The Pegasus Proclivity - On Recent Revelations Of Israeli International Espionage

By now, news of the Pegasus spying scandal has made its way across the world. And I think that, rather than the Western-oriented outcry which is currently also sweeping the media-sphere, taking a look at India's situation is quite instructive here in order to garner a more true picture of what's actually been going on.

In Indian politics at the moment, there is a bit of a scandal because it appears that the government used Pegasus to spy upon the lead Opposition leader.

That's .. well, that's understandable to cause outrage in a democracy (we had some degree of experience with this here in New Zealand - although then it was domestic intelligence rather than a foreign actor which was employed).

Except then it turned out that also under surveillance via Pegasus .. was the Indian Government's own IT Minister.

Now, I do not think - although I shall have to check - that it was his own government spying upon him.

It has also emerged that among Pegasus' list of users are ... quite an array of states, including Pakistan. Is Pakistan using the same service to spy upon the Indian Government as the Indian Government is using to spy on the Indian Opposition?

About the only thing we can say for sure is that the Israeli company which runs Pegasus - and which, contra to their assertions, appears to have had full access to all material collated through its service - has been working with quite an array of regimes, including regimes that are against other regimes it is also working with ... and is effectively spying upon everybody, and being paid to do so by those who are also, it would seem, its targets.

A truly masterful setup!

On The Manufactured Outrage Against The Government's Covid-19 Communications Budget

I must confess myself slightly perplexed at the "outrage" that the Government put $250,000 into working out how to do comms for its Covid-19 strategy. I mean, think about what was involved at every step - what New Zealanders were being asked to do.

You're asking 5 million people to lockdown, then social distance/mask up/scan/vaccinate .. all new behaviors at a national level and requiring outreach to quite a range of communities across the country. It's not just communicating what to do but why it's necessary.

And hopefully actually encouraging the vast majority of New Zealanders, regardless of political preference, to buy into that response and actively help carry it out.

I'm sure somebody out there is muttering about how "could have just stuck Jacinda in front of a camera to say any old thing and people'd have bought it" - but that's simply not the case.

I'm also not sure how far people think $250,000 really goes as far as political communication and education is concerned.

The referendums staged last year cost more than ten times that in terms of comms - and that was for something as simple as two ticks in boxes on one day.

The National Party alone spent more than $250k on just its party facebook advertising for the last Election (i.e. not including individual candidates buying ads on the platform, or anything else, anywhere else).

The inference opponents of the Government seem to have drawn on this issue is that spending money is held to be necessary in order to secure some form of unfair advantage in communication - because, of course, it's "unfair" if we co-ordinate a successful public health strategy...

They - still - feel 'crowded out' by the Government's ability to put out crisis messaging during a crisis which, quelle horror, actually gets listened to and acted upon by a reasonable swathe of the population (even people who don't then go on to vote for said govt in election).

Seymour has a slightly different tac on it, of course - that being the general opposition to taxpayer expenditure , but also loudly proclaiming that this 'proves' that the Government's Covid-19 response hasn't been based on science but rather on sentiment.

Now that's doubly curious - because first and foremost, interviews with leading scientists in the relevant fields in the Herald today had said scientists supporting using public money to craft and hone a decent public communication effort.

It's literally listening to science.

Yet second, Seymour has set up an implicit duality between "following the science" and "listening to New Zealanders". He is opposed, in a democracy, to the democratic will of the people guiding Governance. I'm not sure how else to put it.

Now, we're going to hear a LOT more of that kind of thing going forward, for the simple expedient that various portions of our right-wing commentariat have realized that what THEY want to do ("learn to live with it", "open the border", "roll the Government", "kill an orca", etc.) ...

... is pretty heavily unpopular with much of the electorate and won't fly democratically. Most of it won't fly scientifically, either; meaning that a comms strategy which listens to the electorate and is scientifically valid MUST be attacked as somehow neither of these things.

Instead, we get what's tantamount to declamations of the World's Most Cost-Efficient Brainwashing Campaign. A mere $250,000 to hoodwink (indeed, to congeal) the Team of Five Million - twenty cents per person in and of this fair land to establish the JacindaRaj.

Although what REALLY sticks in their collective craw is the deep and abiding knowledge that even were they to spend ten times that amount themselves, they'd be unable to beat the Government and its tangible track-record of both communicative and Covid-related success.

Hence - what we have here is an attempt to generate well more than a quarter million dollars in outrage ... for free - fact-free and otherwise. 

"There Is No Mental Health Funding In New Zealand"

Over the past few weeks we've seen a heightened level of scrutiny for the seeming non-spending of public money on an escalating public health crisis. Or, if you're the National Party, public health money instead being spent on financing the phantasms of organized crime rather than Mike King's Gumboot Friday initiative. Now, leaving aside the ins and outs of that escalating series of brouhahas (wherein it doesn't appear that anything untoward has happened with $2.75 million dollars going toward methamphetamine rehab, and Mike King doesn't appear to have applied for Ministry of Health funding for his project) ... we're nevertheless left with a pretty important question.

