Clean, green, hmmm.

We went for a walk up the south branch of the Kowai river a couple of weeks ago.  For those who don't know this small river, it rises on the flanks of Maukatere-Mount Grey, splits into two branches and carves a route to the sea just north of Leithfield Beach village. It often dries up in the summer, sometimes going dry several kilometres inland.  Even when it is flowing, by the time it gets close to the sea it's so shallow and warm and turgid, much of its stoney bed is coated in various forms of algae. 

A couple of years ago there was a massive flood in the Kowai.  Very heavy rain in the foothills after a very wet autumn combined with the extensive clear felling of the exotic pine forest on the lower slopes of Maukatere.  The north branch of the Kowai rejoins the larger south branch a few hundred metres above the SH1 bridge at Leithfeld. By that point the flood was like a lahar  – a torrent of massive boulders, trees, shingle and mud that once it subsided, had raised the river bed by a metre. 

Up above what we call the top ford on Marshman's Road, the damage from that flood is still raw and impressive. At one point the waters would have reached almost 4 metres above the current bed. Huge deposits of yellow and blue clay litter the river bed and everywhere there's an ugly tangle of downed willows. The fallen leaves of the willows that line the banks clog the stream, which was still very low despite recent rain.  Because the area in the headwaters is a mass of gorse, the flood brought down masses of seed and the river bed is sprouting a forest of the vile stuff.

What struck us as we wandered along was there was no bird song. We get used to the background chatter of birds on our own property, but the Kowai was almost completely silent. 

As we walked along I could not help but feel anger and grief at what this sad little river once would have been.  

Maukatere was once covered in east coast beech forest.  The Kowai river would have risen amongst this forest with its complex understory of small trees, shrubs, flaxes, ferns, mosses and lichens, and wound through bush on its way to its estuary where it formed lagoons and wetlands rich in fish and bird life. Its waters, filtered through the bush, would have been pristine. 

Now we have a largely denuded estuary, choked with gravel and exotic tree debris. The river bed along almost its entire length is choked with gravel and mud and festooned with the scars of gravel extraction and the tracks of various off road vehicles which use it as a playground.  It is full of pine and willow debris from the flood, and gorse and broom and a host of other exotic weeds. Its banks are lined with wildling pine, willow and poplar hybrids with blackberry, old man's beard, ivy and convolvulus choking the life out of any native that tries to reestablish itself or which people have planted in attempts to restore a little of what once was there.

It's pretty ugly. 

And when you emerge on the edge of the commercial pine forest that was sold to Ngai Tahu as part of the Treaty of Waiting settlement (*) and has recently been clear felled, it goes beyond ugly. It looks like a war zone, which, in a manner of speaking, it is. The flanks of the bare mountain are scarred by the run off from those heavy rains 2 years ago. Deep gashes that were once bush lined gullies, will continue to pour clay and shingle and boulders down into the Kowai in heavy rain.   

Pinus radiata is not a pretty tree en masse and it pours its toxins into the soils beneath it to deter competitors. Not much likes to grow under densely planted pine trees, and when you plant vast forests of them you create an environment that is hostile to most plants and animals.  Gorse will cope though,  give it a bit of light and it will colonise, and as it seeds several times a year in NZ and its seed is almost indestructible, it spreads with astonishing speed and vigour. If you've ever burned gorse you'll know that it's also highly flammable. 

Someone once said to me when they were looking at my heap of composting horse and sheep poo that, given I grow native plants, I wouldn't need to use it because natives don't need such rich compost.  That struck me at the time as not just wrong factually but also a metaphor for a lot of what is wrong with NZ. 

That person never stopped to consider that the NZ bush is largely evergreen and foliage tends to be quite fibrous and slow to rot down; that it evolved in symbiosis with a vast array and number of birds, and that the deep litter on the forest floor would have been heavily fertilised by bird droppings which are full of readily accessible nitrogen, among other nutrients.  I wonder how much the vitality of our remaining bush is affected by the loss of its bird life.  

I look at Maukatere with its numerous scars and the tiny remnants of its once glorious beech forest and bush and think what a wonder it would be to regenerate it, to turn this symbol of all that is wrong about NZ into a beacon of hope for a greener and more sustainable, planet-friendly future. 

Over to you Ngai Tahu.  

*Ngai Tahu bought the Ashley Forest then a Crown asset, freehold at market value in 1989 as part of the deed of settlement, and granted Carter Holt Harvey long-term forestry rights which were assigned to Matariki in 2005.  Ngai Tahu owns the land and Rayonier manages the Ashley Forest for Matariki Forests which is part owned by Rayonier.  The Department of Conservation manages the top of the mountain, the tiny remnant of native bush at Lake Janet and the tracks which lead up to the lake and the summit. 

