The Herald reports:

Inland Revenue has received a surge of inquiries from student loan defaulters worried they could be arrested if they return to New Zealand.

One man who ignored his repayment obligations contacted the Weekend Herald from Australia and said he would now be scared to return for funerals or weddings.

How’s this for a plan? Start paying back the taxpayers the money you borrowed from us, and then you can return for all the funerals and weddings you like.

We paid for 75% of your tertiary education and lent you money for the other 25% or so of it. Not unreasonable you pay us back the 25%, especially as you are not even working and paying tax in NZ.

Rupert writes:

I’ve attached something with this email that Kiwiblog readers might like – it’s a circular calendar – with a ‘spoke’ for each day of the  year, it includes, the phase of the moon (at least full, first quarter, new and last quarter). I’m pretty sure all the content is correct, but all usual disclaimers apply!

The yellow ring in the centre represents (for Wellington) sunrise and sunset – with a jump for day light savings.

A pdf is here – calendar 2016

The PDF is sized to A0, though it would print to A2 reasonably well and tolerably on A3.

Anthony Hubbard writes in Stuff:

Not all neighbours are nice. David Walmsley, for instance, built a giant “play fort” on his Roseneath property and blocked the grand harbour view of the people next door, Peter and Sylvia Aitchison.

The fence was 4m high and 11m long.

The Environment Court has now ordered Walmsley to take the fence down. Any other verdict was, frankly, unthinkable. Walmsley has shown that he is the neighbour from hell.

Judge Brian Dwyer said the Aitchisons had established their case by an overwhelming margin.

I’m glad the judge ruled the way he did.

It is very clear that Walmsley didn’t even want a play fort. For some reason he just wanted to screw over his neighbours and destroy their view.

The judge said Walmsley’s claim that he was building a fort, not a fence was “just a contrivance” to get around the rules. And he criticised Walmsley’s attitude, his “deliberate refusal to consider any remedy”.

How right the judge was.

Not only did Walmsley build this monstrosity, he was utterly unapologetic about it. He felt no need to consider its effects on the neighbours, he told the court in Wellington this week.

“So you don’t have to have regard to what affects them?” the Aitchisons’ lawyer Andrew Cameron asked. “Pretty much, yeah,” Walmsley said.

“So it was too bad for the Aitchisons?” Cameron asked. Walmsley replied: “I think, yeah, pretty much if it blocked their view. It’s not necessarily too bad, and it’s something to be expected.”

The impact on the Aitchisons was two-fold. The first was it knocked around $900,000 off the value of their property. Now I don’t know their background, but I imagine like most families they’ve worked hard all their lives to be able to afford their house. Suddenly losing $900,000 of value could represent all your work for the last 10 to 12 years – just gone like that.

But the arguably bigger impact is the loss of the view. Views are important. They are a big part of why people buy a particular house. They can be incredibly soothing. Your home goes from a place of relaxation to a place of enclosure.

So what happens next? The Wellington City Council needs to take a lesson from this case. It originally gave permission for the fence, but later reversed itself and backed the Aitchisons’ application to the court to have the fence lowered.

The council should be embarrassed that it got things so badly wrong in the first place.

It certainly needs to make sure this never happens again. Any District Plan that allows such a thing is insane.

It is very rare I agree entirely with an Anthony Hubbard column, but I do with this one.

As fascinating as Scott Base is, and the old huts etc, the important stuff in Antarctica is the science. As the Antarctic Treaty basically turns the entire continent over to science, that is not surprising.

The plan was for me to go out into the field with one or two of the sciences teams so I could do first hand reports of what they do scattered around Antarctica. However the weather got in the way of this. This is not uncommon. Antarctica is a dangerous and wild continent, so it is more usual than not to have delays. Scientists may be planning for five weeks in the field, and only end up with three.

So my reporting on the science will be more second hand, than first hand, but I did get to chat to them all first hand.

