The Innocent Man - and the Small Church

I’ve been somewhat absorbed in John Grisham’s The Innocent Man in my spare moments during the last few days.
A true story, it records the astonishing series of seriously unjust events in the investigation, arrest and trials of Ron Williamson of the small town of Ada, Oklahoma, between 1987 and 1999. The catalogue of errors of omission and comission by Police and the justice system has to be studied to be believed. Williamson was reprieved only five days before his execution was to be carried out. I find myself boiling with indignation that so many one-sided processes were applied to this man.

But I’m not sure we’ve always done a lot better in the church. When things go awry in the small congregation and outside help is sought, there can also be problems of blinkered vision. Even the wider church can make mistakes of judgment and lose its grip on natural justice. I can think of at least three conflicts in small churches with which I’ve been connected, when those who were asked to investigate allegations of improper behaviour listened with compassion and sensitivity only to the complainants. In both cases, the other side was not invited to make any response. Rather, those whose stories were never told were advised that the matter was now “all in the past” and they should “move on”.

Forty years ago our denomination conducted excellent “Lay-Clergy Dialogues” a few months after the arrival of a new minister. Sometimes, a crucial function of those events was “exorcising the ghosts” of the previous ministry. It was a conscientious attempt to air and lay to rest any resentments or grievances arising from the former ministry or the discomforts resulting from its winding up. There was at least an attempt to recognise the effect of lingering issues of the past upon the present and the future.

I guess the church doesn’t offer this excellent programme these days. Certainly, the way in which the national jurisdiction sometimes relates to local problems doesn’t seem to suggest that kind of understanding.

A Happy Beneficiary Christmas!

I'm one of those dinosaurs who was in Christian Social Services at the time of the Woodhouse Report and the Social Welfare reforms that followed it in the early 1970s.

Hearing of the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots this morning reminded me of the innovative principle behind those reforms. It was that people on benefits and their children should be able to enjoy a "reasonable quality of life" not just a meagre existence.

One of the "reforms" was the institution of an extra two weeks' benefit, paid in mid-December, to provide a contribution towards the cost of Christmas celebrations and holidays. It wasn't a fortune but it was an imaginative and compassionate way of emphasising that the little extras that most of us take for granted should be available to people who have to be supported by the State.

Alas, all that compassion went out in later "reforms" and now the word is taking on a quite different meaning that suggests further savaging of the standard of living of people and their children at the bottom of the heap.
It's really gratifying to hear that the OECD has drawn attention to the widening gap in Godzone. But will those newly installed in power hear the message, never mind understand the issues and do something about them...?

Last Past the Post

My two bits’ worth in the Mixed Member Proportional debate would have been that it MMP isn’t perfect and needs some adjusting in obvious areas. But I am gratified that there is no strong support for the suggestion of returning to First Past the Post.

Up until MMP came in, I never cast a meaningful vote in my life. I was always in electorates where there was no way that my vote was going to change anything. In rural electorates my vote would never have got my candidate past the post and in urban electorates my vote would have contributed only to the overweening sense of importance that some high-majority partliamentarians displayed.

It was on such a nominal event that I took Paul, aged ten, into the booth with me, and let him vote; he’d studied the issues at school and his vote didn’t change anything more than mine would have.

In those days it only mattered to vote if you were in a marginal electorate. Those were the voters who swept governments in and out. Sometimes a swing of a handful of percentage points in key electorates across the country made a huge change in the balance of parliament. Often we lost skilled and experienced politicians in the carnage.

In the 1970s I proposed on radio a reform which turned out to be almost exactly what we got in MMP a good few years later. I still think mine was better, but then - and now - anything would be better than going back to FFP.

Over the Tasman

I’m all out of blog at the moment. We had a great three weeks in Australia and our three Murder Mystery Evenings were a great hit and raised nearly $5000 for various charities, thanks to a huge amount of effort by the locals in Canberra and Sydney As well, we had an interesting and relaxing time doing some very different things from home. It was good to spend time with the Aussie rellies and to see some new parts of the countryside in NSW.

Coming home was bound to return us to the problems with our old No 1 computer. Its replacement was almost ready for duty. But Windows 7 was not happy with the most important programs I use and getting printers to run with them has been a nightmare. Lots of my most commonly used applications and systems have died. Not surprisingly, it will be some time before everything is running reasonably well. So things are a bit stressful around here at present. However, as the fellow said after accidentally swallowing a peach stone, This, too, will pass. It’s just an uncomfortable process.

And by the way, if anyone still hankers after getting NZ wages up to Aussie levels, they had better price a few local commodities and look at basic wages in that country before making a commitment. We expected things to be dearer but, in some supermarket areas, costs were well above what we might have expected. And the price of prosperity in tearing resources out of the ground has yet to be calculated. The grass, or what is left of it after droughts and floods and fires, is not all that greener on the other side of the Tasman fence.

