I find it hard to be sympathetic to police of the 80s, as we'd recently witnessed the awful things they'd been required to do re: the Springbok Tour, and the evident glee with which many of them did those things. Decent, honourable cops would have found it hard to stay on the force, I'd have thought, and the others would have benefitted in their careers.

There's a new TV cop show, set in 1973-Britain, and commentators all pick up on the attitudes to women and to violence which were commonplace back then, a lot closer to the mid-80s than we are.

It's difficult to keep track without being an obsessive news-junkie, but I don't seem to have heard anyone asking the hard questions about the mess Eden Park is currently in.

Apparently they have such large debt that they are overcapitalised if they want to re-develop the site as housing or industrial, and are looking to the enlargement, funded from outside, to make the stadium viable again. There seem to be messy lines of accountability around the Trust Board and the actual proprietors, though they clearly have good PR advice.

btw, I am an Auckland City ratepayer, am not keen on the Waterfront solution, and all-in-all Christchurch sounds the best bet at the moment.

A million years ago I studied Politics at varsity, and learned that First-Past-The-Post encourages 2-party systems while PR encourages multi-party systems. I wrote an essay on the USA once, in which I concluded cutely that they have a no-party system, as the philosophical and demographic foundations of both main parties are so vague as to be meaningless.

I visited the States once, and found that no power on earth (or heaven) will persuade them to make different values of paper money in varying size or colour; it's how they've always done it, and they'll keep miles and gallons too. So what chance they'll make huge changes in their 18th century political system?