This is Gary Wilson out in the field. If Antarctica had a NZ Chief Scientist, Gary would be it. He has been to Antarctica 25 times and his first visit in 1988 was for his thesis mapping the glacial and lake deposits in the Miers Valley.

His current project is working on being able to more specifically define what temperature increases are critical to effecting change in Antarctica, its ice sheets, oceans, biota and links between Antarctic systems, southern ocean systems and further north.

Antarctica is of critical interest to scientists in terms of the climate for two reasons. The first is that it is a frozen time machine into the past. If you want to know what the world was like three million years ago, you drill down a few hundred metres and can establish what the temperature was, was the land under water, what was the level of certain gases in the atmosphere etc.

The second reason is that the extent of sea level rise due to rising temperatures will be massively affected by what is happening in Antarctica, especially the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Now regardless of your views on the causes of climate change, and how to respond to it, you should be very supportive of bettering our understanding of what is happening in Antarctica. If sea level rises are far less than projected then hundreds of billions of dollars may be spent inappropriately, but likewise is the sea level rises match or exceed what is projected, then the economic costs are huge, and more money needs to be spent on mitigation and adaptation.

So regardless of your views on the policy issues, the need for better scientific understanding is paramount.

This is the AUT Antarctica drones teams. I was lucky enough to share field training with them, so got to hear lots about their project.

They’re going to three different sites (Taylor Valley, Botany Bay and Cape Evans) in the Antarctic (all specially protected areas) to fly drones to photograph the areas using both normal and infrared photography. And in case you think it sounds a fun jaunt, they’ll be camping out for two weeks in sub-zero temperatures not just having to operate their equipment, but also maintaining their camp. And as the areas they are in are protected, they need to have a minimal impact on the area.

This is one of their drones. They’re not like the ones you can buy as toys, but have serious grunt so they can go up and photograph several square kms at a time.

The main purpose of the research is establish the past and cumulative effects of human impacts on these vulnerable ecosystems so that they can be better safeguarded in future. They’re also working on a crowd sourcing tool where staff and scientists in Antarctica can easily report areas they has seen of environmental concern.

Photo: Len Gillman

This is a photo of some of them out last year in Antarctica.

Other projects include:

• Richard Levy and Tim Naish (and team) are uncovering an ancient beach (now 300 metres above sea level) teeming with fossilised remains of sea life that lived when the waters around Antarctica were warmer, to learn more about how our coastal environment may change if temperatures rise.
• Regina Eisert is studying Ross Sea killer whales to provide the scientific information needed to support the proposal for a Ross Sea Marine Protected Area. This includes information on whale abundance, diet, foraging habitat, and movements. As toothfish predators, killer whales are among the species most likely to be affected by fishing for toothfish, if the fishery reduces the availability of toothfish in areas where the whales feed.
• Graeme Hill is  imaging the Mt Erebus magmatic system from source to surface to in investigate the role of geofluids in both volcanic and tectonics studies

The full list of the science projects in 2015/16 in Antarctica, supported by Antarctica NZ, is here.

While scientists obviously choose to come to Antarctica, it is worth remembering most of them spend relatively little time at Scott Base. They mainly are camped out around Antarctica in tents, cooking their own meals, running their experiments, and their only contact with the outside world is a radio which can communicate with Scott Base and McMurdo. It is I am sure an amazing experience, but not an easy one.

As I said, the plan was to be able to report first hand on some of the science, but the weather got in the way.

Stuff reports:

The former Chief Ombudsman, Dame Beverley Wakem, said in a report on the OIA last year that the law does not support “an outright exemption based on the identity of a requester or their role” when considering whether to charge them a fee.

Wakem recommended that agencies review their policies to ensure certain requesters – like media – were not excluded from the rules, so the Reserve Bank could be the first of many to start charging journalists.

Previously it was:

Under the law, government departments and other agencies covered by the OIA are allowed to charge for official information requests.

