The State Services Commission investigation, published yesterday, makes one thing very clear: Joanne Harrison influenced the exit of four fellow Ministry of Transport employees who tried to tell their bosses that she was a fraudster. She managed to hire friends and steal over $700,000 from the ministry despite numerous staff attempting to call attention to her actions. This all happened while she was reporting directly to then-chief executive Martin Matthews, who is now our auditor general – albeit on temporary leave. The Commission has now apologised and is offering compensation to those former staff members. Its report also highlights many other issues at the Ministry, arguing that the 17-year-old legislation that covers whistleblowers needs to be changed and improved.

A second investigation, into whether Martin Matthews is a suitable person to continue as auditor general, is due from Sir Maarten Wevers in the coming days. Matthews is currently constructing his response to the unpublished, but complete, Wevers investigation. He has been given until the end of this week to complete it.

The Harrison case has some similar dynamics to the Todd Barclay drama. It’s become less about the initial problem than how it was handled. Who told the truth and who tried to obscure or even bury the truth. The difference with the Harrison situation is that she is now in jail and the truth is coming out – fast.

The Spinoff has been looking at exactly who did what, and when. That job has been made easier by a new, recent MOT whistle-blower who has produced and provided to us a detailed timeline noting all the evidence, which we publish here, utilising material released by the Ministry of Transport and available to view here. The same whistle-blower has shared a bizarre insight into Martin Matthews’ statements during his time at the Ministry of Transport.

But first, a quick tour of the jigsaw puzzle of documents that reveal a picture of Martin Matthews being given not clues, or hints, but what appear to be multiple solid facts that highlighted Joanne Harrison as a Grade A con artist and thief.

Part of the whistle-blower’s forensic guide to Ministry documents. A link to the entire document is above.

Crucially, the MOT documents show that Joanne Harrison was not some sophisticated operator capable of bewitching and beguiling honest and astute civil servants. She was a brassy and clumsy fraudster who got spotted really early – three years before any action was taken at the top. She was spotted early by people who then subsequently suffered at the hands of Harrison.

The document trail clearly shows Matthews being told by his own senior legal and financial people, time and time again over a three year period, that Harrison was failing to comply with public service rules around contracts and invoices. The invoices were fakes. Amateur, rough fakes. Illegal travel to nonexistent conferences. Government jobs engineered for her husband and an acquaintance. It was a criminal romp.

And yet the invoices were paid. Why?

Matthews appears to have personally shut down internal investigations into Harrison – amazingly, at Harrison’s request. Why?

Melbourne’s police fraud and extortion unit contacted the Ministry of Transport on July 25, 2014 saying that Harrison, clearly identified by her date of birth, was a person of interest who they wanted to interview. Matthews actually discussed this with Harrison, but nothing was done. Why?

Australian police email to the Ministry of Transport in 2014. Source – MOT

Yesterday’s Commission report is limited to reporting on whether Joanne Harrison influenced the subsequent departure of MOT staff who made complaints about her. She did influence that process. She did put these staff at a disadvantage even though the restructuring itself was found to have been a valid exercise.

However the Commission’s findings will surely flow through to the sentiment in parliament when Wevers’ report is released. Is Martin Matthews a suitable person to be our auditor general? Yesterday’s report shows that, on his watch, whistle-blowers were significantly disadvantaged by Harrison on top of his failing to listen to their complaints about her fraudulent activity.

The back story to what happened at the MOT goes further than the relatively narrow remit of the State Services Commission report.

This new whistle-blower shared some fascinating background with The Spinoff.

Martin Matthews was assistant auditor general for eight years from 1990. One of his core responsibilities was fraud prevention. His boss for much of that time was Jeff Chapman. Chapman holds the dubious distinction of being New Zealand’s highest ranking civil servant to be convicted and jailed for fraud. As auditor general and head of ACC, according to evidence at his trial in 1997, Chapman lived the high life: first-class travel, fine wine and food, trips on Concorde and helicopter rides from the French Riviera to Monte Carlo. He was found guilty of defrauding ACC of $20,000 and the Audit Office of $34,549.

According to our source, Matthews had given MOT staff the impression that he was aware his former boss, Auditor General Chapman, had been cheating the system. Matthews, said the source, had been clear that he would not breach the rules, and always stayed, for example, in standard, public service approved hotels. If Matthews did have knowledge of Chapman’s crooked behaviour, however, there is no evidence that he blew the whistle himself.

