Charitably taxing
“The God dividend” (February 2) says, “Max Wallace isn’t a mean-spirited man.” Oh, really? Wallace appears to be on a crusade against any vestiges of religion in public life. He is against the chaplaincy programme in schools in Australia, Bible study meetings in Parliament, a reference to God in the national anthem of Australia, Christians buying a radio station and broadcasting Christian radio, and Archbishop Peter Hollingworth being made Governor-General of Australia.
Now he has come to New Zealand to bless us by accusing the church of being subsidised by secular taxpayers. I would say that churches do far more good in the community. Here in Masterton every year churches provide a free Christmas dinner for those who have nowhere to go, routinely give money to the poor who may not have any church connections, visit the sick and the elderly, provide community life for those who have been rejected by society, provide accommodation for those at the bottom of the heap, and provide foster care.
Christians are often at the forefront of social services in the community. I suspect the community would be substantially poorer if Christians suddenly stopped doing good.
That churches are sitting on valuable portfolios and raking in vast sums would be news to many of us. The social services provided above come from the people who give offerings. They are not paid for by the state at all, nor do the vast majority of churches have huge other sources of finance. We pay our own way and endeavour to do good in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ.
But if churches were taxed what is Wallace suggesting? Should the offering be taxed? Does this mean the factory worker who puts in $25 a week – which has already been taxed – should find his offering taxed again? For many churches – already struggling to pay a minister, pay the electricity bill and give to the poor – additional taxation would be crippling. Churches may have to close – is this Wallace’s intention?
That churches should have to provide audited accounts and submit themselves to the same guidelines as publicly listed companies is also incredibly burdensome. To pay for someone to audit a churches accounts could cost $1000. For small churches $1000 is a big deal. Similarly there are compliance costs in hiring accountants to try to keep up with the ever increasing burden of Inland Revenue. Charities everywhere – churches and others – could find themselves crippled by ever increasing regulation.
This seems an incredibly unnecessary article addressing a non-problem. However, the church of Jesus Christ survived the persecution of Saul of Tarsus and Nero. No doubt it will survive the secular activism of Max Wallace.
Scott Lelievre (Masterton)
A STRUGGLING DIRECTOR
I was heartened to read the opinions of Bruce Babington (Books, February 9), who regards me as a “talented director” and wonders what has happened to me and a few other directors who struggle on in this country. Okay, here’s what has happened over the past five years.
Believers to the Bright Coast, by Vincent O’Sullivan: I was drawn to aspects of this fascinating novel, optioned it and wrote an extended treatment – this was rebuffed by the NZ Film Commission’s script development executive, who threw back a thicket of impossible to answer intellectual questions at me, as if that was somehow going to help the project’s development. The idea of coming up with some money to develop the concept was never broached from her side. I was put on the spot and, without answers to her questions, dismissed.
Slow Water, by Annamarie Jagose (a major prize-winning and original novel): this was a costly and complex idea to explore, but Raymond Hawthorne and I (we had formed a company to look at developing film projects from New Zealand novels) got such short shrift and a lack of interest from the commission that it was clearly a waste of time to take ideas to them.
Raymond and I wrote two detailed drafts of this script without any subsidies. It took over two years. Finally we faced script difficulties that we could not surmount on our own.
Hunter, Joy Cowley’s fantasy adventure story for young adults: Raymond and I optioned this excellent book and wrote an extended treatment (and went on to do two full drafts). We approached the NZFC for finance to write. We’d asked for $15,000 (what it recommends as a first sum) to do a script, but were offered $5000, of which the main worry seemed to be which Maori consultant would the money go to.
The story is in two intersecting timeframes, present day and 200 years ago. We were asked, although it wasn’t put in writing, to drop the contemporary story (half the book), based on chief executive Ruth Harley’s “hunch” that family stories were difficult to sell. This gobsmacking intervention threw away Cowley’s premise of communicating across time. We were forced to say keep your paltry $5000.
Meanwhile, we’d dished out thousands in option fees for all these works, in order to be free to adapt them.
I’ve just taken an agent in Australia, and am hoping for TV directing work on a jobbing basis to tide me over till there’s a new energy and openness in Wellington at the NZFC offices.
Garth Maxwell (Auckland)
CAPTIONS AND POLITICS
The winning caption for the first photo (“Caption competition winners”, February 2) suggests Nicolas Sarkozy is uncertain whether to greet Helen Clark as a man or a woman.
Poking fun at the policies of the powerful is arguably an important part of New Zealand culture, but when an august magazine such as the Listener allows published humour to sink to comments about relatively unalterable personal attributes, it drags us back at least two decades to a time when it was thought permissible to make hurtful comments about looks, physiques and illnesses.
Joe Baker (Dunedin)
MARSDEN MISCHIEF
In “Cross purposes” (Travel, February 2), writer Peter Calder displays a touching belief in the suppositions of both his wife, Professor Alison Jones, and Professor Kuni Jenkins regarding the Christmas Day sermon by Samuel Marsden at Rangihoua in 1814. Is there a book in preparation or is this just another stick to beat the descendants of European settlers in order to prove the superiority of Maori?
