Instinct is up close, personal and infectious

Antipodeans instinctively keep their distance from each other. Right or wrong?

Wrong. The inhabitants of the thinly populated South Pacific outpost of British reserve and stand-offish-ness cannot in fact keep their hands off each other

Touching and feeling is the raw material of social codes of behaviour new and old.

These range from modern introduced sporting activities through the run of hugs, kisses, and handshakes to greetings ancient characterised by the Polynesian hongi or rubbing of noses.

The myth is that of the man-alone. The reality is that of the direct opposite. Males of all provenance embrace a tribal lifestyle often described as mateship in which they adore congregating and will commingle together as closely as they can. Whenever they can.

Mandated distances between non familial or non-bubbled humans in New Zealand as elsewhere is two metres and when proclaimed the distance was promulgated in a vein of this being a natural state of separation, removal, anyway.

Yet as we have seen the fervently-followed collection of ancient and modern social customs and practices runs counter to the notion of New Zealand males naturally keeping their distance from each other.

A more recent example of a socially–licensed custom which by definition encourages males to commingle are the officially sanctioned and even encouraged gay parades characterised by males intertwining with each other in order to demonstrate quite literally their solidarity.

Society issues its licence for such parades in what as seen as the public interest of “diversity.”

Rugby football in the event is a reprise of mating rites dating back to the dawn of time.

In its modified and current form it bestows social license on males to achieve a physical proximity otherwise denied to them and confers simultaneously license for a wider spectrum to observe them in this process, and to shape a conversational philosophy around it.

Opponents of this above conclusion when they feel free to discuss the issue, which is rare, say that the other Anglo Saxon-origin sport of cricket in contrast is designed by its nature to keep men apart, at a distance from each other.

A similar pattern of attraction however is now emerging and is in plain sight. It is now observed that an underpinning mating-cum-fertility ritual has begun to assert itself in the form of onlooker spectators seeking every opportunity for physical proximity to the team players.

For example, spectators deliberately position themselves close to team entrance and exit tunnels in order to grasp and then cradle and cuddle the heads of certain players, otherwise total strangers, as the players pass to-and-fro.

The head-hugging now so familiar in cricket and its derived sports such as softball is a conundrum bearing in mind that in so many countries the human head is a true taboo.

In short, far from being keep-your-distance types, the average Antipodean cannot wait to deliver a man-hug.

An approved contact sport (note the word “contact” as the sanctioned generic description) delivers the proximity permission.

For further evidence to support this conclusion we can examine the behaviour of people during the height of the recent Coronavirus lock down which permitted supermarkets to open as essential service providers.

But this came with the caveat that shoppers do so singly, one family member at a time, rather than on a familial group basis.

In the event otherwise responsible members of the community were observed as couples determinedly doing their shopping together, regardless.

In other words, the social license conferred by their pair bonding arrangements of these couples, ones such as marriage, superseded external commands centred on viral contagion.

In the military distance between individuals is rigidly codified and enforced. Elsewhere in the public service attempts to promulgate and enforce a distance cordon sanitaire between the genders has had only varying success.

In life as a whole we can see that contrary to the established myth, universally believed, individuals will trash artificially imposed distance taboos and huddle as close as they can providing they believe that they have social license to do so.

Far from being stand-offish Antipodeans given the social licence instinctively want to be up close and personal and the closer the better.

International artistes marvel at the gigantic audiences they get in sparsely populated Australasia failing to realise that a large part of this is the compound mass proximity attraction – the more, the closer, the merrier.

Nobody doubts that mandated social distancing has been central to Australasia containing the contagion.

Its continuing success will rely on an understanding that this degree of separation is not a natural state of affairs and that people will still have to be levered apart to keep their distance.

Lethally Dangerous Policeman-turned-Preacher Prepares to take tithe

United Nations at one and the same time has enthralled and betrayed New Zealand and now it fully intends to collect from the beleaguered nation a sum considered to be in the region of 1.5 billion dollars as a climate contribution.

