On objectivity, balance and honesty in journalism

Several weeks ago I listened to a discussion on America’s National Public Radio network about objectivity in journalism. The three participants included Adam Reilly, the politics reporter for the Boston TV station GBH, and Callum Borchers, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

The third guest on the panel, Juliette Kayyem, was not a journalist, but a politically well-connected former Democratic Party candidate for governor of Massachusetts and occasional columnist for the Boston Globe.

The discussion about objectivity took place in the immediate aftermath of the tragic July 4 floods in Texas and the question raised by Kayyem was whether media coverage had paid enough attention to the role of climate change.

This evolved into a more general discussion about objectivity and balance. Climate change has brought these issues to the fore in journalism, as has the polarising presidency of Donald Trump.

Kayyem said she wanted to believe in journalistic objectivity but confessed, with commendable honesty, that she didn’t understand the difference between objectivity and balance.

Borchers replied that the two shouldn’t be conflated and then proceeded to give his own off-the-cuff definition of journalistic objectivity. This went something like “discovering the truth as fully as you can and to the best of your ability without worrying if your story happens to piss someone off”.

That’s okay as far as it goes, but it’s a bit loose and fuzzy for my liking and too open to subjective interpretation. It leaves a lot of wiggle room for journalists who see themselves as being on an ideological or political mission, as many do. It doesn’t say anything, for example, about being open to competing views.

By comparison, balance is relatively straightforward. It’s the notion that journalism should fairly report conflicting sides of an issue. Many journalists and teachers of journalism sneeringly dismiss this as “both sides-ism”. They would prefer to decide for themselves which arguments are valid and ignore the rest.

TVNZ’s highest-profile journalist, John Campbell, is one of those who eschew the requirement of balance, and once ridiculed the idea by asking rhetorically whether the SS guards at Auschwitz should have been allowed to put their side of the story. But you can support almost any argument by choosing the most extreme hypotheticals. (In any case, it would have been revealing to learn how the Auschwitz guards justified their monstrous conduct. Journalists should be open to information from any source that throws new light on an issue.)

The positive thing about the Boston radio discussion is that here were four media commentators (the moderator, a loudmouth named Jim Braude, also weighed in) talking seriously, if only briefly, about the principle of journalistic objectivity. This should be applauded, given that the very idea of objectivity has been attacked as fantasy in recent decades by influential journalists and academics.

It’s also encouraging that objectivity is suddenly being cited in New Zealand as a journalistic value worth aspiring to. In a recent episode of The Detail, RNZ’s head of podcasts, Tim Watkin, stressed the importance of showing that journalists could take themselves out of the story. Watkin acknowledged the pressures that tempt the media to push the boundaries between facts and opinion, but he clearly viewed the discipline of objectivity as something that could help rebuild trust in the media.

Given that RNZ is struggling with a steadily shrinking radio audience and diminishing public trust in the media overall (two trends that are almost certainly interconnected), I thought it significant that Watkin should highlight those points.

What particularly struck me about the Boston discussion was that these intelligent, highly educated Americans (you can be sure they all have impressive degrees) were wrestling over a definition of something that generations of New Zealand journalists, virtually none of them educated beyond secondary school level, grasped almost intuitively.

This was that you tried to approach every story with an open mind, kept your opinions or feelings out of it, presented the known facts in a neutral fashion, followed the story where it led and didn’t allow any relevant information or individuals to be excluded simply because they didn’t align with any preconceptions.

Broadly speaking, that’s my idea of objectivity, and it’s not rocket science. Thousands of New Zealand journalists absorbed it almost by osmosis.

There were always some exceptions to the rule. “Name” writers were given some licence to state their personal opinions, usually under their byline. But in the news columns of newspapers, objectivity and balance were basic tenets of journalism. Unfortunately the current generation has been encouraged to ignore them.

It’s true, as Callum Borchers said, that balance and objectivity are not the same thing, but they overlap. A story that lacks balance is unlikely to be a truly objective one, even by Borchers’ flexible yardstick, because if it omits relevant facts or opinions, it can’t be the “full” truth (insofar as the “full truth” can ever be definitively established).

And while we’re on the subject of balance, let’s get some misconceptions out of the way. Kayyem raised the old canard that if someone says two and two equals five, then the balance rule insists they be given equal space with those who say two and two equals four.

This argument is often used to ridicule the idea that climate change sceptics should be given equal space with those who insist that climate science is “settled”. But at best the argument is sophistry and at worst, it’s dishonest.

It’s an unarguable, objective truth, able to be grasped by a five-year-old, that two and two equals four, but there’s nothing immutable about the theory of anthropogenic climate change, which a significant minority of scientists contests.

The global warming theory may be supported by the great majority of climate scientists, but the sceptics (or denialists, as the mainstream media prefer to call them) are right to argue that science is never “settled”. In fact science depends on the questioning of accepted wisdom and the possibility that we don’t yet know everything. There’s no point at which scientists can sit back and declare, “That’s it, then – we have nothing more to learn”. The advance of knowledge depends on the contestability of ideas and theories.

In any case, “balance” in journalism has never required that equal space be given to competing arguments. That’s another canard that I saw advanced earlier this year in a piece by Tim Hunter of NBR. “The idea that journalism should provide equal weight to all aspects of a debate would involve abandoning a key function of journalism, which is to sift the wheat from the chaff,” Hunter wrote. But he was attacking a straw man.

The argument is not that dissenting views must be given equal space. The important thing is to acknowledge that there are competing arguments, and thus show that whatever proposition or idea is being advanced (for instance, anthropogenic climate change) isn’t unanimously accepted.

But even this is too much of a challenge for the totalitarian ideological mindset that now governs much mainstream journalism. Hence you get major news organisations proudly declaring, as if it’s a point of honour, that they will give no coverage to climate change sceptics. This was an extraordinary and inexcusable turnaround for an industry that was largely founded on, and depends on, the principle of free speech.

And as it is for climate change, so it has been for other issues such as Covid vaccination, trans-gender rights and the Treaty of Waitangi. The mainstream media simply ignored any views that didn’t conform to their own. Or if they acknowledged them at all, it was only so they could be derided.

Even worse, media organisations signed up to a narrow and rigid interpretation of Treaty rights – one that allowed no room for dissent – as a condition of their eligibility for generous taxpayer-funded handouts under the former Labour government. Small wonder that trust in the media has plummeted. I don’t think editors and owners realised the damage they were doing to their credibility.

Now here’s another defining principle of objectivity in journalism: it means being prepared to write stories that express opinions or explore ideas that the journalist may not agree with.

Generations of New Zealand reporters accepted that rule without question. I worked with countless left-wing journalists who unhesitatingly reported statements that personally were anathema to them. But this would come as a radical and novel concept to many of the journalists currently helping to set the news agenda.

Some reporters (Marc Daalder of Newsroom is one, though there are plenty of others) can always be relied on to write stories that either promote ideas and opinions they support or disparage ones they don’t like. I get the impression people like Daalder would sooner have a limb amputated than devote space to an idea they find ideologically unacceptable – that is, unless they’re attacking it.

