Several friends told me that I would love Vienna, when I told them I was coming here for the first time. In fact many said it was their favourite city. I now understand why.

The city has been ranked as the best place to live in the world by both the Economist and the Mercer Survey. I have to agree. I thought Paris was hard to beat, but Vienna

What is so great about Vienna? Well it isn’t that there is something here which is unique to Vienna. It is more that where most cities get a few things right, Vienna gets it almost all right. They just need a harbour to be perfect 🙂

My top ten of what I love about Vienna

1. Their public transport system. It must be the best integrated system in the world. You can hop on any train, tram or bus without delay. And best of all they are free. Heh okay no they are not free, you do buy a pass for the incredibly cheap price of 13 euros for a week, but not once were you asked to produce it.  We were 10 metres from a bus stop, 50 metres from an underground stop and 100 metres from a tram.
2. The architecture. Walking past Stephansdom every day was a treat in itself, but that is only one of dozens of wonderful buildings that are spread all over Vienna.
3. The restaurants. We dined at a different restaurant every night and never walked more than 200 metres (with the exception of the deliberate trip out to a Heuriger). And they all served very good food for quite reasonable prices. The Goulash Palace was especially great, as were the various Weiner Schnitzels.
4. The statues. I love statues. They’re about history.
5. The alleyways. In between the main roads, are scores and scores of little alleyways, with shops to discover.
6. The Roman and Greek influence. If you are a fan of the classics, it is like a blast to the past.
7. The music. It is the city of Mozart and Beethoven.
8. The Austrians. They’re like Germans, only a bit nicer and a bit hotter 🙂
9. The cafe culture. Just like Paris, everywhere you go you can have a coffee, drink or bite on the street.
10. The climate. Sure it gets cold in winter, but 25 – 30 degree summers are wonderful. Hot, but not too hot and low humidity.

This is the Hofburg Palace, in the middle of Vienna. I ran out of time to do a tour of it, so it will have to wait for my next visit. The President of Austria now gets to live there.

Not only do you have statues of Mozart, scores of young men have to dress like him and walk around selling tickets for various shows.

The famous writer and thinker, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

My grandmother used to make us her version of the Sachertorte – a delicious chocolate cake invented by Franz Sacher. You can only get the original version at the Hotel Sacher, which of course we did.

As I mentioned above, one night we went out to a Heuriger, away from the cit centre. The one we went to used to have boarders also, and Beethoven lived there while composing some of his 9th Symphony.

The decor outdoor was lovely. You can see why they are so popular.

And grapes are growing literally above your table.

The wine was excellent. Sadly at this particular place, the service was appalling (you almost had to jump in front of the waitress to get her attention) and the food was ho hum. A rare bad experience.

Still to come are the caves with the underground lakes and the Prater!

Did a half day tour of the Vienna Woods, and some some of its attractions. Was pleased to find little tables on the bus so during the drive I could catch up with editing some previous photos.

Yes I know I do a lot of photos of churches. This isn’t some conversion – more just that they have the most interesting stories, and architecture. My Dad commented that when he toured with some friends a few decades ago they referred to their tour as an ABC tour – another bloody church 🙂

Anyway this looks like a church, but it was primarily a hunting lodge – the one where the infamous Mayerling double homicide happened in 1889. The bodies of Crown Prince Rudolf and his 17 year old mistress, Mary Vetsera were found shot dead. It was covered up as a heart attack for him, and Mary was buried without reference. Later the truth came out that Rudolf killed Mary, and then shot himself after the Emperor demanded they separate.

Incidentally if Rudolf had lived, WWI may have been avoided. The chapel was attached the the hunting lodge as a sort of penance, and memorial.

Poor Mary also had her grave dug up by Soviet troops in 1945, and had to be placed into a new coffin. This is her original one.

We also visited the Heiligenkreuz_Abbey, but enough photos of churches.

Finally we went to Hinterbrühl and down an old mine, as one can see.

The narrow part lasts a good 200 metres or so and then widens out. It is cold down there – 9 degrees.