But according to the former Ministry of Transport employee, the very telling of this story by Matthews was inferred as a discouragement to raise alarm over wrongdoing. According to our source’s account, the impression gained by senior staff was that whistle-blowing was better avoided.

Another former employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Spinoff that in 2015 Martin Matthews instructed MOT staff that during an upcoming visit by auditors they should answer only direct questions and not volunteer any information.

The Spinoff asked Matthews to answer questions relating to this story through the office of the auditor general, and was referred to his May 24 statement: “I have no further comment to make on these matters while this process is under way.”

Auditor General Martin Matthews, left, and his former employee Joanne Harrison at her sentencing earlier this year.

The first two groups of sacked whistle-blowers had ended up talking with Labour’s Transport spokesperson Sue Moroney. The Government’s own Protected Disclosures Act, designed to protect whistle-blowers, had failed. They were out in the cold with no official support. And so they turned to the opposition MP. Moroney explained why she is so alarmed by the Matthews affair. “The systems did work in that the Harrison fraud was spotted quite early by the legal and financial people at the MOT. But the correct actions weren’t taken.”

In parliament Moroney stated that Martin Matthews was told no less than 12 times, on eight different occasions, that Harrison was a fraudster. The MOT documents tend to back up this claim.

One of the other safety nets that should have helped shut down the Ministry of Transport fraud is the Public Service Association, the union for public service employees. The PSA represents around 63,000 public servants but the number of PSA members in each Ministry varies. Sometimes the PSA represents 99% of a particular arm of the Public Service, but notably at the Ministry of Transport only 30% of staff are PSA members. One of the PSA’s roles is to support and protect whistleblowers.

Acting PSA National Secretary Kerry Davies says the PSA membership is often influenced from the top. “Union membership of the PSA is driven by the workplace culture within a particular government agency and that culture is very much determined by the chief executive and the senior leadership team.”

Joanne Harrison actually referred in one of the documents to an MOT staff member’s PSA membership as being akin to misbehaviour or disloyalty.

I asked Davies if she thought the PSA was doing enough to support whistle-blowers. She said more needed to be done and that the association was keen to educate their members on their rights when it came to speaking up about fraud or other serious public service issues.

One of New Zealand’s top corporate governance experts is Cathy Quinn, a partner at law firm Minter Ellison Rudd Watts. Already she sits on an advisory board to the Treasury’s chief executive, an example of private sector expertise influencing behaviour at a government level.

She told me that in the private sector, chief executives are usually kept close to the company chair, not just to make sure things are not going wrong but so that the board can understand if the chief executive is under any unusual pressure in their personal lives. She paints a picture of benign, even benevolent, oversight and tells me that in most big companies the chair and chief executive would talk at least once a week. The chair, or other senior board member, can often act as a mentor to the chief executive.

Just as the public service, with 300,000 staff, is not political, neither is the running of parliament. They are both part of the machinery of government. Their neutrality is supposed to be sacred. The politicians create the drama, but ultimately we vote and the system is supposed to deliver against that national democratic decision.

So why was the speaker of the house, David Carter, so seemingly irked when he announced to journalists in May this year that Sir Maarten Wevers was to launch his investigation into whether Martin Matthews was a suitable person to be auditor general? Matthews had apparently, just hours earlier, stood himself down from the job and called for an investigation to clear his name. Perhaps he saw it coming?

Carter labelled the situation “trial by media” and said he had complete confidence in Matthews. After all, it was mainly Moroney’s advocacy for the whistle-blowers that had kept the whole issue alive. The Office of the Auditor General and the State Services Commission had been conspicuous by their absence. In late 2016, even after Moroney went public with her whistle-blower evidence, neither the new MOT chief executive or the Minister of Transport would agree to an investigation.

Parliament’s own cross-party committee had approved Matthews as our new auditor general, on a seven-year term, late last year. The committee had been told that Matthews’ behaviour, since the fraud had been exposed, had been “exemplary”. That reference apparently came from the Serious Fraud Office, but was limited to the time since Matthews “became suspicious of fraud”.

The MOT’s own document trail would put that date back in 2013 or 2014, not 2016, assuming Matthews had listened to his own senior staff. Those Ministry of Transport documents, catalogued by the the new whistle-blower, show Matthews only took action after someone sent him a message on LinkedIn in early 2016 telling him Harrison was a fraudster. So much for the official channels. It was a social media post that did the trick.

