Monthly Archives: Dec 2015

Careful when donating to charities

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How often do you see an advert for a charity or a person representing a charity when you go about your daily business? And when you do, what is your reaction to them?

Registering a charity in New Zealand under the Charities Act 2005 is entirely voluntary. However there are penalties for stating a charity is registered when it is not.  There are also financial benefits to be had from being registered such as qualifying for charitable tax status. It is important to know that not all charities have succeeded in registering as official charities. This may be for several reasons. Some might be too small to qualify for registration. Others might not be an appropriate nature, such as a political party. For a while the Charities Commission refused to grant Greenpeace a charity number because it was considered to be a political organization.

For some people donating to a charity can be a very off putting experience. It depends to some extent on how one was raised to view philanthrophy and its role in society. It also depends on the credibility of a charity and the kind of pitch it uses to persuade people to open their wallets. I find for example that people who make patronizing pitches are a major turn off – the ones who use phrases “I know you are ______”. Another problem which I have not personally encountered, but I know of people who have are pushy salesmen types who, clearly not versed in the art of persuading people to make a donation, come across as aggressive in pitching why a person should make a donation. Right there is a red card.

I donate to Amnesty International. It is an organization whose mission I believe in strongly, and am reasonably familiar with, as I have participated in their activism in New Zealand. It is also an organization where transparency is considered to be crucial. Every Annual Meeting that Amnesty International New Zealand have, there is a presentation of the state of the finances, how the previous year went and the goals for the current year. At the end of the presentation there is time for questions and debate.

As a nation donating to charity, New Zealanders are a generous bunch. In 2011 it was estimated that New Zealanders gave $2.67 billion. Across a nation of then about 4.2 million people that is about $619 per head, and compares quite favourably internationally. Of course that year, New Zealand was rocked by the Christchurch earthquakes, with their huge financial cost and accompanying death toll, but also this was then followed a few weeks later by the Japan earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown.

Sadly not all charities are entirely forth coming about how they use the donations that are given to them by people thinking that they are credible. One example is Southern Cross Charitable Trust, which offered loans for risky buildings. It was struck off following a Government investigation following concerns at how it used donations. In this particular case, there was no obvious criminal intent involved and the Serious Fraud Office declined to investigate it. Other charities have been struck off because they failed to comply with statutory requirements to register their details or failed to provide adequate information about their purpose.

So, happy donating in the future, but just take the moment to find out a bit from the charity about their purpose. They should have no problem telling you and if they do, that alarm bell ringing in your head is for a good reason.

Mental health in Canterbury a problem

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First there was the earthquakes. Shaking peoples lives apart at all hours of the day. Traumatising children and adults alike. Then there was in short succession in many parts of Christchurch, the odious muddy hell of liquefaction, the nightmare of watching ones house being slowly engulfed by a tide of contaminated mud. And for many there has been the additional anguish of dealing with insurance companies, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority and the Earthquake Commission.

Traumatized by all of that? I am not terribly surprised, especially given the gross insensitivity displayed by people in positions of power, with little or no understanding of the situation confronting their clients. But five years on, with the worst shakes (those over magnitude 5.0 having long since stopped, and only rarely a magnitude 4.0+ coming through)having done their dash, the recovery supposedly well underway and people looking to the future, there is a growing mental health crisis in Canterbury. Its victims are people struggling to adjust to a new normality, struggling with the loss of familiar routines, locations and people in their lives. They are unwilling to go into certain buildings, do certain things, are more wary than usual and are losing sleep.

Worse still, it is a crisis that the people wielding the means to tackle are in firm denial about. The Canterbury District Health Board, the Police, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority among others are finding themselves running into a wall of denial, a refusal to accept that the social outlook in Canterbury has some major post-earthquake headaches that are going to get worse before they get better. The deniers are Wellington based bureaucrats. This is despite ample evidence. Suicides and domestic violence rates have both climed substantially in Canterbury, caused by uncertain domestic circumstances and a loss of income, or social security.

Dr Peter Gluckman in May 2011 pointed out these problems and others to the Government in his paper The Psychosocial Consequences of the Canterbury Earthquakes. Dr Gluckman warned that dislocation caused by people leaving Christchurch for areas they perceived to be safer, more secure would also cause mental health issues might make people more stressed as well.

And before people say, “Get over it Christchurch”, I can say this back to you now: “We would be over it a long time ago if our concerns had been dealt with from the outset”. I say this because how Christchurch gets treated could be a blue print for how other New Zealand cities that have major disasters with long term consequences and large loss of lives might be dealt with in the future. I say this because I do not want to see the mistakes made in Christchurch get get repeated elsewhere with possibly worse consequences than those experienced here. I say this because it is worth saying.

 

 

Drown the drowning statistics

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When I was at Primary School we had a week very soon after Term One started where all students at school would participate in what was known as Swim Week. For a whole week all classes would participate in water safety programmes run at the school using the school pool. When we were not actually being given pool side instruction on how to swim, we were learning about safety in rivers and lakes, at the beach. We learnt about swimming between the flags, about wearing a life jacket on a boat and about how to get out of dangerous situations.