During WWII, concentration camp prisoners did forced labour down here. They built jet engines down here for the Nazis.

Then finally after a long descent, you reach the underground lake or Seegrotte. It is the largest underground lake in Europe, and was created by accident in 1912 when a blast led to millions of gallons of water flooding the mine. As one can see water seeping through the cavern walls at some places, this gets you nervous!

The water in the underground lake is crystal clear, and drinkable.

They also filmed the prison scenes of the Three Musketeers down here.

The view, moving through the underground caves, in our boat. Well worth the descent. Not for Agoraphobics.

The Dom Post says:

For too many beneficiaries the question asked by policy makers and officials has become “What grounds are there for this person not to work?” rather than “What can be done to assist this person to get a job?” …

Of course there are many individuals who, through no fault of their own, are unable to support themselves or their families. Society has an obligation to look after them.

However, the working group’s report highlights some alarming trends that are not easily explainable.

In 1960, 2 per cent of the working age population was dependent upon benefits. Today 13 per cent of the working age population is dependent on a benefit.

And remember that remaining 87% of the working age population also has to fund those not of working age – whether they are under 18 or over 65. More and more people are going to be dependant on relatively fewer and fewer taxayers.

Whether through misplaced altruism or inept policy-making, officials and politicians have created an environment that has convinced some they have no obligation to try to support themselves, and others who have manageable medical conditions that they are completely unfit for work.

The deeper these misplaced ideas take root, the more damage they do. Children are now being born into families in which neither parents nor grandparents have worked for a living.

And this is the worst aspect of what happens. Far too many kids grow up in a household where work is a foreign concept.

The Herald reports:

Calls are increasing for skiers to be required by law to wear a standards-approved helmet on the slopes following a number of fatal skiing accidents.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

AP in reporting on the encrypted Wikileaks files:

At the center of the drama was the posting last week of a massive 1.4 gigabyte mystery file named “Insurance” on the WikiLeaks website.

The “Insurance” file is encrypted, nearly impossible to open until WikiLeaks provides the passwords. But experts suggest that if anyone can crack it – it would be the National Security Agency. …

Legal questions aside, the encrypted file conjures visions of secret codebreakers hunched over their laptops, tearing open secret, protected files in seconds with a few keystrokes.

Reality is not that simple. It appears WikiLeaks used state-of-the-art software requiring a sophisticated electronic sequence of numbers, called a 256-bit key, to open them.

The main way to break such an encrypted file is by what’s called a “brute force attack,” which means trying every possible key, or password, said Herbert Lin, a senior computer science and cryptology expert at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unlike a regular six- or eight-character password that most people use every day, a 256-bit key would equal a 40 to 50 character password, he said.

If it takes 0.1 nanosecond to test one possible key and you had 100 billion computers to test the possible number variations, “it would take this massive array of computers 10 to the 56th power seconds – the number 1, followed by 56 zeros” to plow through all the possibilities, said Lin.

How long is that?

“The age of the universe is 10 to the 17th power seconds,” explained Lin. “We will wait a long time for the US government or anyone else to decrypt that file by brute force.”

I may be wrong but I think the entire universe will have died by the time that file gets broken.

Most parents who get charged with the death of a baby get a lesser charge than murder – and often for good reason. However in this case, it appears the correct charge has been applied:

After leaving her baby to drown during bath-time, a mother wrapped his lifeless body in blankets and logged on to her Facebook page, a court was told.

She spent the next half hour checking out friends’ pages and catching up on news on the Fiji Times website before telling her husband the baby was dead, the Crown alleges.

The 29-year-old Auckland woman, who has interim name suppression, is charged with murdering her 13-month-old son on November 8 last year.

Can you imagine the Facebook status update?

“She could not cope with both of her children and saw no other way to cope with the problem than by his death.”

The woman had been in an abusive relationship with the baby’s father and in early 2009 had been staying at a Women’s Refuge with her children. The case managers at the refuge became concerned with the woman’s mental health, noting she seemed “obsessed with her husband and not able to cope with her children”, Ms Reed said.