This is after its wholly controlled subsidiary World Health Organisation utterly failed to warn New Zealand about the imminence of the Covid 19 virus and continues to actively block from WHO membership Taiwan the one nation capable of giving early warning of this and other such pathogens.

Unapologetic about its shocking failures such as failing to sound the alarm about Covid 19, United Nations considers New Zealand an easy mark for the billion plus contribution for a climate alarm which has failed to materialise.

United Nations is similarly unapologetic about other false campaigns most notably its globalisation one in which it encouraged smaller nations to outsource production thus rendering them vulnerable when a true crisis happened.

United Nations and its apparatus has enjoyed one signal success and it was and remains to present itself to the activist political class of nations such as New Zealand as a semi mystical moral inspiration and authority.

Now though the worry everywhere in governmental and commercial circles in New Zealand is that United Nations will be successful in extracting its climate money from the very politicians it has so consistently and successfully mislead.

The only supra national organisation that can compare with the power of United Nations in terms of keeping countries such as New Zealand in its thrall is the Roman Catholic church in its heyday.

While New Zealand politicians sling off at governments such as those of Australia or the United States, these same politicians become piously reverent in any reference to United Nations, and to anyone bearing one of its high titles.

This state of demonstrable awe was manageable while United Nations carried out its original peace-keeping role, the one for which it was formed.

United Nations transition from policeman to preacher ran parallel with its own conversion from law-and-order keeper to a gigantic self-serving bureaucracy trying to please its growing membership in order to stay in business.

An early diversification was into identity issues and it was now that it began to play to the activist gallery by blending the fashionable with its functional purpose of peace-keeper.

It knew it needed an over-arching cause in order to reinforce its evolving central doctrine of globalisation, binding all nations together in the synergy of a common purpose.

This suited China which was now tooling up as the world’s workshop.

United Nations by now accommodating more and more freshly-created nation-states now tilted toward placating China.

It found common cause with China in excluding from United Nations-controlled world forums, notably the World Health Organisation, the island state of Taiwan.

Taiwan was founded by the Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek (pictured with fellow UN founders Roosevelt and Churchill).

General Chiang Kai-shek had actually fought the Axis powers, thus entitling China to become a founding pillar of United Nations in the first place.

All this was overlooked by the international political class especially in the English-speaking zone, as the United Nations now carried the most virtuous collective banner of the era which was the climate one.

United Nations now subtly conveyed the message that until it took up the climate cause, nothing had been done at all to save what had hitherto been described as the “environment.”

Among the most avid of the adherents to the United Nations climate doctrine, an omnibus one packaging in the globalisation theme among others, was and is the New Zealand political class.

This class remains so enraptured that it is still prepared to wreck its main industry, agriculture, in order to please the gigantic policeman-turned-preacher behemoth.

The United Nations-sowed cult of imminent climate catastrophe was the central distraction from the true threat, the virus one. This in turn was braced by the UN’s refusal to do anything construed as displeasing mainland China.

Even so, it remains very likely that sometime in the quite near future a dismaying starry-eyed New Zealand government will meekly hand United Nations for its non-performance a staggering sum of money allowing it to still further propagate its lethally dangerous prophesies.

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things?”

Constant repetition by climate campaigners of words signifying conceptual disasters of great magnitude debased these words and diluted their meaning and their impact to the point at which when taken up by Fleet Street they failed to deliver the required message in the event of a true calamity, the Coronavirus one.

Peter Isaac the president of the National Press Club conjectures that initial warnings about the damaging effects of Coronavirus were blunted and lost impact just because so many of the words used were associated with moral cause propaganda rather than with an actual disaster such as the present rampant viral contagion.

Isaac rated as the “three horsemen” of the climate movement word bending apocalypse as being these words: crisis, emergency, and extinction.

The outrider of this trio was the word dying.

This word routinely applied by the climate change movement and then taken up by the media remains an encoded way of describing the failure of western society to do anything about the alleged changing climate with the result that people were perishing, “dying.”.

