Len Brown doesn't do his own laundry, alleges Graham McCready

Graham McCready, who has been described by no lesser an authority than Cameron Slater as a "serial litigant, convicted fraudster, blackmailer and now bankrupt", has today alleged that Shan Inglis, wife of embattled Auckland mayor Len Brown, does some of her husband's laundering for him.

Now, one of the main planks of Len Brown's 2013 campaign was that he always did his own washing and ironing, and this arguably tipped many undecided voters in his favour. Doubts over the veracity of this statement were raised soon after his election victory, of course, when several loads of Mr Brown's dirty washing were aired in public, first by the aforementioned Slater and then, incessantly, by the New Zealand Herald.

And now Mr McCready has dropped his latest bombshell, alleging that gifts in the name of Ms Inglis were a "laundering exercise'' to avoid Len Brown having to declare them on his register of interests. By accepting these freebies, maintains McCready, Ms Inglis became a party to her husband's alleged laundering and "in the interest of justice she ought to be made accountable".

If proven true, McCready's allegations will pile further pressure on Mr Brown to admit that he does not, in fact, do all his own washing, an admission that could well prolong indefinitely the tumultuous spin cycle he currently finds himself in.

EMA: “New Zealand can be minor-free by 2050”

by Nicolas Fouquet, New Zealand Gerald’s chief political commentator. Additional distorting by Augustus Finknottle.

The embattled Employers and Manufacturers Association looks set to cause further controversy this week after the leaking of an EMA government briefing document entitled Make Money, not Babies.

The 134-page report outlines radical plans to encourage young New Zealand women to undergo “productivity-realignment surgery” upon leaving school, so as to “maximise their workplace performance” and “outsource the cost-inefficient process of bearing and rearing children”.

The proposals call for an unprecedented raft of industry and government subsidies for women who sign up to the scheme, which is to be called “Babysaver”. These include free tertiary tuition, guaranteed employment and/or deployment on UN peacekeeping missions, and generous grants towards a first home.

According to the document, “The inefficiency of menstruating women in the workforce, the tremendous resources wasted on educating minors, and the cumulative effects of brain drain” mean that the “overall benefit-cost ratio for each child born in New Zealand is 0.4 at best”.

To turn this situation around, the government should invest those resources in attracting “the best talent from around the globe” by recruiting young people “raised and educated in other countries”. Female new arrivals to New Zealand would be given free productivity-realignment surgery as part of a revamped “Welcome Package” which would also feature fast-tracked citizenship and lifetime EMA membership.

The resulting savings on “obstetric and paediatric healthcare, child and youth services, kindergartens and schools” would be used to fund attractive salary packages for migrants, yielding a “substantially superior overall return on taxpayer investment”.

If the government adopts all the recommendations contained in Make Money, not Babies, the EMA is confident that New Zealand will be “minor-free by 2050” and one of the world’s best-performing economies.

The leaked document is likely to provoke further anger against the EMA in a week that has seen demonstrators hurl (unused) tampons at its Auckland office in protest against the inflammatory remarks made by the association’s CEO, Alasdair Thompson, last Thursday. Thompson, who is also the country’s most famous after-dinner speaker, told a talkback radio host that women were less productive in the workforce because of their periods and child-bearing tendencies.

While Green Party co-leader and Australian Russel Norman criticized the EMA’s proposals as being “shithouse”, the Prime Minister’s office described the document as “not without merit”.

Meanwhile, Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly confirmed Sunday that she had been confronted by Thompson in 2009 about her relationship with John Key, in Washington, DC.

At a dinner at McCormick & Schmick’s restaurant – about which Thompson reportedly quipped: “The name alone is a mouthful” – Thompson approached Kelly and allegedly made lewd comments about the relationship she had with Key, who married his wife Bronagh when he and the First Lady were both teenagers.

When asked to comment on the allegations the Prime Minister’s office described them as “not not without merit”.

According to the New Zealand Herald’s source, who was present at the dinner, “[Thompson] asked [Kelly] what the relationship was between her and John Key. There was sexual innuendo. Then he said he asked John Key, the last time he saw him, [if] he [Key] fancied Helen.”

The source said Kelly was visibly upset by the comments and told Thompson: “That’s disgusting.”

As Kelly walked away, Thompson allegedly shouted: “It’s a joke. You’re beautiful, you know.” According to the Herald, Kelly has confirmed the account. She would not comment further on the incident.

The EMA did comment on Thompson’s latest gaffe, dismissing it as a bit of harmless fun. In an unprecedented move, Thompson will today be asked to explain himself to the board without the aid of sexist jokes and is no longer allowed to speak to female members of the media.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for Thompson: he is now more in demand than ever as an after-dinner speaker and is about to embark on a 6-month nationwide tour of working men’s clubs.

The End Is Nigh

Yesterday I bought the October issue of Metro magazine. If Dante was right, my purchase will have condemned me to his Seventh Circle of Hell, where I shall suffer eternally with those who were violent against themselves. But I have already paid dearly for my sin in this life – Metro now costs $9.75.