For several decades now we have been hectored by academic historians in this way.
Jones claims that Ruatara did not translate Marsden’s sermon at all but used the occasion for a political meeting. No convincing evidence is produced to substantiate this theory.
Are we to suppose that Marsden was as gullible and naive as Jones and Jenkins speculate? He had had a good acquaintance in Sydney with Maori visitors, so it would have been likely that he knew some of the language. As a courtesy to listeners to his sermon, he would have probably parroted a few welcoming phrases at least.
The news of the massacre of the crew of the Boyd in 1806 was well known in Sydney, so he knew of the pull of tribal customs.
Are we to suppose that Ruatara’s character was motivated solely by material gains to be made and that he lacked sufficient integrity to promote at least part of Marsden’s spiritual programme? Or that Marsden would risk a venture of his in the hands of a doubtful character?
Would Professors Jones and Jenkins please supply some evidence.
Dennis A Herring (Burwood, Christchurch)
Professor Alison Jones replies: Dennis A Herring obviously has little time for “academic historians” – he does not suggest who these are, but I suspect that he dislikes the eminent historians Michael King, James Belich, Anne Salmond and Judith Binney for their willingness to attempt to see Maori-Pakeha history as an interchange rather than a straightforward record from the point of view of English men. It is curious that he should see the possible “superiority” of Maori as a “stick to beat Europeans” with.
His point that Marsden would have spoken some Maori language and therefore “he would have probably parroted a few welcoming phrases at least” may be correct, but it is irrelevant. What people heard was what Ruatara said, given he spoke Maori, and Marsden, substantively, did not.
He asks, “Are we to suppose that Samuel Marsden was as gullible and naive as Jones and Jenkins speculate?” No one is speculating that Marsden was naive. (He was cunning – and he would have been happy for Ruatara to say whatever he liked, so long as Ruatara ensured Marsden’s people’s protection, and Maori acceptance of the settlement. In fact, it is a matter of historical record that Marsden had a controversial “civilise first and Christianise second” policy which meant that he was more interested in getting the initial interest and curiosity of Maori aroused than in preaching.)
He says, “The news of the massacre of the crew of the Boyd in 1806 was well-known in Sydney so [Marsden] knew of the pull of tribal customs.” The massacre was in 1809, and Marsden had argued with his bosses in Australia that it was a very localised event and would have no negative impact on his mission (that is, the massacre was not an indication of “tribal customs” at all).
His last paragraph is easily responded to, but only fully in the book we are writing! In the interim, the letter writer might like to read the excellent account of the relationship between Ruatara and Marsden in Anne Salmond’s book Between Worlds.
I would like to correct an historical inaccuracy perpetuated in Peter Calder’s account of his trip to Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands. Calder refers to Samuel Marsden’s arrival in New Zealand with “the first three Pakeha settler families … the families of Thomas Kendall, schoolteacher; John King, ropemaker; and William Hall, carpenter”.
The family of Thomas Hansen, master of the Active, also accompanied Marsden and the missionaries. Captain Hansen’s daughter was married to King, but perhaps because they were lay people, the other Hansens have often been overlooked in accounts of these events.
They were discriminated against from the outset: although the families were living side by side, the young Hansens were excluded from the formal schooling the missionaries provided both for their own children and those of local Maori.
Mary Mangan (Grey Lynn, Auckland)
CARRY ON PUBLISHING
Denis Welch is in error (100 years ago, February 9) when he states that “only the School Journal has been going longer, continuously, than Kai Tiaki Nursing New Zealand”.
At least one other journal preceded the nursing journal – the first issue of the New Zealand Dental Journal, published by the New Zealand Dental Association, appeared in July 1905, and continues today as a respected professional and scientific publication.
Harvey Brown (Levin)
A LONG FORGETTING
Lest anyone be tempted to question a belief in the irrelevance of literary theoreticians to the real nature of writing, then a reading of the review by Jane Stafford of Patrick Evans’s book The Long Forgetting (Books, January 26) and subsequent correspondence from Evans (Letters, February 9) puts an end to any such temptation.
The arcane accusations of Stafford in her review (“the rigidity of his postcolonial benchmark … finds it difficult to deal with such external irruptions as modernism, feminism and postmodernism”) and Evans’s equally coded counter-accusations (“the dangers of examining the ideologies that construct our thought”; “Thus white settlement continues to naturalise itself as unproblematic”) are examples of the degree to which English department academics are capable of simultaneously debasing our language and impeding clear communication.
Serious questions also arise from Stafford and Evans’s impenetrable, irrelevant theorising: why are these people employed to produce it, and why are they given so much space to parade it?
Graeme Lay (Devonport, Auckland)
MEN AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
I support Bill Ralston’s call for some sanity in the campaign against domestic violence (Life, December 8). The level of domestic violence in New Zealand has so many negative consequences for so many.
Ralston questioned the targeting of men in efforts to reduce domestic violence. It is clear that 95 percent of domestic violence is done by men to women and children. And it is obvious that male violence is much more destructive than women’s. Targeting men who are violent is the most effective use of limited resources to get the most behavioural change.