All of which brings us back to Tim Hunter of NBR. His sneering piece on LinkedIn, scornfully headlined How to be a journalist, was written in response to two blog posts by the lawyer Philip Crump, who was associated with the Canadian investor Jim Grenon’s bid for control of the board of NZME, publisher of the New Zealand Herald and owner of the NewstalkZB network.

Grenon’s raid on NZME was characterised in the media as an attempted right-wing takeover and Crump was seen as a co-conspirator. That alone made him a media target, but Crump went further by publishing posts in which he criticised media left-wing bias and suggested some rules that might help restore public trust in journalism.

Some of Crump’s suggestions were unexceptionable (be accurate with facts, present them objectively, don’t follow a pre-determined narrative, don’t assume you know “the truth”, don’t sacrifice balance for advocacy, allow readers to make up their own minds, avoid loaded language). I spent well over half a century in newspaper and magazine journalism, including substantial spells as an editor and news editor on daily papers, and his points struck me as eminently reasonable. But Crump’s piece provoked Hunter into a sneering, condescending and highly defensive response.

Crump’s sin, I believe, was that he had the impertinence, as an outsider, to suggest ways that journalists could do their job better and thus start rebuilding the public trust they have squandered. What made it worse was that he was perceived as tainted by association with conservatives who were protesting against a pervasive left-wing influence in the media. 

Red rag, meet bull (and never mind the validity of Crump’s arguments).

I can’t help wondering too whether some in the media resented Crump for showing them up by writing a series of explosive pieces analysing details of Labour’s Three Waters plan that the mainstream media preferred not to investigate and also exposing rampant nepotism and conflicts of interest involving a Labour cabinet minister. Crump’s assiduously researched articles, published in 2022 under the pseudonym Thomas Cranmer, were something of a masterclass in investigative journalism but were steadfastly ignored by mainstream media, presumably because they reflected badly on a government that most journalists supported and felt protective toward.

Before I go any further, I should disclose that Hunter and I have something of a history – albeit a brief and not very happy one. Hunter was a co-editor of NBR four years ago when I was invited to contribute a regular opinion column to the paper. The column was stillborn because Hunter disagreed with a couple of things I said in my inaugural piece and wanted two paragraphs deleted. I refused and withdrew from my contract.

Leaving aside the irony that I was invited to write a column because NBR presumably thought I had something of value to say but then tried to stop me saying it, my experience didn’t exactly imbue me with respect for Hunter. It follows that I don’t regard him as a paragon of journalistic values, although that’s how he presented himself in his attack on Crump.

Consider this: if Hunter didn’t want me as a columnist to express an opinion he didn’t agree with, how likely would it be that he would give space in the paper to any views he disapproved of? How committed could he be to the idea of editorial balance? For me, his credibility was shot to pieces.

I should make it clear that I don’t dispute the ultimate right of an editor to decide what goes in the paper, but the public is entitled to judge a publication on its openness to dissenting views and its commitment to fairness and balance. In my opinion, Hunter failed that test. I was in charge of opinion columns at Wellington’s Evening Post for more than 10 years, dealing with provocative writers as diverse as Bob Jones, Alan Duff, Marilyn Waring and Mary Varnham, and no one was ever censored because we didn’t like what they said.

That aside, Hunter’s response to Crump was a farrago of specious half-truths, red herrings and examples carefully cherry-picked to support his arguments.

For instance, Crump had urged caution when it came to the use of anonymous sources and said journalists often cited selectively chosen experts while sidelining dissenting expertise. I think that has unarguably been true in recent years, especially on issues such as climate change, the Treaty, vaccinations and mis/disinformation, not to mention anything to do with the so-called culture wars. But Hunter misconstrued this (wilfully?) as an argument against any use of anonymous sources, then tediously but predictably held up the example of the Watergate disclosures – 53 years ago – as evidence that non-disclosure of sources is sometimes vital.

This is a form of false equivalence. I didn’t interpret Crump’s piece as arguing against the use of anonymous whistleblowers, where reporters sometimes have compelling reasons to respect their sources’ privacy. I think he was referring more generally to the insidious use of supposed experts, who are not always named, to shape journalistic narratives. Mostly they are from academia and invariably they lean sharply to the left.

In any case, the argument is not so much about the use of “experts”, since they’re entitled to their opinions. It’s more about the suppression of legitimate voices because they don’t pass ideological tests.

Hunter then lays the blame for declining trust in the media not on anything the New Zealand media have done (or failed to do), but on Donald Trump’s fulminations about “fake news”. A convenient excuse; let yourself off the hook by blaming the US president.

Even less convincingly, he goes on to cite the appalling practices of the British tabloid press, implying they’ve given all the media – including our own – a bad name. (I bet Hunter, who is Scottish, was itching to blame Rupert Murdoch, whom British journalists hate. But he heroically resisted the temptation.) Later, when trying to deflect Crump’s criticism of sensationalism in the New Zealand media, he harks back to the British Sun and Daily Mirror of the 1980s and argues that sensationalist “clickbait” is nothing new.

I have a suggestion for him: try to keep to examples that are relevant to the here and now. Don’t muddy the waters with tired, self-serving references to Trump, Watergate and British tabloids. This is New Zealand in 2025 that we’re talking about.

In his desperation to discredit Crump’s arguments, Hunter even goes back to an issue of the Evening Post in 1885 in an attempt to prove that a certain style of journalism, in which the reporter eschews the traditional “who, what, when, where and why” approach to a story, is not new. But a specific instance from nearly one and a half centuries ago doesn’t negate the legitimacy of Crump’s general observation that the abandonment of the old, "straight" approach to story writing opens the way to more personalised and subjective takes on the news.

Ultimately, this debate is really about honesty: not just honesty in discussing the issues facing journalism, but far more importantly, honesty in the way journalists report contentious issues. A key reason people have lost faith in the media is that they suspect they are not getting the full story, and unfortunately their suspicion is too often justified.  

I thought Hunter’s vitriolic piece said far more about him that it did about Crump, and it was disappointing that those eagerly cheering him on from the sidelines on LinkedIn included a couple of senior figures from the journalistic establishment.  It would be a grave mistake to assume Hunter was speaking for all journalists, least of all those of us who recall a time when journalism enjoyed far greater trust and respect than it does now.

 

 

Echoes of Citizens for Rowling

Who remembers the Citizens for Rowling campaign? It was a concerted attempt by the Great and the Good to derail National Party leader Robert Muldoon’s election campaign in 1975.

The campaign’s backers didn’t like Muldoon’s combative, divisive brand of politics and argued that Labour’s gentlemanly Bill Rowling, who had assumed the prime ministership after Norman Kirk’s death in 1974, offered a far more desirable style of leadership.

Citizens for Rowling generated enormous publicity, circulating a nationwide petition and taking out ads in all the major papers, but the campaign was an ignominious failure. National won the election in a landslide, securing 55 seats to Labour’s 32.