The confected alarmism structured around these re-purposed words had its Commonwealth genesis in what Isaac described as only several members of what was once known as the Fleet Street “quality” newspaper category.

The word-bending constructions now assumed what Isaac described as a “royal charter” of approval though usage in one of the qualities, a kind of Stamp of Good Housekeeping.

They were now taken up by public broadcasting, embellished with a gravitas of delivery, and then after gathering additional credence with every mile they travelled from London were reiterated in Australasia.

The result on the audience side of the camera and microphone was confusion

This centred on the crisis/emergency/extinction that under the agenda of a moral movement and one with ready access to the media could theoretically happen with the crisis/emergency/extinction that was actually happening at that moment and was heading toward the population at large.

Isaac originally drew attention to this problem in www.nationapressclub.org.nz and did so with particular reference to what he saw as the proneness of several Australasian newspaper chains to re-iterate the London-sown propagandised vocabulary and terminology.

The latest report from Britain’s Social Mobility Commission demonstrated that in spite of industry sector vaunted and much proclaimed “diversity” that in fact journalists are increasingly drawn from a privileged and university educated background that added up to a sameness of outlook.

The university common room bias was more insidious in public broadcasting because of a much stated impartiality and also because audiences were less aware of the socio-economic human forces behind the constant weaving-in of the theoretical climate “crisis, emergency etc.”

Curiously, noted Isaac before the climate syndrome mutated into one of “change,” it had been labelled as one of global “warming.”

In the event the Coronavirus threat was said to be reduced in a warm climate, while flourishing in the cold weather. A reversal of a popular notion that germs multiply in the heat and get killed off in the cold.

Isaac said that journalists now describe their vocation as a professional one and as such should be expected by the public to use words correctly.

The calling, he said, having robed itself in the mantle of professionalism must be seen to treat moral movements for what they were and do so by putting their propaganda and slogans into context rather than re-iterating and transcribing them as matters of fact.

Journalism whether trade, craft, vocation, or profession was now made up of graduates who had a duty to clearly define for their audiences the difference between a theoretical environmental global alarm and an actual, real-time one, the real thing.

Journalism had not attained its homogenous graduate-grade professionalism without “growing pains.”

The main one was that the elevated journalistic practitioners, seasoned as they were in academic theory, sought as a counterweight to position themselves as contemporary tribunes of the plebeians, as representatives of everyday folk.

They did so by shouldering and arming themselves with what they saw as a noble cause notably the climatist one, and blending their own lofty inculcated values with what they saw as the welfare of the common people.

It was now in this tangled skein of confused values that flourished the agenda masquerading as reporting and requiring the bending of words to accommodate this duality.

Isaac is the author The New Gobbledygook, and The Bureaucrat’s Survival Guide to Workplace Jargon.

The progressive political class’ unquestioning adherence to the United Nations fixation on man-made global warming as the existential threat of the era can be viewed now as being at the expense of considering an actual global scourge such as the present Coronavirus one.

Why was it that the United Nations agency World Health Organisation started talking about the insurgent virus at the same time as everyone else?

Why is it that western governments even now are so frightened to support Taiwan’s membership of the World Health Organisation?

Taiwan, otherwise known as the Republic of China, has long warned of the vulnerability of mainland southern China to exactly the type of contemporary plague as the Corona virus.

Taiwan has long run a campaign for admission to WHO just because it is in such a favourable position to give early warning of these outbreaks.

Its membership of WHO is consistently vetoed by China.

OECD governments meanwhile are loath to admit the way in which United Nations spun them into a near-total preoccupation with global warming, currently encoded as climate change.

Global warming/climate change with its refrain of being caused by developed nations in a few short years became the catch-all cause of western political thought and it also doubled as the central mechanism for the United Nations purpose of transferring wealth from the developed nations to the undeveloped ones.

The extent to which the United Nations focus on the theoretical catastrophe posed by “climate change” to the exclusion of the actual threat gathering in China in the form of the Coronavirus contributed to the present plague will never be known.

