Speaker by Various Artists

It’s emotion that carves memories into the mind, connecting neurons and creating pathways like tyre tracks on wet sand.  I have few memories of the ’87 World Cup, I was too young, and for reasons I can’t explain ’91 passed me by too.  But the growing realisation, in 1995, that our supermen were losing is burned in my mind, as I sat on the floor of my flat choking back tears and hoping my mates wouldn’t see me cry.

Fast forward to 2007 and I still remember sitting with my head in my hands, genuinely scared I was going to throw up on my carpet, the shot of Dan Carter looking similarly ill, sitting in the grandstand as white as a sheet, burned into my brain by emotion.

And then there’s the worst 20 minutes of my life.  Suspended in the air on temporary seats at Eden Park, watching as we fumbled and muscled our way through the longest quarter of rugby in the history of the game, while 60,000 people wrung their hands, and screamed unintelligible expletives in sheer gut-wrenching frustration, followed of course by the elation best captured by Israel Dagg and Corey Jayne’s snow angels, as they lay ecstatic in the piles of tinsel on the hallowed turf.

Given what I do for a job, and my obvious passion for the game, many people have asked me how do we “cope” with the Rugby World Cup?  How do we as a nation bear the tension, the possibility of losing, the cliched national mourning that follows the possibility of losing the World Cup.  (I still love that despite only winning it twice, if we don’t with the cup we have “lost” it, like it’s always ours by right to lose.)

What I love about sport is its meaningless.  If the All Blacks win or lose, life carries on.  And it must be painful for those who actually don’t care about the sport to watch the rest of us live and die with the flight of an oval ball, the plight of the nation in the hands of 23 (increasingly) young men.  But for those that it does matter, it’s OK that it does.

Coping, in this country at least, means hiding your tears of pain from your mates.  It means not feeling, not experiencing, being tough and hard.  So much of the dark sides of our obsession with rugby, indeed the dark side of being a man in this country, is reflected in our excessive drinking, our thuggishness, our unfettered aggression that flows from this cultural repression, flows from the masculine effort to suppress emotion and not feel vulnerable.

So don’t “cope.”  Relish the emotion, allow it to matter, and enjoy the ride.  It might only be sport and the cynical among us may condemn rugby, and our love of it to being an “opiate for the masses.”  But it’s a hell of a drug.  So yell at the TV, stand for the national anthem, well up with pride at the Haka, and feel free to cry tears of (hopefully) joy on the 31st of October.

And remember, no matter what happens, we’ll always have the memories.

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"Kyle MacDonald is a psychotherapist and blogger at www.psychotherapy.org.nz.  He is a regular co-host on the mental health talk show “The Nutters Club” and contributor to the Sunday morning show on Radio Live.  He is also the Public Issues spokesperson for the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists.”

A year ago today, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong surprised the world by saying “no” to the Chinese government – something few countries do these days.

Since then, the Chinese government and the Hong Kong government it controls have succeeded in securing their power, but in terms of inspiring loyalty and support from Hongkongers on an ideological level, they have failed. Instead, Beijing’s refusal to address the demands from young people has pushed them further away from the “motherland” than ever before.

According to a University of Hong Kong poll conducted in June, only five percent of the city’s population aged 18 to 30 considered themselves “Chinese”, while more than 60 percent self-identified as “Hongkongers”, an unrecognised identity that displeases Beijing.

Shortly after the end of the Umbrella Movement last December, a key part of the leadership of the movement, the Hong Kong Federation of Students, began to fall apart as university students across the city voted to break away from the union.

Some interpreted it as a punishment of HKFS for misleading students into participating in the civil disobedience movement. Another explanation is that university students now disapprove of HKFS’s passive tactics. Peaceful sit-ins, rallies and song-singing have failed to bring them the “genuine universal suffrage” that they wanted.

Those who grew up believing protests and demonstrations should be “peaceful, rational and non-violent” have begun to doubt the approach adopted by the movement’s organisers. More are open to the “forceful resistance” approach promoted by the “localists” – a more radical branch of democracy supporters whose anti-parallel goods smuggling campaigns seem to have discouraged Chinese smugglers from coming to Hong Kong posing as tourists.

