The Caring Company: Brief Phone Calls Made Short-Term Relationships

A customer service representative of many years, one realizes very quickly into the profession that the job title is perhaps not as accurate as it should be. Looking through the window telepathically-shooing the customers away, or waiting on the end of the line hoping it’s not that so-and-so Smith that oozed seediness over the phone last week, it all changes when the customer walks through the door. Happiness and rainbows abound when you see their face. Whether  that face is joined to a pair of bare feet or Armani’s, you’re jollier than a sleighing Santa for one reason: customer lovin’.

Customer loyalty love is not something I always remember having been around. I would argue that, as the money increases, so does the degree of your Oscar-winning portrayal of The Person that Most Loves Customers in the World. I can see the point of good customer service: people making sure things are easy for the customer, that they have all the required information, that they get good value and efficiency for what they want. The difference is that now, it all has to be done with a smile. But not only a smile: an it’s all my/the company’s fault, you’re the best, can I help you more after you’re done screaming, Batman’s Joker-esque cheesy-grin smile. In amidst our circus act of listening and trying to solve the most unreasonable complaint, we are supposed to care.

No Clowning Around in the Customer Service Circus

I remember the days before customer service became a part of the part-time student working week. Cafes, shops, bars were teeming with who would be my future compatriots. Some held their head high, shunning the world in a defiant glare; they were the unbeatables: no amount of complaining could bear them down. The oblivious ones were always safe, thinking about some lover or other that had whisked them away the night before; these were much the same as the hung-over ones, who were simply struggling to get through the day. Yet the ones that always stuck in your mind were the ones that were beaten down: the ones who received “I-want-a-new-coffee/refund/person serving me”, that were in fact the ones that went out of their way for customers who only greeted them with a superior, the-customer-is-always-right glare. These were the ones that wanted to help, and they own a special place in any customer services representative’s heart.

Don’t get me wrong: there are always those customers that you do shed a little, semi-caring, retail tear for. The ones that (actually) got ripped off, or lost a dog, or a family member, or something other heart-wrenching affair. Your heart does go out to the ones that got shunted around. But it is not those ones that you remember. The ones that lied to you about being ripped off, or losing their dogs or family members are. After a while, you look back on your customer services career and reflect that you have become a sort of turtle: a soft, squelchy sentimentality that used to be the whole of you is now covered with a thick, retail shell. You now very seldom care. It is a beautiful thing to care about the plight of a stranger. The question is: do we have to care for them all?

The last ten years have seen the technological availability of everything, the call-centre-ization of even the most frivolous businesses, and the recognition of customer service as an exquisite art of cunning and emotional trickery. These have all required customer-service suckers to become more loving. The reason: because we have become so much more visible, and the visibility of corporations has shown what many believed to be some kind of fair, honest working organization to be a Medusa-head of snakes. Customer services people are expected to rectify this ‘misconception’. No, this product is not bad for you. Yes, this product is good value. How will we show you that this is true? By always presenting a wonderful image to you. And what is your first port of call through to this wonderful image? Customer service.

Medusa: Livin' the Bad Hair Day Since 490BC

Being a customer-service representative changes your personality. Retail kills your soul (unless you are a particularly high-minded individual, with a touch of bitchy), but customer service mellows you down. ‘Oh, how ARE you?’ you purr to a customer only introducing himself as ‘John’ (as if you are supposed to know who they are). Complaints are responded to with a soft, Grace-Kelly voice that is ever so gracious and ever so poised – you do tend to wish you could inject a bit of this relational beauty into your real life. Voices screech and shout like the products they claim are malfunctioning. They are extremely bothered about the slightest thing, but not enough to hang up the phone on you when another slightest thing comes their way. If this was a boyfriend or mate, they would’ve been out of your phonebook long ago. But for some screeching fogey called Audrey? You could never give enough.