Now that the actual threat has made itself manifest the governmental sectors and their accompanying media which became drawn into the United Nations-encouraged climate hysteria, are naturally reluctant to admit their cupidity.

This school room climate exciteability peaked at United Nations in New York last year and a channel for amends exists in the form of UN member nations to insist that Taiwan becomes a member of the World Health Organisation.

These governments lulled into compliant complicity by the feel-good climate panic must recognise that they comprehend the current existential, as they would describe it, threat and they must do this by replacing their climate clamour with one to admit Taiwan to the World Health Organisation.

Curiously China will not be the only obstacle to this.

0pposition will come from the Western progressive political class that became so invested in climate change and the United Nations version of it that any renunciation of it, however, partial is seen as threatening their very existence.

United Nations meanwhile will similarly stonewall about its failure to give early warning of the mystery illness and its contagion capability just because this very contagion exposes the flaws in its bedrock globalisation doctrine.

Neither will the English-language media, notably the public broadcasting systems, question for example how the World Health Organisation, based as it is in Switzerland, ground zero for international pharmacy, failed to at least identify the inherent danger of a concentration of pharmaceutical production in vulnerable countries.

The Coronavirus outbreak and the failure of United Nations and its agencies to give adequate early warning of it now illuminates the perils of unquestioning devotion by the political class to a monolithic transnational body such as United Nations.

This type of unquestioning faith has been particularly evident in the anglosphere in Australasia where in the past decade entire general elections have been pivoted on a perceived climate threat and where the oldest-established media chain, Fairfax, has outlawed any material running contrary to United Nations doctrines on climate.

Arts in New Zealand scream conformity, acquiescence, patronage-induced passivity

Anglo-New Zealand artist Derek Cowie has categorised the nation’s art scene as one in which practitioners without even realising it bend their output to the demands of a top-down patronage system.

The reliance on patronage led to a passivity in which the artistic purpose of igniting discussion and debate was now submerged in an obedient quest to conform.

Art, he insisted, should invite controversy, and not by-pass it.

Mr Cowie’s art is renowned for its depiction of the tribulations encountered by everyday individuals and especially the damage inflicted on tem by what he describes as “neo-liberalism.”

This refers to globalisation and the way in which it has undercut the earning power of all but a few New Zealanders.

Mr Cowie was engaged in Britain as an applied artist during the 2008 great financial crash and then stood by as those he describes as “criminals” were then bailed out by the very working people whose trust they had abused.

Worse than this Mr Cowie explained was the way in which these same malefactors after some “token contrition” went about restoring their lavish way of life complete with their bonuses.

On top of all this points out Mr Cowie was the way in which this was conducted openly and without condemnation from the very parties that exist to illuminate such behaviour such as artists.

It was then that he realised that instead of revealing and exposing “elitism in all its facets,” artists were walking hand-in-hand with it.

In his exhibition which opens on March 12 at Wellington’s Page Galleries Mr Cowie (pictured) will quite literally illustrate all this in the vernacular and with a broad brush that will feature too his distrust of contemporary agricultural practices.

These include the overworking of the land and some swipes at the seemingly unchallengeable state-sponsored procedure of planting billions of non-indigenous trees notably the quick-growing pinus radiata variety.

These he claims exhausts the land while handing it over to giant corporations which alone recent experience shows can handle the fluctuations in demand.

Mr Cowie was for many years associated with the late Peter McLeavey often considered the signature New Zealand gallerist and art dealer of his era.

During his years in London he was behind the scenery of Little Dorrit a joint BBC-PBS series. He was similarly engaged on another BBC drama Desperate Romantics, centred on the pre-Raphaelite movement.

He rubbed shoulders with such Hollywood types as Johnny Depp and Dustin Hoffman while responsible for the backdrops on Finding Neverland, the Peter Pan extrapolation.

On Revelation 2001, an archaeological drama, he found himself working alongside such British figures as Terence Stamp.

He is also known for his murals, notably in the Gielgud Room of the National Theatre.