Namely, if everybody seemingly agrees that mental health in New Zealand is at a bit of a crisis point - why isn't the Government 'Doing Something' about it?

Does Mike King have a point when he proclaims to all and sundry that the Government is one of inaction here?

Part of the trouble is that what he's protesting about ... isn't really addressable via funding increases. They certainly help and are vitally necessary - but we're finding out right now that the Government can literally make available tens of millions of dollars in additional mental health funding ...

... yet only expand total capacity by a few beds across the entire country. This is something  that recently happened and they've been castigated for it.

Except that's ... the problem.

There's an old English saying "if you want a good longbowman, start with his grandfather". It's not quite so dire with this sector, but basically to get more mental health workers, it takes several years for people to go through training and qualify as such - particularly if they're becoming highly skilled and more specialized, which is what's needed for the high-needs stuff.

It also obviously takes awhile to build facilities that are fit for purpose; and while in the old days, the Before Times prior to 2020, the skilled labour input issue could be semi solved via importing people with the relevant qualifications and experience

... that's uh ... that's not really much of an option right now. In part because - and this is a broader medical sector problem - we're apparently not able to offer hugely competitive wages relative to cost of living for people who might want to come here (and also because, you know, the border's mostly closed to non-citizens/residents), and we're also losing workers to Australia etc.

The trouble is that the whole "we can't offer hugely competitive wages relative to cost of living" thing is that people only hear the former, and - justifiably - think the Government should pay nurses and mental health workers more. I agree.

Except unless cost of living across the board is somehow addressed, it doesn't actually make that much difference. It's simply much cheaper to live in many other countries, regardless of wages, so you're still further ahead.

Additionally ... private sector mental health support is basically either unaffordable / inaccessible for a lot of people to meaningfully engage with (seriously, counselling's like $80 an hour-long session and goes up from there, and I'm not sure how many people with pretty intractable problems manage to sort what ails them inside only a few of those; for actual more specialized psychology it's .. hundreds of dollars for even a half-hour) - so it's a bit difficult to pay them more, unless I suppose, we start rolling out broader subsidies so that many more Kiwis can basically go through the private system rather than the public one, part-paying themselves and part-paid-for by the taxpayer.

Which isn't a bad idea at all.

Except for the slight issue that it's already rather difficult to get expeditious appointments a lot of places precisely due to demand relative to supply, which leads us back to point number one.

All up, we're seeing the net impacts of a rather massive under-investment and under-support of the health sector in general , and mental health specifically , for ... many many years now; and because Labour indicated they were keen to doing something about it, they've come under a lot of pressure for not having sorted the entire thing out inside a single Parliamentary term.

It's totally understandable - and even, I'd argue, justifiable - to feel frustrated with the pace things have been going at.

However, I'm not entirely sure how much faster or more efficient things could actually really be - in the short term, anyway.

The simple, lamentable truth is that there is no Golden Bullet in this situation. If there were, I'd like to imagine that the Government would have fired it already.

Unfortunately, delays in this sphere can quite literally be lethal. However, I'd also have to question whether making a politicized hot-button issue out of an impossibility - that is to say, hammering the Government for something they don't necessarily have a huge degree of control over - is really the best use of anybody's time or mental-psychoemotive bandwidth.

I leave it for other, more informed minds to let us know what could be feasibly done in the short or even medium term to change this situation for the better. Whether there's some easy institutional fixes to expand accession and capacity, make it more affordable for people to get into what's already out there perhaps.

The point is - it's not such a black-and-white situation as people either want to believe, or have been lead to believe. We don't really do very well with communicating complex, nuanced issues through either our adversarial politics or our often 'gotcha-' oriented commentariat/media. And that can lead to - as in this case - a misimpression that the Government is being callous (rather than cautious, or constrained by circumstance). A perception most definitely fostered by those either genuinely passionate about attempting to prod and/or bull-whip them into doing more, more quickly (i.e. King), or some certain other voices who are basically just looking for any excuse to attempt to dent our Government. Potentially so that they can then have themselves a go of presiding over non-action instead.  

"They Are Not Us" - On The True Meaning Of An Impending Filmic Catastrophe

By now, many of will have seen the latest tranche of revelations from the leaked script for 'They Are Us'. They give new meaning to Marx's famous aphorism that history occurs the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. 

I shall not say that it gets worse following the opening massacre. But the escalating tide of malfeasance certainly becomes more perplexing in its scope and ambit. We can understand intellectually - even as we disagree with - the logic of putting a reconstruction of the tragedy onto celluloid. It is supposed to be a film about the response to that atrocity, after all. Although that does not make it compassionate or in good taste to include said scene - and nor does it justify the 'liberties' taken with the dying moments of cherished loved ones for tawdry dramatic impact. 