On the state of housing

Housing is fundamental to life on many different levels.  It's physical shelter and emotional security and it signals place in a status driven world.

It's accepted as a basic human right by all people of common sense and common decency. 

There are people who think it's okay for there to be homelessness; for people to be paying a massive proportion of their wages on rent or mortgage and to have to scrimp on essentials in order to pay the rent; for young children and old people to die because of their home is cold and damp and mouldy; for landlords to be in receipt of vast sums of public funds which could be invested in social housing; for social housing to be sold off and not be replaced, and for the remaining social housing to be allowed to run down and its occupants to be stigmatised. 

To explain why it is inevitable or even desirable that some people have more than they could ever need while others have to scrape by with barely enough, such people devise all manner of explanations and justifications – from the myth of market forces to the barren belief that people are the authors of their own misfortune – the bad choice mantra. 

All their ideological manoeuvring is an attempt to justify the unacceptable.

I spent a fair bit of my childhood in state housing with a period in a private rental. Being young I wasn't overly aware of the social stigma of the former but I was acutely aware of the stress on my family of the latter.

My parents lost their farm cottage when my share milker father had a bad tractor accident. My mother had a 3-year-child and was 8 months pregnant – with me.  The farm they worked on was very remote; by the time they got my father to hospital his wounds and compound fracture of his leg had infected. He got gas gangrene. They saved his life with penicillin and tried to save his leg with newly developed plastic surgery techniques, using skin from his rib cage. They controlled his pain with morphine. He spent over a year in hospital and came out with a  permanent disability and an addiction to morphine which he fed with various over the counter pharmaceutical drugs like codeine phosphate.  

While he was in hospital my mother lived with her parents until RAF friends of my father's got us housed in a transit camp at Wigram.  They were eventually housed in a small 2-bed 1940s state house in a North Canterbury township. By modern standards it was very basic;  it had no insulation, no reticulated water supply, it was heated by a small open fire in the living room and was clad in asbestos-cement sheets. It's still there – probably upgraded a bit and with reticulated water, town sewage and ceiling insulation but basically it's the same house. I don't know if it's still owned by the state or has been sold off. 

My parents got a 3% state mortgage and built their own small home in another township where my father had got a job. The house was a classic, all-wood, 3 bedroom place on a half acre section. It wasn't insulated, had polished wooden floors in the living room and lino every where else. It was heated by an open fire in the living room, a small incinerator in the kitchen and a diabolically dangerous kerosene heater in the hall. The bedrooms were icy in winter. We had a hot water bottle which heated a small patch in the middle of the bed and was then pushed down to keep feet warm. We had flannelette sheets if there were enough go round all 5 kids, and we wore flannelette pyjamas and woollen socks all winter. Getting up to go to the toilet not only meant braving the monsters that lived under the bed, it meant freezing your feet and butt off on the cold floors and in the bitterly cold toilet. 

But it was ours. Well, it was until the bone in my father's injured leg decided to die and he had to have the limb amputated. He lost his job, they had to sell the house and had no capital gain. We moved to Christchurch into a 2-bedroom plus sunroom private rental because there were no state houses available that were large enough. My older brother had to stay in North Canterbury boarding with another family because there was no room for him in the rental.  

Christchurch was much damper than where we had lived before. The windows in the house constantly ran with condensation.  My memories of it were an unremitting, penetrating cold dampness, my father trying to adjust to losing his leg, and my mother trying to cope with 5 kids and too little money.  Although electricity was cheap we could not afford to run electric heaters and the open fire could never be persuaded to give out any heat.  The electric water heater was useless and inadequate for a large family. 

She had to ask for help – harder than I knew for someone as proud as her. I  found her one day standing over the old washing machine which had broken down. She was sobbing.  When I asked her what was wrong, she screamed at me.  For about 5 minutes I copped all her exhaustion, frustration and humiliation.  I was 12 years old. Then she calmed down, and we hauled the load of sheets out of the machine into the stone tubs, rinsed them in cold water, hand wrung as much water out of them as cold hands allowed and hung them on the line to get as dry as they could on a damp Christchurch winter day. The thing was, we didn't have a linen cupboard full of spare bedding. 

