Latest news with #Heggie
ABC News
30-04-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
NT Administrator appears to back Labor ahead of federal election despite 'non-partisan' role
The Northern Territory Administrator appears to have expressed support for the Australian Labor Party ahead of Saturday's federal election, despite holding a "non-partisan" and "publicly neutral" role as a Crown representative. Professor Hugh Heggie PSM — the NT's equivalent to a state governor — appears to have submitted his political views to the ABC's Your Say election call-out. The entry, with a listed personal email address confirmed to belong to Professor Heggie said: "ALP [Australian Labor Party] has a strong and responsible approach to its social policies and activities as well as the environment, energy, remote First Nations peoples, employment, defence and its global responsibilities." When contacted for comment, a spokesperson for Professor Heggie did not deny he had written the entry but said the Administrator "does not publicly express political preferences or engage in political activities". "The Administrator is a non-partisan role and publicly neutral," they said. "As a non-partisan role, it would not be appropriate for the Administrator to disclose a preference in the outcome of this weekend's federal election." The NT's Government House website also states "His Honour performs a similar constitutional role to that of a state governor and does not participate in the political process". Hugh Heggie has been the NT Administrator since February 2023. ( Supplied: Pema Pakhrin/NT News ) The spokesperson added that the Administrator was "subject to the same voter eligibility requirements as any other Australian". Professor Heggie was appointed the NT's 23rd Administrator in February 2023 by the previous Territory Labor government. Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro, who led the Country Liberal Party (CLP) to power at last year's NT election, was approached for comment. A CLP spokesperson responded to say "this is a matter entirely for the Administrator to comment on". Labor MP Luke Gosling, who's vying to retain the Top End seat of Solomon at Saturday's election, has also been contacted for comment. The Administrator's spokesperson declined to make further comment.
New York Times
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: ‘Moby-Dick,' the Opera, Cuts the Blubber
The opening line of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick' is one of the most famous in literature. But Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, whose moody, monochromatic 2010 adaptation arrived at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, conspicuously avoid placing those classic three words at the start. It's an early declaration of independence, the kind that artists have always had to make when turning a well-known novel — especially one as sprawling and shaggy as Melville's — into singing. Heggie, who also composed the well-traveled opera 'Dead Man Walking' (2000), and Scheer, an experienced librettist, have narrowed one of the canon's most overflowing works to its core plot. For readers who enjoyed 'Moby-Dick' but yawned through the rambling digressions about whaling, do I have an opera for you. The compressed adaptation is direct and clear, at least. Some contemporary operas, of which the Met has offered a burst over the last few seasons, lean heavily on confusing devices: complicated flashbacks; characters shadowed by doubles; singers playing metaphorical qualities like Destiny and Loneliness; split-screen-style scenes crossing place and time. 'Moby-Dick' wants none of that. It stretches across a year or so, but in a linear way. It never leaves the ship Pequod and its salty surroundings. Its characters are flesh-and-blood people. Yet the opera only rarely takes on flesh-and-blood urgency. While the story is streamlined and straightforward — a ship's crew struggles with the demanding whims of a vindictive captain — Heggie and Scheer also want to capture Melville's brooding grandeur, philosophical profundity and portentous language. So the prevailing mood is a dark, ponderous blue — a lot of stern, turgidly paced musings directed straight at the audience. The goal seems to have been to create a piece that's lucid and vibrant, but also dreamlike and meditative. A piece, in other words, much along the lines of 'Billy Budd,' Benjamin Britten's opera based on another seafaring Melville tragedy in which a ship becomes a petri dish for archetypal struggles. This is where the ambitions of Heggie's 'Moby-Dick' adaptation run up against his limitations as a composer. 'Billy Budd' fascinates because of the haunting complexities of Britten's music, but the meditations in this 'Moby-Dick' end up feeling dully one-note, as shallow as a tide pool. Even the circumscribed world of the opera includes a storm, a mast lit up by St. Elmo's fire, intimations of the South Seas, night and day, stillness and dance, vast expanses of sky — yet the music fails to meet the demand for these textures and colors. Heggie doesn't have many ideas beyond squarely undulating minor-key references to Philip Glass, John Adams and Britten himself. Every composer's work has influences, but these quotations are startlingly unadorned, even if played with spirit by the Met's orchestra under the conductor Karen Kamensek. Lovers of traditional operatic forms will find much to admire here, as Heggie and Scheer have embraced the kind of ensembles — duets, trios, quartets — that allow this art form to present multiple perspectives at once. But the variety in the text is not matched by variety in the score, and the conflicts that should energize the story don't always feel vital. The real tension is — or should be — between Captain Ahab, whose obsessive pursuit of the whale Moby Dick has drowned his