and ACT, and New Zealand First. There is no pleasing everyone and few of the people accusing me and my colleagues of bias this week ever pause to consider their own. All anyone in my position can hope for, is to be evenly disliked across the board. Todd Muller had a poor few days. I was surprised at just how disorganised he and his team appeared to be. I’m sure they learnt some valuable lessons. But in two months, will any of this matter? Will we be discussing a few difficult moments on live TV or who does and doesn’t own a MAGA hat? Just wait. If there are a few hundred thousand newly unemployed Kiwis, the issues that really matter will come sharply into focus. Fri, 29 May 2020 21:38:22 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-todd-muller-could-well-be-our-next-pm/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-todd-muller-could-well-be-our-next-pm/ I think Todd Muller can win the election.  He has his work cut out, sure. I don’t think he’s the favourite, but I think there’s a reasonable chance Todd Muller will be Prime Minister by October, and any Labour supporters or strategists who think the election result is a sure thing, count their chickens, rest on their laurels, and put their feet up at their peril.  Because it’s easy to look at the massive shift in the polls this week and get suckered in by the Covid effect. It’s easy to see a divided National caucus and a hugely popular incumbent Prime Minister and think September is sewn up. It isn’t. It’s true, we haven’t seen National’s new leader under much pressure. But Todd Muller has done a very good job of winning over a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds. I interviewed him about climate change on Q+A last year, and at the time, he struck me as a very good communicator. Clear, confident, and sure-footed. True, he might not be quite as good as Jacinda Ardern, but his press conference yesterday afternoon was impressive and I’ve yet to see him really blunder an answer or misjudge his tone. There were little things yesterday... little shifts and choices of language that tell you about his strategy. For example, he said, “I am the first to admit and acknowledge that the government's handling of Covid-19 was overall impressive.” Would Simon Bridges have described anything associated with the government as being impressive? I doubt it. But overall, it has been impressive. And it’s not a binary thing... acknowledging the government has done something well doesn’t mean the opposition hasn’t. Good call, Todd.  Todd Muller looked comfortable in front of the cameras. He didn’t blink much. He wasn’t nervous. He constantly referenced his family and he made self-deprecating jokes about his looks and his religious observance. When he was asked about his conservative social values, and the fact that he opposes legal abortion and euthanasia... he comfortably navigated through his response and noted that his deputy, Nikki Kaye, had completely different views. National’s a broad church, he said. Good answer. He did a couple of other things really smartly. He sought immediately to draw a line in the sand with the leadership debate. Whether or not he can do that, who knows? That may result on the shape of his caucus reshuffle. But if the last 15 years is anything to go by, National often does a better job of leadership changes than Labour.  He also stayed on message with Labour’s two biggest weaknesses: their perceived lack of Ministerial talent, and their inability in this term to deliver on some of their biggest policies. Keep in mind... by the time the election rolls around, we’ll have endured one of our toughest winters in a very long time. Unemployment is forecast to be peaking. Hundreds of thousands of Kiwis will be without work and many of them will have never experienced being jobless before. It’s all well and good to be walking around in a Level 2 honeymoon but sadly this is unlikely to last. Over the next few months, just as he did yesterday, Todd Muller will remind voters about Kiwibuild. He’ll remind them about the grand promises for rail to the airport, about fees-free university, prisoner numbers, and stubborn poverty stats. He’ll praise Jacinda Ardern and say she was brilliant in the heat of a crisis and that she’s a really nice person, but when it comes to the aftermath of a disaster and rebuilding an economy... he’ll remind Kiwis who was in charge after the GFC and in charge after the Christchurch Earthquakes and say National’s the better bet.  Thursday’s 1 九一星空无限 Colmar Brunton poll may have been the straw that broke the back of National’s last leadership team. It showed just 29 percent of voters supporting National. I can tell you now, more than 29% of Kiwi voters will back Todd Muller’s message on Election Day.  Fri, 22 May 2020 21:57:29 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-how-covid-19-is-changing-our-views-on-beneficiaries/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-how-covid-19-is-changing-our-views-on-beneficiaries/ If you lost your job today and you had to apply for the jobseeker benefit, do you know how much you’d get? I mean that. Seriously. Image you’re over 25. You’re single. Covid-19 has happened and lose your job. You apply for a benefit. After tax, how much do you think you get? As of today. You would qualify for $250.74. Is that more, or less, than you might have expected?Imagine trying to cover off transport costs, clothes, and food. You might get another 130 a week to help with accommodation. There’s a winter energy payment you might qualify but none of that stuff goes far. You can shop the cheap brands at Pak ‘n’ Save all you like, but 250 bucks a week isn’t much to live on. I wouldn’t have a chance. And of course it’d be even harder if you had children to support, as well. I’d be in the queues out the door at the Sallies or the City Mission just like all those other Kiwi families. Life