Labour’s Transport spokesperson Sue Moroney

Just a few weeks before house speaker David Carter’s announcement of the Wevers investigation, Moroney had finally succeeded in getting a meeting on April 26 with the state services commissioner, Peter Hughes. After several attempts, it was just about her last ditch attempt to get some action on behalf of the whistleblowers.

Moroney told me that getting the meeting was tough and she had to fly from Hamilton to Wellington especially. Parliament was not sitting and she kept the meeting private because “when an opposition MP insists on seeing the state services commissioner it can get political.

“I reminded him of how everything was connected. I reminded him that the integrity of the public service had been called into question. I reminded him that the public needed to have trust in the public service. I reminded him how important it was that public confidence in the public service is restored.”

Ten days later Peter Hughes announced that the State Services Commission would investigate how the MOT whistle-blowers came to lose their jobs. I asked Moroney if Hughes had been supportive or reluctant in offering her support at that meeting. “He was reluctant,” she replied.

Nevertheless, the dominoes had started to fall. No one yet knows where it will finish.

Somewhat prophetically, and heavy with subsequent irony, here’s what Matthews said in an interview with the Chartered Accountants magazine Acuity in January this year, just a month before starting work as Auditor General.

“Our current regimes are now nearly 30 years old, and I am not convinced they will remain ‘fit for purpose’ for much longer. I think our formal accountability regimes are increasingly being displaced in the so-called ‘post truth’ era we now live in, where citizens in some countries are now more likely to form views about governmental performance from non-authoritative sources on social media.

Effective accountability of governments is important if we are to maintain public trust and confidence in government, a critical requirement for an effective democracy and civil society.”

In this interview Martin Matthews ended up predicting what may well be his own downfall. It will be fascinating to see how the Wevers investigation plays through. Whatever the outcome, it seems a fair bet that the effect on our public service, and future whistle-blowers, will be profound.

Want more politics? Check out the Spinoff’s Gone By Lunchtime political podcast, hosted by Toby Manhire with Ben Thomas and Annabelle Lee.

Listen to the latest episode here, or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

I am late to the Love Island party. I am Jessica, sauntering in with my pleather swimming togs, ready to board the love train after every other bastard has already coupled up. I am also this woman, a mesmerised bystander watching the Love Island quest for true love explode before her eyes like a suitcase stuffed with too many tiny swimsuits, and I will never finish my fish supper.

I’ve only just discovered Love Island, but UK viewers have spent their summer going batshit crazy over the reality dating show where 15 strangers couple up to win £50,000. The Guardian even compares it to the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer, ffs. Those two geezers are right up there with Nicholas Sparks in the ol’ romance stakes, so you know it must be good.

But wait, I hear you say: how can a show about island survival and a search for love possibly be a winner if doesn’t feature Barb lying in a hammock or Zac wearing too-short trousers?

Love Island, thou art more temperate than an infinity pool under a hot Majorca sun. Let me count the ways:

It’s every reality show you’ve ever watched, but better

It’s Big Brother without the mindplay, Geordie Shore without the shitfights, Bachelor in Paradise without Chris Harrison. Love Island chewed on a smorgasbord of reality shows, spat them into a televisual Thermomix and turned the dial to ‘blend the beejesus out of it’. Ta-dah, out poured a silky cocktail of self-deprecating entertainment that intoxicates from the very first sip — nay, the first sniff.

It’s even convinced the Spanish insect world to couple up, bloody great work Love Island.

It’s not even set on an island

I prefer my reality TV 100% landlocked, so I was as pumped as an Island newcomer when I realised the only sea on Love Island was one of human emotions. Whether it’s Camilla’s “I can’t believe I pashed someone who doesn’t believe in feminism” meltdown or Marcel’s grief at discovering freshly-evicted Harley’s half empty water-bottle abandoned in the rock garden, Love Island is a heavy mass of feelings bobbing aimlessly amongst a steaming sea of desire and I AM HERE FOR IT.

Also, no man is an island, but if he was he would definitely feature this giant spin the bottle challenge.

I like to watch people and this is the least creepy way of doing it

Love Island is an anthropological gift. You’re welcome, The Future.

The contestants actually seem to like each other

Chuck a bunch of strangers into a luxury villa, order them to couple up to win a shitload of cash and what the flipping heck, they become friends? Of course they do, it’s not Lose Your Shit Island, and I’ve spent many a happy hour listening to cracking banter about whether Jesus was God’s brother or if their ideal type is ‘budgie smugglers’ or ‘normal dungarees’. It’s a bloody tough choice, to be fair.