Most have guidelines which make exceptions for the media, MPs, and the researchers who gather information for political parties – but this may be about to change.

A blanket exemption for certain categories of requesters is not justified. But that doesn’t mean charging should be automatic and the norm. Agencies should charge only where the costs of collation are very significant.

What about wide-ranging requests that could cost agencies thousands of dollars, and take hours to put together?

Ardern says problems with requests like those should be dealt with by speaking to whoever wants the information and asking them to make changes, rather than imposing a hefty sum to access it.

I agree with Ardern. It is far better for an agency to ask if a request can be narrowed down, rather than just charge for a request that will be very time consuming.

Stuff reports:

He is a member of a notorious gang and faces serious criminal charges, but Stephen William Daly might also be in the running for father of the year.

The Head Hunters member, on electronic bail for his alleged role in armed kidnappings in the Bay of Plenty a year ago, was so frustrated at not being allowed to leave his Whangarei property and take his kids to the playground that he took extreme measures – bringing the playground to them.

The 33-year-old saw a school playground being auctioned on TradeMe with a $1 reserve and began bidding.

“I thought ‘we can do this’. We had the space for it, it seemed cool, like a mean idea.”

Competition was fierce but he won the auction – “we got it for about two grand” – and he sent a relative down to Opotiki in the Eastern Bay of Plenty to pick it up.

But it was completely dismantled, and Daly had to figure out how to put it back together in his back yard in Mahana Pl, Raumanga, a poor suburb of Whangarei.

“We had no instructions or anything, just photos off TradeMe. We’d grab one pole, look through all the photos at where the gaps were – we jigsaw puzzled it for about two weeks. Our builder was bloody awesome.”

When it was finally completed, Daly posted his delight on Facebook with the post: “It gets to ya telling ya babies you can’t take them to the park because I’m on the bracelet so I did something about it. I no longer have that problem. … school playground at home, boom.”

I think to be father of the year, you teach your kids not to do crime. But regardless, it is a nice story about a dad wanting to give his kids a good time, and an innovative solution to it. So I’m all for that.

But what interested me was this part:

Daly is slowly building his property into a paradise for his children, aged 7 and 6, whom Stuff has chosen not to name. He’s just put in a pool and is now laying large decks. Also on the property yesterday was a jetski and a four-wheel motorbike, as well as a pet turtle that had escaped its enclosure.

Previous Facebook posts show Daly driving a vintage muscle car, registration Psyko, and dining with members of reggae band UB40. 

I’m not sure what his income source is. Maybe he is really good at sharemarket investments. But on the assumption his income comes from gang related activities, it seems to be pretty profitable to be able to afford a pool, large decks, a jetski, a motorbike and a vintage car.

Maybe I’m in the wrong job?

This is Discovery Hut, the second oldest building on the continent. It was built by Robert Scott in 1901 and is on Ross Island, near McMurdo Base.

It was pre-fabricated in Sydney.

The hut wasn’t very well designed. It was colder in the hut than in a tent, and so it got used more for storage than sleeping. Each subsequent hut learnt from the one before and got progressively better.

The hut is under the care of the NZ Antarctic Heritage Trust who look after five historic huts. Some of their conservators spend all winter in darkness on the continent working at Scott Base, restoring and preserving the artifacts in the huts.

Cookies!

This is the view out one of the windows of Discovery Hut.

As I said, almost as cold inside as out!

You can see McMurdo from Discovery Hut plus the Polar Star icebreaker in port, having just cleared the way for the supplies and fuel ships to enter later this month.

A memorial to George Vince who died in 1904. He may be the first person to have died in Antarctica. However there had been earlier deaths in the seas around Antarctica.

In the UK, the Conservative Government is changing the law so that workers are no longer forced to fund the Labour Party through unions.

And USA Today reports on a related US Supreme Court case:

The Supreme Court left little doubt Monday where it stands on forcing teachers and government workers to contribute to public employee unions against their will: It’s ready to strike the requirement down.