Hong Kong university students have long been aware and active in local politics, and many politicians jumpstarted their careers as student leaders in university. After the Movement, eyes turned to the city’s eight public universities for fear that the government would encroach on their academic freedom either for vengeance or to prevent another occupy movement. A change of approach has been evident in student-led protests.  

While the government body of Hong Kong Baptist University was selecting its new president in May, students complained that they were left out of the selection process. For the first time, they stormed into a council meeting to demand direct dialogue with the final candidate Professor Roland Chin, resulting in three additional consultation sessions before the university council made its eventual appointment.

The incident inspired University of Hong Kong students, who felt that the government and its loyalists in the governing body were using administrative tactics to get back at pro-democracy academics. The University of Hong Kong is the city’s most prestigious university and widely seen as the Umbrella Movement’s birthplace.

Pro-Beijing media in Hong Kong and China have launched a series of attacks on the university’s Faculty of Law and its academics for provoking students to participate in the unauthorised movement and indulging in politics rather than teaching and researching.

The university council, in an unprecedented move, tried to halt the promotion of former law dean Professor Johannes Chan to vice-president as  university management had recommended.  It is an extension of the movement and another battle between the democracy supporters and the government and its loyalists. Many believe that if Chan gets voted down, pro-democracy academics in other universities will be silenced soon after.

Students barged into a council meeting to ask for the immediate appointment of Chan in July. The public and government reaction was far more critical this time. Some compared the students to the “Red Guards” in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, only that they were manipulated by pro-democracy parties.

The rift between young people and the Hong Kong/Chinese government is getting even wider. The young people have become more resistant to anything that signifies Chinese influence, from the use of simplified Chinese and Putonghua to compulsory exchange programmes to China. Some even rejoiced in the recent Chinese stock market crisis.

It is important to note that Hong Kong young people do not dislike Chinese culture, which is shared by Taiwanese, Singaporean Chinese, Malaysian Chinese and people with Chinese descent around the world. What they dislike is the negative connotations that come with being a Chinese national and the ruling party of China.

For more than a century under the non-interventionist British rule, Hong Kong has developed into a city with its own character, its own language system (just ask any Putonghua speaker to read a Hong Kong blog post) and its own quasi-national identity, which are all threats to in the eyes of Beijing.

When Hong Kong youth ask for democracy and universal suffrage, they are not merely asking for the right to choose their own leaders. They are demanding the Chinese government to let them determine their own destiny. To them, the 1997 handover of sovereignty should have ended all colonial rule, not only the British.

They want Hong Kong to be its own entity, perhaps not necessarily as the independent city-state advocated by the localists – but definitely not another colony of China. 

Nickkita Lau is a PhD candidate in Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland.

The case of the I-Kiribati man Ioane Teitiota being deported after failing to become the world’s first climate change refugee in the Supreme Court of New Zealand is unfortunate, but is not unfair and misrepresents the reality of climate change to Kiribati in a harmful way.

I’m a self-proclaimed climate activist – I protested at the UN climate negotiations in Peru last year and submitted to the Ministry for the Environment’s consultation process calling for ambitious action on climate change. I am also currently living in Kiribati, working at the hospital here as part of my medical training.

My climate change activist friends back in New Zealand think this man being deported is disgraceful. Although the long-term impacts of climate change upon Kiribati are certainly disgraceful, Teitiota’s deportation is not and to think so is to misunderstand the unique situation that these low-lying islands and their proud peoples face.

Yes, people who live in Kiribati are absolutely the “vulnerable of the vulnerables” and are experiencing unjust hardship due to rising sea levels, ocean acidification, temperature extremes and adverse weather events. There will come a time when their lives are directly threatened by climate change - but this has not yet occurred.  Yes, there are issues with overcrowding, sanitation and clean water in Kiribati – but the resilient and cheerful people here live contented lives within their rich culture and the development issues that affect Kiribati people are not unique and are largely not due to climate change.

It would be unfair for me to speculate as to Ioane Teitiota’s reasons for originally leaving Kiribati, or how much of a role the impacts of climate change at home played in his decision to fight to stay in New Zealand. I can only observe the comments of those I-Kiribati people involved in climate advocacy here and quote to you the words of Pelenise Alofa, National Coordinator of Kiribati’s Climate Action Network – “no one has ever left Kiribati because of climate change”.