The time when you really start to think about your situation is when the fantasies start rolling in. You remember Audrey and the way she treated you. You want revenge. She kicked when you were down. You were working in retail at the time and you couldn’t fight back. It was so unfair. You bleated to all your friends, and they all laughed at her pathetic ways, but it wasn’t enough. The time for pity is over. A torrent of violent attacks and insults hurtle into your brain, bringing out the worst in your usually-so-lovely nature. The scale of violence increases as another Audrey sound-alike disrespects your intelligence. It is all too much. Is this reality the result of the buyer-BFF relationship we are expected to have every time we pick up the phone? The words ‘ironic’ and ‘paradox’ spring to mind.

The complaint about complaints, to finish, is this: why are we the ones that are supposed to care? Sure, we’re paid to – but no amount is ever really enough to butter up some foolish Joe that came off the street with no shoes on. Is it really too much to ask, on both sides of the retail counter, for customers and corporations themselves to be a little bit nicer? If the systems within companies worked better, we wouldn’t get so many complaints. And if the Audrey’s of this world could forget about their impending divorce, bad hair day, and general lack of happiness before they picked up the phone, perhaps the whole of society would love them that little bit more. Hate breeds hate. I am a person. That customer service person over there is a person. And all people, not just haters, deserve civility from civilians.

Brendhan Lovegrove and Mike King: Walking the Plank

A man peeps his head around the corner of the stage. A bald, shiny head, it reflects the audience’s pretensions: fun and light-hearted, they want to be able to see themselves in the show. And a few seconds later, they do: a man planks on a stool on the center of the stage.

Mike King and Brendhan Lovegrove’s show was not really quite what the advertisements promised. It’s not that it was less; it’s that it was different. Having been a long time fan of the Love in the Grove, I was interested to see what kind of collaboration he could come up with involving the King of Pork. The result, really, was two different shows.

The thing that attracted me to the show in itself was that it seemed inherently racist. By racist I do not mean a pig slaughtering of Mike King; I was enticed rather by the inherent race battles that have founded our society, those of European basing their identity in relation to Maori, and of Maori just opposing those Europeans full stop. This kind of rivalry exists little these days; we are
simply too politically correct. Yet I had hoped our Town Hall’s comedy chambers would yield such a long-awaited battle.


Lovegrove’s planking stunt turned into a little yarning, into the same old inappropriateness, and then a few new tactics washed into the mix. Of course there was a little audience flirting; there is always the odd hen’s night lady he proposes to take home. It is all a part of his charm: this lady-killing, foul-mouthing, oh-my-gosh-he-really-did-say-that swagger stance is an old-time favorite.
Our National Bacon-Preserver Mike King was also one for the entertainment. Spouting out mouthfuls of I-hope-my-wife’s-not-watching Kiwi favorites, the main thing that came across about our naughtiest comedian was actually that he was intensely relatable. Wandering around the stage with a smirking stroll, King appeared quite at ease with the crowd. The stage could have been his home sitting room, although one gets the feeling that in front of the wife he might have tried that bit harder.


Together, as an award-winning dynamic duo, I believe this show could have been unforgettable. As it stands, showcasing separate comics with essentially separate shows, it certainly emits a few laughs. It’s just that the concept itself is not one that delivers, or one that is new. Sure, the jokes are not the same. Sure, they didn’t perform together. But if they had, one King could’ve made two, just enough glory to decorate Lovegrove’s Billy T crown.

The Mob Squad: The New Technological Terrorism

As once read on an American comedy quiz, there are three types of student mentality towards the old cash cow you call your bank statement. 1. Just reach into my wallet and grab a fifty. 2. Can’t complain. 3. I dream of bagel. Friends, when I saw my Vodafone bill last month, I’d be lucky to dream of toast.

Yes, I know I’m with the old-ripper-offerer network Vodafone. But that still doesn’t excuse the exorbitantly high prices we are charged for sending a few letters detailing all manner of banal things. We text about the quality of the coffee we drink, some nice pair of eyes we saw on the bus, dresses (especially dresses), sly comments in the classroom, and even the widely-abused weather topic. We laugh, we love, we lie, sometimes we even have borderline-cheating relationships over the trusty old clicker. However, we do pay the price.