Most men are not violent, and the wonderful grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers and sons who love their families without hurting them all deserve congratulations.
The “It’s not OK” campaign and the annual White Ribbon Day for men to make a public stand against violence to women are proven ways to reduce crazy male behaviour – and to emphasis the desired, healthy behaviour we want from all men. Supporting them is the only sane thing to do.
Garth Baker, Project Manager, National Network of Stopping Violence Services
Jane Stafford’s review of Patrick Evans’s The Long Forgetting: Post-colonial literary culture in New Zealand is what I can only imagine to be a personal attack. This rather unacademic, knee-jerk, anti-Maori rant defies scholarly thought, as one will soon discover upon reading Evans’s book.
I am dismayed at her desire to attempt to shut people of from reading what is a truly significant, original and groundbreaking piece of work; finally, a Pakeha has stood up and truly reflected upon himself and his culture. Evans’s book is engaging, entertaining, superbly written, funny, witty, sophisticated, well-researched, accurately cynical and highly intelligent. Most of all though, he tackles the real issues of Maori-Pakeha relations and New Zealand identity.
Please do not let Stafford’s neo-colonial, unreflexive defence stop you from truly having your minds opened.
Rebecca Ream (Spreydon, Christchurch)
KING OF LANGUAGES
Harold Williams (“The man who went to see Tolstoy”, January 5) helped the young Arthur Ransome when he arrived in Russia and got him a job as the Daily News correspondent. Williams thought he had the making of a good journalist, and became a father-figure to him, according to Ransome’s biographer Hugh Brogan.
It was said of Williams’s wife, Ariadna, that “the Cadet Party had one good man, and he was a woman’. But when Ransome heard the gentle Williams say, “There has not been enough blood-letting”, he blamed her influence.
The Williams fell out with Ransome by 1918 over his opposition to Allied intervention in Russia, in despatches and three books. Ransome had talked to Lenin and Trotsky, and Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that “when he told me that he had actually played chess with Lenin, who proved to be rather a poor player, and with Litvinov, a much better one, I inwardly genuflected.” Muggeridge was an admirer of the new Soviet Union – until he went to live there.
Ransome later married Evgenia Petrovna Sheleina, who was Trotsky’s personal secretary. He wrote 12 children’s books, starting with Swallows and Amazons, and several short stories, including The Unofficial Side, which was based on the Russian Revolution.
John Wilson (Johnsonville, Wellington)
BACK TO THE ENVIRONMENT
We are being urged to take better care of the environment. Think of the following:
1. Air New Zealand is offering cheaper seats on domestic flights to encourage people to fly more.
2. Not long ago council rubbish bags were made of heavy brown paper, bio-degradable, not plastic.
3. Milk was sold in glass bottles which were collected and re-used.
4. Doggy doo went into compost bins, not put inside plastic bags with other rubbish.
5. School (or work) lunches were put in a paper bag.
Perhaps we should be looking back to the old days with more than nostalgia.
Pippa Coulston (Omokoroa, Tauranga)
WHIFFY COMPOST
Did some unintended decomposition infiltrate the “Make compost that doesn’t stink” piece (“How to …”, January 12)? While the airtight bokashi fermentation method may not pong, it is misleading to say “since the process is anaerobic (not relying on oxygen), whiffy smells are eliminated entirely”.
The decomposition of organic waste buried in landfills is anaerobic and produces methane (a greenhouse gas 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide), which many councils are trying to eliminate by encouraging home composting. But home composting is aerobic only if oxygen is added to the material through aeration. This can be done by regularly turning and loosening the material, but many people don’t bother. Smelly compost is evidence that the process has become anaerobic.
The New Zealand-invented, -patented, -designed, -manufactured and exported Earthmaker Aerobic Composter achieves aeration by holding material above the ground during the early stages of decomposition. The natural heat of the composting process draws air up through the material, which also loosens as it spills from shelf to shelf. Its developers believe that this is the easiest and most effective way yet devised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions created by domestic organic waste.
Michael Smythe, Design Director, Earthmaker Enterprises (Northcote, North Shore)
SIR EDMUND
In the wide ranging accolades that have flooded in for the late Sir Edmund Hillary, and in the search for a lasting tribute to him, very little reference has been made to what many consider to be his finest hour: overcoming the Hillary Step.
The Hillary Step is a 12 metres vertical rock face at 8790 metres above sea level, just below the summit of Everest. Climbing this daunting, near overwhelming hurdle while breathless, yet in tantalising sight of the ultimate goal, required a very special quality.
We can see Hillary Steps all around us – in playing sport, in fighting adversity and in any human endeavour that strives towards identifiable goals.
What more fitting tribute could there be than for us all to ensure that the concept of a “Hillary Step” falls into common usage?
By routinely acknowledging and admiring the successful overcoming of problems in this way, we would ensure that our Kiwi icon would always be remembered. We would be championing the resolute determination and very special strength of character that allowed Sir Ed to “knock the bastard off”.
Chris Skellett (Warrington, Otago)