Yet it is these subsequent scenes of which we have heard today which serve to illustrate the true purpose of this film's production. 

In it, we hear Simon Bridges - or, rather, an actor playing a character called Simon Bridges, who appears to be but loosely based upon the real man - making statements like, and I quote "Come for our guns, you might get bullets." Or, in case you hadn't quite got the undercurrent - "If one of those worshippers had one of these they could have stopped this tragedy in seconds."

Now, these are not lines the real Simon Bridges - dare I say "our" Simon Bridges - has ever, to my knowledge, uttered. Quite the contrary in fact. National, despite some criticism from some of its more traditional support base, supported the changes in firearms legislation brought in following the massacre. One could fairly suggest, as journalist Henry Cooke did, that Bridges might almost have a case for defamation in terms of how inaccurately he is portrayed here. It's so bad that the lefty-liberal sector of Kiwi twitter is up in arms defending Simon Bridges. 

And nor is this calumny confined exclusively to the then-Leader of the Opposition. 

David Seymour appears to have been transmogrified into a Christian evangelical up in arms about Ardern on a religious basis. Now I don't deny that Seymour can come across as something of a fundamentalist - but he is a free market fundamentalist, not a Christian one. And nothing like the figure they're put in his place - who is so sufficiently divergent that at least the writers chose to rename him as 'Solomon Marsh'. 

Winston, meanwhile, has ... an array of appearances within the leaked material, including uttering a Maori proverb in Te Reo during the course of a crisis meeting. And while I absolutely don't disagree that Winston could certainly intone something resonant during a big event, having seen him do it with my own eyes ... it's always been European 'high culture' (or, in one case, admittedly, Star Wars) or something from the Old Testament. Presumably the writers felt that an older Maori politician in a key supporting role would make for an admirable opening for some sort of "Magical Native American" / "Noble Savage" style trope. 

Although that's partially because I'm not sure an American audience would know what to make of, nor how to handle Winston. He isn't Trump. He can occasionally sound like Trump. But he's the wrong colour (neither orange nor white) to actually be Trump in their own domestic political narrative even before we get to both his role in the story and his actual politics in years previous. 

But you see, that's the key to what's going on here - indeed, why this film has somehow been green-lit in the first place.

It's been billed as based on (recent) history - a retelling, perhaps, or an exploration. In truth, it is neither.

What it's actually based on is American politics. What it actually seeks to explore is their own domestic situation - or, rather, how some over there would assumedly quite like their domestic situation to perhaps (one day) be. 

We have become, collectively, a dramatic device. We, in this film at least, from the greatest to the least of us - We Are Not Us. We are just window-dressing, staging-props, a veneer of Kiwiness to be draped over more audience-familiar American set-pieces congealed and carved out precisely for that decidedly foreign (to us, to these events, at any rate) 'domestic' market. 

It is an appropriation and an exploitation wherein anywhere and everywhere and anything becomes nowt but a tawdry bowdlerized morality-play setting for the Americans' own domestic circumstances.

The only story they are interested in telling is their own one, endlessly re-garbed as from somewhere else.

Hence why we have Simon Bridges, who in real life supported the government's firearms law change, being reduced to a mouthpiece for NRA style memetic talking-points. Because there has to be a 'villain' - and instead of the actual criminal of March 15 in such a role, we have a pantomime political pastiche.

In truth, this is not a novel experience in some ways. Authors and dramatists have done this sort of thing for centuries. Shakespeare wrote plays notionally set in Ancient Rome yet treating issues much more immediately relevant to Elizabethan England - and featuring his actors anachronistically garbed in pantaloons and hearing clocktowers chime, to boot. Although I do not seek to compare those works to "They Are Us". The former are, unquestionably, works of great literature whatever their inaccuracies. The latter, shall only prove memorable precisely due to the egregiousness of its inaccuracies and outright foundational insensitivity to various of its notional subjects.

Effects which can have us all legitimately up in arms about how our country, our people, and our politics are being downright vandalized in their disfigurement for entertainment-educative purpose. Because the "Us" of "They Are Us", as we can quite clearly demonstrate, are not in fact "Us" at all.

Now this should not be read, of course, as an attempt to impute that the various political figures "portrayed" in this script are the most salient victims in all of this. They have unquestionably been unfairly mis-represented, in some cases to quite ludicrous extent. Yet that pales in scope to what the victims of March 15 have found themselves in for as the result of this clumsy co-option of their story in order for the Americans to tell themselves something about themselves with the availment of popcorn and a cinematic score. 

Should this film somehow still manage to go ahead, it shall prove to be not only a 'farce' but also a tragedy and a travesty into the bargain.