It leaves me with more questions than answers

What makes a shy landmine disposal expert go on television to find love? How does Chloe make her left boob twerk? Do they have enough sun cream? I’m worried they’re not using a high enough SPF. Why does Montana wear socks with her bikini? Is she cold? Why don’t they use the hot tub? Will I really see Marcel at the crossroads? Why are thong togs even a thing?

I will not avert my eyes until my soul gets the knowledge it craves or someone slip slap slops, whatever happens first.

My kids won’t stop watching Doc McfuckingStuffins and I need to escape

Love Island is a magical land of eternal sunshine and clean surfaces. The Islanders don’t have 90 loads of washing drying on the clothes horse for the fifth day in a row, or lock themselves in the bathroom while their children hiff Lego at each other until they bleed. On Love Island, the cushions stay on the couch and the lawns are beautiful and tbh I’d like to couple up with that villa please and thank you Caroline Flack.

Ultimately we are all just a girl in a thong bikini, standing in front of a boy in budgie smugglers, asking him to love her

Chuck all your eggs in one basket because it’s all about love, innit?

The latest season of Love Island is available to watch on TVNZ OnDemand.

This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.

Spookers director Florian Habicht on The Inland Road

July is one of my favourite times of year, and we are so lucky to have such a fantastic festival. Sitting under the Civic stars really makes me happy. The Spookers’ closing credits were even influenced by the Civic, so if you’re watching the film, watch the credits right to the end and make a wish!

I’m very excited about our New Zealand premiere, as the entire Spookers cast will be at the Civic in character and costume. Maybe we can do a curtain call after the film, take a bow and sing a song.

I’m also excited about The Inland Road by Jackie Van Beek. The young lead actress Gloria Popata is a new star of New Zealand cinema – you can find her on YouTube singing ‘Purple Rain’ at the film’s recent premiere in Berlin. I’m also eager to see the German/French film Frantz. It’s a love story in stunning black and white.

The Inland Road

Something more about Spookers. I tried really hard not to make the film as I was in the middle of writing a script that’s very dear to me, inspired by the late and great Warwick Broadhead. I was planning to shoot it last year. But Madman production company called me out of the blue, to see if I was up for a film about Spookers. Suzanne Walker from Madman dreamed up the idea to make a documentary about the haunted attraction. I wanted to say no but I agreed to go to Spookers and shoot a test. I’d never been there and this was the only way I would know for sure, so I could say no without regrets.

But when I arrived and saw all the performers getting into their makeup and costumes, I fell in love. They come up with their own characters and do their own makeup and prosthetics – I was blown away by their creativity and curious about what goes on behind the masks. The energy of the place felt intense and once I learned Spookers takes place in an old psychiatric hospital, I knew I couldn’t say no.

Spookers

I got to make the film my own. Lani-rain Feltham from Junkyard Universe was the New Zealand producer and we had a lot of fun. Spookers is a documentary with more heart than horror in it – you meet and get to know some of the most beautiful New Zealanders. It’s a real whanau and maybe it’s similar to my doco Kaikohe Demolition. The Civic premiere is on Saturday night and it should be quite an event – I hope to see you there!

Spookers: July 22, 23 (all dates are for Auckland screenings; other centres follow).
The Inland Road: July 25; August 3.

Stalker

Human Traces director Nic Gorman on Stalker

I’m going to talk about a film I have seen a number of times but never on a big screen, and one that was a key visual influence on my own film, Human Traces. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is one of the greatest films ever made, a densely metaphysical Russian sci-fi road movie epic about three men, one of whom is known as the Stalker, who enter The Zone, a deserted industrial wasteland which supposedly contains a room (sorry, A Room) that has the ability to fulfill any occupant’s inner-most desire.

Stalker has a very deliberate and unusual pace. Tarkovsky has described his aesthetic approach like this: “If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.” He’s right. Time moves in such an unusual way in this film. Watching Stalker is like undergoing a strange and immersive ritual. You don’t get that with Marvel.

In Human Traces the characters are trying to return a once-inhabited sub-Antarctic island to a ‘natural’, pre-human state by getting rid of all non-native biota and the traces left behind by the previous occupants. The island is a very important character in the film. I always conceived of it as being similar to The Zone, not in a metaphysical way per se, but in the sense of a location reclaiming itself and starting to expel the humanity forced upon it.