The court’s more conservative justices sharply criticized the current system in which public employees in 23 states and the District of Columbia must pay for the cost of collective bargaining, even if they disagree with their unions’ demands. The problem, those justices said, is that virtually everything the unions do affects public policy and tax dollars.

Unions are major political players. The unions are so strong in the US that almost every Democratic candidate has to oppose trade agreements, or risk union funds being spent against them.

Hence they should not get compulsory funding from workers. They should only get funding from people who wish to join them, as is the case in NZ.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Californian who led much of the criticism of the mandatory union fees, said teachers challenging the requirement disagree with union positions on issues such as tenure, merit pay and class sizes. “The union basically is making these teachers ‘compelled riders,'” he said.

Awful to be forced to fund an organisation so it can advocate for policies you strongly disagree with. Imagine for example being a gay man forced to fund a church that preaches homosexuality is wrong – well that’s how conservatives feel when forced to fund unions.

The 325,000-member teachers union, which spends more on politics than any special interest group in the state

The biggest money in politics is often from unions – certainly in NZ. Look at registered third party campaigners – almost all unions.

The Herald reports:

Labour leader Andrew Little said the 50.2 per cent confirmed that people wanted NZ to have a good relationship with the US. “It is important that we do have a good relationship with them. But what is equally important to New Zealanders is our non-nuclear status. It has defined us as a nation for the past 30 years.”

Mr Little believed the almost 30 per cent who did not want the US to visit would be those who, despite any assurances from the Prime Minister, would have doubts about whether any visiting US ship was actually non-nuclear.

Umm, you’d have to be pretty stupid to have any doubts.

Whether a US ship is nuclear powered or not is a matter of public record. You can’t have a secret nuclear reactor on board a ship.

It is also publicly known that no US surface ships carry nuclear weapons. I really don’t think the USG will secretly load some on board a frigate just to piss us off.

We’ve had visits from ships from other countries that have nuclear weapons such as the UK. They do not officially confirm nor deny if any are on board, but we have let them in as it is obvious there are none. Is Little suggesting we should have a different policy for the US as opposed to the UK?

The largest part of Scott Base is the Hillary Field Centre. It is where people are equipped to go out into the field, and also to be supported when they return if they need to work on their experiments immediately.

It is just over halfway through a major $6 million upgrade.

This is the general lab area.

These are the cages. Each group going out into the field gets a cage where all the gear they need to survive and do their science is stored. it can take several days to get everything organised. Some gear may be late getting in from Christchurch, and sometimes McMurdo will lend gear out also.

They have scores of tents, including these polar tents.

This is the drying room, where after you return the tents and sleeping bags etc get dried.

One of the other labs.

A useful guide on penguin behaviour.

The boiler room.

The food store is almost like a supermarket. But there is no quartermaster issuing you the food. Each group decides for itself what food they want to take, and take it. The training is for people to make good decisions themselves.

This is the Scott Base webcam, which you can check out here.

The important (for me) server room.

And the computer lab.

I mentioned that there was a major renovation on. Contractors are working throughout summer and winter to do a major expansion. It will make for far easier loading of gear, departures and logistics.

More of the expansion work.

This structure was a long way away from the other buildings. I asked why, and the reasons is it is where the explosives are stored. I then told a Dad joke “Knock knock … Who’s there … Basil …. Basil Who …. Basil Brush, Boom Boom.” – sadly some of the younger staffers did not know who Basil Brush was!

The Herald reports:

Welcome to Kim Dotcom’s Good Life — but was it worth $24 million?

The dollar figure is the cost Dotcom put on the making of the music video which he made public today.

Remember this guy is claiming he didn’t get a fair court hearing because he was so poor he could not afford more lawyers and witnesses.

Arrival Heights is around 2 km from McMurdo and it is an Antarctic Specially Protected Area as its height and horizon make it ideal as an area with minimal electromagnetic interference to do atmospheric studies.