would be really tough.To me though, I think maybe the first question tells us more about our society. The question isn’t whether or not you could live a life of any decency on that much money, but if you honestly had any idea what the dole is worth in 2020. I’d take a stab in the dark and say a lot of us had no real idea. It’s like Bill Gates trying to guess the price of a bottle of milk. He never goes to the supermarket so it’s not something that’s crossed his mind in decades.That’s the thing with the benefit. Most of us who’ve never been on one don’t even know how little someone receives before we feel sufficiently informed to slag them off as bludgers. I’m not saying everyone on a benefit is out and about and actively seeking work and looking to lift themselves and their loved ones into a better life of fulfilling employment and contributions. But I also think it’s a really easy and lazy criticism for us to casually group all beneficiaries together and characterise them as bludgers on the couch. And I wonder if this crisis is going to change a few attitudes.Do you think the staff who are being made redundant at Air New Zealand are bludgers? Or the staff at Sky City? Or Flight Centre? The staff who were working at those Bunnings that are closing? I know my colleagues aren’t bludgers but heaps of them have lost their jobs. And there’s a fairly good chance, with all the many thousands of Kiwis being made redundant at the moment that some people who might never have expected to have to rely on a benefit - will. At least for a bit.And that’s why it’s there, of course. Help in a crisis. Almost 40 thousand Kiwis signed up for the jobseeker benefit last month, as Covid took off.  Almost half of them had never been on a benefit before. Sure, the government of kindness that pitched itself as being dedicated to the fight against poverty has rejected advice from its own working group for a second year in a row, and the pleas of all manner of food banks and social agencies, and refused to increase benefits in the budget.But aren’t you glad that for all the easy hits we score on beneficiaries, there was still something there to help all those people who lost their jobs? I am. After all, any one of them could have been me. Covid-19 isn’t over. Any one of them could still be you.LISTEN TO AUDIO ABOVE Fri, 15 May 2020 22:12:35 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-my-coronavirus-resolutions/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-my-coronavirus-resolutions/ Let’s call them Rona’ resolutions.  Given this is *maybe* our last weekend before we can hug our friends and travel to see our families... I want to pause and observe the moment. Consider the things you’ve experienced during life at Levels 3 and 4. The things you’ve learnt. The things you’ve appreciated. The good habits you’ve somehow maintained. How do we bring those good things to life at Level 2 and beyond? I’ll be honest with you. I’ve not lived a perfect lockdown life. I’ve been drinking a bit more than I should and bingeing on sugary junk, even though I know it makes me feel crappy and down. I’ve not been nearly as productive as I would have liked. I’ve read only about half as many of the books as I wanted to get through. I’ve spent far too much time mindlessly scrolling Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But there are certainly things I want to maintain. 1) I resolve to support the small businesses that give character to my neighbourhood. There’s a little cluster of little cafes near my home. One of them is called Little Algiers – it’s run by an Algerian guy who moved here a few decades ago, and I don’t think I’ve ever come across a cafe or an owner with fewer pretensions. He’s the sort of guy who bursts into laughter, or exuberantly shares a French proverb with his customers. It wouldn’t surprise me if he gently kissed the hand of his female patrons... he’s just a real charmer, one of life’s great characters. And our neighbourhood is so much better for his business, and the business of the people in the shops and cafes around him. Of course supporting local business is more than just a food thing. Ask yourself, what businesses make your neighbourhood unique? What businesses make your neighbourhood better? And what would it be like if they didn’t exist?  If like me, you’re fortunate enough to have a job and some expendable cash at the moment... it’s in your interests to support your neighbours. 2) I resolve to get outside every day. Exercise is a big part of my routine, and I enjoy going to the gym and having a really decent sweat sesh. But there’s something really refreshing and fortifying being outside and feeling the sun or the wind on your face. I’ve especially noticed it, being cooped inside so much. When I go for a bike ride, or just a walk around the block... it doesn’t matter if it’s beautiful and sunny or crappy and rainy. Going outside resets you a bit.  3) The pandemic has been really good at narrowing my focus in life to things that matter to me. I’ve spent a lot of time catching up with mates and talking to my family members on Skype and Zoom. On a couple of occasions, I’ve sat down and had a really decent, intense 3 hour conversation with a close friend overseas. We’ve not just caught up. We’ve properly talked. We’ve connected. I resolve that as life goes back to normal, I’m going to make sure I carve out time for proper, nourishing, meaningful conversations with the people I love. Fri, 08 May 2020 21:59:55 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-how-will-we-pay-for-covid-19/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-how-will-we-pay-for-covid-19/ Who’s going to pay it back?  