The part I’ve found the hardest to stomach is, having come back from the land of the cork-hatted cobber, I’ve discovered it didn’t really have to be all that hard. Walking around in the beautifully sun-lined malls, with young men and women smiling and chatting noisily in their Aussie accents, I happened to casually glance with an innocent smile towards the big Vodafone shop, oh-so-eloquently marked with a speech bubble to try and be our fake Paris Vodafone BFF. But then I saw the sign. Wait: Did I just read 300 minutes to any network of my choice, for only $30? Yes, sad-eyed Kiwi, yes you did.

Many of the Australians I had met had flash phones. I cast my mind back to the times when they had casually called friends for minutes on end; when checking a Facebook status on the bus, train, or workplace seemed the most natural thing in the world.  To my recollection most were not in wonderful jobs; I just thought they were inclined to be materialistic. Innocent  Kiwi eyes dreamed of the day.


I remembered with melancholy the times when I would go to dial a number, my friend anxiously inquiring: “Do you have free minutes?”, as if there were no other option; the friend was simply looking out for my financial health. The times spent in the payphone to check your account balance, because you knew that ringing on the mobile would waste your last precious PrePay minute. The fear allayed when after a long cellphone call, all would be explained: “He’s on a plan”. And finally, the extra-sad moment when an impoverished student had met another on Telecom: upon hearing the first digits, 027, he knew this was a friendship that could not last.

The fear, anxiety, and haplessness caused by the extreme tension upon seeing a Vodafone account bill is not for the faint-hearted. If I were a ridiculous American, I could sue for the added stress caused. We are pushed between a rock and a hard place with our networks. Unless we want to change to 2 degrees (whom I would like to personally thank for introducing some diversity and cost-effectiveness into our phone environment; someone’s gotta start the trend), who no one can afford to text, we are stuck between loses-coverage-at-the-best-moments Telecom and heart-attack Vodafone. The only choice is a plan, or a hippy, phoneless existence. But if you choose a plan, what if you go over the minutes allocated? The sneaky bastards are always trying to shift in some clause in the contract that you’re sure wasn’t there in the signing phase. Alas, what to do?

The first tactic in the old action plan is to see what it is that makes Australia’s, and probably most of the world’s, phone services cheaper. The answer is competition. It is the same as everything, and it extends to much more than phones. Our clothes, our technology, our food, even our booze sometimes is not as well priced (although I’m not such a fan of their bars; too many pokies). Australia, because it is a bigger economy, has safeguarded itself a little better than us against the old corporate thieves. With six major networks and a variety of phone retailers, prices had to come down.

It is not just the price of phonecalls and texts that have come down, either. Struggling to communicate coherently through the barrage of nasal-pitched  Australian accents, I had to find myself a phone – and fast. The cheapest available, that did not look heinous, was a little $40 beauty. A quick stroll to JB Hi Fi Auckland, however, will try and sell you this rather primitive specimen for $190. Post-pavlova, a little country enmity does seem to sink in at this stage. The fast breeding of IPhones among my Australian acquaintances was duly founded.

So what is a wage-weary student to do? Switch, maybe. Boycott? Who knows. It’s just not fair. As those of you will know that have tried this little number, no you cannot bring a beautiful phone back to our shores to inject a new Sim card into (which Aussies don’t even pay for) for free: you must pay around the $150 mark. The companies know. It’s all a conspiracy. Text all your friends. We are in the midst of a new form of terrorism. Osama bin Laden’s replacement lies just an invoice away.

Fashionable Eyes

Sometimes, as a student, it seems there simply isn’t enough good taste to go around. Snail backpacks, sneakers, even the odd hiker sandal seems to creep into the lecture theatre, much to grimace of the surrounding onlookers.