We didn't have to suffer that for very long as we were eventually housed in a brand new 4 bedroom, brick state house in Aranui.  My older brother was able to come home and for the first time in his 16 years he had a bedroom to himself. It was not much more than a box room but it was his own. My mother and father probably felt the stigma of living in Aranui in a state house more than we did but there was no denying that the house was the best we had ever lived in.  

For my father in particular, owning his own home was a visceral thing. The eldest son of a farm labourer, he had spent all his childhood living in tied accommodation.  They managed to scrape together some money and bought a house with another state mortgage. A lovely 1920s villa which my father was as proud of as any man could be.  

He died in it. He was younger than I am now. It died too. Perfectly sound and saveable but in the east Christchurch red zone, it was bulldozed and dumped by a government too far up the backside of a venal insurance industry to be bothered to save it, and my mother was in need of the money tied up in it to pay an equally venal aged care industry when we were no longer able to care for her.

The 4 bed state house in Aranui died also. 

Our little story is worse than some but far better than most when viewed globally and historically.  Despite the crappy housing, we grew up healthy and we thrived – mostly it must be said due to the social welfare systems that are being undermined and starved of funding in the cause of the great neoliberal project of enriching the rich and impoverishing the rest.

The way I live now is at a vast remove from my childhood. I benefitted from free education, from that small window of opportunity that opened up for working class girls like me.  I lived and worked in the UK in relatively well paid jobs and with my partner managed to end up with a mortgage-free house in London. Selling that and moving here before the housing market took off meant we live in a house that is warm, dry, spacious and aesthetically pleasing, and we rent out the cottage we lived in while we were building. 

That cottage is the cheapest rental of its size and quality within 50 kms of Christchurch. That's because we would rather take a loss than be leeching landlords. 

That some people live in absolute luxury alongside others who live in garages or cars or under bridges or in shop doorways is not just unacceptable in a first world country. It divides, it destroys, it stifles and it wastes potential. 

It is the exemplification of all that is wrong with our society.   

Spinning the web

The current wave of outrage about Ken Livingstone’s defence of fellow UK Labour MP, Naz Shah, is a media beat up of epic proportions.  The target isn't Shah – who has even been forgiven by some in the rightwing press because she has confessed her sins and issued a ‘heartfelt’ apology –  the target is Jeremy Corbyn and the left of the Labour Party. The media and rightwing politicos are directing yet another artillery barrage at Livingstone in the hope that it will also wipe out Corbyn.

Livingstone is a hostage to fortune on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in part because he refuses to condemn as anti-Semitic (among other things) the often controversial and contradictory Muslim Cleric, Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradwi. In light of the high probability that he would be attacked and anything he said taken out of context and used against him in the court of popular opinion, Livingstone would have been wise to have kept out of the debate. Had he done so we might have been spared the awful sight and sound of John Mann charging up to loudly claim the moral high ground. 

Livingstone also stated in his media interviews that Hitler had once been supportive of a Zionist plan to relocate German Jews to Palestine. In the line with current standards of media accuracy and impartiality, he was promptly accused of saying Hitler had been a Zionist. 

The overall tone of the rightwing media response is exemplified by this comment from The Independent: "A Labour MP has stepped down as an aide to John McDonnell after it emerged that she once backed a plan to relocate the state of Israel to North America".  

Since when has an obviously ironic and amateurish meme on Facebook constituted a "plan"? 

Only a rightwing journo, nose down in the dirt, in hot pursuit of an anti-Corbyn story could produce such arrant nonsense.   

As for the foolish man who is Communications Director for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism who claimed that Shah's action was evidence of "gross and brazen anti-semitism" and an "expression of extreme prejudice towards Jewish people" –  may I suggest a regime of cold baths and deep breaths. 

I suspect there are few people who are more alert to, or critical of anti-Semitism than me. I know how deep and widespread its roots are and how easily it can spring back into destructive life even when people think it has been killed off. I've been vociferously anti-anti-Semitism for as long as I've been vociferously pro-Palestinian rights, i.e. for many decades. 

If I’d seen the meme – which was unearthed from Shah's Facebook page by right-wing blogger and Sun columnist Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) – I may not have shared it because it has spelling mistakes and I am a pedant, but it is clearly meant to be ironic. There is nothing in it to suggest it is anti-Jewish. It is a piece of anti-Israel and anti-American agitprop but however hard the right wing contorts itself, there is simply no basis for arguing that being critical of the actions of the Israeli state automatically constitutes anti-Semitism.  

Another charge against Shah is that she posted a link to an article which draws parallels between al Qaida and Zionism. I'm not sure if it was this one by Catherine Shakdam but if it was, it's worth reading. 