Flying the Flag

In the last few weeks of seeing flags of twenty nations all over the place – even permanently painted onto the pavement in our town! – I have been reflecting again on our country’s aspirations about a national flag.

The fact that Australia blatantly copied ours a century ago doesn’t mean that both nations should hang onto a dated design forever. It’s time for a change, and this 2005 competition winner by Kyle Lockwood still seems to me to be one that we could have proudly waved alongside the others. It has just the right balance of the traditional and the imaginative.

There were two embarrassing moments at a Jetboat Sprint competition in Idaho a few years ago. The Australians won and had to do a winners' circuit with their big flag and there was quite a lot of discussion between Kiwis and Aussies as to which flag was which. The selection was eventually agreed and off went the winners for the victory lap. However, halfway round, the flag caught on their hot exhaust and burst into flame. As if this weren’t embarrassment enough in USA, where burning the flag is a real no-no, it was later discovered that everyone was wrong. The Australians had flown – and set alight – the New Zealand flag.

I know it's not the most important issue in the country today. But let’s at least keep the discussion going.

MMP and all that...

In thirty years of “Fixed Past the Post” parliamentary elections I never failed to vote. But none of my votes ever had the slightest chance of making any difference. It just happened that I always voted in an overwhelmed minority or an outright majority. Indeed, I felt that my contribution could make so little difference that one time when Paul was studying the election at Intermediate School I took him into the booth and he did it.

Only people who lived in marginal electorates could change anything. And the Electoral Commission, which set the electorate boundaries, sometimes had more to do with the outcome of subsequent elections than the voters. Tiny swings in voting made for enormous changes in the parliament and some outstanding leaders on both major sides lost their seats to much less competent aspirants. I hope that we don’t ever go back to “First Past the Post”.

My two bits’ worth is that we don’t need to abandon the Mixed Member Proportional system. It obviously needs some fine tuning. But basically it ensures that every voter can cast a vote that counts for something.

Any voting process which requires people to sort the candidates in order of preference asks a great deal more than some voters can hande. Indeed, about .5% of those who vote in Australia, where voting is compulsory, just go for the “donkey” vote, numbering the candidate list down from the top in numerical order.

Let’s tidy up MMP and give it a few more parliaments before we tinker with the whole system all over again. If you want to confuse yourself with all five options, they’re well laid out in http://www.referendum.org.nz/

The Margin of Error?

I’ve just had my fourth phone call for a political poll. All of them in the dinner hour. One I just refused to handle and two I put on hold while I answered the door and when I got back they’d gone. Funny, that.

This last call I answered as well as I could about how I’d voted last time and various things. Then I found myself saying No to a series of questions about voting in Taranaki. I asked why was I expected to know about Taranaki and, after a lengthy pause—oh, dear, I’m sorry, we’ve made a mistake.

I was more than slightly concerned about this kind of “mistake” so I asked for a chat with the duty supervisor. Again, an apology was forthcoming and then I was assured that my responses would be discarded. That didn’t impress me too much, either.

What reliance can we place on results when the interviewers pick up the wrong question sheet or don’t know where their respondents live and then discard certain results on a cavalier basis?

You saw it here first!

The short news piece on the Chapel of our Lady of Rugby the other night was no great surprise to members of our congregation.

Our parish’s last monthly newsletter featured the chapel in an editorial that asked whether God has favourites in the Rugby World Cup. Helen, who wrote it and found the lovely photos of the stained glass windows, did some more research by last Sunday when she was rostered to lead worship.

So we learned that the chapel was established in 1964 as a memorial to team members who died in an accident. It has become a shrine for visitors and has attracted gifts of mementoes of the game.

For those players whose Christian faith is a serious part of their life there must be some sense of satisfaction about their sport being honoured in this little building. It’s pleasing that it has not been overlooked in the current celebrations.

Go the ABs!

Go the ABs!

Yes, by all means. It’s about time we had our turn with the Rugby World Thingie.

But let’s not go overboard if we do manage to grab it. Let’s be sure that our celebrations do not detract from the achievement by resulting in discourtesy, damage, injury, or death.  

And if the unthinkable happens and our team goes slightly down at the end, let’s remember that winning and losing are facts of life. For every winner, there’s at least one loser. If that happens to us, the national psyche doesn’t need to be permanently racked.

We are already winners, just living in this great little country. We excel at all kinds of human endeavours. If this particular trophy isn’t ours just at this moment, let’s get on with doing those things which we do so well.

Rena and the beach

It's been heartening to see the response of local people and officialdom to the disaster being strewn on the Bay of Plenty beaches.

I was disappointed to hear that, at first, volunteers were banned from the beaches, and then not called up after they registered their offers to help. So I'm really chuffed to hear that there's a big turnout of locals being actually used in the wretched task of scraping oil off their pristine coastline.

I think there's no end to the capacity of people to volunteer to meet a need. And, most of the time, I think we do pretty well in taking up their availability. Well done, everyone.