Have you asked yourself that question at any point in the last few weeks, as governments around the World scramble to respond to covid-19? All of these billions of dollars being borrowed and sprayed, these wage subsidies and tax breaks. Who’s going to foot the bill? Who’s going to shell out? Who’s going to be the last one in line at the front desk when the restaurant closes for the night? Don’t get me wrong. New Zealand is in a pretty good position relative to most other countries. We had low debt going into this, and with a bit of luck, we’ll get back to a higher level of economic activity faster than most countries. Tell you what, never have I felt so pleased to wake up to the sound of an angle-grinder as I did at 8am on Tuesday morning. And of course I’m not advocating for the government to let our economy go to ruin. The wage subsidy has been pretty effective in supporting Kiwi businesses with at least part of their balance sheets up until this point. But already the cost of that is in the double-figure billions. And depending on what Grant Robertson decides with his budget and the ongoing support and stimulus in the coming months and years, we could be looking at doubling our sovereign debt as a percentage of GDP. Tens of billions of dollars.  So who pays? Because the way we’re set up at the moment, even before the coronavirus we had some massive expenses in the works: ticking fiscal timebombs waiting to go boom. Superannuation costs, with the rules as they currently stand, are going to balloon in the next decade or two with a surge of Kiwis hiiting retirement age. Then climate change: upfront costs of adapting to life and protecting our assets and infrastructure in a steadily warming world are going to be astronomical.  I’m not going to make this an us-versus-them thing, and throw around generational blame. We all have skin in the game. But honestly, until this point, politicians of all stripes have pretty much kicked these issues down the road. They’ve jabbed their fingers in their ears and agreed that it’s for a different government in years to come to have to sort out. We have to extend our perspective and our concerns beyond just the here and now. At some point, for a start, there are surely going to have to be changes to our tax base. I’m not saying we should just increase income tax or that changes need to be made overnight. But we have to ask if our tax base is suitable for the debt we have to service. Maybe we have to reconsider our superannuation rules and policies such as fees free university. I don’t worry for my future. But I do worry for my friends, and other people of my generation and the ones thereafter. I worry for my nephew. Maybe you worry for your children or your grandkids. You should. The sooner the health crisis is over, the better. But then there has to be a reckoning. Will we leave this bill to our kids, alone? Or are we truly all in this together? LISTEN TO AUDIO ABOVE Fri, 01 May 2020 22:11:45 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-its-time-to-start-spending-and-make-it-local/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-its-time-to-start-spending-and-make-it-local/ A friend of mine lost his job yesterday. He’d probably been expecting it. He knew things weren’t looking great, but still,  the official notice was a tough read. His employer is proposing to disestablish his position as a result of covid-19. It’s out for consultation but I think we all know how these things work, especially right now. Truth be told, I don’t think we’ve seen anything like the full weight of this impact just yet. Grant Robertson confirmed yesterday that thousands more people have applied for the jobseeker benefit in the last few weeks. Iconic businesses such as the Shotover Jet are closing shop for who knows how long. Treasury’s forecasts, in a BEST CASE scenario, still have unemployment reaching almost nine percent. If history is anything to go by, it could be double that for Māori. I think too, many businesses are just now really starting to feel the bite. Smaller businesses might had some revenue trickling in up until now. Work that was done in the first part of March has been paid which kept things ticking over for a bit. But nothing’s been done in April. The wage subsidy might cover some outgoings but many will be facing big shortfalls. It all makes for a really weird setting. On the one hand, total lockdown might be over. We’re all feeling pretty pleased about moving out of level four. There’s a sense of relief, a sense that we are progressing, that our collective efforts over the last month or so have paid off. It feels like things are getting better. But actually, at the same time as the restrictions on our movement and our social interactions are reduced, the economic blow of covid-19 is going to bite harder and harder. For all of us, it means a broadening of responsibilities. Up to this point, our main focus has been maintaining the integrity of our respective bubbles, physical distancing. But as we enter this next phase there are two other ways for us to contribute to the coronavirus fight back. First is to make sure we support those doing it the toughest right now. Food banks have seen as astonishing increase in demand. Many are recording their busiest days ever. If you can help the Salvation Army, Budgeting Service, or City Mission, do it. And if you’re one of the relative lucky ones, if you’ve got a bit of financial security, if you’ve got a job… PLEASE… spend some money. Support whatever local businesses that are allowed to open under level 3. Buy some coffees or takeaways. Support a business that has set up contactless trading. We’ve got into the habit of not spending much money these last few weeks. The only thing on my credit card statement is a few transactions at the supermarket. There are many New Zealanders who won’t be fortunate enough to have the option to spend up for a while to come. But for those of us who can, now is the time to open your wallet, and dig deep. Over the last month, doing our bit has saved Kiwi lives. In the months to come, doing our bit will mean saving Kiwi livelihoods. Fri, 24 Apr 2020 23:27:48 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-three-lessons-from-the-covid-19-lockdown/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-three-lessons-from-the-covid-19-lockdown/ In an absolute best case scenario, this will be the last weekend any of us ever spend at Alert Level Four. This could prove to be the last Saturday in which you wake up and you can’t go for a bracing early-morning swim. It may be the last Saturday for which you can’t order a Bacon and Egg McMuffin for breakfast. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few days and months. So much is uncertain in our lives. There’s a lot of pain still to come. But while we’re here in Level Four, while we are all adjusted to the day-to-day realities of the most restricted life many of us will live, I want to reflect on some of the lessons from Covid-19. The first is this: Covid-19 has been a lesson in what really matters. Isn’t it interesting what happens to our World when we’re forced to decide overnight who qualifies as an “essential” worker? It’s not the corporate bigwigs who keep us alive. It’s not the suits. It’s the people who stock supermarket shelves for nineteen or twenty bucks an hour. The people who collect our rubbish, and pick our veggies. The people behind the counter at the petrol station. The nurses who tend our sick. A lot of those people aren’t paid much but we’d be totally stuffed without them.  And outside of the economy, outside of day-to-day subsistence, hasn’t lockdown sharpened your mind as to the people in your life who really matter? I really miss my family. I really miss my friends. And maybe it’s only through forced isolation, knowing I can’t see them, that I stop and actually consider how much I love them.  The second lesson from Covid-19 is the value of community. That sounds super-cheesy, I know. But so much of our World today is geared towards individualism: Be your own person. Stand out from the crowd. Do it your way. Social Media is the nexus of Generation Self-Obsessed: Look, World! Here’s what’s happening with ME!  But without a massive collective effort right now, without everyone giving something, we’d be in far greater trouble. Those of us who statistically would probably be just fine with coronavirus are following all the preventative measures to protect those who wouldn’t. We all rely on each other.  The final lesson is the value of science. Regardless of when our leaders decide to move us out of lockdown, New Zealand has clearly benefited by heeding the advice of scientific experts, here and abroad. These are people with decades of experience and expertise applying it to help to save hundreds or thousands of lives. Sure, we’ve benefited from geographic isolation. But scientists in the United States and Europe also warned of potential catastrophe weeks or months before their leaders took any meaningful action. Here in New Zealand, we watched disaster unfold and as we did, we listened to experts. The likes of Ashley Bloomfield, Siouxsie Wiles, Michael Baker and Ayesha Verrall have become some of the most-trusted and respected people in our country. At its most basic level, without science we might not be washing our hands, self-isolating, or contact-tracing... any of those things we all take for granted as sensible scientifically-informed advice which is saving lives. But compare the way we all keenly lap up the scientific advice today... with the scepticism or disdain with which climate science has been treated. Both of these things, covid-19 and climate change, threaten millions of human lives and economic devastation. Faced with one threat, we’ve shut down our economy overnight. With the other... we’ve largely put our fingers in our ears. Think about that when we come out of all of this. By acting on science this time, we’ve saved lives. By continuing to ignore it elsewhere, we’re setting ourselves up for an almighty fall. Fri, 17 Apr 2020 23:47:05 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-should-we-delay-the-election/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-should-we-delay-the-election/ Should we push back the election? It’s not surprising that both Winston Peters and Paula Bennett think we should push it back a few months. They obviously think a later election would be to their advantage. Covid-19 is so big, there’s very little space for anything else in the day-to-day news coverage at the moment. By having the election in November, a bit more water will have passed under the bridge.But even with Covid-19, and all of the fallout we’ll have to deal with in the next while, is five months not enough time to make a pitch to New Zealand voters? That’s how long we’ll have between Monday week, when cabinet will decide whether to move us off Level Four, and the scheduled date for our general election. Five months. Just think about what you were doing six weeks ago at the start of March; a lot can happen in five months.And actually regardless of whether it’s September or November, National will find themselves with a strong pitch off the back of this. Jacinda Ardern and this government have been at their very strongest in a crisis. The Prime Minister is a uniquely gifted communicator. She’s calm, she’s reassuring, she’s empathetic. At the moment, she’s leaning heavily on one of her best-performing ministers – Grant Robertson – and the expertise of competent, well-respected, public servants. Of course the government has made a few mistakes here and there but just look at the polling this week: a vast majority of New Zealanders regardless of their political stripes, think the government is doing a good job with the coronavirus response thus far. If you think back to last year, it wasn’t all that dissimilar in the immediate aftermath of March 15th. Again, that calm, empathetic public messaging from Jacinda Ardern, and her poll numbers surged. Again, after