I feel for Teitiota – his children were born in New Zealand, his life is in New Zealand and he very understandably does not want to go back home. But for one I-Kiribati man to claim to be a “climate change refugee” is to misrepresent Kiribati and cause harm to people working passionately on the issue of climate change here.

This claim misleads the public about what our current response to Kiribati’s climate problems should be. Research carried out in Kiribati shows that I-Kiribati people want to continue to live in their country for as long as possible and desire adaptation projects such as sea walls that will allow them to do so, rather than to flee Kiribati in 2015. The failure of Teitiota’s claims make it harder for people working to protect Kiribati’s climate to secure assistance and funding for the adaptation projects the country really needs .

Teitiota’s case also fundamentally misrepresents how I-Kiribati people want to respond to climate change in the long term. The culture and identity of the I-Kiribati people is deeply connected to their land and if the people of these islands have to move because of rising sea levels, they want to move as a group to another island, a new Kiribati, and resettle with dignity. They do not want to and should not have to flee climate change as individuals migrating to various other lands, and do not identify as victims but as a strong community of people jointly affected by large forces beyond their control.

As an observer here in South Tarawa, Kiribati, I see anger at Teitiota for his actions and the words he has spoken about his country. I see resentment for him from civil society here for the way his court case has mischaracterized how I-Kiribati people want to respond to climate change.

Teitiota’s claims are a harmful outlier to Kiribati’s reality. The people of Kiribati don’t want to leave yet, and need our help to stay and to adapt to the changing climate with dignity for as long as they can. They are not refugees and they don’t wish to be – they are people who need the international community to take urgent action on climate change to protect their islands and their sovereignty, and people who want nationwide resettlement with dignity rather than a slow process of flight and the label of being a refugee. 

In his address to last year's Local Government New Zealand Conference, well and truly on the campaign trail, John Key took aim at the 'loopy local rules' that seemed to exist solely to annoy people. Our national fixation with building a deck needed fewer impediments, and one of the big stumbling blocks was The Bloody Council.

A Rules Reduction Task Force was to be established, which would crowdsource concerns that central government would then address. There are few more tried and true campaign methods than finding a stick to beat local government with.

Everybody hates The Bloody Council.

The back-pedalling began almost immediately. Dunedin City was one of the offenders singled out in the beginning, for stopping someone building a deck near a reserve. Which was a good story, up until the point that it was untrue. When that was pointed out, the city's name was removed from the example, but the example remained all the same.

When it was pointed out that a vast majority of local rules are enforcement of government legislation, the ambit was widened. "Local" was dropped from the Task Force's mission of loopy rules identification. Rather than reprint all of the advertising material, they actually just got someone to cross the word out in marker pen on a bunch of them.

“It's not about local government specifically” Inky Tulloch, former Mayor of Mataura, Task Force member and race car driver told us. “We want to hear about any kind of loopy rules at any level.”

We were always at war with RMAsia.

Yesterday, the Department of Internal Affairs released the Rules Reduction Taskforce Report, a summary of the concerns raised during the consultation, and a series of recommendations as to how to address them (#10 'Stop making loopy rules').

The Beehive knows how influential and effective local government can be in our communities, often in ways that run counter to their general policy direction, which is why they're so interested in limiting the scope of our activities. Alongside the predictable overtures in the report to reforming the Resource Management Act, and clarifying Health & Safety legislation, is a recommendation that they Finish The Job when it comes to reform of the Local Government Act.

The real story is that many of the rules that people sent in, local or otherwise, turned out to be myths. Lolly scrambles haven't been banned, nor climbing a three-step ladder without a harness. (The report is sadly silent on Bullrush). The process of debunking these myths is actually a really positive one, for all levels of government, and for our communities, but it didn't suit the narrative. That takeaway message would be a concession of defeat.

By ruling out the easy option, Paula Bennett still needed something to hang her hat on, to justify the report's existence. With the damage from the leaky homes disaster still being mopped up, the Minister decided the time was right to raise the spectre of deregulating the building industry. Products have moved on since then, she says. We've all moved on since then. Surely we can all agree that there are some building jobs that shouldn't need to be signed off and certified?