Right wing Zionism and right wing Islamism definitely have one thing in common, and that's a hatred of the political left. Israel and the US and their allies were totally opposed to and actively undermined the moderate leftwing Palestinian leadership.  As stated in Shakdam''s piece and elsewhere, there is evidence pointing towards the US and Israel having fomented extremist Islam as part of a wider move to 'Balkanise' the greater Levant region as part of Israeli expansionism. It's surely worthy of note that the extremists of Al Qaida and ISIL have not directly attacked Israel or Israeli interests – in fact most of their victims are other Muslims and it is Muslim countries which have suffered most from the unrest in the Middle East. 

The Israeli government and its supporters cynically and persistently use the accusation of anti-Semitism to deflect and defuse criticism of Israeli actions.  In so doing, they are busy stripping anti-Semitism of its political and historical meaning and significance.

The actions of the Israeli state with regard to Palestinians are indefensible. The irony and the tragedy is that that they are reminiscent of how Nazi Germany and all its collaborating states and peoples acted towards Jews in the 1930s. 

I've talked to young Israelis travelling in NZ after the end of their military service and been appalled at the unthinking racism some of them display towards Palestinians. It's an almost word for word replication of the bigoted supremacist ideology trotted out by white racists:  Palestinians are stupid and uneducable; they are incapable of running their own affairs; they are aggressive and untrustworthy and innately predisposed towards being thugs and terrorists. 

Those young Israelis didn't arrive at those ideas by themselves, such notions don't pop up out of a social vacuum – they are fed to the young through educational and religious institutions and military service. 

To create the sort of soldier-medic who can shoot a helpless young man in the head with as little thought or compunction as he might step on a bug, or the sort of crazed religious fanatics that can burn a family alive – the 'other' has to be turned into a faceless, soulless, non-human being. The trouble is that the only way people can come to see the 'other' as faceless, soulless and non-human is to become those things themselves.

That is the horror of fascism.  

I abhor Muslim fascists as much as I do Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Buddhist ones. In fact I abhor any ideology that is founded on and perpetuates ignorance, irrationality and bigotry. And I abhor all people of violence – most of all those who dispense their violence from the safe distance and comfort of conference and board rooms. 

There are people – including a few who claim to be of the left – whose support of Palestinian rights owes a great deal to a hatred of Jews.  The political right wing – the traditional home of anti-Semitism – currently fears and hates Muslims more than it hates and fears Jews, except of course for those Muslims who happen to be part of the ruling elites of the likes of Saudi Arabia who are granted a temporary exemption. Such people support Israel because, for the moment, they hate and fear people of another religion more.  Why and how much they hate and fear Muslims varies of course. For most it's ignorance, they have swallowed the toxic ideologies and political spin pumped out by the right wing media, but for others it's a calculated and calculating strategy at the heart of which is the principle of divide in order to continue to rule.

My feminism in a series of tweets

#myfeminism is the product of a deep & unshakeable belief in simple principles of natural justice

#myfeminism understands that humans as a species are inherently social, adaptable, creative & curious

#myfeminism wants a world in which people are able to be social, adaptable, creative & curious

#myfeminism is striving for equality for all by fighting for a social system that’s capable of delivering & maintaining it

#myfeminism seeks to explore and build on what unites people and undermine what divides & separates them

#myfeminism understands the might & the implacable viciousness of the forces that stand in opposition to it

#myfeminism recognises that humanity as a whole is facing a social & environmental crisis of unprecedented magnitude

#myfeminism understands that the overdeveloped world is sucking the life blood from the planet to fuel its toxic way of life

#myfeminism knows that the affluent's right to choose rests on structural realities that deny/constrain the choices of most people

#myfeminism recognises we are not helpless prisoners of our biology but we are the products of it

#myfeminism recognises the harm in being ignorant of and alienated from our biological self

#myfeminism understands there’s a biological binary but much else in reproduction is socially conditioned & flexible

#myfeminism knows that for the vast majority of women in the world, reproduction remains a defining reality

#myfeminism knows that women are capable of being cruel, competitive & self interested

#myfeminism knows that men are capable of being kind, cooperative and altruistic

#myfeminism means I will feel more solidarity with some men than I do with some women

#myfeminism doesn’t demand poor women/women of colour put affluent/white women before their menfolk as proof of sisterhood

#myfeminism recognises that some women are fully & consciously complicit in the maintenance of the phallocracy

#myfeminism deplores media fabrications that perpetuate a shallow & toxic notion of womanhood

#myfeminism recognises the burqa & the bikini are both products of the phallocracy

#myfeminism asks that you ask why governments that hammer the poor are prepared to yield to demands for gender equality

#myfeminism loves to laugh, finds joy in living and doesn't fear death   

#myfeminism knows it can't be adequately represented in a series of tweets but decided to try anyway

Farming Part One : The Pigs

The HUHANZ animal shelter used a Facebook page  to call for action to draw attention to the latest of three fires at a Waikato controlled environment pig farm.  A total of 750 or so pigs have died in these fires; the first fire in 2005 under previous ownership killed 300, a fire 8 months ago under the current owners killed 400, and the latest fire killed 50 sows in farrowing crates.