.Meanwhile Mr Cowie observed that the conformity he perceived now in the arts in New Zealand was often encouraged by a pervasive fashionable and institutionalised collective sharing and exhibiting of the same opinion about the same things – mass tree planting was just one example.

The move to follow fashion had coincided with the growth and the reliance on artistic patronage.

This in turn meshes with the same artistic conventional drift and with the common purpose of ensuring that what was not upset was the apple cart of conventionally acceptable attitudes.

Art, by definition, must tread dangerously, where the conventional fear to tread, he proclaimed.

Napier-based industrial authority reminds sector that machinery is UK’s biggest import category

Ken Evans of Tekam NZ Ltd urges trade officials to “open their eyes,” to the enhanced export prospects in Great Britain for industrial food processing machinery.

Tekam of Napier is the predominant engineering specialist in meat and fish processing heavy duty machinery.

New Zealand as an internationally ranked food process machinery design and development nation is in a position to reclaim this market he said, noting that machinery already ranked as New Zealand’s eighth most significant export.

Supplying the UK with heavy food processing technology was now much easier with the evaporation of much what is still known as the “tyranny of distance,” he said.

The freight cost of shipping to the UK from Napier was now comparable to shipping to the South Island, Mr Evans (pictured) declared.

Machinery remains the United Kingdom’ s No 1. Import category he added, 12 percent of its total imports.

In regard to the UK market New Zealand was “in so many ways in an improved position” now than in the pre-EU era of Imperial and Commonwealth Preference.

Mr Evans has been responsible for some of New Zealand’s major meat processing systems and he has been a leading exponent of the refurbishment of many installations during the sector’s re-configuration in recent years.

“Meat processing machinery is upwardly and downwardly compatible and equipment can be re-purposed and transferred from one district to anothe, or even from one country to another --it is never scrapped.”

Mr Evans cautioned trade administrators to face up the “reality” as he described the situation of the sought-after markets in Asia and the Middle East, a market for meat processing systems that had become a “mirage.”

The Middle East North Africa market he said was tied into the export of live sheep.

“Well intentioned and lavishly taxpayer-funded model meat process installations have failed to dissolve the linkage between live shipments and specialist technology processing hardware of the type that is paid for,” said Mr Evans, adding, “we must now be realistic and accept this linkage, and the way in which it blocks our technology exports, however great the benefit of this technology and its cost-effectiveness to the region.”

Mr Evans, a participant in meat processing equipment trade missions to the Middle East, noted that the reality of the consequences of the live sheep export ban now had to be recognised, however “painfully.”

Similarly he urged trade administrators to accept other problems in exporting industrial equipment to the Asia region.

In Asia engineering food technology exports from New Zealand had been characterised by the need to supply test equipment which was promptly copied.

Mr Evans has previously drawn attention to another problem in these regions which is the little talked-about practice of prospective buyers imposing bidding and tender fees that turn out to be non-refundable.

Membership of the EU had led to Great Britain’s own meat processing equipment industry fading away as Britain became a service economy and continental European manufacturers took over.

Mr Evans has consistently warned of New Zealand “drifting” into becoming a service economy itself.

Instead the requirement was to grasp the new opportunities presented by Brexit, and indirectly by the United States which had promised substantial trade opportunities to a post-Brexit United Kingdom.

He cited a string of New Zealand agri engineering innovations including soil-heave freezer insulation, through to electric fences and halal-compatible process chains to reinforce his message.

There has been in industrial machinery terms an exclusive focus on emerging markets, a fixation which in the event has failed to emerge through eco-politics, and investment recovery – “getting paid,” as he put it.

“We are now faced by a re-emerging market, a recurring one, in the form of the UK,” he said.

He cited New Zealand’s reorganisation of its meat processing, notably in rendering, as an obvious attraction for densely populated countries as Great Britain.

“The industry’s transformation in recent times has meant that most people do not even know where the meat processing works are located, they are so unobtrusive.”

Botanist was used as example of fate that awaits Deniers

Dr David Bellamy who has died at the age of 86 was an early practitioner of conservation civil disobedience and who as a populist broadcaster introduced a new technique to natural history presentation and who as pitchman for the carpet industry was able at last to describe why wool was superior as a textile.

