I've only been back in New Zealand for a few weeks and already I'm sick of hearing about "the principles of the treaty".

A typical example is today's visit by a UN representative on indigenous peoples James Anaya, who said from what he has observed during his visit to New Zealand, treaty principles are too vulnerable to political discretion. Mr Anaya used the example of Te Reo Māori being made an official language, yet not made compulsory in schools.

What the F***?

Is learning the Aboriginal language compulsory in Australia? Are the Swedes all learning Sami? Are any of the native American languages compulsory in the US? I don't see the Chinese making Tibetan a compulsory language or the Northern Iraqi's making Kurdish compulsory. Who is this bozo and what medication is he being prescribed?

Of course this prompted yet another solo protest. A chap named Ropata Paora parked a beaten up old Isuzu 4x4 across the only road leading to and from One tree hill in Auckland. The 4x4 had been hastily painted up to resemble a UN vehicle and Paora stated: "Without the treaty, they'd be illegal aliens. So unless they acknowledge the treaty, my korero [speech] to them is 'I'm not the trespasser, you are,'".

Amusingly, the police cited Paora as the 4x4 had at least one deflated/unsafe tyre and no warrant of fitness (the NZ version of an MOT) since 2007.

While clowns like Paora are at least entertaining, it's ironic to see how time and political fashion have turned on the treaty of Waitangi. When I emigrated from New Zealand almost 20 years ago, Māori activists were loudly proclaiming the treaty to be "a fraud". Two decades later, protesters like Paora are complaining that it isn't being acknowledged.

What exactly is not being acknowledged?

The Treaty of Waitangi is actually a very simple document and contains only three articles:-

1. Article 1 puts all of New Zealand under the rule of the British crown.
2. Article 2 guarantees the Māori chiefs their existing lands and prevents them being sold to anyone but the crown. This was intended to protect Māori from the kinds of shady land purchases which had alienated indigenous people in other parts of the world from their land with minimal compensation.
3. Article 3 guarantees to all Māori the same rights as all other British subjects.

While it's true that complications arose (the most major one being the differences between the English and Māori versions of the treaty) and that some Māori got the shitty end of the stick in a handful of dodgy real estate deals, the fact is that this all happened over 170 years ago. Decades of discussion and billions of dollars have changed hands. From the Iwi Trust to Tāngata whenua, a huge range of social initiatives have been funded, all designed to redress the wrongs done to the self-proclaimed "indigineous" people of this land.

I have 3 words for the likes of Paora; boo fucking hoo!

It's way past the time to put this ancient crap to bed, stop thinking of ourselves as members of this ethnic group or that tribe/part of society, class and what not, stop playing the race card or waving the flag of victim-hood and start thinking of ourselves as New Zealanders first and foremost.

And maybe the first step, should be either re-defining the term: indigenous or re-examining it's use in the current context...

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of: indigenous is:-

originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native:

By that definition, anyone born here or even those who have lived here for a major portion of their lives are...indigenous.

We have real economic, social and environmental issues we should be concentrating on. We should be focusing on creating and maintaining our schools, roads, hospitals, on global economic and environmental issues and how we can play our part in making a better world for ourselves and each other. Instead, we remain focused on the things that divide us instead of those that unite us.

Let's be the change that we want to see in the world...

Let's ALL be indigenous

Television in New Zealand can be largely summed up in 4 words: seven channels of shite.

It's full to the brim with loud, brash, unfunny American and Australian crap, interspersed with even louder and brasher ads for half-price sales at Harvey the Rabbit or some such, about every 10 minutes. It's basically a noise factory that in a very short period of time leaves the viewer numbed to the seemingly endless flow of static it spouts.

I'm not really sure why I turned the TV on, during a dark and stormy night as I sat in a comfy armchair in front of the flickering embers of a cozy fire. I'd been reading a novel by the light of a solitary lamp and listening to the rain pounding on the tin roof, when I set my book down and flicked on the boob-tube, for no particular reason that I can recall.

What I heard was a track that made me sit up and listen.

The song was called: Careful and the artist was Flip Grater.

With a distinctively smooth coffee-and-cream voice that is reminiscent of both Stevie Nicks' vocal performance in Fleetwood Mac's Dreams and Wire Daisies vocalist Treana Morris, Flip Grater has created a masterpiece of Indie subtlety in her new album While I'm Awake I'm At War.

Every aspect of the album speaks of craft; simple, clear guitar licks and a softly-played violin which carries the listener down a dark river. Minimal bass lines and a muted rhythm give the album a soft-spoken, melancholy sound that makes the heart ache and the mind reminisce and remember. The lyrics are intelligent, thought-provoking and meaningful.