Farrowing crates were developed by the pig industry because, as a result of selective breeding, sows are very heavy and cumbersome and made more so by a lifestyle that denies them adequate movement, and they have very large litters. The sow’s bulk and lack of fitness, combined with enormous litters, the stresses of confinement and the frustration of the instincts to separate and nest build as farrowing is imminent, can lead to high piglet mortality. 

Hence the crates, in which sows are imprisoned prior to giving birth and for up to 4 weeks afterwards.  The crate does not allow the sow to turn around and it forces her to lie down which allows the piglets to suckle and decreases the risk of them being crushed, smothered or savaged by their over-stressed mother.

In a crate the sow is effectively reduced to a milk machine – a living version of the ‘calfeterias’ that dairy producers use to feed those offspring of dairy cows that are destined to be replacements for dairy herds or to be raised for beef.

Crating is horrible enough when you consider pigs’ intelligence and the frustration of basic instincts, but it enters the realms of the horrific when there is a fire. The thought of any animal trapped in a cage in a fire appals most people and anyone it doesn’t appal is surely missing an essential element of their humanity.

The latest fire at the facility is thought to have been electrical and possibly due to damage to wiring caused by the numerous rats. The owners, who sold a dairy farm to move into intensive pig farming, say they had had problems with equipment failure. Observers have pointed to the absence of an automatic sprinkler system and fire extinguishers.

When the news broke that this facility had had its third fire, HUHA members called for a vigil on the road outside it. It was a small scale affair, quiet and dignified and aimed at raising awareness of the lives and deaths of animals in intensive farming operations.

There was a lot of support for it on the HUHA Facebook page but also some opposition, some of it from people who claimed to be motivated by concern for the feelings of the farmers. One of the most active of the critics, on her own FB page, supported a petition to withdraw the charitable status of the animal rights group, SAFE, which has been a thorn in the side of controlled environment and intensive dairy farming. 

Several of those who were critical of the vigil claimed that the sows would have died or been rendered unconscious by smoke and fumes before the fire reached them which means they would not have suffered.

The fact that people and companion animals often die of smoke/toxic gas inhalation in house fires does not mean that animals in shed or barn fires will die or lose consciousness from smoke inhalation before burning to death.  Whether the smoke and fumes render them insensible or kill them depends on the nature of the combustible material and how the building is constructed and ventilated. 

Most importantly, those who use this rather shabby argument ignore the fact that caged animals who smell and hear a fire will be in a state of utter terror for some time before they are overcome by fumes.  Even if the flames or the radiant heat did not burn the pigs alive, it would not have been a quick or an easy death. 

The critics also avoid the fact that, if the building had had very good smoke alarms and a sprinkler system or other effective means of quickly dousing a fire, and had the owners had plans for responding to a fire – even if the way the fire started was beyond any reasonable person’s ability to anticipate or prevent – the animals may well have been saved.

One of the critics even made the astonishing statement that, if animal rights people were so concerned about the fire risk, THEY should have installed sprinkler systems in the facility themselves after the last fire and, as they hadn’t, they were as culpable as the owners.

Another argument was that the appropriate course of action was to write to the MPI to call for improved fire safety standards and the vigil was highly insensitive to the feelings of the owners who were suffering as a result of the loss of their animals and property.  

The argument is an odd one. The claim is that the vast majority of farmers, including these particular famers, are deeply concerned about the welfare of their animals and do everything they can to ensure their welfare, however, the only way that high health, welfare and safety standards on all farms can be guaranteed is by tighter government regulation.  So, if pigs burn to death it's because the standards are too low which means the government is to blame – not the farmer who chooses to operate at or below the bare industry minimum. 

As to the hurt feelings of the owners of the pig farm, it seems logical to ask, if they had the intention to run it in a safe and professional manner, why did they not do due diligence when buying the facility or, having realised after purchase that the buildings and equipment were sub-standard, why did they not make the necessary improvements immediately, and if necessary, take buildings out of commission until they were safe? 