The botanist, a simplifier, used buffoonery as a teaching technique and this earned him an immense following throughout the Commonwealth and especially in Australia in New Zealand in which he was to star in numerous television documentaries.

With the advent of climate as a political force Bellamy a scientist whose career began as a laboratory assistant and who had honed his explanatory skills at the chalkface was the obvious populist authority figure to act as advocate for the climate cult to everyday people.

Nobody was more qualified to be a standard bearer than David Bellamy, an authentic scientist with a social reach that had made him a trusted household name throughout the developed world.

Bellamy for example had anticipated extinction rebellion by many years by getting himself arrested in Australia and then threatening to affix himself to monuments in Britain

Bellamy declined to cooperate with the climatists, let alone be their advocate.

He instead outlined the cyclical nature of climate. He pointedly rejected the notion of carbon dioxide as a harmful contributor.

The climatists now used Bellamy as an example of what happens to people who defy them.

Bellamy was banished by the BBC instantly sensitive to the danger that Bellamy as a climate denier was posing to its own role as defender of noble causes.

Independent Television followed. ITV operates under a government licencing system and it too now turned the off switch on the botanist.

Bellamy refused to recant and instead now followed up on his “poppycock” view of warming by revealing the central intent of the movement which he said was to frighten children which of course was eventually what happened.

It was now that Bellamy became entangled with the (Manchester) Guardian which had already established itself as the users manual of the progressives. Once revered, he was now tersely dismissed as the “Bearded Bungler.”

When Bellamy was originally taken up by the BBC it was as an antidote to what was being unfavourably viewed as its own monoculture of posh chaps talking received English.

Bellamy from a working class background talking in an indeterminate and gushing brogue and waving his arms around, pawing the air, was one of the building block of the new diverse look characterised nowadays by the full slate of dialects from regionally “accented,” as they are known, presenters.

Bellamy’s career as a science populariser in fact was well established before the climate movement evolved from political correctness as the university class sought a new unifying doctrine in order to take their guilt transfer mechanism model to a more advanced level and a global one.

Astronomer Galileo under the attentions of the Inquisition refused to reverse his published opinion that the earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa.

Botanist Dr David Bellamy 400 years later under a contemporary inquisitorial equivalent refused to countenance an imminent climate catastrophe.

Just as Galileo went on to describe how the tides worked, so did Bellamy expand his argument by describing the beneficial value of carbon dioxide.

Galileo said that deities had nothing to with the movements of the universe.

Bellamy said that climate change had everything to do with frightening children.

Galileo’s books were burned.

So were Bellamy’s television contracts.

UK-based New Plymouth–born scientist Dr Kelly blacked out as New Zealand government consolidates UN climate line

The government’s ban on oil and gas exploration is the major obstacle to its own prime objective of weaning off coal the dairy exporter Fonterra.

The government has been so successful in generating uncertainty about natural gas supplies that the dairy cooperative is prevented from investing in the alternative power generation.

This particularly applies to the South Island where explorers OMV and New Zealand Oil & Gas hold licences to develop offshore gas.

In the middle of this contrived emergency New Zealand’s most eminent climatic authority Cambridge’s Professor Michael Kelly (pictured) has stated that the “lesson of history is regularly ignored as the current level of climate alarm is cranked up,” adding that “all the data shows that extreme events were more extreme and more common in the first half of the 20th century

“But climate change is supposed to have started in 1960”

The physicist noted that modern renewables “remain an insignificant share of the energy supply……the transition away from fossil fuel energies will take 400 years at the current rate of progress.”

The onetime Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department for Communities and Local Government contends that absence of historical data has allowed climate warming activists to make extravagant suppositions at will. This contempt for data also extends to modern times.

Professor Kelly notes that in the 1990s the global average surface temperature had been rising sharply for 15 years “and many predicted that this rate of warming would continue, when in fact it has halved.”