For Muldoon, Citizens for Rowling was political gold. It played to his strength as a political counter-puncher and a man of the people, enabling him to portray Rowling’s backers as elitist and condescending.

So who were Citizens for Rowling? The driving force behind the campaign was the Canadian-born former TV current affairs interviewer David Exel, who enlisted the support of a bevy of high-profile names – among them, Everest conqueror Sir Ed Hillary, Anglican bishop Paul Reeves (later to become governor-general under a Labour government), academic and peace campaigner John Hinchcliff, civil libertarian and educationist Walter Scott, lawyer John Jeffries, businessman Sir Jack Harris and future Labour prime minister Geoffrey Palmer.

It’s that last name that particularly resonates 50 years later. Palmer, who was then an idealistic young law professor at Victoria University, is the only survivor of the leading Citizens for Rowling signatories. And sadly, he appears to have learned little or nothing during the intervening decades.

I’m forced to that conclusion because according to the NZ Herald today, Palmer is the leading signatory to an open letter opposing ACT’s Regulatory Standards Bill.

If you closed your eyes and concentrated hard, you shouldn’t have too much trouble guessing the names of at least some of the others. In fact they are almost comically predictable.

There’s Dame Anne Salmond, Professor Emeritus Jane Kelsey, Professor Emeritus Jonathan Boston (they do love their titles in academia), climate change bore Jim Salinger, old-school socialist Geoff Bertram, former CTU economist Bill Rosenberg and geeky law academic and activist Max Harris. The usual suspects, in other words - a select roll-call of the Left-leaning brahmin academic caste. 

The parallels with Citizens for Rowling are unmistakable and their efforts are likely to be just as ineffectual, because New Zealand society, for all that it has changed, still has a deep egalitarian streak that is stubbornly resistant to guidance from self-appointed elites.

To put it simply, many New Zealanders resent being told what to think. That was the lesson of 1975 and I don’t think much has changed.

There is more than just a faint whiff of patronising intellectual superiority in the posturing of Palmer and his fellow signatories. In their lofty eyries, they appear to labour under the naïve delusion that their open letter may help turn the tide against David Seymour’s Bill.

I don’t think it will – not because their objections don’t have any substance, necessarily, but because the people most likely to be influenced by the letter are those who belong to that steadily shrinking portion of the population that still habitually reads the Listener and listens to RNZ, both of which can be relied on to reinforce their world view. Such people are programmed to suspect the worst of Seymour anyway and will earnestly nod their heads in agreement with Palmer’s open letter.

Of course the signatories are simply exercising rights available to everyone in a liberal democracy. But they are doing so in the obvious belief that their names, and hence their opinions, carry a lot more weight than those of the average citizen. In other words they are pontificating from a position of entrenched privilege, though I’m sure they don’t see it that way. (It’s worth noting here that this type of elitist posturing invariably emanates from the Left – a curious fact, given that the Left has always presumed to speak for the disadvantaged.)

To return to Citizens for Rowling: I disliked Muldoon intensely, but the campaign against him got my back up nonetheless. Citizens for Rowling gave the clear impression they didn’t trust their fellow New Zealanders to figure things out for themselves; that we needed guidance from mountaineering heroes, lawyers and high-ranking clerics.

I voted for Labour in the subsequent election, but I greatly resented this elite group’s attempt to use their public status to influence the outcome, and the election result suggested that lots of other New Zealanders probably did too. I predict this latest ill-conceived initiative will misfire for much the same reason.

Harlan County USA: still compelling after nearly 50 years

Last night I watched, for the second time, a documentary film called Harlan County USA. Made in 1973-74 but not released until 1976, it deservedly won an Academy Award for best documentary.

Harlan County USA is a cinematic record of the Brookside coal miners’ strike in south-eastern Kentucky, historically one of the most deprived and poverty-stricken corners of America.

The film, which is available on YouTube and runs for 103 minutes, is remarkable for a number of reasons. The first is that it was made by a small independent crew from New York led by producer-director Barbara Kopple. That an absolute outsider – a big-city, university-educated Northerner – was able to win the confidence of the miners in this isolated, insular, oppressed Appalachian community, and be granted access to the intimate detail of their lives, was extraordinary in itself.

More striking still is that the film has no narration, only a few brief excerpts from interviews, and a loose, almost anarchic structure. A couple of explanatory captions at the start lay the groundwork and set you on your way, but after that you’re on your own. Viewers have to construct their own narrative from what they see unfolding on screen and from the dialogue of the participants.

This isn’t always easy, because the southern accents are not easy to understand and people constantly talk across each other, just as in real life. This is classic cinema verite – capturing things as they are, with no filmmaker interference beyond the camera’s presence. 

Having said that, the film maker leaves no doubt as to whose side she’s on. The camera is always on the miners’ side of the picket line, giving a striker’s-eye view of the strike-breakers (gun thugs, the strikers call them) and their uniformed enablers from the police and sheriff’s office.

What gradually emerges is a compelling and sympathetic picture of an impoverished but proud community that refuses to bow down to far more powerful forces.

Harlan County USA reinforces some of the darkest stereotypes about the American South. A brooding air of menace hangs over the thickly wooded valley where the action unfolds. It’s not hard to imagine that a decade earlier, the sinister-looking convoys of pickup trucks and battered Detroit V8 sedans that force their way through the picket lines might have carried Ku Klux Klan vigilantes hunting for civil rights activists. (The participants in the Brookside strike, incidentally, are almost all white.)

This being America, we meet some scarily repugnant figures who could have stepped straight from the pages of a novel. One is the leader of the local strike-breakers, who wears an expression of pure unadulterated hate and fingers a semi-concealed pistol as if nothing would give him greater pleasure than to use it.

Then there’s the almost charismatically grotesque Tony Boyle, president of the United Mine Workers of America. In a sub-plot to the main narrative, Boyle is challenged for his job by a union faction that thinks he’s too friendly with the mine companies. His main rival is subsequently found shot dead in his home, along with his wife and daughter. Boyle is convicted of conspiracy to murder and spends the rest of his life in prison, where he died in 1985. (Kopple originally set out to make a documentary about the attempt to unseat Boyle but got sidetracked when she stumbled across the Brookside strike.)

Some things are implied in the film rather than overt. The director resists any temptation to sensationalise, dramatise or even spell out what’s happening on screen, leaving it to the viewer to figure out what’s going on. And sometimes things occur with such shocking suddenness – as when we learn a young miner has been fatally shot – that you ask yourself: did that really just happen? (The footage of his funeral, where his mother collapses from grief, is a hard watch.)

Two other features of Harlan County USA are worth mentioning. One is the musical soundtrack, which draws heavily on the “high, lonesome” bluegrass sound characteristic of that part of Appalachia. The songs of Hazel Dickens, in particular, grew out of the privations and injustices of life in a company-run mining town. Titles such as Black Lung and Cold Blooded Murder speak for themselves. The union anthem Which Side Are You On? is here too and has particular resonance because it was written during a miners’ strike in Harlan County 40 years earlier.