Our island is called Perseverance Island, lying deep in the Southern Ocean. There’s an old hut set on the shoreline with a temporary scientific lab built next door, a couple of rusting sheds and an old World War II bunker on the other side. It’s a fictional island that uses geographical and historical elements of three real sub-Antarctic islands: Auckland, Campbell and Macquarie Islands.

There’s a real verdant, overgrown, elemental quality to these places. When I was researching them, reading and looking at images in the National Library, Stalker came to mind. People even tried to establish a functioning settlement on Auckland Island at one point but it became so hellish they abandoned it. The livestock became wild and there are still other remnants of human habitation – old stoves, foundations, rusting hulks. This became a key idea in making the film, this idea of permanence, what we leave behind, how our touch ripples on years after we are gone.

The music in Stalker feels organic, almost diegetic, like it came sourced from the Zone itself. Tarkovsky said about his use of music, “The aim was to produce a sound, close to that of an earthly echo, filled with poetic suggestion – to rustling, to sighing.” Stephen Gallagher, the composer for Human Traces, and I referenced this a lot when working on our score. That’s how we wanted it to feel – elemental, like an “earthly echo”. There are some oscillating synths, primal strings and wind instruments, sounds and objects that we imagined coming from the bottom of the world.

Human Traces

An odd thing about Stalker is that Tarkovsky shot most of it twice. He shot for a year and filmed all the exteriors in Estonia before he realised his footage had been developed incorrectly. I can’t begin to imagine how heartbreaking that must have been. He fired his cinematographer and started the whole thing over. In the end it killed him. While they were filming in the foamy and polluted waters in the place they had located The Zone, much of the crew became exposed to toxins in the water from the factory upstream. Tarkovsky died of cancer a few years later, as did his wife Larissa and Anatoly Solonitsyn, who played the writer.

The film has a very strange power. Perhaps the best way to describe it is ‘uncanny’. There’s something familiar about it – we recognise the genre, and the story – but everything is given to us in such an alien way. Dreamlike is the wrong descriptor but there is something mythic about the effect it has on the viewer. It’s so weirdly prophetic about the Chernobyl disaster, for example. The power of prescience, the influence of death, the impermanence of art. Stalker is a film that gets deeper and richer every time you see it. See it at this year’s festival, let it grow into you like a tendril.

Stalker: July 22, 24, 29.
Human Traces: August 5, 6.

More Film Festival picks from filmmakers Paul Wolffram (What Lies That Way), Katie Wolfe (Waru) and Robin Greenberg (Team Tibet)

Bill Direen: A Memory of Others

Bill Direen director Simon Ogston on Tony Conrad

Tony Conrad was cool, used-to-hang-with-The-Velvet-Underground cool. Cool as fuck cool. A Harvard mathematics graduate when he moved to New York in the early 1960s, Conrad quickly became a key figure in its avant-garde art scene. There he made music with people like La Monte Young and John Cale, and non-narrative films that mesmerised with their hypnotic rhythms of flickering light. A serious but unpretentious artist, Conrad continued to challenge and delight audiences right up until his death last year, aged 76.

In 1997 Conrad came to New Zealand and I went to his show at Christchurch’s much-missed Lumiere. He never revealed himself, preferring to appear as a silhouette projected on to a sheet while he created a sustained drone on his violin. The music and stark imagery accompanied one of his beautiful films to create an experience I have never forgotten. That same year, Tyler Hubby began filming what would eventually become his new documentary, Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present. Twenty years ago! Time flies, as I’m sure Hubby would attest.

I took a different approach to my own portrait-of-an-artist documentary Bill Direen: A Memory of Others. We shot the film in three weeks while driving from the Otago town of Middlemarch to Auckland, as Direen performed with a wide range of collaborators and paid tribute to Kiwi cultural icons such as Janet Frame, James K. Baxter and Douglas Lilburn. Like Conrad and Direen himself, these were individuals with a sense of curiosity and playfulness, a sustained commitment to craft and a willingness to take artistic risks. They helped shape our collective consciousness and made the world a more interesting place. I think we should all try to take every opportunity to experience their work and draw inspiration for our own, whatever that may be.

Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present: July 22, 24, 26; August 3.
Bill Direen: A Memory of Others: August 4, 5.

For bookings and more on the festival, visit the official site. Lots of trailers are here. And don’t miss The Spinoff’s top ten festival film picks, plus tips on how to make the most of the festival.

The Auckland section is sponsored by Heart of the City, the business association dedicated to the growth of downtown Auckland as a vibrant centre for entertainment, retail, hospitality and business.