The New Zealand physicist’s findings have been blacked out in the country of his birth by the tightening institutional ban on anything contradicting the United Nations doctrine on global warming.

Even so, the anxiety of the coalition government to rid the dairy industry of coal is pointed up by the parading of international alternative energy specialists.

One of these was Michael Liebreich who is chairman of the advisory board of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance describes itself as “producing research on industries in transition, focusing on clean energy.”

Unsurprisingly enough, Mr Liebreich is quoted as saying that Fonterra's use of coal to power boilers that dry milk into milk powder was "insane" and old-school and must stop.

The Green Party wing of the coalition government in its determination to be seen at the leading edge of United Nations doctrines has indicated that it will lure the dairy exporting industry out of coal with dollops of cash from the state’s immense green energy inducement fund

This might work for Fonterra, a farmer cooperative. Politically in this proposed divvy-up there could be reactions if the Chinese and French-owned dairy export processors such as Westland Milk, Parmalat and Danone took advantage of the taxpayer-funded poor box.

While China’s role in New Zealand is well known and correspondingly sensitive, France’s presence is rarely perceived.

France quietly holds dominant positions in many strategic New Zealand industries including hotels, construction, utilities, transport, electrics, finance, wine, and even office equipment

Meanwhile, Green Party officials nowadays refer to the power required by companies such as Fonterra as “process heat.”

This is an engineering term used to describe steam generation and it is used by the Green Party as a circumlocution around the government’s contradictory energy policies such as the no-coal but can’t-guarantee-gas one.

Woodchips another favoured political option means that dairy companies such as Fonterra would have to completely re-equip to accommodate the new thermal divergence in feedstock.

Fonterra, meanwhile has done its best to appease the Greens notably by divesting itself of its so recently highly regarded strategic investment in coal mining.

Professor Kelly has drawn attention to the shaky assumptions of warming activists, those inside parliament and those outside it.

Forty years after the Antarctic sightseeing airline crash multiple errors and omissions can be seen as the cause ……

Parallels are inescapable between the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and the crash onto Mt Erebus in 1979 of an Air New Zealand DC10 sightseeing flight.

Both collided with Polar ice. The Titanic with an Arctic iceberg. The DC10 with Mt Erebus in the Antarctic.

Both the Titanic and the DC10 were considered the most advanced technologies of their era.

Sabotage did not figure in either disaster.

Head office interference was cited in both disasters. For the Titanic to go faster and for the DC10 sightseeing flight to go lower.

Routine and mundane failures were related to the cause of both disasters.

The flawed fat finger headquarters coordinates entered into the DC10 navigation system. The failure of anyone on the Titanic crew to have the keys needed to open the binoculars safe box on the crows nest.

Passenger requirement diversions in both disasters are seen as contributing factors.

On the Titanic the radio office was preoccupied with passenger telegrams to the exclusion of receiving operational iceberg warning messages. The DC10 flight was underpinned by the need to give passengers the closest look at the Antarctic terrain.

Both captains perished in the disasters. Captain Smith of the Titanic and Captain Collins of the DC10

Both captains had overconfidence in the machinery under their command.

Captain Smith in the unsinkability of the Titanic. Captain Collins in the veracity of the input into his automated navigation system

In both disasters blame attached to human handling of the technology and not to the technology itself.

In both disasters the shadow fell on corporate top management.

Bruce Ismay the head of the White Star Line, a Titanic survivor, was subsequently blamed for urging the Titanic to go faster regardless of the ice threat. Morrie Davis his Air New Zealand counterpart was blamed for acquiescing in the low altitude flying in the vicinity of Mr Erebus

Both disasters were followed by inquiries in Great Britain.

In both disasters the unanswered questions and associated riddles have accelerated interest in the tragedies.

In the instance of the Erebus disaster the Privy Council was moved to recommend that the past remain in the past, that bygones be bygones.

The New Zealand official history crisply states: “Debate raged over who was at fault for the accident. The chief inspector of air accidents attributed the disaster to pilot error. Justice Peter Mahon’s Royal Commission of Inquiry disagreed, placing the blame on Air New Zealand and its systems. The controversy continues….”