Even more noteworthy is that some of the most formidable and articulate characters on the miners’ side are their wives. When some of the men show signs of wavering (the strike went on for more than a year), it’s the women who stand firm.

In the end, the violent death of the young miner helps bring the union and the mine owners together. A contract is signed and the men go back to work. But there’s no sense of elation and as the postscript updates run over the closing credits, you’re left wondering how much, if anything, has really changed.

 

 

Bob Jones, Sitiveni Rabuka and me

The Newsroom website this morning has a long, affectionate tribute to Bob Jones, written by Tom Scott. One great character writing about another. It’s very entertaining. How could it not be?

It also served as a reminder of an era when Wellington was a far livelier and more stimulating place than it is now – a city full of rumbustious, larger-than-life individualists who lived life at 100 miles an hour and didn't bother with seat belts, metaphorically speaking.

I can’t claim to have known Jones well, but our orbits overlapped from time to time. I only once went to his big house on the hills overlooking the Hutt Valley, but I drank with him in his office on several occasions and lunched with him a couple of times. All a long time ago, I should add, and always at his invitation.

I also recall quite a few phone conversations. It was always him ringing me, never the other way around, and it was usually at a time when I had more important things to get on with, like getting a paper out. Jones loved to talk.

I remember reading years ago about a court case he was involved in. He was often caught up in litigation of one sort or another and I think this one involved a property purchase that had turned sour in a big way.

At one point Jones was in the witness box being questioned by counsel for the other side. He was challenged for supposedly not knowing about some detail that was in contention and replied to the effect that he was far too busy to be on top of every little thing relating to his property investments.

I remember thinking, “Yeah, right”. During the period under consideration by the court, he was often on the phone to me, at some length and never about anything important. In other words he gave the impression of having plenty of time on his hands. I suspect the truth was that the finicky minutiae of business bored him. Media and political gossip was far more interesting.

Jones had a love-hate relationship with journalists. He was endlessly, acerbically critical of them, but enjoyed their company – or at least those he respected, or saw as being potentially useful to know. I think he phoned them when he was bored or felt like an argument.

“Useful to know” ... I think that was central to Jones’ personality. He liked to cultivate people he perceived as being influential. These included politicians (especially politicians), sporting names, columnists and editors. They appeared to fall in and out of favour at Jones’ whim, and in line with their perceived importance at any given time.

Political compatibility wasn’t a requirement. He was as close to some left-wing politicians as he was to those on the right. He befriended leftie journalists too, such as the Stuff columnist Virginia Fallon, who wrote a generous tribute to him after his death. He would phone her and bait her, she recalled, but she couldn’t help liking him, despite Jones embodying many of the things she raged against.

Jones was also a name-dropper. He liked to remind you of all the important people he was in touch with. I found it odd that someone so famous seemed to find it necessary to do this, but he was not the only prominent person I’ve known with this quirk.

He could sometimes be seriously unpleasant to deal with – a bully, not to put too fine a point on it. Someone close to Jones once explained to me that his famous displays of irascibility were attributable to Addison’s disease, a hormone disorder for which he took medication. His staff recognised the warning signs and would keep their distance when his mood changed.

The flip side was that when he turned on the charm, he was affable, amusing and hard not to like. He was also extremely generous toward worthy causes and not the least bit interested in grandstanding about it or earning public applause.

I saw Jones’ less appealing side when he contributed columns to two papers I was involved with (first the Dominion, later the Evening Post). Jones was a columnist for various papers at different times and it always ended badly. Either Jones would spit the dummy or editors would decide that publishing his column wasn’t worth the hassle of constantly arguing with him.

He regarded his words as sacrosanct; so impeccably crafted that no ignorant and impertinent sub-editor had any right to touch them. Even a minor change to bring his punctuation into line with the paper’s house style – the sort of intervention all other columnists accepted without a murmur – would cause him to erupt with rage.

The truth is, he wasn’t quite the writer he thought he was. At his best he was witty, perceptive, outrageously provocative and totally original in the way he saw things. He was a contrarian through and through, but his syntax – the way he constructed his sentences – was highly idiosyncratic and often clumsily tortuous.

He also bristled at any restraints placed on him for legal reasons. Several times he offered to indemnify the paper against any legal action that might result from his columns. If he was prepared to pick up the costs of court proceedings and pay any resulting damages, he reasoned, what possible problem could there be? He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see that giving him a free hand would hopelessly compromise the editor’s autonomy and independence.

His offer of indemnity illustrated what I believe was a crucial point about Jones. He could afford to take risks that other people could never contemplate. His wealth made him bullet-proof.

As it happened, he was the cause of the only big defamation case in my journalism career that directly involved me as a named party. In essence it arose from a column Jones wrote for the Dominion claiming that Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, the leader of the coup that deposed the legitimate Fijian government in 1987, had repeatedly failed his School Certificate examinations while at Wellington College.

It was classic Bob Jones mischief – mischief was one of the defining qualities of his public life – but it obviously stung Rabuka. He sued for defamation (as I recall, the amount claimed was $1 million) and as editor of the Dom at the time, I was named as second respondent.

The proceedings dragged on for years and descended into pure farce. The case turned on whether the Fijian High Court had jurisdiction, which in turn hinged on whether the offending edition of the paper was available in Fiji. When it turned out that the only copy they could find was in the library at the New Zealand High Commission in Suva, Rabuka’s lawyers sent someone to sit in the library all day and see whether anyone looked at it. Four people did – so if Rabuka was defamed at all, it was only to those four visitors to the High Commission library. With its languid tropical setting, it was the stuff of comic novels.

I think the case eventually fizzled out for lack of interest. Certainly no one ever clapped a hand on my shoulder, and Jones' disparaging reference to Rabuka's scholastic record appears to have done no lasting harm. When I last checked, he was Major-General the Honourable Sitiveni Rabuka, CF, OBE, MSD, prime minister of Fiji.

Colonisation and the burden of guilt

A friend recently lent me a New Zealand book published in 2021 and called The Forgotten Coast, by Richard Shaw. The title is odd because it tells you nothing about the book’s contents. The same is true of the cover photo, which shows the author as a boy (at least we must assume it’s the author) holding up a wriggling eel that he appears to have just caught. Its relevance isn’t clear.

The book is unusual in other ways too. On one hand it’s the painstakingly researched biography of a brilliant young Catholic priest, a great-uncle of the author, who died tragically young from TB; on the other, it’s a breast-beating mea culpa over the injustices suffered by Taranaki Maori in the 19th century. Unable to make up its mind, it weaves uneasily between the two narratives.

Nonetheless I found The Forgotten Coast interesting because I have a few things in common with the author. Shaw, a professor of politics at Massey University, has deep family roots in Taranaki. His forebears were Irish Catholics and his great grandfather was part of the Armed Constabulary that took part in what is now called the invasion of Parihaka.

Shaw’s family settled on land confiscated from Maori and became prosperous farmers. These things trouble him, and his book involves a lot of anguished self-flagellation. He takes what some Australian scholars would call a “black armband” view of our history, meaning he sees aspects of it as deeply, ineradicably shameful. This obviously weighs on him personally.