There are no lights up at Arrival Heights. If driving up at night you must have your lights turned off, and use moonlight. If at night you need to go from one building to another, there is rope joining them up so you can navigate in the dark.

NZ has an atmospheric research laboratory as Arrival Heights. It was built in 2007, but a previous one was there from 1959.

Most of the experiments and monitoring being done there are for NIWA, and include the upper atmosphere, trace gas monitoring, geomagnetic studies and air quality surveys.

This is the oldest running monitoring experiment. It has been going since the 1980s. You may note the computer is running DOS and the PC has a floppy disk drive!

The roof of the labatory has multiple egresses to allow monitoring.

This equipment was made in 1937 but still performs its function well – to monitor the ozone layer.

In case people wonder the value of such science, well it was the discovery of the hold in the ozone layer around Antarctica that led to the Montreal Protocol which phased out production of many substances that deplete the ozone layer. As a result the hole in the layer around Antarctica is recovering and it is projected to be back to “normal” by around 2050. The Montreal Protocol has been called the most single most successful international agreement to date.

A 2015 report by the U. S. EPA estimated that the protection of the ozone layer under the Montreal Protocol will prevent over 280 million cases of skin cancer and 1.5 million skin cancer deaths.

Many of the experiments are automated and need no human interaction. But some of them, including this one, require a technician to make selections and operate the equipment. Antarctica NZ has two technicians who operate the gear at Arrival Heights, year round.

Stats NZ reports:

The consumers price index (CPI) increased 0.1 percent in the year to the December 2015 quarter, following a 0.4 percent increase in the year to the September 2015 quarter, Statistics New Zealand said today. The previous smallest annual movement was a 0.5 percent fall in the year to the September 1999 quarter. 

That’s great for families, especially those on fixed incomes.

Inflation in the last three years has totaled just 2.4% or 0.8% a year.

Inflation from 2005 to 2008 totaled 9.4% or 3.2% a year.

And if you recall Labour’s major policy at the last election was to destroy the generation market for NZ electricity because power prices were going up too much. Well electricity costs have increased just 0.4% in the last year.

Also Labour were campaigning recently on the price of milk. They seemed to think milk should cost less than coke, despite the fact one has to be farmed, milked and transported while the other is just a syrup you add to water.

Anyway what have milk prices done? Down 14.2% from a year ago! Labour really do pick them well. In fact milk is cheaper now than it was in 2008!

There are three main organisations involved with Antarctica. They are:

• Antarctica New Zealand
• New Zealand Antarctic Research Institute
• Antarctic Heritage Trust

On top of that you have involvement of other organisations such as the NZ Defence Force, MFAT, NIWA, most universities etc.

So what does each organisation do?

Antarctica New Zealand

Antarctica New Zealand is the government agency charged with carrying out New Zealand’s activities in Antarctica. They manage NZ’s presence in Antarctica, run Scott Base, support the world leading science and help protect the environment of Antarctica.

They have a seven member board appointed by the Foreign Affairs Minister.  They have 27 staff based in Christchurch and from 10 to 50 staff at Scott Base.

However many staff work in both Christchurch and Scott Base. You may be an HR manager most of the year in Christchurch but also spend two to three months at Scott Base helping with operations.

The Scott Base staff are in three teams – base services, engineering, and programme support. People can do multiple roles. For example the Winter Base Leader was also the domestic staffer (cleaner/chef’s assistant). She has a PhD but there isn’t much science over winter so she takes up the domestic role.

Their budget is $16 million a year of which most goes on operating costs such as $900,000 on flying within Antarctica, $680,000 on fuel, $435,000 on data/comms link and $202,000 on food.

New Zealand Antarctic Research Institute

NZARI is a charitable trust that partners with research agencies to support science in Antarctica, the Southern Ocean and the Sub-Antarctic.