As always with these things the devil, will be in the detail, but if a self-certifying building industry is the answer, I think we might be asking the wrong question. 

Aaron Hawkins is a Dunedin city councillor.

Ever since the demise of Campbell Live, the debate about the “future of media and journalism” has ramped up and given rise to some serious rethinking of paradigms.

I have personally attended two events this year with completely different speakers, but the same “end is nigh” theme for mainstream media and journalism as we know it.  The messages from the local events, and from the kilometres of op-eds written about this issue from around the world, have similar themes around the cracks that are appearing.

The internet is causing the largely advertising-based revenue of the big media outlets to shrink faster than the ice caps.  Keith Ng and others have also done an excellent job in highlighting issues with the rise of professional PR, and how that makes institutions in power, be they government or private sector, more opaque and less accessible.

There are many of, course, who would cheer at the downfall of mainstream media, which can often justifiably be seen as being too cosy with powerful special interests.  Yes, the world would probably be a much better place without the Murdoch Empire but the mainstream media's ability to reach mass audiences undeniably gives them an important role to play in society.  

It is that one place where we all come together, like a family at the dinner table. Or at least it was. With the internet, we’re seeing the breakdown of that singular sense of community identity into many smaller communities and niches.  So now, if you’re into cosplay and urbanism you have your own highly networked groups where you can have deep conversations on the specific details of that issue with others from around the world who are equally passionate – without what the Prime Minister said about the TPPA, or  the fact that there was a big protest march in every major city, being a blip on your self-selected radar.

For me, the prospect of ever-narrowing niches as a substitute for the clarion calls that a functioning "mass media" can provide wasn’t really good enough so I started to look around the world for anyone who was working on solutions.  And I found a surprisingly diverse range of answers.

One of the most interesting is a Dutch company called Blendle.  They’ve created what’s been called the iTunes for news.  You sign up and then pay per article you read, with a massive selection of choices from both local and international magazines.  They’ve been running for a few years now and are both popular and profitable.  Medium has a great write up on their story here and here.

Another story I kept hearing about was that of the Texas Tribune.  More like a traditional news org, they’ve won awards for the quality of their journalism and have managed to grow at a time when many of their competitors are shrinking.  They rely on a mix of philanthropy, donations, and sponsorships for their financial security.

And then there are the likes of Vox.com and Narratively that focus on quality of content over “Breaking news”.  Narratively specialises in longform, and I personally quite enjoy Vox’s philosophy of explaining the news.

Still fairly new to our shores is data journalism - using crowd-sourced and public stats data to get around the PR walls and our own unsubstantiated reckons.  It's the much needed alternative to the “human interest story”, and there’s a growing global movement building behind the philosophy.

Public Address blogger Keith Ng and the data team at the New Zealand Herald have been leading the way over here, with projects such as the Inequality calculator, and smart visualisations around the demographic changes in Auckland and election results.  Elsewhere, organisations like Pro-publica have made a name for themselves by going where traditional journalism couldn’t. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their ‘Dollars for Docs’ project that tracked the flow of money from Big Pharma to individual doctors in the USA.

It’s clear that data is going to play a much larger role in society going forward, but most of today’s media institutions of today are nowhere near ready for it.  

To differing degrees, the MSM here are rushing to reinvent themselves, but in ways that some cynics would describe as rearranging the deckchairs, and without any signs of throwing out old paradigms in order to hit upon some deep innovation.

On the local front, eyes have turned to a collaboration between enterprise incubator Enspiral and Scoop – which Scoop founder Alastair Thompson has already written extensively about – as a hope for something that could be truly innovative. 

Meanwhile, we have the energising crossover between satire and serious news that’s gained real momentum, especially with millennials. John Oliver deserves special mention. He took Stewart’s technique of combining humour, satire and solid journalism, and then added in something new.  Agency.  He gave his views opportunities to act on the outrage and become part of the solution.  From Net Neutrality, to FIFA, to Big Tobacco; he’s transforming journalism, and inspiring others to follow suit (check out Ryot and of course our very own Robbie aka White Man Behind Desk).