Glassons Cardigan: Saving almost every NZ woman from bare-armed shame

But on the converse, we also seem quite bereft of anything nice that isn’t Karen Walker or something similarly priced. Why, oh why, do whiny English people get to have beauties like TopShop and other “High Street” brands that are fashionable, reasonably-priced and sometimes quite lovely, when our streets would appreciate just a bit of their lovin’ that mych more? We’re stuck with bad-quality Lippy, every-girl-has-their-cardigan Glassons, and some plain bad disasters that have their origin in surf shops.

Op-shops seemed the only salvation for some of us. However, the other day I was pleasantly surprised. Alerted to a find on Facebook (studied closely while the time for studying gently whittles away), I found a website blog that, I felt, inspired my fashion to something better. Named Four Eyes, this not quite-so-geeky fashion statement gave me a glimpse of a future where a bit of fabulosity just didn’t seem that far away.

Four-Eyes is a fashion blog that has four co-founders: Alex, Mino, Danny and Chin. They hail from all walks of life; some are involved in fashion, some are not. What is immediately apparent is that none of them need fashion-blinkers: the photos posted are of fashionable youngsters that, to be honest, you had lost hope of seeing in our tack-bitten streets. The concept: photographing people on the street with an impeccable sense of style. The result: the sense that, as Joan Rivers would say, we don’t have to be an impoverished fash-ho any longer: the salvation is in the imitation.

 

The thing I love the most about this blog is the way it heralds that ‘Kiwi can-do’, innovative attitude. Yes, the pieces they photograph (and the photography skills – not too bad boys, I must say) are divine, but mostly, it is the way the underground fashionistas that they photograph style themselves. It reminds me of a rule that sometimes we forget as brand-slaves: that it is not so much what you wear, as how you wear it. The fashion critics’ eyes light up at a particular teal-green pant combo that, because New Zealand is not always that fashionable, is not brand-tailored: the owner has tailored them themselves, with a little pin on the side. Just that little bit of the inspirational in what, thinking of the usual non-eye-candy on the street, you would expect to be mundane.

As a last nostalgic note, the blog reminds me of the Kiwi version of “Nylon Street”, the fashion photo album which so many carry around as a bible (although sadly, mine has carried the burden of bookshelf dust for a little too long). I’m so glad that somebody has made a local, free version of it, just like we did of America’s Next Top Model OMG, OMG (high-pitched whiny voice included). But seriously. I am. Your next inspiration lies within reach, and I don’t mean the reach of those purse strings. Enjoy.

The Biutiful Bardem

The scene is stillness. The child’s hand wears diamond ring. Father and daughter lie in bed reminiscing about their heritage, a close family shot. It is a spot of peacefulness, but it is one of the only within Biutiful, the latest Inarritu film featuring our latest on-screen lady-killer, Javier Bardem.

Except in this film, Bardem isn’t so much lady-killer as nappy-wearer. An absorbing portrayal of life on Barcelona’s hard-worn streets, Biutiful tells the story of Uxbal (Bardem), an outwardly shady man with an inwardly pure heart. The ghetto which he calls home is a world-class example of crime, corruption, and exploitation; the feelings motioned by Uxbal, his broken family, and those around him are raw and real – the only motions they go through are the ones they need to stay alive.

Uxbal himself is rather hard to pin down. A peripheral gangster, an aid worker, a dedicated father, a businessman, and a man who takes money in exchange for parents to hear the dying words of their children are all true, but conflicting, descriptions. Uxbal lives on the edge of life and death, both metaphorically and physically. Death as an everyday facet in his low-decile neighbourhood is one factor; his mausoleum visits, accidental part in a mass death, and role as an orphan is another. Yet Uxbal, too, is dying. His perspective changes quite slowly after he discovers his own demise: his imminent death is just another fact of life, the burnt crust on his daily bread. It all seems very primal.