the eruption on Whakaari White Island. I’m not suggesting the government hopes for crises, but clearly during crises the Prime Minister excels. Outside of a crisis though, it’s a different story. When life’s a bit more normal, this government has struggled. Up until now, it’s done a poor job of efficiently progressing its agenda. Housing, child poverty, mental health, infrastructure, climate change, immigration... it hasn’t yet delivered on the big promises of Labour’s campaign.And there lies National’s opportunity. Apart from a dumb speech at the beginning of all of this when Simon Bridges completely misread the mood of the nation, I think the opposition has done pretty well throughout the covid-19 response. They haven’t been overly critical or petty. They’ve been starved of airtime and headlines but they’ve done a pretty good job of scrutinising the response.And when we’re out of lockdown and out of the immediate crisis, when we’re dealing with the realities of a significant recession, bet your bottom dollar National will go hard. The sell is obvious: National will say they guided New Zealand’s economy back to health after the Global Financial Crisis. And regardless of whether the election is in September or November, they’ll say they’re more efficient at getting runs on the board, projects in the can, at delivering on their promises. And even though most of us really value a calm, empathetic, reassuring communicator leading in the heat of a crisis, when life goes back to normal, when we’re out of lockdown but businesses are still going bust, some Kiwis will value different qualities.Finally then, where does this leave New Zealand First? It’s going to be much harder for them to find positives from Covid-19. Winston Peters has been working, sure, but hasn’t been a face of the response. In the coming months it might take some extreme moves to win back oxygen and attention.Keeping the election in September is in Labour’s interests. But it hurts their coalition partner much more than it hurts National. September or November, whatever the Prime Minister decides might give us an insight about whether she wants another three years with Winston, or whether she’ll risk it and try and go without him.LISTEN TO AUDIO ABOVE Fri, 10 Apr 2020 22:12:06 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-health-ministers-outing-proves-rules-arent-clear/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-health-ministers-outing-proves-rules-arent-clear/ When I saw the Health Minister David Clark had been for a mountainbike ride, I knew immediately he’d be in trouble. That’s dumb, I thought, not a good look.  But I’ll be honest with you. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure exactly what he’d be in trouble FOR. Was he in trouble for riding a bike on a track which, yes, is in a mountainbike park, but is classified as being ‘easy’ terrain? A track that is more-or-less an undulating dirt path which kids and families are comfortable riding along? Was that the problem? That he might fall and hurt himself? Because I can tell you right now, there are thousands of cyclists riding every day in New Zealand right now. Some of them ride fast. Some of them ride down hills. There must be hundreds every day, including me, who do a few laps up and down Maungawhau Mt Eden. Is that really any less risky? So, was the Minister of Health in trouble for riding in a Mountainbike Park? Or was he in trouble for driving a couple of kilometres to the park in the first place? You see, I honestly thought the driving was as much of a problem as the path and the ride. From listening to police advice, I understood that we are allowed to exercise, so long as we stay within our local area. We can only drive to a place to exercise if we stay local. But what’s local? Surely, I thought, if the bike park isn’t close enough to his home for the minister to bike to in the first place, instead of taking his sign-written van, surely that’s NOT a local area!’ I thought. After all, if he wanted to exercise, why not ride his bike to the park? It’s like taking the elevator to the gym. So. Was David Clark in trouble for driving to exercise? Was he in trouble for riding on a mountainbike path?Or maybe there was a third option. Maybe David Clark was in trouble for both of these things? These are fiddly little details and in the scheme of things this is hardly the most pressing issue we all face at the moment. Except that all of us are considering these rules every day. And when it comes to rules and communication on where we are and aren’t allowed to go, I think the mountain biking minister speaks to a bit of confusion. For the most part, especially compared to the likes of Australia and the United States, the messaging from our health officials and government has been superlative. Crisp and clear. But with this exercise thing, it’s been a little fuzzy. They haven’t come out and simply said ‘The only time you can drive is to the supermarket or to access essential services.’ No. Instead all of us are being asked to use our better judgement at the moment. We’re all being asked to use common sense. And when we can’t trust the judgement of the Minister of Health of all people, well, it makes me a bit anxious about the just how effective this lockdown will be. In the coming days we should get a better sense of exactly how well Alert Level Four is working in reducing our coronavirus count. I just hope that if looks to be working well, and the data shows a steady reduction in cases, we don’t get too relaxed, too early. The more conservatively we behave, the more we err on the side of ‘it’s-probably-NOT-a-good-idea,’ the better our chances of ending this sooner rather than later.LISTEN TO AUDIO ABOVE  Fri, 03 Apr 2020 21:13:22 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-im-grateful-for-living-in-a-connected-world/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-im-grateful-for-living-in-a-connected-world/ One day when my father was about two years old, a strange man walked through the front door of his house. This was Portsmouth, England. 