I believe that if you make your living by locking animals in cage or inside a building and you:

fail to control rodents which might degrade electrical wiring;

do not to install a sprinkler system and/or have other fire fighting equipment appropriate for different types of fire;

do not install and maintain smoke alarms that can be heard from or are linked to the farm house or staff quarters; and,

do not have evacuation plans for the animals – then I am sorry but you cannot claim to care about animal welfare or expect the likes of me to feel sorry for you.  

I don’t care if it's poultry, pigs, cows or horses. If, for your convenience and/or your profit, you lock animals in a cage or a shed, leaving aside the wider welfare issues, you have the moral responsibility to do everything you can to prevent fire and to be able to fight it.  If the current law does not make you criminally liable for harm to animals occasioned by your failure to ensure health and safety, then the law is wrong and needs to be strengthened.

Or we could just ban all factory farming.

Edit: link to FB page hosted by HUHANZ 

'Diss the fatties, date the hotties'

The title of this blog post is a slogan on a tee shirt held up by a little man whose name I genuinely forget and can't be bothered looking up – but he's one of those who persuade other idiotic men to part with a load of dosh to be told how to alienate and offend any woman with any semblance of intelligence and self respect. 

Apart from being a reminder of the depths of some idiots'  misogyny, the slogan is important because it reminded me to finish this post about obesity. 

When I was a kid I read a Phantom comic in which a prince refused to marry the woman chosen to be his bride because she was too fat.  Judged by today's standards, "too fat" was rather plump -– certainly not severely obese. The Phantom's solution was to kidnap the young woman and hold her prisoner for a few weeks and make her gather her own food –  thereby forcing her to lose the weight she had gained, presumably through being lazy and self-indulgent. Once the weight had been lost, he presented her to the prince as a slim, and therefore attractive and acceptable, bride. 

There's more than a hint of this in some attitudes to extreme weight gain – i.e. the belief is that people become overweight because they are lazy and self-indulgent and they need a Phantom equivalent to force them to eat a normal diet and to exercise. If only it was that simple.

I know people who are very overweight who swear blind that they eat sensibly and get loads of exercise. They say diets do not work, that any weight they lose comes back and they get even fatter than they were before dieting. Often they blame their genes or a medical condition but I'd lay odds that most of them are unaware of, forget and/or are inaccurate about how much food and drink they actually ingest, the type of food it is, and how little exercise they actually get.  That's aside from the complicated stuff of how your body processes different types of food and drink at different stages of life and all the other factors associated with weight gain.

It takes a lot of fortitude to be brutally honest about how much our own actions and inactions contribute to the state of our health.  It is not helped by the mass of misinformation that circulates and the intense pressures to consume that run alongside equally strong pressures to look and behave in certain ways. I understand that the pressures stacked against the individual are enormous. 

There is the fact that, once you are very overweight, and the longer you have been overweight, to lose weight and keep it off means you may have to have bariatric surgery and/or find the psychological strength to always control your food intake and – preferably – to restrict it to whole foods. And you have to do this in a society in which high calorie and cheap food and drink is coming at you from every direction. 

The 'fast' food industry – by which I mean manufacturers and marketers of all processed foods – with its cynical marketing ploys, its reliance on addictive, harmful chemical additives, and its vicious PR-orchestrated attacks on its critics, peddles cheap, high calorie / low nutrient, chemically enhanced products that wreak havoc on people's biochemistry.

Medical 'do no harm' science looks for palliative surgical and pharmacological solutions to the problems that food manufacturers have created. I cannot be alone in seeing the irony in the fact that people who've had bariatric surgery are left reliant on nutritional supplements. They gain weight because of a combination of ingesting high calorie, nutritionally depleted, easily accessible foods and drinks and having a genetic predisposition to easy weight gain.  They cannot lose the weight. They have surgery and are then made completely dependent for the rest of their lives on a cocktail of supplements produced by a branch of the very industry that produced the crap which caused them to get unnaturally fat in the first place.

Governments typically sit on their hands or actively collude with the whole sorry business refusing to act to control the industry and instead pouring money into education campaigns which never work.  

The mainstream media, as with most other issues, relies heavily on food and drink industry PR and press releases. Those journalists with the intelligence and integrity to want to pursue the truth are often hamstrung by their corporate bosses'  demands for the sort of froth and nonsense that attracts readers/viewers.