Funding for NZARI is sought from organisations concerned with global scale connections to Antarctica and consequences of its changing environment.

There are multiple sources of funding for science projects in Antarctica – Marsden Fund, NIWA, universities, overseas Governments. None of them have a dedicated focus though on Antarctica, which is where NZARI comes in. Their aim is to:

• Bring new money into the Antarctic Research sector
• Help to grow the linked up research effort so that research teams can address more challenging scientific questions
• Work in partnership with research organisations to facilitate the development of core scientific questions

Their Director is Gary Wilson who is the sort of head (in an informal sense) of the Antarctica scientific community. He’s been to Antarctica 25 times and a further 12 times to the Sub-antarctic.

They have an international science panel with members from the US, Australia, UK, South Korea, and Norway.

Their budget is $1.5 million a year plus they get support in kind of $1 million a year from Antarctica NZ. Major funders include the Aotearoa Foundation (set up by Julian Robertson) and Air New Zealand.

Antarctic Heritage Trust

The Antarctic Heritage Trust is also a registered charity. The trustees include the Ambassadors or High Commissioners from the US, Ireland and the UK.

They do an amazing job preserving and restoring five historic huts in Antarctica. These huts are not just reminders of the great age of exploration but they are also the first human habitations on the continent. And the only remaining first habitations on any of the continent. Until they were built there was nothing here.

The five huts they preserve and restore are:

• Carsten Borchgrevink’s Hut, Cape Adare (the first building on Antarctica)
• Robert Falcon Scott’s Hut, Hut Point
• Ernest Shackleton’s Hut, Cape Royds
• Robert Falcon Scott’s Hut, Cape Evans
• Hillary’s Hut, Scott Base

They get funding from the NZ Government, but also from four museums, the Norwegian Government, Christchurch Airport and the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust.

Their budget is around $3 million a year.

The care and skill that goes into preserving the old artifacts is amazing. Professionals have restored thousands and thousands of artifacts with huge skill.

Stuff reports:

Tourist beggars who claim their camper van was robbed have been asked by police to move on.

A man and woman who say they are American tourists have been begging outside Ballantynes on Colombo St in Christchurch for more than a month. 

Since December, the pair have sat with a piece of cardboard sign held down by two water bottles. The sign reads: “American tourists everything stolen from campervan”.

Sergeant Greg Hume said he had approached the couple numerous times and told them to move on. 

They had not reported any theft to police, he said.

“I have asked them to ensure the matter is reported to police by making an official complaint and they haven’t done it.”

The tourists told Hume they had been staying with friends since they lost their accommodation in a camper van.

“For whatever reason it, [the camper van] was left on the side of the road and then it got trashed apparently and their items stolen.” 

People on the street have sympathised with their story but nearby businesses remain unconvinced.

Chantelle Padget said the couple bought multiple items from the convenience store where she worked. 

“They don’t even come in here and buy cheap stuff, they will come in and buy cigarettes . . . that’s why I don’t believe them.”

Padget thought the tourists were getting at least $100 a day.

It seems pretty clear they are fraudsters.

I wonder if they are breaking any laws though? Is it illegal to make a false claim so people donate money to you

Yesterday we got a tour around Hillary’s Hut. Due to asbestos it is closed for general use, but you can be guided through it.

The hut is being preserved and restored by the NZ Antarctic Heritage Trust. They give the background:

In December 1956 HMNZS Endeavour left New Zealand for Antarctica to support both the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE) 1955–1958 and the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957–1958 with a major programme of science.

Fresh from conquering Mount Everest in 1953, Edmund Hillary was enlisted to lead the New Zealand party that would lay supply depots from the Ross Sea towards the South Pole for the first trans-Antarctic crossing. Led by the then Dr Vivian Fuchs, the expedition planned to cross the continent from the Weddell Sea.