1954. The U.K was still recovering from the Second World War. The rationing of meat and sugar was only just coming to an end. My father, the little boy, didn’t recognise the man in his Naval unifrom. He’d never seen the man before, so, like a lot of little boys, you could forgive him for being a bit shy. A bit scared. ‘John,’ my Grandma would have gently coaxed him. ‘John, this is your father.’ My Grandad had returned from fighting in the Korean War to his wife and a son he was meeting for the first time. I found myself thinking about that moment a few nights ago. That was one of the defining period’s of my father and my grandparents’ lives. My Grandad was serving his country, at war in the distant Pacific. My Grandma was at home in England with a baby. She must have felt very alone.  Of course, in those days, there wasn’t much you could do but send letters to each other. Maybe Grandma sent a photo or two. There was no such thing as phoning home for a yarn. Grandad’s messages would have passed through a military sensor to make sure he wasn’t sharing sensitive information. Who knows how long it took for he and Grandma to get their messages to each other. But they had no choice. Everyone knew the deal. That’s how it was in those days. In one sense, it’s globalisation that has got us in this position. The coronavirus has spread wide and fast because people today move around the World with incredible ease. But when I think about my grandparents and the generations just a few decades before me, their experiences and hardships, I feel so grateful for that connectivity.  This week I’ve video-called friends quarantining in Cambridge, in the U.K. I’ve connected with an mate in Copenhagen. I’ve shared selfies with an old school chum who’s running a coronavirus clinic in Australia, me in shorts and a T-shirt on the couch. He, in gloves, a mask protective goggles, and a medical gown. I’ve shared funny videos with my friend Chloe in Toronto. I’ve had a cup of tea over Skype with Lee and Lindsay in New York and talked politics with a mate hunkering down by the border of Israel and Lebanon. I’ve had two different Skypes with my Granny in Adelaide. I’ve talked to my parents in Golden Bay most days and listened to my Dad jamming on his new guitar. I’ve spoken with each of my three siblings, and on a video call I’ve heard my nephew, Ren, say my name for the first time. ‘Jack’ We can’t touch, sure. We can’t hug, or high five or shake hands. But we have never been more connected.  So, if like me, you’re missing people, be grateful for the things we sometimes take for granted. This isn’t a time to feel isolated. This isn’t a time to feel lonely. This is a time to do what I did several times this week. Pick up the phone and call Grandad.   Fri, 27 Mar 2020 23:01:12 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-were-all-in-this-together/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-were-all-in-this-together/ I miss the human touch. I know that’s maybe a weird thing to say. After all, I live alone. I don’t have kids. And I’m not the world’s most touchy-feely person at the best of times. So I’m hardly doing a whole lot of touching. But yeah. I suppose you only realise how much you take something for granted, when you can’t do it. Do you ever do that when you have pain? A sprained ankle? A crook in your back? You promise yourself... when I’m fit and healthy and I’m back going about my normal day-to-day life, I won’t take that feeling for granted. But of course you do. We all do. It’s human nature.  I think for the most part, the authorities here are doing a really good job. There are elements of the punditry, colleagues of mine, who just weeks ago were saying this whole coronavirus thing was overblown.They're now screaming that the government should have acted sooner or restrictions should be harsher. I’m not a public health expert, but I do think we were a bit lax at the airport. For example, the fact you had people who were arriving from countries with significant outbreaks, lining up next to people who’d just arrived from countries with no outbreaks.. didn’t make a lot of sense. Obviously the authorities agreed. The information and checking around self-isolation was obviously a bit lax too, and in the last couple of days the government has really tightened up the situation at arrivals. Ashley Bloomfeld has been an excellent communicator. Regardless of your politics, you would have to agree the Prime Minister is at her best as the public face of a crisis response.  At work, we’re doing a big split. The newsroom is dividing – there’s a red team and a blue team. The teams will take turns to work out of the newsroom and work at home. They’ll never cross over in the office. But for the theory to work in practice, you can’t do anything socially with your colleagues either. Physically, you can never cross paths. So, at the end of the day yesterday, we said goodbye to each other. We don’t know when we’ll all be back as one newsroom. People who I sit next to five days a week are on the opposite team. Of course the social distancing protocols meant we couldn’t even give each other a hug goodbye. I felt a bit sad. I’m a bit worried about my grandparents. Well, more worried than they seem, anyway. I called Grandad a couple of days ago and asked if he was stressed out by everything. ‘Oh No’ he said, in his thick midlands accent. ‘I just walk the dog.’ The phone has been really nice, actually. And I don’t mean for texting or tweeting or checking Facebook. In the last week, every night I’ve sat down and had a couple of good conversations with friends and family. That’s one of the few blessings of this whole mess. Yes, we’re isolated in a physical sense. It’s feasible we could be even more so in the days and weeks ahead. But we’re all in this together. Isolated yes, but there is no one who isn’t affected. From Grandad in Ashburton I’ve made calls to the Middle East, to New York, to home in Golden Bay. Email is well and good. WhatsApp messaging is a godsend. But I read a piece in the New Yorker the other day... a guide to life in self-isolation. And it noted there’s something especially nourishing about the voice of a loved one at the end of the line.   In the next few weeks, I’m going to be deliberate in dealing with the anxiety that comes with the unknown. I’ll listen to music. Read. Exercise. Eat lots of veges. Tend my little garden. Try not to drink too much. Turn off the news and the flashing push alerts for a few hours every day. I’ll wash my hands every time I pass a sink. I’ll keep phoning my friends and family. I’ll keep laughing. I will take solace in knowing that as stressful as this moment is for all of us. This too shall pass.LISTEN TO AUDIO ABOVE  Fri, 20 Mar 2020 21:46:46 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-plenty-to-learn-from-jeanette-fitzsimons/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-plenty-to-learn-from-jeanette-fitzsimons/ When I was 12 years old, my school arranged for our local MPs to each visit our class. I remember David Carter coming and speaking to us. I remember Ruth Dyson doing the same thing. And last but not least, Rod Donald came and spoke to Room 22 at St Martins School.  I can’t tell you what any of them said. I don’t know if I could have distinguished at that time what each of them stood for, but I remember looking out the window at the end of the class and seeing Rod Donald push off down the street on his bike, and thinking wow! A bike? That man must really care about conservation. A couple of years later, I was doing my paper round, and I bumped into Jeanette Fitzsimons. I recognised her from the news. I knew she was a Green MP. But she was lost and she asked me how to get to the closest bus stop. Wow! I thought. The bus? She must really care about conservation. In the US, they reckon politicians become Senators for one of two reasons. Number one: principle. They genuinely want to affect change. They want to better the lives of their constituents. Number Two, the second reason: Power. They want to be President. That might be a little crude and I’m sure there’s some grey between that black and white, but I’ve always admired politicians who are clearly in politics for the right reasons. People who are drawn to politics on the strength of their convictions. They don’t realistically expect to be President or Prime Minister. They’re not drawn to the baubles of office. The fancy-schmancy dinners, the office full of staff, the chauffeur-driven ministerial limosines. None of that. They’re in it because they genuinely believe in the cause. Now I should point out, no political party or philosophy has a monopoly on conviction. People on the left, the right, and the centre - if those definitions exist anymore - have all dedicated themselves to political work and service on the basis of authetically-held conviction. And you would have to say, regardless of your opinion on the Green Party, that all of all us, at least to some extent, consider conservation and environmentalism a worthy and important cause. Sure we might disagree on specific policies and just how far we should go, but I would hope no reasonable person wants to destroy the Earth. And so, when I think of Jeanette Fitzsimons, that’s it. I think of someone who clearly was in politics for the right reasons. Someone who didn’t seek fame or power but genuinely thought they could make the world a better place. Whether or not you agreed with her or not, she lived what she preached. In an individualistic age, she believed in the greater good. And in politics, a world that exposes hypocrites, there’s a lot to be said for integrity. Fri, 06 Mar 2020 21:46:54 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-being-prepared-for-an-emergency/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-being-prepared-for-an-emergency/ It now seems so stupid, but when I was a kid, everyone in my family used to tease my Mum about the emergency supplies she kept at our house. There was water, canned food, some other bits and pieces that would perish too quickly, and I remember we’d wind her up about stocking for the end of the World. What do you know that we don’t, Mum? Then the earthquake happened. My point is, yes, it is good to be prepared. I keep a bit of water at home, some torches, a few emergency supplies. But this morning, as supermarkets are apparently overwhelmed by people stressed out about Covid-19 Coronavirus, and many of us feel really stressed out about a looming threat we can’t see, I think it’s a good opportunity for us all to strike a balance between prudence and perspective. What I mean by that? Well, for a start… don’t forget, the health authorities have been expecting covid-19 to show up in New Zealand. They all said that their models showed it was only a matter of time before a person here tested positive. Every day the virus has been delayed has given our public health authorities another day to organise. And say what you will, they’re not perfect, but compared to some of the countries where this has really blown out of control, I think we can all reasonably have a bit more faith in the competence of our officialdom. We can also be grateful to the person who has tested positive for the responsible way in which we understand they’ve behaved over the last few days. They arrived home from a country where Covd-19 has quickly spread in the last few days. They wore a mask on the flight. They travelled home in a private car. They felt unwell. They didn’t go straight to the supermarket or a really crowded space and cough all over everyone. No, they called Healthline. On the advice they had, they travelled to the emergency room, wearing a mask, and they were placed in a negative air pressure room in isolation. Health authorities have the details of everyone they’ve been in contact with and everyone on the flight. Now, all that being said… I get it. I understand why many of us still feel really anxious. This is clearly a really serious viral outbreak and no one can say with absolute surety just how bad it’s going to get. It looks very likely covid-19 will continue to spread around the World. I dare say the person here who tested positive won’t be the only one. And even though the vast majority of people who test positive for the virus only end up getting a cold, about three thousand people around the World have died.   