One of the things I find most Biutiful (mind the pun) about this film is, forecasted in its initial scenes, its stillness. There is no distracting, mind-numbing sound to go with it, the sound that blots out the humanity of a film and makes it some American circus blockbuster featuring Adam Sandler. Simplicity is beautiful, and this film knows it. I suppose what makes it intensely watchable (and actually quite captivating; you do find the time slipping away under you and your prerequisite popcorn) is that in itself, the film is actually so complex that its silence makes it profound, rather than boring. It is certainly one of those cinematic treats that take your mind hostage for some time afterwards.

 

It is as I write this that I realize the mentioning of the cast somehow seems secondary to the content. There are many characters, the most central (and they would have to be for a film on a family man) his family, and a couple of other families surrounding him. Uxbal is certainly not lacking in family drama or unhappiness, but it is the love and protection that he gives them which gives his definitely-not-nuclear family cohesion.

The sense of what he has lost in his own childhood adds metaphorical imagery that, like many other instances in the film, rotates and reappears to make sense of the intangible, the misunderstood, and the indecipherable. It is beautifully circular, like life itself, and carries its inconsistencies and ironies upon itself like the scars on a heart. Plus, if you want to add a little student good will into the mix, a course-related AUT fundraiser is showing this little magic-maker at Bridgeway Cinemas with a handy glass of wine. Watch it and you will see why Bardem won Best Actor at Cannes.

Home Hobbiting: Why Students Can't Seem to Leave The Nest

Take a quick scan of your friends. How many still live under the comfort of Mum’s meals and SpongeBob duvet covers? How many are proud of it? More to the point, are you still your parents’ pantry pirate, stumbling in at all hours of the morning with a phone call or two beforehand; your reward an onslaught of the Nag-O-Saurus rapping on your childhood door? I believe, because face-reddening research has told me so, that many of you still are home-hobbits, whether you want to admit to it or not.

We all love the perks: the home-made cuisine, the freshly-ironed laundry, the thoughtful taping-of-shows,  and the Oprah-endorsed talks of ‘how was your day honey’ (although perhaps not the cutesy names that follow after them). After all, as known by those who have left home and made the cowardly crawl back, who would prefer 2-minute noodles and toilet-scrubbing duties to Hotel Home? Yet, the shame lingers.

Excuses are made by all of us. “Well, I was flatting/ on O.E/ am now too poor to afford to live elsewhere”. “My boyfriend/girlfriend dumped me/ my parents live in a nicer suburb/ I can’t stand my smelly flatmates” are also some less plausible choices. But we must own up to it, my fellow slothful scavengers. We stay at home because we are just too damn lazy to do anything about it.

We know, in our deepest, most embarrassed hearts, that the other generations loathe our idyllic idleness. Sometimes we loathe our freedom too, but in a glorious, KFC munching, emo-Jeremy Kyle-exaggerated fantasy world of knowing we have the world at our feet. Let them be jealous: why wouldn’t they be? We’re going to be richer, more tech-savvy, less frown-lined versions of them. It’s easy to hate your betters, especially when they’re better looking. They might try it on with the cougar-pants, lie about their age, get hideous Joan Rivers facelifts just to deny their ageing abyss of envy, but they know, too. We’re just that little bit cooler and, as they hate to hear being told, more ‘chilled out’.

In fact, the main explanation for our lovable birthplace lounging is the fact that we are Generation Y, or the ‘Millennials’ (just to prove the above point, those who are in Gen Y but don’t want to be even remotely affiliated with Generation X, our predecessors). So, the question remains, what makes us so cool? In a bit of Millennial Wiki–esque research, I am told it is because we are discerning consumers with high disposable incomes, think of ourselves as unique, and are more confident and neo-liberal. Damn. It’s no wonder many of us spend a bit too much time in front of the mirror with the GHD (hopefully minus the often-accompanied tragic photo posted on Facebook, your arm artfully holding the camera on the side).

But really. Do you want to know the real reason why we’re still molly-coddled by mother’s minions? It’s actually because of our parents. This really should come as no surprise: we have had enough psychologically demanding TV shows, celebrity figures and colloquial advice to want to get into those Barney onesies. Who makes you who you are, according to our neo-liberal philosophy? Half nature, half nurture. Who nurtures you? Your mother, the version not quite as celestial as the religious version after her weed-infused days at Woodstock.