The current incarnation of Metro is clearly suffering an identity crisis. The advent of the cannily conceived MiNDFOOD in 2008 must have knocked Metro’s minders silly. “It’s like six magazines in one” claims MiNDFOOD’s advertising. It’s really more like six half-arsed magazines in one (giving it three arses?),  but its owners know exactly what they are doing, unlike ACP.

In March this year it was reported that Metro’s circulation was just 9,680 and that it was likely running at a loss. Former editor Bill Ralston wondered whether ACP would soon be forced to combine it with North & South. Meanwhile MiNDFOOD was described as one of the few titles that were not haemorrhaging readers, and its website puts its current circulation at 30,758 (NZ Audit Bureau of Circulation data). Based on the same data, MiNDFOOD is the fastest-growing magazine in the country. Ralston’s speculation could well come true, sooner rather than later.

But one certainly doesn’t get the impression that Metro’s current editor, Simon Wilson, can hear the wolves baying for his publication’s blood. Reading one of his editorials is like having your brain rubbed with an oil called “Essence of Smug”. Wilson was presumably on holiday for most of September; his October editorial certainly reads like it was written while he was out to lunch.

Just how little effort Wilson puts into his editorials becomes obvious when you read Nicola Shepheard’s excellent cover story, “Shark Attacks Granny”, in which she expertly covers The New Zealand Herald’s tabloidization under the deputy editorship of Shayne Currie, NZ’s tinpot William Randolph Hearst. Wilson doesn’t feel under any pressure to lead from the front in his editorial: he simply rehashes Shepheard’s best lines and steals some of her considerable thunder. On the rare occasion that he actually tries to write something off his own bat, he falls flat, just like this sentence, which has too many rhymes for “prat”. How about this for a paragraph, which begins with a relative clause, no less:

    Which means if you want to blame anyone [for the tabloidization of the Herald], blame all of us. We’re the ones buying, or not buying, the paper.

This kind of blarney makes a Woman’s Day editorial look profound. We’re all to blame; we’ve all sinned. Thanks for that, Simon Magus. In the rest of his editorial Wilson tells us who his heroes are, like a 5 year old listing his favourite superheroes. Along the way he manages to misspell the surname of one of them twice, “as you do” (to quote him on Steve Braunias’ taking of his daughter to the races).

Mention of Braunias, who has been peddling his unique blend of Scroogery and schmaltz for so long that he has become a national institution (surely a fate worse than death for a writer with subversive pretensions), brings me to the issue’s special feature, “One Big Day in Auckland”. Braunias headlines “24 other top writers and photographers” who together attempt to chronicle the events of Saturday, September 4, 2010 in Auckland, “the city we love”. It’s hard to describe the result.

The birth of twins (who problematically didn’t arrive until the 5th) is documented in graphic detail. There are two poems, the less said about which the better. Tessa Duder goes for a sail. Emily Perkins makes lamingtons. You get the idea.

Apart from Nicola Shepheard’s cover story, which shines out like a light when all around is dark, the October Metro will do nothing to improve the mag’s ailing circulation. Utterly ignorant of Dylan Thomas’s sound advice, Metro is going gentle into that good night.

Headlining Acts

Anyone who's ever been published, whether in print or pixels, has striven long and hard for the perfect headline or title. We've all had our precious handfuls of pregnant words aborted by an uppity editor convinced they can do better -- and herein lies the peculiar attraction of headline coining.

Every writer's quest for the perfect headline is the equivalent of the hole in one in golf. The odds against them achieving it are huge, but it can be done. Some headlines are so good that they render the actual article utterly redundant. Their small, perfectly formed punning perfection is the story; the rest is silence.

Grail-questing journalists often spend just as long formulating a headline as they do writing their stories, sometimes even whiling away the hours before deadline coming up with fantasy headlines. I once met an obituary writer in the QF Tavern who, after bumming a cigarette and the 50c he needed for another pint of Guinness, exclaimed: "I can't wait for that Maggie Barry to kick the bucket, I really can't."

This not being entirely apropos of our foregoing charity-based conversation, I pressed him to explain, but he blustered on with: "But she's got to have a heart attack or a fatal stroke . . . " His sentence ended in a deep draught of Guinness, leaving me none the wiser. After an equally deep drag on my too mild cigarette, he said: "And it's got to happen in a park, or even better, in some botanical gardens . . . "

After another Guinness and smoke coupling, I attempted to recap: "You can't wait for Maggie Barry to die of a heart attack in the botanical gardens?" "Zigackly!" was his response. "Why?" was inevitably mine. "Because I have the perfect headline for her obituary!" he triumphed. "'Live by the sward, die by the sward'!"

*****

But there is one publication that seems not only to have abandoned the quest for the journalistic Holy Grail but also lost all self-respect. The best measure of any publication's self-respect is the quality of its proofreading. The New Zealand Herald's proofreading has been a joke for so long that Aucklanders accept the paper's daily errors as a fact of life, like Auckland's high humidity. 

One would be hard pressed to find a high school newspaper with more incompetent proofreaders than the Herald's. Below is just one of the more recent fiascos to have slipped through the newspaper's proofing net (if such a thing exists):

As one of my colleagues quipped: "It takes forever to get there . . . but when it does, it's terrible." For God's sake, Herald, grow some coglioni!