When I look back at Swim Week and the whole rationale behind it, I am sad to see the number of people who are drowning or otherwise being involved in needless accidents going through the roof. Just today the death toll from drowning in New Zealand for 2015 exceeded 100 people. That’s 100 people who  will not see in 2016 in a few days time because they went into water in the course of a recreational pursuit and never came back out. We blame it on all sorts of things – boating bylaws; a lack of fences around pools; supervision among other things. But at the end of the day so many of the drownings are because people got into situations that they did not know how to handle themselves in. But time and again it comes back to the very things we were taught in Swim Week, which included identifying rips at the beach; swimming between the flags and not going into the water at unpatrolled beaches; telling someone what you were doing. All of it common sense.

What is really irksome is this is not rocket science or nuclear physics. There have been numerous tragedies locally at the Waimakariri River, and some have involved people who could swim, but misread the water conditions where they ran into difficulties. It is true also that sometimes, however well meaning, the signage at known places of risk is not clear in telling the public about the hazard.

One thing that needs to be done when educating non-New Zealanders about this country is making sure they understand our conditions are quite different from overseas. Our lakes, rivers and seas can change very quickly. Even if new comers – especially those from countries not known for their aquatic environments – are not enrolled in swimming lessons, showing videos to them about how make themselves safe and 1-on-1 theory instruction should be had.

What is wrong with people taking basic responsibility for their own actions? If there are signs saying no swimming in a certain location or to exercise caution, the local council did not put them there just to beautify the location, but because there is a credible risk. A boat driver should have as many life jackets in the boat as he can take passengers. A person who cannot swim – quite aside from getting into swimming classes as soon as they reasonably can – should not be near water of depth without supervision, and if they are planning to do so, they should go in with supervision.

If there is anything we should be trying to drown, it is not ourselves, but our drowning statistics.

Merry Christmas

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Rather than writing a blog article for 24 December I thought I would explore a day in 1914, when German and British soldiers on the western front of World War One decided that they would put their arms down for 24 hours and meet their foes on in the trenches opposite them. It was a time in World War One when the soldiers, the sailors and the airmen who were fighting in atrocious conditions in northern Europe realized that there would be no peace in 1914.

How different this was to World War Two or the more recent conflicts. In World War Two in 1940 the Germans bombed London on Christmas Day. In 1941 the Japanese occupied Hong Kong on Christmas Day. Two years later 1944, the Germans and the Americans were locked in a bitter struggle for Bastogne in the Ardennes. But on this day in 1914, two foes divided by everything except perhaps the common knowledge that their trenches and the conditions in it were probably no better than those in the opposing trenches, decided on a spot of humanity where they would bury their dead, have a game of football and sing a few carols. They might swap cigarettes and a few rations.Christmas Truce

If these foes could manage it in 1914, why can’t the conflict in Syria and Iraq be put on hold for 24 hours in a show of humanity?

Merry Christmas. Back on 29 December.

A New Zealander as the United Nations Secretary General?

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Every five years, the United Nations Secretary General role comes up for renewal. As the current incumbent, a Korean gentleman named Ban Ki Moon comes to the end of his tenure, people are starting to ask about who might replace him in the role. Each new Secretary General must come from a different part of the world to his/her predecessor.

One of them is former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark. Since she left New Zealand politics following Labour’s defeat in 2008, Ms Clark has held office at the United Nations Development Agency, with a $4 billion budget. Her credentials as a leader are well established and she has considerable experience in governance, having led New Zealand for nine years. All this is just as well given the office of Secretary General has been tarred by scandal in the last two decades.

The United Nations under Secretary General Kofi Annan took several major hits to its credibility with scandals that should probably have forced him to resign, but he did not. Under his tenure large scale ethnic atrocities took place in Serbia where Serbian forces were committing significant atrocities against Kosovo Albanians, and in Darfur where Janjawid militias were slaughtering big numbers of . These took place with not so much as a raised finger of disapproval by the United Nations. Scarred by infighting over whether or not to recognize the American attempt to restore democracy to a post-Saddam Iraq, the United Nations Security Council was a disparate body. Under his tenure, significant scandals involving the misuse of United Nations funds also came to the surface in the food for oil scandal where in return for oil, Iraq, which was then still under the rule of Saddam Hussein, would be able to purchase food. Billions of dollars worth of revenue was misappropriated and during the course of various countries implicated making inquiries into conduct, numerous officials were made to resign or were sacked.

When Mr Annan left, Mr Ki Moon had a significant job to do just trying to restore credibility to his office, without getting involved in any of the ongoing crises around the planet. This, Mr Ki Moon appears to have done to his major credit. However, he has been exposed by a sharply divided Security Council showing the highest level of international distrust of each others motives amongst the Permanent 5 members to have existed since the 1980’s.

I like the idea of a person not from the United States, but preferably from a country where transparency is held in high regard, being selected to be the next Secretary General of the United Nations. The job is one of the most high pressure employment gigs one could ever do, with a degree of loneliness that the heads of State or Government from the major nations around the world would recognize and understand even if they do not personally agree with the purpose of the United Nations. It comes with perks, but also immense responsibility wrestling with dilemmas whose length of existence is a good indicator of how hard they might be to resolve.

I hope that Helen Clark does become Secretary General of the United Nations, if she can put some distance between her and activist groups wanting support for their own agendas. I think at a time when there is so much polarization of international politics and mistrust between nations, having third party Secretary General who can see both sides of the argument and deal with bit players on the side is a very good idea. How well she manages to make groups work together is another story altogether.