The facts stand: you might want to take a deep breath and put your big-kid panties on. Millennials are confident because they were very much wanted by their parents. Millennials are confident because they were sheltered and protected. Millennials are confident because (can you take any more?) they have ‘helicopter’ parents who organize and help them in anything (helicopters because they ‘hover’ over their children). Remember those seemingly silly games where you didn’t have to win, you just had to participate? This PC filth has made  us believe we are invincible. A confident and actually quite conventional generation, we are so because Mum and Dad (or one of the two and a big, annoying step-parent) held out the lollies while we performed the way they wanted us to. Ah, just when we thought we were the ones who had it going on.

Despite the apparent theft of a superb identity, you might be thinking: “I actually really love Mum and Dad”. You know, you’re really not alone. One of the things that makes our generation Millennials is that we are the first generation to truly like our parents. In a recent university-conducted survey, students who were asked who they most admired in the world were the first to answer “Mum or Dad”. Aw. Aren’t you proud. Dr Phil’s advice, blankly stared at on your sick days off, has finally been put to some use.

For all that we love them and admire their good works, our parents really are very good at getting blamed. We’re, as Jerry Springer and Co proclaim, screwed up because Mum didn’t give us enough attention, Dad cheated on Mum, we missed that special Karate class or didn’t get an egg that Easter. Turns out, though, that we’re really the eggs. Either values have changed dramatically over the past twenty years, or we’re avoiding becoming adults. We, as a Brigham Young University study found, are more likely to define ourselves as adults based on our personal abilities and characteristics rather than things we have actually been through. But weren’t we taught that experience equals knowledge? Is saying we are ‘mature’ and able to work a part-time job enough to say that we live at home, but are not still children?

My home-hobbiter friends, it is time to say who we are. We rely on our parents. We cannot blame them for our luxurious lazing, but they do support it. Money’s not really the issue: otherwise where would all the I-pods and laptops come from? We can’t seem to leave home because they, hell-awful propagators of ourselves, are part of so much of where our confidence and happiness comes from: the haven called home. As one classmate puts it, “there’s just less responsibility”. Shove that in your SpongeBob and cuddle it.

Toni Morrison 'Jazz'ing Up Your Tuesday Morning

An avid reader, I often find when reading a book that you’ve heard it all before. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl in stupid accident that is all his fault, boy finally wins girl back. It’s all a bit Jennifer Aniston for me. This week, I present to you a corny sentence but a great book: it’s all about adding a little Jazz into your life(!)
Jazz is a story of love and loss in the African-American ghetto of the 1920’s. Rhythmic and catchy, it centres much around the blues movement starting out at the time, and steals much of its passionate sadness. This passionate sadness is blunt and stares in your face. It doesn’t care what you think. It knows where it comes from. You feel, when reading this text suffused with so much of this daring misery, that perhaps you actually lived in the place.

Love becomes a theme of the novel in many ways: it explores different forms of legitimate or illegitimate love, why we need love, love’s history, love’s spaces, love’s unpredictability, and also the irony of loving somebody you expected to hate (and maybe already have, with a seething, uncontrollable, Mr. Burns sneer). It is not really romantic, however, which is surprising. I am grateful for this lack of romanticism: if we wanted it, we’d be in 18th Century Romanticism (an area most feel they’ve done with quickly).

Loss in the text is wise, but also dramatic and passionate in Morrison’s novel, depending on who is experiencing the loss. Again, the loss is surprising. Again, it is not always romantic. It is an interesting point raised in these pages that romantic love and loss just aren’t that much of a big deal, in comparison to what life has to offer otherwise. People cheat, people find other people they like more, people never really liked each other that much in the first place, yada yada.

Instead of the traditional whinge, it is nice to embrace that sadness and make it boldly beautiful. It is the way in which Morrison does this in the novel that also reminds me of the singer Tracey Chapman (come on, you all must know her): her unashamed desperation and focus on family, heritage, and grassroots, with the odd bit of romance shunted in. Soul sisters indeed.