The two children were taken into the care of Child, Youth and Family, and had been returned to the woman’s care only two days before Baby A’s death.

CYF have a very tough job to do. I am sure in hindsight, they regret letting her have the children back. Hopefully there will be a separate investigation into the robustness of that decision.

The Herald reports:

National Party MPs might be allowed a conscience vote on a Labour Party bill that proposes lowering the drink-driving blood alcohol limit, Prime Minister John Key said today.

The Government decided last month not to lower the limit from 0.08 milligrams to 0.05 milligrams per millilitre of blood, saying it needed to collect data for the next two years to find out what the effect would be and to demonstrate to the public that a change would be effective. …

Labour MP Darren Hughes has drafted a member’s bill that proposing lowering the limit to 0.06mg, saying the Government is “dithering” and there is already clear public support for the change.  …

However, Mr Key said at his post-cabinet press conference today drink-driving issues were usually dealt with by conscience votes.

“I imagine it would be a conscience vote,” he said.

“I know there’s a wide range of views within our caucus.

“So that’s something I would have to take to caucus, but off the top of my head I’m not proposing to stand in its way.”

While I am against lowering the BAC limit, at least until we have some specific NZ research on the prevalence and accident rate of those driving with a BAC between 0.05 and 0.08, I think National should allow a conscience vote on the issue of Darren gets lucky with the ballot. I’d rather hear National MPs genuinely give their views for or against any change, rather than be whipped on it.

Hopefully Labour would also do the same, and allow their MPs to vote against should they wish to do so.

On Thursday night we went to a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. This music can be amazing in the worst of conditions, and to hear it in the Karlskirche, performed with instruments from Mozart’s period was simply amazing. The highlight so far.

Normally it annoys me when people are in the foreground of a photo, but here it gives you some idea how large those two columns are – they are based on the famous Trajan’s column.

The interior photos are a bit dark as flashes were not allowed. But hopefully this gives some idea of the environment for the Requiem.

Even better, we somehow managed to get seated in the second to front row, so were barely three metres from the orchestra.

A shot of part of the ceiling.

The four soloists at the end of the performance. I don’t attend a huge amount of classical, but their performance was world class. It probably helps that they specialise in the Requiem.

The blond woman at the front, looking at the audience, was the lead violinist and along with the singers also gave a masterful performance.  I lost count of how many ovations they got.

The Herald reports:

Employers may be asked to pay part of the costs if their employees have to go on sickness or disability welfare benefits under an insurance-based reform of the welfare system flagged in a new report today.

A working group on reducing welfare dependence chaired by economist Paula Rebstock, in its first report, says employers need to be more actively involved in managing their workers’ health issues – keeping them well, and getting them back to work quickly after an illness.

It cites a system in the Netherlands where employers have to pay for most of the costs of their former workers on sickness and disability benefits.

Ms Rebstock said sharing the costs with employers would be “part and parcel” with a possible move towards funding welfare benefits through a social insurance system as in most developed countries.

Her group’s report is cautious about shifting welfare on to an insurance basis, one of the issues it is required to address in its terms of reference.

But Ms Rebstock said the group felt an insurance approach would give everyone involved in the system – employers, Government and beneficiaries – an incentive to get people back to work as soon as possible.

I’m cautious about shifting costs to employers, but I think the pros and cons of such a model are worth exploring. The status quo where the proportion of the working age population on sickness or invalids benefits increases year after year is not sustainable.

I’ve tried to find an copy of the actual report by the working group, but have not yet been able to.

Sunday News reports:

MORE than half of all households in private rental accommodation need state subsidies to pay the rent, says a new report that urges the Government to vest some of its “cold, mouldy and old” Housing New Zealand stock in not-for-profit groups.

It also reveals the Government is moving to abandon the decades-old acceptance that a state house is a “house for life”.