It has a little bit of a country feel, but not of checkered-scarf-and-square-dancing ilk; instead it's a more folk-like sound, which evokes images of windy Celtic landscapes and salty driftwood scattered over a long stretch of lonely, wind-swept beaches. It does make use of the much-maligned steel guitar in tracks such as I am gone, but the effect is more along the lines of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game, which - coincidentally - followed on the TV almost immediately afterward.

Dark and evocative (as the best Folk music always is), but with a thin vein of light running through it (in tracks such as Bullet that I ride), While I'm Awake I'm At War is a superb arrangement by any measure and an absolute must for any fans' collection.

Play it on a dark and stormy night, when the rain pours and the wind howls. Pour yourself a dram while staring at the embers of a dying fire...and (re)discover a sound that caresses the mind and heart, a sound that evokes thoughts and feelings...

Rediscover music.

It's all downhill from here....wheeee!

Footage was shot on pocket camera, in one take. We could only get low-res photos which are not very clear, it has no video fade effects (I couldn't figure out how to do them in bloody Adobe premiere!) and all in all is a bit rough and ready (just like us!) ...

...but it's from the heart (and maybe the lungs and stomach)

One of my bugbears is dysfunctional packaging (in the UK), which appears to be a large percentage of it.

For some reason (and I have no idea what has changed to initiate it) certain packaging has become almost impregnable to the average unadorned human being (hands, teeth, feet etc). Flimsy plastic wrapping is now something a superhero could be proud to use in their fight against crime. Try opening for example a plastic bag of sugar, herbs, nuts or anything other than certain snack foods (a few of which are still designed to be opened with just our hands) and you will need tools; a knife or a pair of scissors, a hedge trimmer maybe. Because if you manage to open them by hand and don't give yourself a hernia in the process, then the bag will split (presumably in order to punish your precocity) and the contents will spill all over the place, often dramatically. A result I call CSE (contents spewing everywhere).

Ok fine I have scissors in the kitchen, so I use them. But the way the bag has been designed - folded and glued - means that it is not possible to do a clean cut straight across or even a clean straight cut of a corner, unless you are a origami expert twice removed (some dishwasher salt bag designers please take note). So the top or corner is now zigzagged shaped, which means that pouring anything out of it involves, yes you guessed it, 'contents spewing everywhere' again. Ok, so I quite like the bottom of my dishwasher covered in salt crystals ... looks kinda festive don'tya think?

Or ... bags of sugar which are so full that to cut below the top glue line means (unless you have a steady hand, good eyesight and are really careful) 'contents spewing ... ' yeah I think you get what I mean. Then they add insult to injury and include that useless large piece of sticky tape, which is <sarcasm type="extreme">really handy</sarcasm> for you to stick down the top after opening, even though the bag is so full that it bursts open a few nanoseconds later; then when the bag becomes more comfortably empty the tape loses its stickiness anyway.

I am beginning to think that packaging designers are just taking the proverbial ... Ok maybe a tad paranoid, but I wouldn't be writing this if it was just an occasional occurrence; because just lately it appears to be that too many packaging items have some sort of dysfunction. It's a trend of sorts. I'm sure that there are all kinds of security, health & safety and other reasons that it happens - but it still annoys the heck out of me, because it just feels gratuitous or badly thought out.

Anyway here's just a few initial items on my personal aggravation list:

• Juice cartons, you know the hard to open, cardboard/foil/plastic/whatever combination cartons which are practicably unrecyclable and will only pour anything if allowed to gurgle-slop and then more often than not 'spew contents everywhere'. I've lost count of the amount of times the plastic ring-pull security seal thingy has snapped off, so that you cannot open them without some kind of electrical equipment and a sort of grim determination.
• Sugar, herbs, nuts for cooking etc or anything that has that horrible stiff plastic wrapping and is glued up the whazzoo (in order I presume to stop people opening them in the store, wandering around whilst snacking out and perhaps doing a little shopping in the meantime). Thus trying to open them by hand (as previously mentioned) almost always results in CSE (contents spewing everywhere) in your kitchen and possible starvation if you are in the 'field' caught short without a Swiss knife, machete or ice pick to hand.
• Wine bottles with foil tops, that have no tab to help peal them off, although it is one way to spend an almost Zen-like and rather thoughtful afternoon pealing off the foil top, micromillimeter by micromillimeter. Just keep a packet of plasters handy (... if you can open them that is ... sob).
• Milk bottles (plastic), those with foil security tops that occasionally are overglued and just will not come off, resulting in ... once you do get them off and before calling emergency to treat your dislocated shoulder, more blooming CSE!
• Teabag boxes, with that flimsy plastic outer covering that is fiddly to open and peal off ... piece by piece by ... and then you have to 'unseal' the cardboard box underneath anyway (whereby you learn that paper/cardboard is actually strongest at the perforations). But I guess the plastic outer cover stops damage to the teabags when the packets fall in water; which could be handy if you keep them say in the shower stall instead of the cupboard, or the delivery lorry drivers forget to batten the hatches in a rainstorm, or a 100ft tidal wave ...
• Crackers, you know the 'fragile' ones that come in micron thin plastic wrapping which affords zero protection against percussion damage. In fact my guess is that this wrapping creates a minus protection factor (anti-packaging!) ... in other words crackers in this stuff are more likely to be damaged than if they were completely loose. Then they have that <sarcasm type="major">handy</sarcasm> tab you pull to guillotine the top off ... which works only when the moon is full and you aren't in any kind of hurry.
• Any kind of packaging which is that spongy, soft plastic wrap (the type that your bread comes in), or other types of flimsy plastic that you screw up and put in the bin ... but then quietly unwraps itself over the next few minutes to a size that is actually larger than it was beforehand; thus defying several laws of physics in the process. This causes an inverse square mass issue inside your bin, necessitating the use of heavy items in order to weigh down the plastic 'explosion' and make room for anything else.
• Margarine tub lids, a fiddle to get off, almost impossible to put back on, without specialist equipment, so that they 'click' properly. Which means you make a grab for the marge in the fridge and the loose lid flips off ... you lose your grip (in more ways than one I might add) and the tub somersaults impressively into the air ... it lands on the floor with a splat (and we all know which way round it lands) and results in another major CSE event.
• That stupid, useless and aggravating push-lock-plastic-strip thingy (don't know the official name ... don't care). On certain packaging you have a plastic strip on the inside of the opened edge, which when pressed together grips and seals the package opening (hahahahahah - if only) like a zip.  As you can guess by my maniacal laughter they just hardly ever and I mean ever work, ever, ever, ever! Arggghhhhhhh ... [takes deep breath] ...

There are more examples I'm sure, but I think I've just blocked them from memory.

So [another deep breath] every time I see a <sarcasm type="global" class="of its own">handy</sarcasm> 'pull here to open' message or tab on any type of packaging: I grit my teeth, gird my loins (at least I think I do as, like Terry Pratchett's Rev Oats, I'm not entirely sure how you do that) and make a mental note of where the knives/scissors/chain saw ... tissues/soap/biohazard suit are located ... I'll let you know how I get on.

Su

Most people probably don't need further reasons, but for the undecided among you, consider these:-

1. Allegations by BP's deepwater rig partner Andarko Petroleum who have openly accused the company of being "reckless". James Hackett, chief executive of Anadarko Petroleum, said it was considering "contractual remedies" for what the company has described as BP's "gross negligence or wilful misconduct" over the spill.
2. BP's increasingly desperate attempts to stop the flow of crude oil following the rig explosion have demonstrated a total lack of workable disaster / contingency planning.
3. Thanks to lax US and UK laws (allegedly watered down by oil-industry lobbyists), BP was permitted to operate the rig without the use of safety devices such as the acoustic switch blowout system. This fail-safe device costs a half a million dollars to implement, but BP appears to have decided that this was an unnecessary expense. Yet another legacy of the Bush/Cheney administration.
4. While people died and others continue to risk their lives to contain the disaster, BP top dog Tony Hayward swanned off on a rich-boy's yacht race.
5. Instead of gratefully accepting their help and focusing on the problem at hand, BP's lawyers attempted to gag fisherman volunteering to help with oil spill clean-up efforts, by forcing them to sign away their right to free speech, from holding BP harmless for any accidents that might occur, and requiring them to give the oil giant a month's notice before filing any legal claims.
6. Despite preliminary estimates of a cleanup cost running into billions, along with BP's average net earnings of close to $20bn per year for the last 3 years, sailing-boy CEO Tony Hayward has decided to proceed with dividend payments, before the cleanup costs can even be properly estimated.
7. BP has a poor environmental and safety record that dates back for decades. It was named by Mother Jones Magazine as one of the "ten worst corporations" in both 2001 and 2005 based on its environmental and human rights records. Between January 1997 and March 1998, BP was responsible for 104 oil spills.
8. In recent years, BP has been implicated in a number of gas price manipulation scandals. Detailed allegations by federal investigators that BP traders illegally manipulated propane prices in 2004 and formal charges brought against BP by the Oklahoma Attorney General left BP executives squirming and red-faced, but did little to change their ways.
9. On the local front, BP has a long history of always being the first to increase fuel prices at the pumps and the last to reduce them - so much so that fuel price increases are refereed to in New Zealand as: "the BP subsidy".
10. At the same time, BP have demonstrated that they don't give a damn about their forecourt customers and have managed to take the last remaining vestiges of "Service" out of the "Service station" by mumbling something incoherent about health and safety laws, without being able to quote chapter and verse when pressed. This has even extended to one station refusing to assist a disabled driver and ordering him off the forecourt for apparently "creating a safety hazard".

Seen enough? Join the boycott

The only thing that governments and corporate interests still fear, is public opinion.