For every person who has a genetic or medical reason for extreme weight gain, there are many more whose initial weight gain is due to them having ingested too much of the wrong sort of food and drink, and exercised too little, but demonising, shaming or attacking them is not only cruel and destructive, it's stupid. 

At the other extreme, arguing that being very fat is unavoidable because it is genetically determined, or even that it is desirable, is not just foolish, it lets a cynical and profit-obsessed food production industry, and complicit, lazy and/or incompetent governments and media off the hook.

I've been reading some activist websites that focus on obesity.  Some try to normalise it. Some question what we define as obese and are critical of the body-mass index as a useful measure. Some cite studies that claim obese people eat less than thin people and that fat kids are more active.  

Some point to the genetic foundation of weight gain - the so-called "thrifty gene" theory that humans who could lay down body fat easily had a selective advantage in times of food shortages. When such people are exposed to easily accessible, easily digested, high calorie foods, their genetic blueprint dictates that they will gain weight and not be able to lose it.

The way genes are expressed is hugely complex and variable and even with a proven genetic predisposition to lay down fat stores, in order to put on extreme amounts of weight, the individual has to ingest a far larger number of calories than they burn up and / or be ingesting substances which alter their bio-chemistry. The most obvious way that happens is eating large amounts of high calorie/low nutrient foods and drinks that are laced with various chemicals – preservatives, artificial flavourings, colours etc.

Because we are subjected to the tyranny of the thin does not mean we should idealise being fat. I increasingly see women who are well beyond plump being held up as having a normal and desirable weight. I know overweight people who have as distorted an idea of their body size as an anorexic does because all their peer group is overweight. We are getting used to seeing plump as normal and fat as barely outside normal.

We're not talking about moderate increases in weight. Leaving aside the difficulties of measuring and defining obesity, it's obvious that there are many more overweight – and importantly, many more severely overweight – people today than there were in the past.  

The extreme obesity that features on an increasing number of tasteless and exploitative shows on television and feeds into a thriving internet fetish market, is still relatively rare but between this sort of super-obesity and the people with 'normal' levels of body fat, there are increasing numbers of very overweight people. I don't need BMI based statistics to tell me the population is getting fatter – I can see it. 

I grew up in 1950s and 60s New Zealand, and although we ate a lot of fresh food and we got a lot of exercise, we also consumed loads of refined sugar, refined flour and saturated animal fats. The artificial fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides used in agriculture and horticulture were different in type and probably amount but it was hardly a pollutant free environment.  I can remember very few adults who were significantly bigger than my slim parents, only one or two adults who I thought of as being quite fat, and only one or two kids at my school were slightly plump. I cannot remember ever seeing or knowing about anyone who would have qualified as being severely or morbidly obese. 

Something has changed dramatically in the past 30-40 years which is driving a large number of people's bio-chemistry so far out of equilibrium it's no wonder simplistic measures such as telling them to eat less / exercise more fail to work.  

Like most things, the increase in obesity in general and in severe obesity is multi-factoral, ie. it is not just what you eat and how much of it you eat relative to how much energy you expend, chronic stress, food-based and environmental toxins and nutrient-deficiencies also play a large role.  

Medical science has not had very long to develop an in-depth understanding of the complexities of the human neuro-endocrine system, let alone the peptidergic pathways in the central nervous system and the ways that these are affected by the presence of large amounts of body fat (especially visceral fat), and by the mass of chemicals we are exposed to in our food and in our environment more widely, and by the enormous increase in the amount and the type of sugar we ingest.

What can be said with certainty is that carrying too much body fat long term is NOT a good thing – it places great stress on your musculo-skeletal structures and your cardio-pulmonary system; it compromises your endocrine system; it stresses your liver and kidneys and your largest and most misunderstood metabolic organ, your skin.  

Yes, you can be overweight and "healthy" by modern health parameters (which are pretty wide ranging) but, the bigger you are, the more strain there is on your essential and irreplaceable bio-systems.  

We need some body fat, too little is also not good but too much is demonstrably harmful. How much is too much will differ from individual to individual and we can carry on arguing about BMIs and thrifty genes or we can agree that there is a vast and increasing  health issue which is exacting a dreadful toll and look to how we might fix it.

An open letter to Richie McCaw

Dear Richie,

You're a great rugby player and I understand the reasons why so many honours have been heaped on your shoulders but I don't accept that they're deserved. I know that those who the conservative world honours almost always share its core values and it was no surprise when an over-excited John Key opened his 2014 election campaign by holding up his mobile phone and crowing – "Richie says, yes you can." 

(We have to assume there was an actual text from you and that it was not unsolicited.)