Unlike Shaw I’ve never lived in Taranaki, but my maternal family roots are there and I could relate to his family history. My mother’s family were devout Irish Catholics too. Mum grew up in Hawera – my grandfather wrote a history of the town in 1904 – and my family tree on her side is Taranaki to the core. My grandparents and great-grandparents are buried in the Hawera cemetery (and a lovely cemetery it is, to be sure). I visited their graves only a few weeks ago.

I have other points of identification with the author. He recalls that as a pupil at Francis Douglas Memorial College in New Plymouth, he took part in a long-established Catholic secondary schools’ speech and debating contest called the O’Shea Shield. So did I, although a decade earlier, in 1967. (My school, St Patrick’s College, Silverstream, won the shield that year, but no thanks to me. My team lost its debate against an opposition lineup from Sacred Heart Whanganui that included my cousin Damian de Lacy and a confident verbal skirmisher named Ruth Richardson.)

More to the point, however, my great grandfather, like Shaw’s, was part of the colonial forces that he depicts as ruthless enforcers of Maori subjugation. John Flynn, my mother’s grandfather (pictured above in later life), wasn’t at Parihaka, but he was a combatant in the Battle of Te Ngutu o te Manu (the beak of the bird), north of Hawera, in 1868. That was the battle in which the celebrated Prussian adventurer Gustavus Von Tempsky was killed and his men were ignominiously routed by the brilliant guerrilla chief Titokowaru. Twenty soldiers lay dead or dying when the smoke cleared. John Flynn, who served with the Taranaki Rifle Volunteers, was lucky to escape alive; he was shot in the thigh and carried to safety by his comrades during an arduous seven-hour retreat through the dense bush.

My other maternal great-grandfather, Charles Quin, later commanded the Normanby Volunteer Rifles in the small Taranaki town of that name, although hostilities had subsided by then and he never fired a shot other than in target practice. So I’m waist-deep in connections with the colonial oppressors whom Shaw condemns. And it gets worse, because my forebears, again like Shaw’s, took up land made available by the government; land presumably taken from Maori, although I’m not sure whether, in Charles Quin’s case, it was acquired fairly or confiscated. I do know that he ended up with substantial holdings near Normanby and Eltham.

There’s little doubt that a great injustice was done in the way land was taken. As Shaw explains, the law was arranged to facilitate easy acquisition of Maori land by white settlers and to restrict what Maori themselves could do with it. Even worse, Maori were sometimes forced to sell land to repay debts imposed by the Crown.

Deplorable? Certainly, and Shaw doesn’t hold back. His assiduously researched, eloquently crafted and sometimes painfully introspective book generally supports the orthodox left-wing academic line that colonialism was a brutal assertion of white supremacy.

I can sympathise up to a point. Every time I drive anywhere in New Zealand I’m aware that this wondrously rich, beautiful and bountiful country was once all Maori. It’s not hard to understand their resentment that they now control only a small portion of it (albeit a steadily expanding one).

I can also share Shaw’s distaste at the way a colonial template has been super-imposed on our history as if Maori didn’t exist. This is evident in all sorts of small ways. Driving through Patea, for example, I can’t help but notice that all the streets have staunchly English names – Norfolk, Cambridge, Dorset, Victoria, Manchester – despite roughly half the population identifying as Maori. 

More problematical, however, is the author’s struggle to come to terms with his family’s role in the colonisation process. He writes at one point that he doesn’t bear personal responsibility for what happened in the past, which is obviously true, yet the entire book is shot through with guilt and shame.

Here he and I, for all that we may have in common (Taranaki, Irish Catholicism, ancestors who took up arms against Maori) part company.

I am neither proud nor ashamed of my forebears in the Taranaki Volunteers and the Normanby Rifles. They acted according to the prevailing attitudes and values of their time. To judge them according to 21st century standards is to engage in what is known as presentism: a tendency to interpret past actions and ideas according to our rather smug feelings of moral superiority. Shaw’s ancestors were creatures of their time, just as he is.

In any case, New Zealand history is complex and highly nuanced. The relationship between Maori and Pakeha was rarely straightforward. This was borne out by a recent Newsroom book review in which the historian Ron Crosby pointed out that more Maori fought on the side of the British Crown than against it – something you won’t read in histories that present the conflict as a straightforward one between Maori and the colonial invader, with no inconvenient caveats. In later life even Titokowaru became an advocate of peace between the races.

My own family history offers evidence of the ambivalence in Maori-Pakeha relations. Although John Flynn fought against Titokowaru’s Hauhau warriors, he spoke te reo and was on friendly terms with most Taranaki Maori – a fact attested to by his ability to travel unaccosted through the bush between New Plymouth and Hawera at a time when most Pakeha hesitated to venture beyond the safety of their towns.

Shaw himself refers to a tension between Pakeha who sincerely wanted to do the right thing by Maori and others (such as Native Affairs Minister John Bryce, who ordered the invasion of Parihaka) who had fewer scruples. He reminds us that New Zealand’s first Chief Justice, Sir William Martin, not only opposed confiscation of Maori land but pointed to Ireland as an example of how a “brooding sense of wrong” could leave a malign, long-lasting legacy. (That so many Irish, themselves victims of oppression and dispossession in their country of origin, should themselves become dispossessors of Maori is an irony not lost on the author.)

There are some things I can agree with Shaw on. One is that we need to know more about the totality of our history, not just the bits that shore up our comforting national mythology. He’s right when he says we pay more attention to Gallipoli and El Alamein than to the battles fought on our own soil.

That’s changing, as books such as the recently published Toitu Te Whenua, Lauren Keenan’s journey through the battlefields of the New Zealand Wars, demonstrate. But it’s a painfully slow process. The British, Americans and Australians celebrate their warts-and-all histories far less timorously than we do. How many people, for example, have spent their lives in Lower Hutt without knowing that eight British soldiers were killed in 1868 in a skirmish at Boulcott’s Farm, now the site of a local golf club?

It follows that we shouldn’t forget the past. We should face it squarely and try to remedy historical injustices wherever practicable (as governments have tried to do over the past several decades). But not forgetting is one thing; bearing a personal burden of guilt seems to me to be quite another.

Featherston Booktown: The book festival where books are optional

                           

My attention was captured yesterday by a Facebook post promoting next month's Featherston Booktown Festival. It advertised a panel discussion entitled “Fixing the Bear Pit: How to Make Parliament a More Humane and Positive Place”.

How this was relevant to a book festival wasn’t clear, especially since the advertised discussion doesn’t appear to be connected with any book. But what particularly struck me was the accompanying photo of brawling parliamentarians (above), which was clearly taken in a foreign country. I guessed somewhere like Serbia, though someone who knows how to trace these things subsequently identified it as being from Ukraine.

Alongside the photo, the description “Bear Pit” seemed apt. The problem with this is that in my lifetime there has never been a scene in the New Zealand parliament that remotely resembles the one depicted. The only punch I can recall being thrown was the one Trevor Mallard aimed at Tau Henare in 2009, and that was outside the debating chamber.

