Shop until you drop


A new shopping mall opened in Mount Wellington in Auckland today. Called Sylvia Park today's opening is the first phase of a projected 8.4 hectare development. Among stores opening today was the latest "The Warehouse" branch, which is now diversifying into food, pharmaceuticals and wine and spirits. Three hundred cut price TVs went within an hour of the store opening. The numbers crowding to visit the shopping mall clogged up the car parks, the approach roads and even the motorway from Auckland, which developed a 3 km tailback.

An item on John Campbells TV3 programme tonight touched on this new facility for Aucklanders. Like every mall around the world, apparently, it is designed according to certain well established principles. First, there is a kind of axis along the site, with the major shops at each end. This ensures that the consumers have to walk by all the other shops to get from one major shop to the other. The big shops pay relatively less rent, they attract the shoppers, the smaller shops with the passing traffic, pay proportionately much more rent. When you shop in a mall, it isn't unusual to feel some slight confusion as to where you are - this again is deliberate, it induces a feeling of detachment, in which you stay longer and spend more. There are no clocks anywhere, so you don't realise how long you've been there. The escalators always move slowly, so you have longer to look around at the shop fronts. Malls almost always are completely enclosed, some natural light might make it through a glass roof, but generally the mall is lighted brightly and artificially, again this makes it harder to judge the passage of time and makes the shops fronts and the displays more attractive.

The plan is to develop this mall to the biggest in New Zealand, covering the equivalent of 30 football pitches. It aims to attract 10,000,000 shoppers per year. Major efforts are being made attract men, and eventually there will be 3,100 car parks. It sounds appalling. Auckland, you are welcome to it. I pray nothing like this will ever make its way south of the Bombay hills. For another slant on this project, check out the union perspective.

I will say this now. I HATE SHOPPING MALLS. I always have. One of the very best things about living in Wellington is that there are no shopping malls. You actually have to go to a proper shop in a proper street, with real sun, or rain or wind, with the traffic (not so nice) but the passers-by, the buildings, the buskers, the cyclists and the REALITY. Malls are claustrophobic, plastic, artificial and boring - the same shops, the same goods, the same crowds and come with the same overwhelming feeling of empathy with battery hens.

I find it difficult to believe that investors still think they are likely to make money from huge shopping malls stuck miles away from their customer base. According to today's New Zealand Herald there are 1,500 car parking spaces. Every one was filled throughout yesterday - how many tens of thousands of litres of petrol did they consume? How many customers will make the same journey when petrol is $3.00 a litre or more? How will the "bargain" be seen when it costs more than the savings to make this journey? Like piranhas stripping a carcass, the consumers gobbled up three hundred $49.99 televisions in just 29.99 minutes. This shopping frenzy was described by one Warehouse employee, as a "terrifying stampede of people rushing at us". This shop had 28 checkouts, with queues 13 deep. Retailers are paying anything from $500 to $2,000 per square metre. The Warehouse, and other discount stores, are going to find their narrow margins narrowing to nothing when oil costs finally filter through to the transport costs in importing cheap goods from China, the Philippines and elsewhere. There will be no more bargains then. The New Zealand Herald asks whether this first day's experience was a PR disaster or proof the centre will be popular. I doubt that either apply.

The National Party opposition was quick to use this snarl-up as proof more needed to spent on roads. Brian Rudman in the Herald claims that during National's tenure of office in the nineties, Auckland was starved of road funding for almost all that decade. He also mentions Transit New Zealand's opposition to private developments along such new motorways; private developers just assume that access will be provided as though it were just another local road. The National Party wishes to strip Transit NZ (the funder of new roads and maintainer of the State Highway system) of this power, which is just what we all need, more motorways and bypasses with more shopping malls which will slow the road again, with more roads, and so on ad infinitum.





Australia, the Pacific's own bully boy.

This week ( 10th June 06) there have been two broadcasts in New Zealand concerning Norfolk Island, and the Australian Commonwealth government's aggressive determination to revoke the present arrangements whereby Norfolk Island retains a degree of autonomy in running its own affairs. One programme examining this issue was on the John Campbell Live on TV3, and the other on Nine to Noon on Radio 4 today.

Norfolk Island is a small isolated dot about 1500 kms off the Queensland Coast. It was first settled by the descendants of the Bounty mutineers in 1850, previously having served as a British penal colony. Most of the inhabitants, about two thousand, share one of eight surnames, dating back to this first settlement and because of this, the Norfolk Island phone directory is probably the world's only one that makes use of nicknames. According to most reports, about three quarters of the inhabitants are against this move. The problem is that Australia is not interested in the opinion of the inhabitants, but is going to change Norfolk Islander's status whether they like it or not.

This aggressive and antidemocratic posture comes from a country that one is beginning to like rather less. For instance, Australia's relationship with its aboriginal population generally seems to have been stuck in the nineteenth century. The state of aboriginal populations throughout the country are Australia's unacknowledged shame.

More recently the last few years have seen Australia behave like a bully to East Timor in regard to oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea. Australia's intransigence in regard to these assets has been inexcusable. East Timor, the world's newest nation, arising from the blood of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese after the invasion by Indonesia, a country unsupported by Australia for a generation, is one of the world's poorest nations. Australia is one of the world's richest. That one of the world's richest nation's should begrudge so much these assets, which could otherwise go a little way to supporting this new nation, was more than mean and petty, it was cruel. Unfortunately it appears to be in character. Chris Trotter, a New Zealand columnist, comments about this matter in an article examining the latest troubles in East Timor. He comments that it is quite possible that Australia has fomented some of these troubles, and this is supported in this article from the Interpress News Agency which states that Alkatiri, the elected Prime Minister, was wanting to pursue a more nationalist course in East Timor, and assert Timor's rights over its oil assets and other means of production and resources. Whilst there is no proof proffered in these assertions, they certainly sound quite feasible, and exactly what an Australian government beholden to the Bush regime would do. Andre Vitchek gives a sobering summary of Australia's relationship with East Timor here.