Bruce Willis You Are The Ghost

It’s not that your wife doesn’t love you. It’s because you died and now you are a ghost and she can’t hear you talking to her. That time you saw her taking off her wedding ring? It’s because you’re her dead husband and she can’t continue to mourn your absence with heterosexual jewellery indefinitely. Stop haunting her already, Bruce Willis! Bruce Willis, it’s hard to be a ghost and not know you are a ghost. Haven’t you noticed that the only person you’ve talked to in a year is a supernaturally gifted child? Don’t you think it’s weird your wife just cries alone in the living room every night, rewatching your wedding tape and never looking or speaking to you? Don’t you remember being fatally shot in the stomach at the beginning of the movie? Walk towards the light, Bruce Willis. Walk towards the light.

Hera Lindsay Bird

The Spinoff Review of Books is brought to you by Unity Books.

NOTE: The Spinoff’s mystery bestseller commentator is off on a hike or something, leaving this week’s list stripped of furniture. But the important details still remain.

AUCKLAND UNITY

1 A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman (Vintage, $26)

2 No Is Not Enough: Defending the New Shock Politics by Naomi Klein (Allen Lane, $35)

3 The Power by Naomi Alderman (Penguin, $26)

4 Iceland by Dominic Hoey (Steele Roberts, $35)

5 The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $38)

6 Black Marks on the White Page edited by Witi Ihimaera & Tina Makereti (Vintage, $40)

7 Men Without Women: Stories by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, $45)

8 Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole (Faber, $33)

9 Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti (Faber, $40)

10 Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse (WW Norton & Co, $31)

WELLINGTON UNITY

1 New Animals by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press, $30)

2 Our Future Is In The Air by Tim Corballis (Victoria University Press, $30)

3 Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, $38)

4 Home: New Writing edited by Thom Conroy (Massey University Press, $40)

5 Power by Naomi Alderman (Penguin, $26)

6 Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli & Francesca Cavallo (Particular Books, $40)

7 No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics by Naomi Klein (Allen lane, $35)

8 Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) by David Sedaris (Hachette, $38)

9 Totara: A Natural & Cultural History by Philip Simpson (Auckland University Press, $75)

10 Rise & Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland (Borough Press $37)

The Spinoff Review of Books is brought to you by Unity Books.

Having trouble viewing the quiz? Take it here.

The Spinoff Media is sponsored by MBM, an award-winning strategic media agency specialising in digital, with vast experience across all channels. We deliver smart, tailored media solutions as well as offering a leading data and analytics consultancy.Talk to us about your communications challenges and how MBM can help bring you success through the power of media and technology.

Duncan and Jane went full Blockaholic this week with special guest Sam Cable, 2016 winner of The Block NZ, and a block of Caramilk chocolate. Using the immense power of the sponsorless podcast, the pair help Sam put the call out for a new flatmate. Ever dreamed of living with Sam and Emmett from the Block? For a mere $300 a week, you can.

Sam then goes on to spill the beans about almost every aspect of reality television including how to ruin a shot after you’ve said something bad, whether or not the winnings are taxed, and why his favourite phrase “I just love love” was never included in the final cut.

Warning: this episode contains an obscene amount of Dominos chat as Duncan learns that Sam designed his local Dominos Pizza joint and proceeds to pitch his life away in an effort to secure a carb sponsor.

To listen use the player below or download this episode (right click and save). Feel free to subscribe via iTunes, RSS or via your favourite podcast client, and be sure to get involved on social media using #realpod

This content is brought to you by Lightbox, home of the amazing Bachelor-inspired drama UnREAL. Take a peek behind the curtains of reality TV by clicking below to watch:

This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.

SWIDT MC Spycc says:

‘Player Of The Day’ is stadium music. It’s a song about winning, beating the odds, and just owning whatever field you’re in, whether its music, sports, fashion, or being the kings of your neighbourhood (in our case Stoneyhunga), be the best. And it’s also about hip hop and our culture of lyrical competition and using our own references and neighbourhoods to tell our story.

Anyone and everyone that grew up in New Zealand at some point wanted to be “player of the day”. Its unique phrase to Aotearoa and it’s also a message that can stand on the world stage at any stadium !! It’s a New Zealand hip-hop anthem.

SWIDT’s album Stoneyhunga is out July 28.

The Spinoff’s music content is brought to you by our friends at Spark. Listen to all the music you love on Spotify Premium, it’s free on all Spark’s Pay Monthly Mobile plans. Sign up and start listening today.