I suppose the use of a picture from an overseas image library misrepresenting an event in Ukraine as having occurred in New Zealand could be passed off, at a stretch, as a legitimate exercise of creative licence (Peter Biggs, the chair of Featherston Booktown, comes from an advertising background, so may well see it that way), or perhaps as a bit of harmless frivolity. But I think it comes perilously close to dishonesty in advertising, because it sets up the false premise that the New Zealand parliament is a place of mayhem when in fact it’s relatively civilised.

Off the top of my head I can think of only three recent instances when parliamentary order was seriously challenged, none of which involved violence. One was the Maori Party MPs’ haka that disrupted proceedings last November and is now the subject of a hearing by the privileges committee. (As an aside, party co-leader Rawiri Waititi contemptuously dismissed parliament’s “silly little privileges committee” and “silly little rules”. But I wonder what his reaction would be if a group of National or ACT MPs wilfully breached protocols on a visit to a marae. I think we know the answer to that question – not that the situation is likely to arise, since Pakeha guests on a marae invariably treat their hosts’ customs and rules with great respect.)

The other examples were Green MP Julie Anne Genter’s in-your-face monstering of National MP Matt Doocey and National MP Tim de Molen’s intimidating behaviour toward Labour’s Shanan Halbert. In both cases the offenders apologised and were censured.

Otherwise parliamentary scraps are merely verbal and generally settled by the errant MP apologising or being temporarily banished from the House. Yet here’s a book festival deceitfully using an image from another country to generate a sense of moral panic over supposed bad behaviour by our elected representatives – and curiously, involving a subject about which there is no book.

Now consider the makeup of the discussion panel. We’re expected to assume that the four participants, all being former MPs, will have a special insight into what goes on in parliament. But two of those former MPs are very former. Rick Barker’s bum hasn’t touched the green leather since 2011 and Marilyn Waring left Parliament in 1984, which makes her positively prehistoric. The other two, Kiri Allan and Ron Mark, have a stronger claim to relevance: Mark was an MP as recently as 2020 and Allan retired from politics in controversial circumstances in 2023.

Of course Waring and Barker are entitled to their opinions on the conduct of parliamentary affairs, but probably no more than the rest of us, given how many years have passed since they sat in the House. Couldn’t Featherston Booktown find anyone with more recent experience of the so-called Bear Pit, if indeed that’s what it is?

We’re also entitled to question whether the panel will present anything approaching an objective view. Allan and Waring both seem to have been wounded by their political careers and left embittered. That may make for (melo)dramatic war stories, but does it make them good judges of what happens in the House? I predict that both women will present themselves as victims.

Then there’s the question of political balance. Two of the four panellists were Labour MPs, and although Waring sat on the National side during her time in parliament (and won deserved admiration for her courageous defiance of her bullying leader, Robert Muldoon), she has since re-positioned herself firmly on the feminist, anti-establishment left.

Mark will try to bring some balance but it’s not hard to foresee which way the discussion will swing. Parliament will be portrayed as a male-dominated club that reinforces the power of the white patriarchy. Don’t expect the antics of Genter (a female bully) or the Maori Party to be mentioned.

I should stress here that I think Parliament is a flawed institution that in many ways invites ridicule for its childish antics and anachronistic rituals. I don’t see how anyone who watches it live on TV, as I sometimes do, could come to any other conclusion. But we’re not likely to have a fair and balanced discussion if it’s skewed by the experiences of people who bear grudges. I wonder, did the organisers approach anyone from National or ACT, or would that have risked steering the debate in an unwanted direction?

The Parliament-as-Bear-Pit event tells us something important about the nature of book festivals generally. They are essentially ideological exercises, intended to reinforce the prejudices of those attending.

Having been to a few such festivals myself, I would suggest the attendees are typically the ageing, genteel, affluent left – the type of people who drive hybrid or electric cars, have their radios permanently tuned to RNZ (to which they listen wholly uncritically), avidly read the Listener, attend film festivals, classical concerts and yoga classes, and vote Labour or Green. They enjoy the trappings of capitalism but fondly think of themselves as socialists. Many of them are prigs, intolerant of dissenting opinions and highly judgmental.

These people wouldn’t thank you for alarming them with ideas or authors they don’t agree with. Book festival organisers know this and programme their events accordingly, which isn’t hard for them because they’re of the same mind. The book world is an ideological monoculture.

The Featherston Booktown programme bears out my theory. Sure, there are non-political sessions. For instance, you can hear the noted axeman John Campbell in conversation with a Norwegian who wrote a book about firewood. It’s hard to see politics intruding there, although you never know with Campbell. There’s also a Q & A with my friend Simon Burt about his acclaimed, politics-free book Route 52: A Big Lump of Country Unknown (a sitter for inclusion in the programme, given that its subject is more or less local).

Nonetheless there's an unmistakeable ideological thread running through the festival, as is often the case. There’s a session on how the justice system can make use of tikanga Maori (again, unrelated to any book), another called The Way of Waiata (ditto) and a discussion entitled Rogernomics: 40 Years On Through the Lens of a Wairarapa Community, in which Marilyn Waring and Rick Barker, neither of whom comes from the aforementioned region, feature again. (No book about that either, which makes you wonder whether the subject was chosen because it’s never a bad time to rake over the coals of Rogernomics yet again for the book festival crowd and declare how wicked it was, book or no book.) There’s also Invasion! The Waikato War, which at least has the merit of a book on the subject (by the leftist historian Vincent O’Malley). Oh, and I almost forgot Colonisation and De-Colonisation: Facing Them Head On (moderated by the multi-talented John Campbell, who can of course be relied on to take a rigorously impartial approach. In this case the flimsy pretext for the panel discussion is a slim book that came out, er, five years ago.)

Not all the sessions will be drearily predictable and a few of the participants have even been intelligently chosen. The adverse effect of Rogernomics on the Wairarapa is something one of the panellists, former long-serving Masterton mayor Bob Francis, knows plenty about, and at least the organisers in this instance roped in former Labour cabinet minister and key Rogernomics proponent Richard Prebble. So there will be some informed, first-hand input rather than just the usual anguished breast-beating about how heartless and immoral the 1980s economic reforms were, conveniently ignoring that the country was teetering on the brink of financial collapse when the Lange government came to power. I predict Prebble will enjoy himself immensely – in fact, will be greatly energised by the sight of all those pursed lips and disapproving faces in the audience.

(As an aside, I smiled when I saw that the Rogernomics session is sponsored by Murray Cole, owner of the Martinborough Hotel. As one of the entrepreneurs who did extremely well out of economic deregulation in the 1980s and the breaking up of state monopolies, Cole should have been shoulder-tapped for the panel. That would bring a different perspective to bear.)

Overall, the Featherston Booktown programme gives the impression of having been carefully curated to avoid offending the sensibilities of the attendees or challenging sacred leftist shibboleths. A friend of mine, a genuine lover of books, accurately calls it a wokefest. None of this should come as any surprise, given that this same festival cravenly cancelled what was intended to be a light-hearted Harry Potter quiz in 2019 because a handful of trans activists insisted on banning anything to do with J K Rowling. (So much for free speech.)