Both disasters gave rise to much bibliography and cinematography. Art followed the fact of these two disasters.

The first Titanic film featured a survivor.

The Aftermath was broadcast by Television New Zealand while memories of the Mt Erebus disaster were still fresh in the public memory. The TVNZ dramatized documentary is still considered unimprovable.

The director of the most recent Titanic feature film James Cameron lives in New Zealand.

An earlier film Raise the Titanic starred Jason Robards whose grandson Jasper Robards manages the Cameron family arable farms in New Zealand.

HRH’s deft handling of awkward trade meeting revealed depth of character, patience, remembers National Press Club president

Prince Andrew lamented the transition of the televised weather broadcast into entertainment. “I miss the isobars,” he confessed referring to the whorls and lines on the now disappeared diagrams that represented the connecting points having the same atmospheric pressure at a given time or on average over a given period.

HRH was dismayed that so much applied science in the media was taking a back seat to the imperative to entertain.

We met at government house in Wellington, New Zealand, and Prince Andrew was on tour as Britain’s trade “ambassador” working for United Kingdom Trade and Industry, the nation’s central promotion and development agency.

The prince sat at the head of a horse shoe shaped gathering of which I was a component through having at the time a role with what was then known as the British New Zealand Trade Council, which dates back to 1917, recalls now National Press Club president Peter Isaac

Andrew had a crisp, incisive manner. Nothing other-worldly about him. He fixed the group, looking at us directly, friendlily.

The British High Commissioner at the time George Fergusson, who had once himself held down a governmental trade promotion assignment, piped up about the international prospects for New Zealand honey.

Fergusson went into detail about the medicinal properties of honey, and did so at some length.

He then segued into a random history of the electronic microprocessor.

It occurred to me that the point of the story might have been to remind the prince of how the microprocessor patents had been allowed to slip way to Asia before being at the very last moment repatriated to the English speaking realm, the United States.

Geordie Fergusson, the last in a dynastic succession of British proconsuls to New Zealand, finally allowed his electronics contribution to taper off without it defining any special lesson, or indeed, point.

Andrew had a reputation for petulance, for being easily irritated, and it occurred to me that HRH might be becoming somewhat peeved about Fergusson taking over what was designated as his, HRH’s, show.

Andrew (pictured above at the time) listened attentively and with apparent interest to this vice regal dissertation.

On the heels of this followed now a question that surprised everyone including Andrew.

A local departmental trade functionary asked HRH about his golf, and his prospects for practising it in New Zealand.

Bringing up an off-agenda topic with a member of the royal family is a not unfamiliar play, especially with Andrew’s father, Prince Philip.

It is of course risky. It either catches the mood of the moment or it does not. This one did not.

This was not immediately apparent to the public service questioner, it turned out.

Andrew’s expression grew quizzical, but only briefly, and he sought to deter the issue by focussing on another imminent question, this one on the beaten track about trade and technology.

But the questioner persisted.

“We know all about you and your golf,” was the chummy follow up from the functionary.

“Come on…..we all know it is your passion……”

The prince’s private secretary now cut in suggesting that the prince extrapolate on a more focused point about commonwealth trade.

Andrew who speaks in a middle class English accent, and not the trademark drawl so many antipodeans associate with the royal family, took up the threads without allowing, if in fact, he felt it, any trace of irritation to cross his face.

He was at ease. The private secretary brought the event to a close. There was another pressing appointment, it seemed. Andrew was ushered out, yet gave the impression that he would much prefer chewing the cud with us.

Andrew presented the picture of a technocrat and a people-person, an encompassing ability that is by no means widespread.

As royalty becomes treated as reality show stars, and as reality show stars gravitate to royal status, Prince Andrew has become one of the most caricatured individuals on the face of the earth.

The profession of royalty has much in common with Andrew’s other profession, that of arms in that they are both hurry-up-and-wait occupations.

It is in the extended waiting periods between engagements in which lurk the unforeseen and contemporary perils