Auckland’s hills help to define our city. Sometimes they’re a blessing, sometimes they can be a bit of curse. Occasionally they also present a unique opportunity. Nicolas Reid, who regularly comments and sometimes posts at Greater Auckland, has been part of a group working recently to unlock one of those opportunities: the Albert Park tunnels. Reid and long-time advocate Bill Reid (no relation) presented their plans this week to the City Centre Advisory Board. They’re calling the project Te Ara Tomo: The Underline, and here’s what they propose.

The idea is to open up the and restore the tunnels that were dug under Albert Park during WW2 as an air-raid shelter. Following the war, they were backfilled with clay blocks and sealed.

Albert Park with band rotunda lower left and a grid of tunnels beneath, with Princes St and the University of Auckland. The main tunnel starts in the upper right.

The main tunnel runs 660 metres, all the way from the eastern end of Victoria St through to Churchill St, overlooking the Stanley St intersection where the motorway ends and the tennis courts are sited (the entrance is currently hidden in the undergrowth in our feature photo). That tunnel is 4.4 metres wide and 3 metres tall. There are a lot of smaller tunnels off it, too. So, why not make use of them?

The basic concept is to re-open the tunnels and turn the main tunnel into a walking and cycling route with connections to the University via some lifts. Doing so would provide a much easier, grade than up and over Symonds St and Albert Park while improving connections from the City Centre to locations such as Parnell. They’ve called this Te Ara Tomo – The Underline and is shown below.

Importantly, it would link in perfectly with existing and planned walking, cycling and PT networks. For example, it would create a new cross-town cycle link, connecting the Grafton Gully cycleway into the Victoria St Linear Park, which is also happens to be connected through Queen St where Light Rail will one day run and to the future Aotea Station. The lifts at Symonds St would also hook into the Symonds St buses.

The main tunnel is in pink. City Rail Link in red. Green and yellow are key cycling and pedestrian routes.

This just gives another reason as to why it’s important we preserve the Victoria St Linear Park and not accept Auckland Transport running bus routes along the road.

Leaving Aotea Station onto what could become the Linear Park, looking towards Albert Park.

And there’s no shortage of potential users of the concept. Here are some from their presentation.

40,000 students at University of Auckland

• Approximately 30,000 on any given day
• Over 70% currently walk, cycle or take public transport to campus
• 13,000 a day walk to and from campus from bus, train, ferry stops in town
• Many more walk from apartments and flats in town, Carlaw Park, Parnell.

100,000 commuters to City Centre

• approximately 50% walk, cycle or public transport, many potential trips:
• 400 people live in Parnell and walk to work midtown each day (Census 2013)
• 1000s catch eastern bus routes and walk back up from Britomart

50,000 residents live within in the City Centre

• and they walk everywhere.

Plus local and international tourists, day trippers, recreational cyclists…

Given the potential it offers, they’ve estimated that conservatively, it could see 3,000-3,500 entries per weekday or over 750,000 per year.

As part of opening up the tunnels it also provides an opportunity to turn it into a piece of urban art with a new lining. Some examples from overseas include:

Some of the things other cities have done with their tunnels.

While the walking and cycling through the main tunnel is the key concept, it’s not the only one. There are after all 3.5km of tunnels under there. Some possible ideas for use include:

• Historical displays and a mini museum
• Art displays
• Tourist and retail opportunities, such as:
  • a wine cave, showcasing New Zealand wines at “cellar door”
  • a cheese cave, showcasing some of New Zealand’s premium dairy products
  • a Waitomo Caves style glowworm encounter

By now you might be asking just what this is going to cost. They say McConnell Dowell have prepared some costs to reinstate the tunnels and install the lifts, lighting etc. They say the main tunnel and lifts would cost around $14 million, an extra $2-3 million for additional space for the other ideas mentioned above, and $1-2 million for planning, consenting, traffic management and tunnel surfacing. All up it would be around $17-19 million. They are also looking at doing this commercially with users paying a small fee to use the tunnels, along with money from the other activities.

To me, even if just looking the project from a walking and cycling perspective, the cost seems pretty reasonable given how useful it would be. It would also add to other iconic cycleways the city is building including Lightpath, Skypath and Glen Innes to Tamaki Dr (hopefully alongside the rail line through Hobson Bay).

Overall this seems like a great project and one the council should quickly look to add to its plans as it reviews and refreshes the City Centre Master Plan and the other plans.