I’m reminded of an annual Sydney event pompously called the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, which has deservedly been mocked because the supposedly risky ideas promulgated never threaten the cosy leftist consensus. Australia’s intellectual left, like our own, still labours under the fanciful delusion that its ideas are subversive, ignoring the fact that since the 1970s the real radical thinkers – the outsiders who challenged orthodoxy and whom the literary establishment wanted to shut down – have tended to be on the political right. Literary events such as Featherston Booktown serve much the same purpose as the Sydney gabfest and could fairly be called festivals of safe ideas.

Should it bother us that a book festival includes several sessions that appear to have nothing to do with books but rather provide a convenient platform for a roster of perennially disaffected activists? After all, if that’s how festival patrons want to spend a weekend, it’s surely their business.

Problem is, it’s not just their money that pays for it. It’s ours too, because Featherston Booktown is subsidised (heavily, I suspect) by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and Creative NZ. We may have a nominally centre-right government, but the steady flow of public funds to the entitled leftist literary and arts mafia continues unabated. Some things never change.

Little stands to capture the 'Anyone but Whanau' vote

The least surprising news of the day is that Andrew Little has confirmed he will run for the Wellington mayoralty. I imagine the announcement will come as relief even to people not normally disposed to look favourably at a Labour Party stalwart. “Anyone but Whanau” is likely to be the catchcry, and I’m sure Nick Mills was right when he said on his NewstalkZB talkback show this morning that Little has to be the hot favourite – though there’s still a gap in the field for a late contender who combines political nous with the charisma that Little lacks.

The former Labour leader doesn’t strike me as a visionary, and nothing he said in an interview with Andrea Vance in The Post today has changed that view. No one should expect him to magically recapture the vibe that made Wellington New Zealand’s most exciting city in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Perhaps the best Wellington could hope for under a Little mayoralty is that he would be a far more competent and grounded manager than the incumbent. That wouldn’t be hard, I hear the cynics chorus; but it might be a modest first step on the city’s road to recovery.

 
Footnote: I haven't lived in Wellington for more than 20 years, so have no skin in this game. But I'm still a frequent visitor and grieve for the city that used to be.

Like

Comment

Copy

Share

Andrew Little signals a tilt at the Wellington mayoralty

So former Labour leader Andrew Little is considering a crack at the Wellington mayoralty. He gives the impression he hasn’t yet made up his mind but my guess is that he deliberately put the word out that he’s a potential candidate just to gauge the public reaction – and my guess, again, is that the feedback will be overwhelmingly positive, because Little would stand out in an uninspiring field and certainly presents a very plausible alternative to the incumbent disaster, Tory Whanau.

I note that Wellington NewstalkZB host Nick Mills, who has himself declared an interest in running, gave Little a glowing endorsement on his talkback show this morning. Mills has a big audience and Little will doubtless be encouraged by his approval. 

If Little goes ahead, and if he wins, he will join a long and growing list of former central government heavyweights who have made the transition to local politics. Auckland’s former mayors include ex-ministers Christine Fletcher (not a heavyweight, exactly, but she did hold ministerial portfolios), John Banks and Phil Goff. Former minister Fran Wilde served one term as Wellington mayor, later became chair of Greater Wellington Regional Council, and this year will contest the mayoralty of South Wairarapa, where she now lives. In Christchurch, Lianne Dalziel won the mayoralty after stepping down as a minister in 2004 and served three terms in the top job.

Nelson has had two mayors who were formerly MPs: Philip Woollaston and the incumbent, former National cabinet minister Nick Smith. Other former MPs turned mayors included John Carter (Far North), Harry Duynhoven (New Plymouth), Jill White (Palmerston North), Sandra Goudie (Thames-Coromandel) and more recently Ron Mark (Carterton). There may be others I’ve missed; this doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive list.

There was occasional traffic in the other direction too. Hamilton mayor Mike Minogue became a National MP (and a constant irritant to party leader Robert Muldoon), as did Mark Blumsky in Wellington. Another former Hamilton mayor, Bruce Beetham, served for six years as the Social Credit MP for Rangitikei, while Georgina Beyer jumped from the mayoralty of Carterton to a seat in Parliament as the MP for Wairarapa. Later came Jono Naylor, ex-mayor of Palmerston North, and Lawrence Yule from Hastings, both of whom served one term as National MPs. Green MP Celia Wade-Brown is another who rode into the House of Representatives on the back of a mayoralty, albeit a wholly undistinguished one.

Cynics hearing the news about Little are likely to nod their heads knowingly and mutter about politicians being addicted to the dopamine hit of politics and being unable to stay away. A mayoralty might have special appeal for such people because it’s seen as conferring individual power and control in a way that a cabinet seat might not. But there’s something to be said for seasoned politicians turning their skills and savvy to local government, especially when a city is in such a stricken plight as Wellington.

This post has been amended with additional information since it was first published. Thanks to my research assistant Mark Unsworth.

Correction: Eamon Sloan, a regular follower of this blog, tells me the Andrew Little story was on the Post's front page. The statement in my original post that the Herald broke the news therefore appears to have been wrong. I apologise for the error and have deleted the reference. I partially absolve myself because I could find no mention of the story on the Post's website. 

My war with the NZTA: Part Deux

Here’s a piece of advice for anyone contemplating a road trip: carefully check the NZTA website beforehand for any road closures.

This never used to be an essential precaution. It is now. And again the question must be asked: what has changed that requires state highways to be so frequently closed, causing huge inconvenience and disruption, when it wasn’t necessary in the past?

The obvious answer is that it’s part of a wider bureaucratic obsession with “safety” – here I pointedly use inverted commas – that has steadily strengthened its grip on the country to the point where it’s a drag on the economy and an impediment to progress.

In the case of the NZTA, this obsession is exacerbated by an apparent culture of disregard for the needs and rights of the public. The long-standing principle that New Zealanders should be free to travel on public roads without let or hindrance, to use a delicious old legal phrase, has been systematically subverted to the point where we accept holdups as an inevitable fact of life.

No one can complain when roads are closed for essential and urgent repairs, as happened north of Napier after the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabrielle, but routine highway maintenance and improvement is surely another thing. Yet the Desert Road – part of the main artery between Auckland and Wellington – was closed for two months during summer, forcing traffic to take a 40-minute detour. Does the NZTA factor the cost and inconvenience of such disruption into its calculations, or does it just go ahead because it can?

My own experience, reinforced yet again by a recent road trip through Taranaki, the Waikato, the Central North Island and Hawke’s Bay, tends to confirm my long-held view that the NZTA views road users in much the same way as Basil Fawlty regarded his hotel guests – as nuisances to be managed with minimal inconvenience to the control freaks in charge.