Pram Point, on the edge of the McMurdo ice shelf and four kilometres from the United States’ McMurdo Station, was chosen as the site for Scott Base. In January 1957 the team completed the buildings (six interconnecting units and three detached science buildings) that would form the antecedents of the modern-day Scott Base. A party of 23 men wintered over at the newly formed base.

This team basically founded Scott Base. Hillary of course also got fame for making it to the South Pole on a tractor. His job was to lay out depots for the British explorers. But after he had done that, and as he was only 80 miles from the South Pole, he decided to head on down there and beat them to it 🙂

I love the address.

The main room in the hut.

A very old beater.

d

And even older phone.

I like how they say “Today’s Guess” instead of “Today’s Forecast”. The weather here can be quite variable.

This is the emergency exit in case of fire.

And with the exit open. Would not be great fun crawling out through that!

NZ History has more details of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

Hillary was the first person since 1912 to reach the South Pole overland.

First the misleading headline:

‘Free’ education system set to have cost parents more than $1 billion this year

You read that and you would think this means that parents have paid $1 billion this year towards their kid’s schooling.

The price of a free school education will soar to record heights this year.

Official figures show “voluntary donations” from parents and others will this year have collectively provided more than $1 billion to bankroll schools since 2000.

So it is not an annual figure but a figure over 15 years.

Commentators have described that as a watershed figure with some arguing New Zealand’s “free education” system is broken.

It is a meaningless figure, not a watershed one.

If you add stuff up cumulatively you will always get a big figure.

If you started in say 1996, then in 2012 you would also find $1 billion of fees and could call that a watershed figure.

Unless there is a particular reason to start in 2000, the $1 billion figure is meaningless and just an invention to get a headline.

Even worse nowhere in the article do they state how much the annual amount of donations currently is.

Scott Base is the home of the New Zealand presence in Antarctica. It is where everyone starts and ends their activities in Antarctica. It is where you get equipped to go into the field, and is home to the base staff who support the scientists.

However it is not where most NZers in Antarctica spend their time. Most science projects are not done from Scott Base. They are done throughout the continent. In fact the scientists get grumpy when they end up at Scott Base for too long, as their purpose in being here is not to live at Scott Base, but to do their work in the field.

So while Scott Base is a critical part of what New Zealand does in Antarctica, it is not an end in itself – more a means to an end.

But without Scott Base, none of the science could be supported.

The atmosphere is very dry here so you need to drink constantly. Almost everyone walks around with their drink bottle and you are recommended to drink four litres a day of water. The bottle even helpfully tells you how to stay hydrated with sarcastic instructions about how you open the lid, pour water in, close the lid, drink the water and repeat four times 🙂

This is the kitchen and mess. Meal times are easy to remember – 6 am, 12 pm and 6 pm. The food here is great, and done by a very small team.

This is my favourite place – the lounge. You see right out over the ice sheet from here and a beautifully serene place to just take in the views, chat or read.

The biggest risk to Scott Base is fire. Most staff are trained firefighters – they spend a week being trained before they get deployed.

Because of the dry atmosphere there is a lot of static electricity. They have these metal plates everywhere so you can ground yourself. If you touch a phone or computer or camera before grounding, you may break it.

This has been my temporary office.

They have a small room for movie watching and a pretty good DVD collection. I’ve not seen it used much in summer (rather go outside) but I imagine in winter gets a lot of use.

Having a quiet drink in the bar. It’s a good area to socialise and unwind. As Antarctica is not part of any country, the drinks are quite inexpensive due to the lack of tax. However no one I’ve seen has had more than a few social drinks. You get up way too early in the morning for that. Plus there is a huge emphasis on health and safety. Over indulgence would not go down well with others.

A small gym.

And you can go mountain biking. There are also running trails and a small ski area. Important to keep fit down here.

A good sense of humour as seen by various office notices.

And also by this sign.

This sign is not a joke. Some staff and scientists work night shifts, and sleep during the day. Being noisy inside the sleeping areas is a cardinal sin. They are for sleeping, not talking, and you even get taught to gently close the doors, rather than let them make noise shutting automatically.