It is likely the determination to return Norfolk Island to its previous status as a part of the Australian state of New South Wales is due to the same considerations as Australia was dealing with in its "bargaining" with East Timor, i.e. possible large deposits of oil and gas. By changing the status of Norfolk Island now, Australia is pre-empting any possible arguments that the islanders might wish to make in regard to their interests in these assets. A report from the BBC "From our own correspondent" is available here and the radio programme can be listened to here. . The nominal excuse for renewing Australia's direct control of Norfolk Island is that the island's finances are in a dire state. But despite all the arguments about this matter, I have been unable to find out exactly what the financial state is. It would be nice to know. I doubt it is anything like as dire as it is being made out. The island survived as an outpost long before air travel and mass tourism. Additionally, on one programme, the Australian spokesman said "everything has changed since 9/11". Using 9/11 as an excuse for changing the status of Norfolk Island is so preposterous that this brings considerable doubt as to the motives of the Australians in this matter. For a Norfolk Islanders view visit the website of the Society of Pitcairn descendents, it provides some interesting history, which proves that nothing much changes.

If the present arrangements by which the Norfolk Islanders govern themselves came about by agreement with Canberra, then it is only just that any change in these arrangements should also be by agreement, otherwise we must assume that democracy is less important in 2006 than it was in 1979. Looking at Australia, the UK and the US, I have the horrible feeling that this is indeed the case.

And, I have a personal interest in this matter. There is another small island off the coast of Australia, that also used to be governed by New South Wales, before its status changed. It too has a strong sense of its own identity, and is going through some major financial problems. It too might be considered as something of a security risk post 9/11. So go to it, Norfolk Island, assert your independence, don't kowtow to the new bully on the block, because next on the list might be New Zealand.






Sex

Not really about sex, but it might get me a few more visitors from their surfing of the web! Yet another case in regard to an alleged sexual assault on a minor ends ignominiously. This time a teacher was arrested and charged by the police for raping and sexually violating a seven year old girl, in 1996, ten years ago. She claimed she had been raped twice, once in the school corridor, and once in a small office off the classroom, with no door. The trial lasted five days, but after hearing all the evidence, the judge removed the case from the jury and discharged the defendant, a now 46 year old teacher, allowing permanent name suppression. This is a rare move in any trial, and the judge said he had found it "implausible, then unlikely and then impossible" that offences had been committed. He stopped the trial because any conviction would be a miscarriage of justice and no conviction could be regarded as safe. (Dominion Post report)

A happy outcome for the teacher, who could have easily joined Peter Ellis and many others in the catalogue of wrongful convictions in New Zealand. (See my earlier posting from two years ago here). What particularly perturbed me, was firstly, that the case had got as far as a trial in the first instance, and secondly, the lack of publicity engendered by this trial and its most peculiar outcome. For a judge to throw out a case like this must be unprecedented in my twenty years in New Zealand, but it is difficult to know just how "rare" this is because the case has had no subsequent discussion whatsoever.

Whilst I am perturbed, I am not surprised that the prosecution had proceeded. There is a continuing and very serious flaw in the New Zealand justice system where the police are not only the investigators of crime, but the prosecutors. Whilst there is no doubt they will make use of legal expertise in deciding whether to prosecute or not, these sorts of instances make me seriously doubt the effectiveness or fairness of this legal advice. Another frequent issue in many prosecutions is the actual charge that people face. Very often, cases which are obviously manslaughter cases, are charged as murder. For instance, one or two years ago, I forget exactly how long now, a father was charged with murdering his two year old son who was severly incapacitated by a degenerative and incurable neurological condition. The whole case was a tragedy, but by charging this man with murder, the tragedy was compounded. In fact, the man was found not guilty. Was this the purpose of making the charge this severe? Knowing that no jury was likely to convict of murder, was it the police's way of making it likely he would get off? I don't know the answer to my own question of course, but this sort of thing happens quite frequently, yet I have never seen any discussion in the media about it.

The lack of media examination of this trial, why it got as far as it did, and what role should the police should play in the justice system, means that our justice system has escaped yet again its urgently needed examination and review. In my previous posting, I suggest that the police be deprived of their role as prosecutor. I would like to see the setting up of what I have called a "Courts Office", who would take on the function of investigating and prosecuting criminal offences. The "Courts Office" would have as their overriding function, "to find the truth of the matter", their mission statement as it were, noting here that the truth of the matter is not necessarily achieved by a succesful prosecution. They would employ the police as their agents, to investigate, to interview, to do the footwork. The Courts Office would be charged to ensure fairness. e.g. the defence should be given all necessary materials, the defence should be assisted in finding their own expert witnesses to refute other witnesses, if such are needed, and the Courts Office should not be pressured to prosecute if the evidence is flimsy or unsafe. Defence solicitors should be able to approach the Courts Office if they have problems with the way the police are working, or suspect bias in their investigation. The Courts Office should be able to hold the police accountable for the way their investigation is conducted.

If we fail to change our justice system, we will continue to see cases such as the rape case that was thrown out, the pack-rape case that I mention here at the end of the page and we will suffer many more miscarriages of justice, or at least the accused will. There are moves afoot to change our appeals system, with the possible establishment of a Criminal Cases Review Authority, (see my page on miscarriages of justice here) which certainly is needed, but how much better to get things right in the first instance. We can, and we should, do both.

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