I’ve no doubt that at times you've found the PM's fawning fanboy attentions a bit embarrassing and tiresome – although not half as embarrassing and tiresome as many in the wider populace have found them –  and that, like many of your fellow citizens, you wish he'd grow some gravitas.  

At times I did wonder if your tacit and overt support of Key was the result of political naivety but any doubts I had on that score were dispelled by your recent decision to use your considerable influence to sway public opinion towards John Key's flag. 

And let's not be disingenuous and try to pretend it's anything other than John Key's flag. 

He wanted a fern; he wanted the flag to be black or at least to have some black on it; he expressed his preference for the black, blue and white Lockwood design; he has been pictured wearing it as a lapel pin whilst on official duties, and he set up the costly two stage referendum to maximise his spin doctors' chances of swaying public opinion, which, let's not forget, initially was overwhelmingly against flag change.

He wants the change and he wants the flag to be remembered as his flag.  And indeed it will.  It is already a symbol of an increasingly divided country so, if adopted, it will be an apt legacy indeed. 

The irony in this is that a lot of those people who are calling for flag change so that we have a flag which distinguishes us from Australia – are the very people who would have screamed foul if a left wing government had staged such an obvious piece of political manipulation.

Can you imagine the outrage from the political right and its media mouthpieces if a left wing government, whilst preaching the need for austerity amongst the affluent, had decided to spend $26 million on a two-stage referendum intended to ensure a particular outcome, i.e. to ask people to choose a design by ranking their preferences from a skewed shortlist of designs – most of which featured the PM's preferred symbol – and then used highly influential people to manipulate public opinion into voting for the 'winning' design?

The spin doctors knew that a straight vote for flag change, especially in advance of any constitutional changes, would result in a resounding NO.  So they set up a process in a which a minority of the electorate would pick one of the fern based designs after which they would put the political machine on maximum spin cycle to try to ensure that design would win over the current flag. 

They knew there'd be a core of people who would follow the PM's lead. They also knew some people who were previously opposed to flag change would start to waver if a lot of celebrities and sports stars like yourself supported the challenger – especially as the Olympics are later this year and perish the thought that someone might mistake a Kiwi medal winner for an Australian.  And they banked on the fact that a lot of people would be disgusted by the whole process or care little either way and they'd not vote at all.

If their calculations prove to be correct, the outcome will be that a small minority of the population will once again have imposed its narrow self interest on the rest of the country.

If this flag change had been part of an overall review of NZ's constitution and a move towards a republic, I could see the logic of it.  If John Key didn't fall over himself to tug his forelock to the Queen and welcome British royal visitors to NZ, and if his government had not reintroduced a British style titular honours system, I might be less inclined to see it as a cynical rebranding exercise and a distraction and diversion from more important issues.

Like it or not, New Zealand history is inextricably tied up with British history. Our legal and our political system are all derived from the British system. On your passport, it is the British Monarch, not the Prime Minster, who asks foreign governments to grant you entry and protection. The relationship between tangata whenua and the British Crown is a defining element of our history, culture and constitutional arrangements. The coat of arms symbolises that relationship, as does the old flag.

The black and blue Lockwood design makes no reference to it.The black is a nod to the All Black brand which has spread its tentacles into all other NZ sports brands and which originally had no symbolic national significance; the giant stylised fern frond is also a nod to sporting as well as other commercial brands; the blue (usefully much closer to the National Party blue than the navy blue of the old flag) is supposed to represent the Pacific Ocean, and only the red stars of the Southern Cross remain unchanged. 

Perhaps if this clunky design does win, when the government then embarks on the next costly exercise – that of changing all the official uses of the current flag (eg. all the insignia which feature the coat of arms) – it could make partial amends by changing the spear in the hands of the Māori warrior to the Tino Rangitiratanga flag. I won't be holding my breath.

In the context of the secret negotiations around the TPP – the signing of which arguably involves the greatest ceding of political and economic sovereignty that independent New Zealand has ever seen – the spiel about the importance of having flag change becomes even more obvious as a piece of political theatre designed to distract and divert people away from way more important issues.  We get to vote on the design of a bit of cloth that is run up a flag pole and which athletes drape themselves in but we don't get to decide on joining the TPP which, if ratified, means our sovereignty has been profoundly compromised.

You're a sportsman and a team captain; you know what it takes to get a group of individual players to work as a team. You should also know what gets in the way of that happening.  

IF it is adopted, the blue and black flag will always be disliked by a great many people in a way and to a degree that the old flag – for all its problematic history and reminders of a colonial past – never was.