For those that like a little verse, it is also quite poetic. I would like to take this statement to point out that’s it’s not actually a new book; I like to think of it as a classic that injects a little sassy flavour into the bookshelf. However, if you like your John Clancys and your Danielle Steels, don’t touch it with a ten-foot sewer pole. It is not plain spoken. It’s too beautiful for $30 Whitcoulls shopfronters. You might have to search on Amazon for it, but it is well worth the read. Plus, when you do, there are several brothers and sisters of the text that advise, inform, and strum the violin along with it. Desperate poetry.

Playstation-Wielding Prisoners: Are Pimped-Out Prisons Fair?

Talk about the prison system in New Zealand and two issues usually arise: the rising state of crime within our innocent clean-green islands, and the fact that prisoners are now allowed luxuries such as Playstations, X-Boxes, Nintendos, and Sky TV. The main question this article will discuss is not only, ‘Is this true?’ but also, “Is this fair?’ How come we have to abide by all the rules, watch over our backs for rapists and murderers and tell kids not to accept stranger’s candy when those very criminals might end up with flasher technology and nicer meals? And more importantly, who is funding all this paedophile pampering and murderer molly coddling?

A main point here I would like to add (although trying not to have a bias, as snaky journalists are apt to do), is that it is not only Playstations and cafeteria-cooked meals that prisoners have had over the past few years. If you are a minimum-medium security prisoner (e.g. not Clayton Weatherston), life is looking pretty sweet. Under-floor heating warms your slippers all day, until you receive money, gifts, and kissy-kissys from the wife, kids, and/or jailbait on Saturdays. You may also make calls to whomever you like from morning till night (think: possibly working from “home”), only working your ‘real job’ four and a half hours a day. A story has also just broken about David Bain wannabe Mark Lundy receiving medical treatment outside prison after murdering his family. It’s easy to see why people get angry. Would you want the person who stole your car, assaulted your grandmother (or worse in the case of Lundy), to have life so lavish? Surprisingly, the answers are often mixed.

It is probably time to get to the facts. Out of 19 nationwide prisons, the Department of Corrections owns assets of $1.7 billion and a budget of $748 million. Comparably with, say, Canada, we have good rehabilitation rates: only 14% of our adult rapists reoffend within nine years, in contrast to their 61%(!), and we have the same re-offending rate of paedophiles (21%). We have a breaking-out and positive drug-testing rate of 15%, which is relatively low. We also offer restrictions such as text blocking (no text-messaging allowed in some of our prisons), along with only a few other nations such as France, Sweden, Scotland and Mexico (although this is probably a money-saver when you have free in-cell calling). The UK, by contrast, is also worse than us on the Playstation front: they spent more than 221,000 pounds on prisoner entertainment and only admitted to 10,000. Bad public relations indeed. Are these statistics really bad enough for us to kick up such a fuss? Or is asking a statement like that simply begging the question?

The journalist Marc Alexander has echoed a debate that has been passed around in our national politics like a hot potato since who knows when: that we need to stop seeing criminals as misunderstood victims. Although this might be hard when research tells us at least 60% of our prisoners have at least one major personality disorder, it does ring true. New Zealand often has such high aspirations for equality because it is viewed as a first-world country. There are many beautiful things about our European ideas: we love to forgive, we have numerous charities, and we join in with the big guns when it comes to international politics.


But could these ideals be affecting the way we treat our most hardened criminals? Just like most of us don’t want to be the one at the head of the line or the one pushing in, we don’t want to be the ones who push for pensioner-punchers to be denied Halo 3 or for stabbers to have their heated rugs pulled from under them. Why? Because everybody is equal. The courts might preach that all are innocent until proven guilty, but what really happens to those who are proven in the wrong? As far back as 2002 a Sentencing Act was passed, reducing the amount of incarceration time before parole to a 1/3 less. The media might be the ones mitigating what we hear about these prisoners, but there nevertheless seem to be myriads of cases where special treatment is given, not to mention the lessening of sentences for the most disturbing of crimes.