In its report on New Zealand’s social housing system, the Housing Shareholders Advisory Group says Housing New Zealand is developing strategies to provide homes only “for as long as [a] need exists”.

This is a significant shift from the practice of leaving tenants in the same house for years, giving them security of tenure regardless of whether their circumstances change.

This is merely sensible.  The provision of state houses should be done to those most in need, and is not a life-time entitlement.

It will never happen of course, but a more sensible policy would be to have the state provide income assistance to tenants based purely on need, and not on who the landlord is.

Jonathan Marshall at the SST reports:

TVNZ boss Rick Ellis has racked up more than $140,000 on his company plastic – including $32,000 entertaining – during a time of major redundancies at the broadcaster, a Sunday Star-Times survey of more than 100 public-sector chief executives has revealed.

I’ve not been jumping on the bandwagon for most of these disclosures, as they seem reasonable. But hell $140,000 is a lot of money – even over two years.

Ellis’ liberal spending over the 24 months to June this year coincided with a period of plunging profits and savage job cuts at the state-owned enterprise, which has been hit hard by the global financial crisis.

TVNZ’s 2009 annual profit was 89 percent down on the previous year. Some 215 TVNZ staffers have lost their jobs since 2007. Between June 2008 and June 2010, Ellis, who earns between $710,000 and $840,000 yearly, spent $140,768.19 on his TVNZ-issued credit card.

The expenditure may be legit, but that does not mean it was prudent. I am glad to see the Minister asking the Chairman for a please explain.

But assessing just how Ellis spent $140,000 of TVNZ’s money was difficult. Citing commercial sensitivity, the broadcaster refused to hand over anything more than a grand total, broken down into broad categories. This included $11,765.52 on “miscellaneous” items. The broadcaster last night refused to say what they were. The ombudsman is investigating.

TVNZ spokeswoman Megan Richards said TVNZ would release only limited details of Ellis’s expenditure because “we are a commercial operation in a highly competitive, not to say cut-throat global industry. The kind of detail government departments may care to release is damaging to our competitive position.”

Richards said it was unfair for TVNZ to release its data when bosses of private companies Fairfax, APN, MediaWorks and Sky were not forced to.

But Maori TV CEO Jim Mather, also a state-owned enterprise boss, happily provided his credit card statements and receipts. Mather spent $19,632.53 in the same 24-month period.

I may be wrong, but I suspect the privately owned MediaWorks will have a massively smaller bill on their CEO’s credit card.

The Herald reports:

Labour’s nominations for the Te Atatu seat have been reopened in the wake of disciplinary action against sitting MP Chris Carter.

Hmmn. So they have re-opened nominations before they have heard any defence from Chris Carter. If Carter does decide to go to court that could be evidence of bad faith.

The New Zealand Council of the Labour Party, meeting in Wellington this morning, has decided Mr Carter has a case to answer under the party’s disciplinary rules.

Mr Carter was not at the meeting but two of his lawyers, Claudia Elliot and Simon Mitchell, were in attendance.

Is that the Simon Mitchell who burns paintings for Helen Clark? How helpful of him.

In the meantime, Labour leader Phil Goff will write to Parliament’s Speaker Lockwood Smith on Monday, formally severing parliamentary ties with Mr Carter. …

The effect of becoming an independent means that he will no longer be included in funding formulas for Labour and will attract his own parliamentary funding as a sole MP.

Now kudos to Labour for that. By saying they will no longer accept funding for him, they are truly excluding him from Caucus. This really does indicate no way back for Carter.

Also related to Carter, in Sunday News Willie Jackson calls for John Tamihere to be offered the Te Atatu nomination for Labour. That would really stir things up!

On Wednesday we want out to Schönbrunn Palace, which was the summer palace of the Habsburgs.

This is the Palace from the front entrance. They have a tour of the state rooms, which are well worth doing. Sadly no photos allowed from inside.

Behind the Palace, are the magnificent gardens. These are free to enter, and are quite massive.

These are the Roman Ruins. Not actual roman ruins, but created in 1778 as a symbol of the decline of power.