humanity, and Starbuck, the sensible first mate who tries to steer the whole operation clear of disaster. But the opera gets distracted by a side plot about finding brotherhood amid racial and religious difference: Greenhorn — the name the opera gives the novel's narrator — first fears and then befriends Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner. It's not until nearly an hour and a half into the three-hour opera that it really holds your attention for the first time. In a ruminative aria, Starbuck mulls whether to murder the sleeping Ahab to save himself and his shipmates. In the end, he can't bring himself to do it, and he slinks out as Ahab softly moans and the curtain falls. The sequence is riveting — but we've waited until the end of the first act for it. For the other highlight, we have to wait again, until late in the opera, when Ahab finally lets down his guard with Starbuck and confronts the cost of his single-minded mania. It is the calm before the final, doomed hunt, and Heggie endows it with real tenderness. Ahab, though, primarily expresses himself through drearily similar monologues, grounded in Melvillean diction and given a similarly antiquated musical feel through robustly shaking Handel-style coloratura. The tenor Brandon Jovanovich, stalking the stage with a belted-on peg leg, conveys a sense of Ahab's weariness more than of his intensity. The cast is entirely male, with the exception of the soprano who plays the young cabin boy Pip; Janai Brugger captures the boy's otherworldly purity. The baritone Thomas Glass was a solid Starbuck and acted with remarkable confidence, given that he was announced as a replacement for an ill Peter Mattei just a few hours before the opening on Monday — a performance that began with the orchestra playing the Ukrainian national anthem, the Met's latest gesture of solidarity with that country. While the tenor Stephen Costello was a plangent Greenhorn, the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green sounded underpowered as Queequeg, with little to do except intone native prayers. The sweet-toned tenor William Burden was piquant among the smaller roles. Leonard Foglia's handsome production, with sets by Robert Brill, costumes by Jane Greenwood and lighting by Gavan Swift, is dominated by masts and rigging. The deck cleverly curves up into a backdrop that cast members can climb up and tumble down, seeming — with the help of Elaine J. McCarthy's projections — to be lost at sea as their boats are broken in the whale hunts. It is a clear staging of a clear piece. But that piece lacks the ingenuity and depth to hold its own with its source material, let alone break free. And it turns out that Heggie and Scheer's opening salvo of independence was just a coy deferral until the opera's closing moment. As Greenhorn, the Pequod's only survivor, is rescued by a passing ship, the captain asks his name. Costello answers, singing low and mournful: 'Call me Ishmael.'
BBC News
29-01-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Essex Police PCSO cuts left staff in 'disbelief'
Police officers have been left in "complete disbelief" at plans to make all 99 of its police community support officers (PCSOs) redundant, a representative Police revealed on Tuesday it also wanted to cut 65 staff roles amid a £5.3m budget Heggie, chairwoman of the force's federation, said watching staff being told their jobs were at risk was "one of the hardest things I've witnessed in my career".It followed Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner Roger Hirst telling BBC Essex redundancies were "the least worst option". "Our reaction across the board is a complete disbelief at what's potentially going to happen and the impact that's going to have," Ms Heggie said."If we lose our PCSOs we cannot continue to provide the service we are at the moment, there's no doubt about it."There is disbelief, sympathy for our colleagues and there's anger." PCSOs are paid employees but do not have powers of arrest unless accompanied by a proposed redundancies are subject to Heggie added: "You can't underestimate the value they bring, they are an instrumental part of community policing. They are our eyes and ears."Essex Police employs about 3,755 officers and said salaries accounted for 81% of its yearly who was elected on a Conservative ticket, told BBC Essex he would consider taking a pay cut during the catalogue of cost-saving measures."The frustration is we have been in a position for the last few years to reduce crime across Essex," he said."It almost feels like we're being penalised here in Essex for being so successful." Hirst said the impact of losing "brilliant" PCSOs and staff was going to be "tangible".He added: "We've shown Essex Police has the tactics, the ability, the capability to reduce crime across the county, we just need to have the right resources."In a statement on Tuesday, Essex Police said "inadequate" funding from the government was to blame for its challenging financial a Home Office spokesman said an extra 13,000 neighbourhood police officers, community support officers and special constables were being funded as part of a "visible policing drive". 'Political game playing' Reacting to the announcement, Conservative MP for Braintree and former Home Secretary James Cleverly said Labour had got its "maths badly wrong".He said Essex Police had been "squeezing and squeezing and squeezing" financially, adding: "But now they've gone as far as they can go because of Labour's financial mismanagement."However, Labour MP for Thurrock Jen Craft accused Cleverly of "political game playing"."We've had 14 years of chronic underfunding on all of our public services, not just police," she said."This year we've had a funding increase for police forces, including Essex." Follow Essex news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