A major part of Scott Base is the Hillary Field Centre which is halfway through a major renovation. I’ll cover that in a separate post.

A guest post by Matthew Jansen, Secretary of Care Alliance:

Yesterday Kiwiblog posted a link to, and extensive quotes from, The Age story about an elderly Australian couple who last year committed suicide simultaneously.

The story was an affirmation of the decisions made by the couple, and their daughters’ respect for it. (Actually, two of the three daughters. The third daughter’s voice was not present. Hmmm.)

There were a number of details in the story that made me pause. Take this one:

About four years ago, Pat and Peter’s resolve to stay away from hospitals was heightened. While hanging washing in the backyard of their beloved home, Pat, then 83, tripped and broke a bone in her thigh. She was carted off to the emergency department.

“Carted off”. Really?

To me, that small detail reveals the Shaw’s determination to make the facts fit their theory.  Paternalistic medicos are the problem, they had decided, therefore the paramedics treated her without appropriate dignity. They ‘carted her off’.

The story reveals that the Shaws were long-time supporters of Philip Nitschke’s Exit International. They therefore approached growing older with a particular set of expectations and plans. It’s called confirmation bias.

The story makes clear that the Shaws were not terminally ill.  Mr Shaw was concerned that he could not follow the arguments in the Quarterly Essay as he once had. Anny, one of the daughters, thought that her parents “were tired. Even a bit bored, she thought.”

And these are meant to be the reasons for approving state-sanctioned and state-provided assisted suicide? Seriously?

The Shaw’s story is entirely consistent with the experience of assisted suicide in Oregon: wealthy, well-educated people who have had all the advantages of a good life, convince themselves that they could not, or simply do not want to, bear anything less than what they have had. So they want a law that suits their circumstances, and to hell with the consequences for other people who have been less fortunate.

Or as Mr Shaw is quoted as saying “I am not afraid of dying but I am afraid of pain and incompetence.” 

The international experience in Oregon, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland is absolutely clear: the vast majority of assisted suicide cases are not for physical pain, but for social and psychological reasons. They are about fear: the fear of becoming less than we have been, less than we want to be, and of being abandoned.

This is the heart of this debate: people who say “I’d rather be dead than live like that” are implicitly (and in Matthew Parris’s case explicitly) saying that it is right and appropriate and legitimate to believe that some people – the “incompetent”, the disabled, the ill, the elderly, the different – are simply better off dead.

I think that’s wrong. I think the better response to such fears is to address them directly, and to support the person and their whānau to live their life fully. It’s more difficult, it’s certainly more expensive, but it is better.

There was one concluding irony at the end of both The Age and Stuff websites: they published contact details for suicide prevention services.

Why?

If suicide is okay, and assisted suicide is even better, who would decide who deserves suicide prevention services?

It is a very very very bad idea to cook inside your tent, which means you are cooking outside on the snow.

In case you are rather stupid, the reason you do not cook inside your tent is two-fold. The first is you may burn it down with yourself inside it. The second is carbon monoxide poisoning.

So you need to construct a field kitchen. You use saws to cut out blocks, and then shovel them out.

There’s three things you are doing. First you cut out one row of blocks to create rows to sit on. Then you cut out two rows of blocks next to that, so you can put your feet down there. and you create a wall with the blocks to help shelter from the wind.

It was snowing the entire time we were out there building the kitchen, and cooking.

And the kitchen is complete.

Out comes the cookers and food.

And dehydrated meals have never tasted so good!

As I said, it snowed a lot.

This is the infamous P bottle.

And the toilet is a bucket with two plastic bags inside it and a very cold lid.

This is getting ready to boil water the next morning. The mat is to soak up any fuel, and you remove before cooking.

And then the fun part of demolishing the field kitchen. I took the direct approach of running into the walls several times!

We then headed back to Scott Base around midday Monday.