As interesting as these new frontiers and technology are, it would be a mistake to limit our vision to just that dimension.  Especially when the changes in the relationship between journalists, the public, and those in power are even more intriguing. 

To do this, we have to first understand the concept of relational models.  There are essentially four basic models by which we interact with each other:  Authority ranking, Communal sharing, Equality matching and Market pricing.  Malcolm Gladwell does a decent job of explaining them in his piece on the rise of Talent here:

“Communal sharing is a group of roommates in a house who are free to read one another’s books and wear one another’s clothing. Equality matching is a car pool: if I drive your child to school today, you drive my child to school tomorrow. Market pricing is where the terms of exchange are open to negotiation, or subject to the laws of supply and demand. And authority ranking is paternalism: it is a hierarchical system in which “superiors appropriate or pre-empt what they wish,” as Fiske writes, and “have pastoral responsibility to provide for inferiors who are in need and to protect them.”

The point isn’t that one of these models is better than the rest, it’s that we choose the most appropriate model for the situation.  Using the example of a dinner party.

 “You buy the food at the store, paying more for those items which are considered more valuable. That’s market pricing. Some of the people who come may have been invited because they invited you to a dinner party in the past: that’s equality matching. At the party, everyone is asked to serve himself or herself (communal sharing), but, as the host, you tell your guests where to sit and they do as they are told (authority ranking). Suppose, though, you were to switch the models you were using for your dinner party. If you use equality matching to acquire the food, communal sharing for your invitations, authority ranking for the choice of what to serve, and market pricing for the seating, then you could have the same food, the same guests, and the same venue, but you wouldn’t have a dinner party anymore. You’d have a community fund-raiser. The model chosen in any situation has a profound effect on the nature of the interaction”

So if we look at the relationship between journalists and the public, up until quite recently it looked like one of Authority Ranking, where journalists decided what stories we needed to hear, for better or worse. These days there’s a strong element of Market Pricing, either through ratings or clicks.  It’s competitive and it’s skewing the stories that are pushed out towards clickbait and infotainment. John Campbell, like a lot of other journalists, cares about people, and believes strongly in telling us what we need to hear.

Of course, it’s not all Market Pricing.  Social media has created a new avenue for relationships between the various stakeholders, one based around Communal Sharing. News stories are a form of relational exchange between people on your social media feeds right now.  We share stories because we want the people important to us to share the buzz or emotion we got from it.  Or, as is also quite common, to tell others who we are.  What you share tells people something about your values and what you care about.  What was once information for consumption is now something we use to communicate our identity to the people we care about.  We share specific stories on facebook for the same reason we buy a new (or old) shirt.

Going the other direction, if we were to look at the relationship between journalists and those in positions of power, traditionally it looks a bit like Equality Matching.  Where access was based on mutual respect between politicians/ large companies. That’s changed too with the rise of PR.  Now it looks a lot like Authority Ranking, where those in power continue to exert control about what they let journalists do.

The internet has given (almost) everyone access to immense volumes of information about the world we live in.  The hope was that it would enhance democracy and participation. But as David Foster Wallace had the great foresight to point out, the search for quality and relevance inevitably leads to the rise of gatekeepers.  Which is why, as we experiment with these new ideas and business models we also need to take into account these fundamental relational models, or we might just end up with something worse than what we have now.  Democratic society depends on getting this right.

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If you’re keen to be part of this discussion on future pathways for journalism and the media, then you might want to come along to Journathon on 2 December.  It’s a day-long hackathon (and Step it Up 2015 side-event) that’s aimed at exploring what journalism and media might look like in 2020 and beyond. 

We’ve got two international thought leaders already confirmed: Duco Van Lanschot from Blendle and  Evan Smith from the Texas Tribune. It’s a shared project between the Centre for NZ Progress and Enspiral, with a lot of support from the sidelines from Stephen Olsen at NewsRoom_Plus and Julie Starr.

If you’re in tech, the media, data or you just believe in the necessity of journalism and have some ideas then we’d really like to see you there.  It’s free to attend if you make an application, or you buy any ticket to the Step it Up 2015 conference on 30 Nov – 1 December.