But if you’re feeling anxious, try and maintain some perspective. Channel your energy into prudence. Wash your hands thoroughly. Cough into your elbow. And don’t ever tease your mum for having a few emergency supplies. Fri, 28 Feb 2020 20:47:33 Z /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-travelling-through-colombia/ /on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/opinion/jack-tame-travelling-through-colombia/ This time last week, I was sitting on a beanbag at a foreign language exchange in Medellin, Colombia. The place was full of young people joking and laughing, often alternating in their conversations between Spanish and English, so the extranjeros, the foreigners, would get a chance to practice their Spanish and then the native Spanish speakers would get a chance to practice their English. It was a warm Friday night. Maybe 25 degrees. Every night’s a warm night in Medellin – they call it the City of Eternal Spring. And so I was surprised to see a young man walk through the front door, wearing a stripey woollen sweater. He had braces and a big smile, and he looked really young. I shook his hand and introduced myself. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked. Jesus. 19 years old. A kid from across the border in Venezuela who knew almost no English whatsoever. How long have you been in Colombia? I asked. 2 weeks he told me. Did you family come too? No. All of my family are still in Venezuela, he told me. ‘The journey was very hard but I am very happy to be here.’ By some estimates, there are as many as 2 million Venezuelans who’ve fled their country’s violence and disastrous economy for life in Colombia. Four thousand cross the border people a day. Think about that. The population of Colombia is fifty million. It’s ten times New Zealand. Imagine if we had four hundred refugees arriving here every day. Venezuelans speak Spanish, but still, an influx like that causes some problems. There are Colombians who are deeply unhappy with the number of Venezuelans in their country. But many also recognise that Venezuela took in huge numbers of Colombians when their shoe was on the other foot during the civil wars and drug cartel violence of the last thirty years. In a way, Colombia is returning the favour. Some Venezuelans are just trying to make the best of it. I ate lunch every day at a small restaurant run by two Venezuelan women who’d fled their homes. It was a classic hole in the wall and the menu of the day changed constantly. Chicken soup, fish in coconut cream, beef tongue in salsa. Rice. Beans. Maybe a bit of flirting with the extranjeros on the side. I went Salsa dancing with two infectiously funny Venezuelan sisters. I can tell you that Para sudar como un cerdo, To sweat like a pig. The older sister has a job and speaks English. She supports her younger sister, who’s waiting on papers to legally work. Venezuela has a dazzling coastline, masses of natural resources, and the largest confirmed oil reserves in the World. Those young women told me they don’t see any future back home. Anyway, I wanted to tell you this, not to go into a big sob story or anything like that. But because it’s these interactions, these friendships, that make the experience of travelling so special for me. I’m very fortunate to have enjoyed an extended break this year. I had a week in India, and then a really special time travelling with my brother in Pakistan for a few weeks. Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Karachi. I took a good decent hike along the Bosphorous in Istanbul. Then I parked up Medellin, Colombia, one of my favourite cities anywhere, to study Spanish full time for the best part of a month. You might associate Medellin as the home of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, but actually the city is even more remarkable for its astonishing transformation. After listening to my Colombian friend describe the bloody reality of Medellin’s entrenched urban warfare. Life in a city where gangs and paramilitaries gunned each other down for a few yards of territory. Violence that had families sleeping on the floor every night. Violence that only a few years ago made her home the most dangerous city in the World. My friend asked about life in New Zealand. ‘Tienen muchos ovejas, si?’ ‘You got a lot of sheep, right?’ She asked. I felt almost embarrassed to answer.  Last week when our language exchange wrapped, I shared a cab back across Medellin with some friends. Jesus was sitting in the back. I was packing to fly home, and so I gave him my Medellin metro card with a few bucks worth of public transport credit on it. It was nothing, but he thanked me several times, earnestly.  You learn so much in an interaction like that. As much about Latin America, Venezuela or Colombia, as you do about New Zealand. Why? Well there’s honestly not much difference between me and Jesus. A few years and a woollen sweatshirt. Except I can see my family when I want. I don’t have to worry about where my next meals comes from. The more I travel, the more I feel I’ve hit the jackpot in the great lottery of life. Fri, 14 Feb 2020 21:47:56 Z