And this is the Obelisk Fountain. I wanted to ask if there was one for Asterix 🙂

At the top of the hill, is the Gloriette. There is a small charge to climb up the staircase to the top, where you get wonderful views.

The natural pool behind the Gloriette.

The rear of the Palace, from the Gloriette.

The main grounds behind the palace, as seen from the main fountain.

The Neptune Fountain. It is majestic. Every garden needs one!

The HoS reports:

A drug dealing 12-year-old took a kilogram of cannabis to sell to his mates at an intermediate school.

The kid with the stash, worth about $7000, was busted when his friends at Auckland’s Manurewa Intermediate were caught smoking some of the cannabis.

The 12-year-old had been given the drugs by a family member to sell at school.

I hope that family member is now in jail.

Labour’s education spokesman, Trevor Mallard, said police and Child, Youth and Family (CYF) should be told of every drugs case in primary and intermediate schools.

“The sharing of this information could well help the kid in the long run. It might be that CYF and police decide to do nothing but they should have that information.

“That’s something that the minister should look at.”

But Education Minister Anne Tolley indicated on Friday that was unlikely. “This issue should be of concern to everyone – parents, communities, boards of trustees and teachers,” she said.

“Boards manage schools and develop their own policies – and most would notify the police or CYF in the event of a drugs issue. That’s a commonsense approach – and schools shouldn’t need the Government to tell them that.”

I’m basically with Trevor on this one. If we are talking kids not yet at secondary school, then I think there must be mandatory notification. This is too important to leave to school discretion. Sure you don’t want schools having to report every 17 year old who is caught with some pot, but hell if a kid is into drugs at age 10 or 12, then they are at serious risk of a life of dysfunctionality.

The HoS mentions:

Goff and Carter could be at the same event today when Labour politicians gather at the 100th birthday celebrations of former speaker Jonathan Hunt’s mother. Carter was expected to attend with former Prime Minster Helen Clark.

Boy, that could lead to some interesting conversations. Someone want to sneak in with a webcam? 🙂

Chris Trotter writes:

An armed band of about 150 terrorists enters an isolated village in a country torn by civil war.

The men defending the village, accepting the terrorist leader’s assurances that they will not be harmed, surrender their weapons.

One man refuses, telling the terrorist leader: “If I hand over my gun, you will kill me.”

Shots are exchanged, the man falls.

The terrorists then start slaughtering the defenceless villagers – mostly women and children. Forty are killed – many hacked to death with bayonets and axes.

Meanwhile, outside the village, local farming families are also being attacked and killed.

About a dozen men, women and children are murdered: some bayoneted; some shot in the back as they fled. Their homesteads are looted and set alight.

Having completed their grisly raid, the terrorists take refuge in the nearby mountains.

What would be your best guess as to what happens next?

If you said a small army made up of professional soldiers and local volunteers headed into the mountains in pursuit of the terrorists, you would, of course, be correct.

And if the commanders of that small army discovered that the local inhabitants of the mountainous region into which the terrorists had fled were providing them with food, shelter, ammunition and new recruits?

What would your best guess be as to their next move? If you said they’d probably “unleash hell” on the local inhabitants, then, once again, you’d be quite right.

Now, when and where did this terrorist raid take place? Last week in the mountainous border region separating Afghanistan from Pakistan? Not even close.

The incidents I’ve just described took place in and around what is now Te Urewera National Park in April, 1869.

The “terrorists” were Te Kooti’s “Hauhaus”. The village was Mohaka. The local tribe which gave Te Kooti and his men shelter was Tuhoe.

THE Waitangi Tribunal has so far released more than a thousand pages of historical research into the Tuhoe people’s claim to Te Urewera.

But you’ll not find anything on those thousand pages remotely resembling the Mohaka massacre as I have described it.

There is a peculiar reticence on the part of the tribunal’s historians to acknowledge that the war which spilled over into the Tuhoe people’s territory in the 1860s and 70s was a civil war.

