Canary in the Mine

The case regarding the female probation officer reprimanded for refusing to bow to Maori protocol has some interesting twists. Josie Bullock says although she has been given a verbal warning, the department seems to have relaxed its approach since she kicked up a fuss about women being required to stand behind men. Ms Bullock said the probation service was a government department and was supposed to be non-sexist and secular. Yet she was obliged to attend functions where there were prayers and to take second place to men purely because she was a woman. Since the incident in which she got into trouble, she said she had attended several other departmental ceremonies where women were not required to go to the back. However, feminists and Maori women are not leaping to her defence. Maori activist lawyer Annette Sykes said she did not support Ms Bullock. As a probation officer, she was obliged to abide by rigid court protocols, and in the same way, she should abide by and respect Maori protocols. Prominent Wellington feminist Margaret Shields, co-convener of the recent Women's Convention, said if Maori protocol was used it was not for others to define what that should be. It would seem that feminism has stopped manning the barricades when faced with multiculturalism. And it's obviously official that Maori culture takes precedence over Pakeha culture.

The Spanish parliament has legalised gay marriage, angering conservatives and clergy as it made the heavily Roman Catholic country the world's third country to grant full recognition to same-sex couples, even letting them adopt children. The 350-seat Congress of Deputies approved the measure by a vote of 187-147 with four abstentions. The bill, a divisive plank in the ruling Socialists' platform for social reform, gives homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexual ones.

But two years after predominantly Catholic Belgium legalised gay marriages, a majority of Belgians oppose giving gay couples the right to adopt children, a survey published yesterday showed. The poll, published in the daily La Libre Belgique, showed that 54 per cent of the 2000 people questioned opposed a bill now being debated in parliament that would grant such a right.

Stephanie Coontz says she has been studying family history for 30 years, but began focusing on marriage only in the mid-1990s, when reporters and audiences started asking her if the institution of marriage was falling apart. "My initial response was that marriage is not undergoing an unprecedented crisis, but has always been in flux. Furthermore, many of the things people think are unprecedented in family life today are not actually new. Almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before....But when it comes to the overall place of marriage in society and the relationship between husbands and wives, nothing in the past is anything like what we have today, even if it may look similar at first glance. The forms, values, and arrangements of marriage are indeed changing dramatically all around the globe. We are living in an historical moment as far=reaching as the Industrial Revolution."

The Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the world's largest publicly owned petroleum companies, has quietly joined the ranks of those who are predicting an impending plateau in non-OPEC oil production. Their report, The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, forecasts a peak in just five years.

You can rest easy in your bed. Despite claims to the contrary, China's nuclear arsenal is about the same size it was a decade ago, and the missile that prompted a Washington Times fright article has been under development since the mid-1980s. "Contrary to reports you might have recently read that Chinese nukes number in the hundreds--if not the thousands--the true size of the country's operationally deployed arsenal is probably about 80 nuclear weapons." So that's all right, then.

The viewers organisation VoTE (Viewers for Television Excellence) has begun a campaign to get the time when adult programmes can be shown (the "watershed") pushed back from 8.30pm to 9pm.

A lot of research about the effect of violence on TV is coming out. A survey in New Zealand of 15- to 17-year-olds showed almost two-thirds had played R18 video games, and a few had played Manhunt, which is banned there. Three-quarters of the 330 who took part in the survey said their parents knew they were playing restricted games, and over a third said parents bought them the games. One in five said an age restriction made them appealing.

And a team from the University of Aachen, Germany, says video games may "prime" the brains of players for violence.