This post originally ran on Greater Auckland

The Auckland section is sponsored by Heart of the City, the business association dedicated to the growth of downtown Auckland as a vibrant centre for entertainment, retail, hospitality and business.

It’s a well-understood phenomenon that fear is profitable. Make someone feel unsure or uncertain in their own judgement, offer a solution that happens to be your product, and watch the dollars roll in. For example, halitosis (bad breath) didn’t exist as a condition until the makers of Listerine started selling the idea, primarily to women that it was a medical problem that would make them unpopular and rejected, unless they used mouthwash to rid themselves of “fermentation of the oral cavity”.

The “halitosis appeal”, as this tactic is now known, is used to sell everything from yogurt to shampoo to car polish and is such an integral part of our media landscape that we barely notice it any more. However, it’s not just advertisers shilling toiletries who use the halitosis appeal to play to our weaknesses.

I’ve grown up with media advertising being used to undermine me almost as long as I can remember. I’ve been told my entire life by companies that, without their diet drink/roll-on deodorant/winged sanitary pads, I will die alone and unloved; and it will be my fault for not caring enough about myself to buy their product. It’s difficult to push back against these messages but not impossible, but once I became pregnant with my son last year the background hum of undermining and uncertainty became a roar.

People trying to conceive, pregnant people, and new parents attract fear tactics like whaea around a new baby in a cafe. As soon as my partner and I made it known that I was pregnant, the world suddenly became a terrifying place. Pregnancy is hard enough with the morning sickness, the fatigue, the mood swings and the constant, gnawing fear that you might lose this precious little spark floating around inside you. That fear makes you easy prey for people looking to make money off you. If you REALLY cared about your unborn baby, you’d take the supplements with the pregnant lady silhouette in pink on the box, not the ones your midwife prescribes. Isn’t your foetus worth a dollar a pill – despite them having the same ingredients?

If it’s bad when you’re pregnant, it becomes hellish as a parent. You’re sleep-deprived, hungry, confused, and terrified with the weight of a responsibility greater than you thought possible. You’re making decisions you didn’t even know existed, and someone else’s life is literally in your hands. You’re the perfect target for manufactured fear and the profits that go with it. The results can be devastating.

In 1974, the organisation War on Want released the report “The Baby Killer”, an investigation into Nestlé and similar companies. It found that baby formula manufacturers were entering economically deprived areas in countries like Chile, Malawi and Nigeria, and using the halitosis appeal among other marketing tactics to persuade new mothers to abandon breastfeeding and start using their formula. Sales reps dressed as nurses even entered hospitals and neonatal clinics, armed with free samples and inaccurate information about the dangers of breast feeding. Without access to sterilising equipment, the money to afford a steady supply of the formula, and even clean running water in some places, infant mortality and malnutrition skyrocketed. The report caused an international scandal that led to Nestlé being boycotted around the world.

The disgraced “scientist” Andrew Wakefield, who published a heavily-discredited paper suggesting a link between MMR and autism, is possibly the most cynical example of exploiting parental anxiety. He held the patent for a medical test that could be requested by lawyers acting for parents who were looking to sue doctors and hospitals over the “damage” vaccines had caused their children. This test would have netted Wakefield a cool $43 million. A year. He’d even invented a name for this disorder, “autistic enterocolitis”. Not quite as catchy as “halitosis”, but just as lucrative.

This month, Friends of the Earth Australia announced to great fanfare that they had discovered “toxic nanoparticles” in baby formula. Despite this being founded on shaky methodology and poor science, the story was picked up by news networks and parenting groups around the globe. Like Wakefield’s “autistic enterocolitis”, “nano-hydroxyapatite particles” sounds ominous. To a new parent who’s probably already dealing with the internal and external pressures of feeding their baby formula as well as or instead of breastmilk, the idea that there’s something unpronounceable and “toxic” in the cheerful tins they buy from the supermarket is terrifying.

So far, there’s been no alternative suggested by Friends of the Earth for those parents worried they’re poisoning their babies. It’s unlikely that they’re going to unveil their own brand of nanoparticle-free baby formula any time soon. It’s even possible that they really are just concerned citizens wanting to make the world a better place for our babies. However, given the history of using bad science and fear on already-anxious parents, I’ll wait until I see some real, quantifiable evidence before questioning my choices.

Roz Palethorpe is a mum, science teacher and writer. She can be found on Twitter at @grumpybirb. 

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