Hypocrisy, cant and fashionably woke opinion masquerading as news

■ The Master Huffer and Puffer is back in business. When Winston Peters spent 11 minutes blustering his way through an interview with Corin Dann on Morning Report this morning, it was if he’d never been away. It was déjà vu, and not in a good way.

One point in particular struck me. Peters got indignant, as only he can, when Dann asked whether NZ First might be prepared to provide confidence and supply from the cross benches in the event of a hung parliament.

“You’re asking me the outcome before the people have spoken,” the Great Populist righteously declaimed. “You have to know [first] what the voters have decided on, and the voters are masters of this matter, not politicians.”

Oh, really? When, I wonder, did Peters come around to the novel view that the voters’ will is paramount?

Could this be the same Winston Peters who decided in 2017 that NZ First would endorse a party that won 37 percent of the party vote over one supported by 44 percent of the voters?

The voters didn’t decide the outcome of the election on that occasion. Peters did, and now he seeks to rewrite history by pretending the voter is supreme. Only Peters would expect to get away with such bare-faced hypocrisy.

We may never know whether he anointed Jacinda Ardern as prime minister in 2017 because she offered him a more generous deal than Bill English did, or whether he was motivated by pure spite toward National, with whom he had a rancorous history. Quite likely it was a bit of both.

What we do know is that Peters disregarded the voters’ preference when he went with Labour, to the astonishment and delight of Ardern and Grant Robertson.

Ardern subsequently became something of a political phenomenon, leading the country through the Christchurch mosque massacres, the Whakaari-White Island eruption and the Covid pandemic with such assurance that voters rewarded her by giving Labour an unprecedented majority in 2020. We know how well that turned out.

NZ First was unceremoniously wiped out in that same election, but the damage had been done. Had Peters not ignored the voters’ clearly expressed preference in 2017, we would have been spared the most harmful government in living memory.

To put it another way, Peters, by going with Labour, is ultimately responsible for everything that has happened in the past three disastrous, chaotic years. Voters have notoriously short memories, so need to be constantly reminded of that.

He now has the effrontery to present himself as Mr Fixit. But putting Peters back in government, in any capacity, would be like calling back the same builder whose dodgy workmanship caused your house to collapse the last time you employed him.

■ Also on Morning Report, Maori Party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer was extolling the virtue of unity. She claims to want her fellow politicians to focus on a future where we can live in harmony rather than focus on what we don’t have in common (her words).

It’s an appealing sentiment, but it rings resoundingly hollow coming from one of the most divisive figures in Parliament and the co-leader of the only New Zealand political party that, by definition, sets itself apart on the basis of racial identity. Far from cultivating a spirit of accord, Te Pati Maori proudly celebrates its otherness. That seems an odd basis on which to present yourself as a champion of unity.

Ngarewa-Packer railed against the politics of fear and division and twice described the positions taken by her political rivals as “revolting” – not a word calculated to promote the warm, positive vibes she supposedly aspires to.

She didn’t name them but clearly she was referring to National, ACT and presumably NZ First as well. It’s worth pointing out that all those parties have Maori candidates as well as Pakeha, and in the case of National and ACT, representatives of other minorities as well. ACT, which I suspect is the party Ngarewa-Packer most reviles, has three MPs of Maori descent, including leader David Seymour.

By way of contrast, the defining feature of the Maori Party is that all its candidates are (and presumably are required to be) Maori. But can you really exclude 84 percent of the population and present yourself as a unifying force? I suspect that when Ngarewa-Packer affirms the value of unity, she means unity on her terms. If there was an award for cant of the day, she would be runner-up to Peters.

■ You know there’s no real news around when you turn on RNZ at 8am on a Saturday and the lead item is about an Auckland University sociologist no one has ever heard of urging the New Zealand government to protest against the discharge of waste water from the Fukushima nuclear reactor.

Of course there was real news around; it’s just that whoever edited the bulletin decided the opinion of an obscure leftist academic – one who spoke with a North American accent – was the most urgent and compelling story of the morning.

I later googled the academic, one Karly Burch, and found an earlier RNZ news item which quoted her as saying the nuclear waste discharge needed to be viewed “in the context of nuclear imperialism and nuclear colonialism”.

In other words this was a purely political opinion: a fashionably woke one, but no more relevant, coming from a sociologist, than that of a bank teller or a barber. No newspaper – not even a leftist one like The Post – would lead its front page with such a flimsy story.  But this is RNZ, and normal editorial criteria don’t always apply.

The next item wasn’t much better. It quoted Buddy Mikaere, a former member of the Waitangi Tribunal, who was concerned about supposed misinformation in a booklet about co-governance. More than any other news outlet, RNZ loves stories about people’s opinions, just as long as they’re the right sort (Family First not so much). The item included a voice report in which the journalist presented a loaded, politicised interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi as if it were a settled fact.

My impression is that most RNZ reporters do a conscientious job, but as an institution it leans sharply to the left, like all public broadcasters, and ideology inevitably seeps into its news bulletins. This is more likely to happen when there’s a skeleton staff on (I’m told RNZ newsrooms are scarily empty at weekends) and editorial checks and balances are probably not applied as rigorously as they might be during the week.

As a publicly funded news outlet, RNZ has a unique obligation to ensure fairness, accuracy and balance. This becomes even more important at a time when public trust in the media is dangerously frayed.

It’s also worth noting that RNZ recently went through an expensive, high-profile inquiry that resulted in an embarrassing mea culpa for illicit editorial tampering by a rogue journalist who has since been dismissed. Has the organisation learned nothing, or do different standards apply when the influence exerted by biased journalists is deemed to be ideologically acceptable?