Chris, as I understand it, is not saying Tuhoe did not suffer grievous wrongs, and is not saying there should not be a settlement as compensation.

His issue is that the professional historians are not providing the full historical context for what happened.

On Tuesday did a tour of the Österreichisches Parlament, or Parliament of Austria.

The buildings, formerly called the Reichsratsgebäude, are stunning, and lean heavily of the Greek and Roman classical pasts.

The buildings were built from 1874 to 1883, long before Austria became a republic – when they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A huge statue of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, out front.

This is the Hall of Pillars – literally. I like our Grand Hall in the NZ Parliament, but it doesn’t compete with this. Each pillar weighs around 16 tons.

This is the National Council Chamber, or lower house. It was previously the House of Lords in the Empire. It got mainly destroyed in WWII, so looks more modern with the rebuilding.

The Council has 183 MPs, and they are elected for five year terms. The age of suffrage is 16 and they use a party list proportional representation system. The current Government is a red-black grand coalition of the SDP and the Austrian People’s Party. They have 108 seats together.

This is part of the Federal Council Chamber, or Upper House. It is a small room, with just 62 members. Each state legislature appoints 3 – 12 members. So it is not directly elected. They are less powerful than the National Council.

This room was by far the most impressive. It is the former Austrian House of Representatives, of the Austro-Hungary Empire. It had 516 delegates including Germans, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Slovenians, Ruthenians (Ukraine), Croats, Romanians and Serbs.

Today it is only used by the Federal Assembly, which is a joint session of thw two Councils. The Assembly only meets to swear in a President, impeach the President or declare war. The last two have never happened.

The ten statues are of Numa Pompilius, Cincinnatus, Quintus Fabius Maximus, Cato the Elder, Gaius Gracchus, Cicero, Manlius Torquatus, Augustus, Seneca the Younger and Constantine the Great.

These are the galleries in the former House chamber. Somewhat nicer than the galleries in the NZ Parliament!

I was amused by this statue as at first I thought he had a very impressive member. Then as I tried to work out why his glans looked like a paw, I deduced it was in fact part of his loin cloth – presumably made out of a animal’s skin.

John Armstrong lets loose at National with both barrels:

Shame on National. That party’s behaviour in Parliament over the past couple of weeks has on occasion veered close to being a disgrace both to itself and the institution.

Not that many people would have noticed, however. National’s antics inside the House have been totally shrouded by those of Chris Carter outside. …

The upshot is that Labour – almost by accident – has given National an old-fashioned hiding on that most fundamental of all questions: which party can be can best trusted with the reins of economic management. The one compensating factor for National is that all this has happened largely out of public view.

However, it has given considerable momentum to the three-pronged strategy that Labour is developing in order to try to win the economic policy argument at next year’s election.

The first prong is to endlessly repeat that National has “no plan” – that National has no solutions which will lift economic growth.

That notion has gained currency following National’s recent clutch of policy reversals. The damage done to National’s 2025 goal is of considerable help in reinforcing that narrative.

Hopefully a few people are reading John’s column, and working on ways to prevent a repeat.

This is Alser Straße 41, which is where my Dad lived up until 1938.

The ground floor back then was also apartments – not shops.

Alser Straße is in DIstrict 8 of Vienna – not too far from the city centre.

And this is inside the apartment block. Very few families in Vienna live in what we think of as houses with a section – almost everyone was and is in an apartment. However there was often a garden area out the back of an apartment block, shared by those backing onto it. Sadly we couldn’t get through to the garden.

Vienna has the best public transport system of any city I have encountered. Trams like this go past every couple of minutes.

A nearby apartment proudly proclaiming that Mozart lived there. Now this is true, but what you soon learn is that Mozart was a bit of a bum and floated all over the place – around 80 buildings claim to have had him live there.

Vienna is such a wonderful city of culture, that one can only feel sadness that so many residents were displaced or killed during the Nazi era.

is it illegal to drive a motor vehicle and use a cellphone, yet legal to pilot a helicopter and text.