David Cox

Let us explore the other side of the coin for a minute, supposing that we are being unreasonable. There have also been cases of ill neglect within the prison system, and not just a ‘watch-your-back’ mentality between imprisoned former gang members (or so they are stereotyped). One case is of a certain David Cox, an over-60’s minor offender who died of pneumonia after having repeatedly asked guards for extra clothing and blankets. Cox died seven days after having contracted the disease, reportedly having a blue pallor and shaking. Even in the low-risk prisons, then, not everything is coming up rainbows and lollipops.

Perhaps the problem with these kind of discussions is that we have heard the side of the real victims, the families or those directly attacked, so often and with so much emotion. We can relate to these people. Most of us have not been inside a prison. How many people are related to or still friends with a current inmate? We are nicely dressed, non-patched Aucklanders who know someone that a crime has happened to. We find it hard to sympathize with the high percentage of mentally ill convicts because we all know, thanks to John Kirwan, that 1 in 5 of us have it already. Why should we care about a sad inmate? They stole our car and hooked our cousin up on meths. Besides, the heated flooring and Playstation-parading that we’re funding really gets up our noses. We’re not happy with it and we’re having to pay for it, but we’re warm-hearted New Zealanders. We don’t want to get all Texas-Death-Row on you. We just want to write an article.

Fabulously Foreign: My Perestroika

My Perestroika Dir. Robin Hessman; 2009; Run Time: 87 minutes

This year’s Documentary Edge Festival boasted, as the name would would suggest, quite an array of foreign and Kiwi based films. Liking the look of a few but being constrained by time issues (hell, I’m sure I’m not alone on that one) I ambled over one fine Saturday to see one before the Festival ended: My Perestroika, at the quaintly-lovable Academy Cinemas (for those who don’t know, it is under the Auckland City Library).

Armed with a couple of Russian friends and a male dragged along, I expected the film-documentary to be merely a prelude to a nice dinner somewhere. Yet My Perestroika manages to capture your attention quite quickly. It starts with a few black-and-white video clips of the old USSR regime and propaganda, but before long you are launched into five quite engaging stories.

The stories belong to quite diverse characters, all from the same primary-school class: Andrei, the successful business-owner; Olga, the pretty one; Lyuba and her husband Borya, alternative, philosophical teachers; and Ruslan, a rock-musician that busks on the street. What makes their accounts of the Soviet tirade so interesting are their candid attitudes: open and accommodating, they show you the smallest facets of their life, acknowledge their blindness to the regime, and graciously laugh it away as they compare it to the open corruption of much of the world today.

My Perestroika is not a clean film. You can see bits of laundry and ash hanging around the camera. The same can be said for the content. Although it is impossible for almost any kind of media to be without a bias, it was about as close as it comes to not having one. Andrei’s high-end shirt business is shot in much the same light as Olga’s servicing of the pool tables in some seedy part of the city. There seems to be little commentary on anything, most noticeably of what is good and bad for children, which is something that you would expect to see in a Soviet history film. Lyuba and Borya’s son, Mark, experiences everything that goes on in the house, passively smoking as he watches South Park. There are videos, black and white and crackly, of USSR kids’ campaigns to make posters and send letters and sing, all in aid of the communist dream, but no obvious judgment as to its happening. All is left for the consumption of the naked eye, and the camera is both indifferent and unflattering.

What I found best about the documentary, however, amid the constant smokiness of their apartment-bound lives (the documentary itself is like an ad for Marlboro; a ciggie is never far from any hand), was its open-endedness. Not to spoil it for the prospective viewer, I will leave you with the bitter last moments: shots back and forth, exactly matching, from the Soviet time to now,respectively. It leaves you thinking, despite the lack of a clear persuasive angle, that not really that much has changed; quite a scary thought.