Some like it hot and some do not
Philip Matthews surveys a parched news landscape.
Blame it on no rain
At the time of writing, which was about 10.20am on Friday, the temperature in Christchurch was a mild and entirely pleasant 17 degrees. We can live with that. But a sweltering high of 33 was expected. A hot and dry summer is predicted after the driest November since 1864, with a miserly 1.4 millimetres of rain recorded at Christchurch Airport in one month. There will be concerns about water use in gardens and even the small amount of drizzle that appeared on Wednesday – arguments raged over whether this could actually be called ‘‘rain’’ – does nothing for the city’s gardens and verges that already look to be, in the immortal words of the great Australian Barry Humphries, ‘‘dry as a pommie’s bathmat’’.
Parks and devastation
This column is regularly preoccupied with the activities of the world’s second most powerful man, the orange menace in the White House. Sometimes it is about nothing more serious than his propensity to spectacularly lose the plot on social media, which is often a diversion from the really bad stuff. But this week there have been two examples of the really bad stuff. The shrinking of two national monuments in Utah – known as Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante – is said to represent the biggest reduction of public lands protection in US history, as well as a broad insult to the native peoples who don’t fit Trump’s description of ‘‘the families and communities of Utah’’. Second, and much more dangerous, was the highly controversial decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. How does, say, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) feel about that? ‘‘President Trump made the biggest mistake of his life,’’ said PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erekat. Okay.
The mogul invasions
It was a big week for our homegrown or adopted movie moguls. Sir Peter Jackson threatened to pull the pin on a massive film museum and convention centre project in Wellington which had Mayor Justin Lester communicating in a deeply coded sentence that ‘‘we have reached out to Jackson and Sir Richard Taylor. We are looking forward to meeting with them at their earliest convenience.’’ Meanwhile, the brilliant James Cameron and his wife Suzy Amis Cameron wrote a piece for the Guardian in the UK on how agriculture is destroying the environment. New Zealand was not even mentioned by the Camerons which did not stop some local media from looking for a Kiwi-farmer-bashing angle.
Housing effects
Fans of acronyms and policy discussions were excited about the release of the BIMs, otherwise known as the briefings to incoming ministers. The most dramatic was the briefing to incoming Housing Minister Phil Twyford, which revealed that the Auckland housing market is having bad side effects: ‘‘The substantial increase in house prices over past decades appears to be the major cause of the observed increase in wealth inequality. This flows into wider social costs, including overcrowding and homelessness, health problems, and poor educational and labour market outcomes.’’