Delays and disruptions were constant. Intriguingly, there seemed to be no consistency. I think it was on the outskirts of Te Kuiti that I saw at least 200 metres of road cones encroaching on the road where a single truck was working on a roadside power pole. Only an hour or so later, I passed several trucks and a big crew working on a much larger job but with a minimal number of cones and no disruption to traffic. Decisions seem to be left to the discretion of the specific site manager.

Inevitably I also saw sections of road cordoned off with cones where nothing was happening at all, and speed limits imposed for supposed road works that either hadn’t yet started or had been completed. This is routine. The inevitable result is public disregard for speed warning signs, which is the very reverse of safe.

At Tongaporutu, in northern Taranaki, SH3 was reduced to one lane, controlled by traffic lights, for a couple of kilometres when only a short section of roadside barrier was being replaced at one end. A clear case of overkill – but at least the road was still open, which was more than could be said for SH54, which links Feilding with SH1 north of Hunterville, when my wife and I tried to drive over it en route to Taupo in November.

On that occasion roughly 40 km of SH54 was closed to northbound traffic for what turned out to be about two hundred metres of work towards the northern end (we saw this on the return journey). Traffic was diverted back through Fielding and onto SH1 through Bulls, adding – at a rough guess – an hour to the travel time.

What made it worse was that because of poorly conceived signage, we were probably 20km along the road before we realised there was no way through. An electronic sign advising that SH54 was closed was placed in such a way that traffic coming off a side road from Ashhurst, as we did, couldn’t easily see it.

In any case, for the sign to mean anything you had to know you were on SH54, and I’ve driven that route countless times without having a clue what its official designation is.

It takes a particular type of dull, pedantic bureaucratic mind to assume that all road users know the official nomenclature of the highway they’re on. In this case, a sign saying “Highway closed ahead” or “No access to SH1” would have done the job, but no; logic and common sense don’t apply.

That was one of two recent instances in which an entire road was closed in one direction for what we later discovered was a short section of work that didn’t appear to involve major reconstruction. Why there couldn’t have been a simple stop/go arrangement for that section, leaving the road open to traffic in both directions, albeit with short delays, is a question only NZTA could answer.

Incompetence is one obvious explanation, but there’s also the possibility that making things easier for road users just isn’t a priority for the NZTA. I suspect such road closures may be indicative of the NZTA’s corporate ethos and its general attitude toward the public. It points to a culture of, at best, indifference and at worst, arrogance toward road users.

In the more recent instance, traffic between Ashhurst and Bunnythorpe (a part of New Zealand that I’m coming to view as some sort of terrestrial Bermuda Triangle) was sent on a long diversion caused by the laying of pipes beside a section of road (beside, not on) that was probably no more than 200 metres long.

The detour was a relatively minor inconvenience for us – perhaps an extra 10 minutes at most. But if you’re catching a plane or hurrying to an appointment, a 10-minute delay could make the difference between a good day and a bad one.

I should add that this happened when the road was unusually busy with traffic heading to the popular Central Districts Field Days, a factor that the traffic management planners either didn’t take into account or didn’t consider worth worrying about. Incompetence, indifference or a combination of the two? Take your pick.

All this points to the possibility of a deeper cultural flaw within the NZTA: namely, an inability (or perhaps stubborn refusal) on the part of NZTA planners and bureaucrats to place themselves in the position of the typical road user – i.e. the people the agency supposedly serves.

This is also obvious in comically illogical destination signage which unfailingly omits the place names most likely to mean something to the traveller.

I’m digressing here, but I noticed, heading north at a roundabout on SH3 at New Plymouth, that the most prominent directional sign pointed to a place called Northgate. Not to Hamilton, not to Auckland, not even to Te Kuiti, but to Northgate – a location that no one from outside New Plymouth is likely to have heard of or be remotely interested in visiting, and which doesn’t rate a mention in my 2018 NZ Road Atlas.

Even Google isn’t sure where Northgate is, but the geniuses at NZTA who decide what names to put on road signs evidently think it’s the destination of most significance to travellers heading north out of New Plymouth and looking for confirmation that they’re on the right road.

This is a common characteristic of NZTA highway signage, which frequently points to no-account places (Tauriko, Pauatahanui and Ongaonga are other examples) to the exclusion of towns and cities whose names actually mean something.

None of the above should be surprising when you consider that the NZTA is a big, monolithic institution with no competitor to keep it on its toes and no politician with the guts or gumption to pull it into line.

The NZTA appears to be answerable to no one: a law unto itself. Labour MP Kieran McAnulty has admitted as much, revealing in 2023 that when he was a cabinet minister holding the associate transport portfolio he was powerless to influence the NZTA over its insistence on an irrational and deeply unpopular 80 kmh speed limit on SH2 (which is wide, flat and straight) through the Wairarapa. It wasn’t until more than a year after the election of the National-led coalition that sanity finally prevailed and the former 100 kmh limit was reinstated.

If it seems from all the foregoing that I have become mildly obsessed with the NZTA and the traffic management racket, I plead guilty. I should get out more often.

Oh, that’s right, I do get out often. It's just that every time I try to go anywhere, road cones dog me every step of the way.

 

My war with the NZTA: Part One

So let me see if I’ve got this straight: the government’s response to public fury and exasperation at the wasteful, disruptive and mostly useless traffic management racket is to set up a hotline where people can report excessive road cone use? God save us.

I predict this pathetically feeble non-solution, announced this week, will achieve one-fifth of SFA because hardly anyone will bother ringing an 0800 number to dob the traffic management racketeers in.

People will rightly be deeply sceptical about trying to engage by phone with an anonymous and remote bureaucracy, knowing they’re likely to be left hanging on the line for ages before anyone answers – and that their complaint will go nowhere anyway, disappearing into a yawning black hole. People are profoundly distrustful of hotlines, and with good reason.

And perhaps it’s just as well if no one bothers using the service. Given that it’s hard to drive more than 10 km on any state highway without seeing forests of road cones, interminable temporary speed limit signs and traffic management trucks holding up traffic, often for no discernible reason, the line would be clogged 24/7.

More to the point, however, the hotline is a contemptible copout that places the onus on us citizens to deal with the problem of sclerotic, cone-choked roads when the real responsibility lies with the politicians themselves.

They allowed the traffic management monster to run rampant and it’s their responsibility to cut it down to size, starting with a root-and-branch cleanout of the New Zealand Transport Agency from board level down – which would mean defenestrating the chair, former National Party leader Simon Bridges – and the imposition of a new corporate culture that emphasises consideration for road users ahead of do-nothing jobs and profits for the traffic management racketeers.

Prime minister Christopher Luxon and Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden (whose title gives you a rather large clue to where things started going wrong) both admit that excessive traffic management is a plague upon the land.

“You can drive around this country at different times of the day and you’ve got whole roads shut down, no one is doing any work and the cones are frankly just clogging up the joint,” Luxon said at his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday.

Setting aside the fact that no politician should ever feel the need to use that flatulent and empty word “frankly” in an attempt to sound tough, since we’re entitled to assume they’re always expressing their genuine opinion, we should probably at least be grateful that Luxon has finally cottoned on to an issue that’s been driving New Zealand road users mad with frustration for years.

For her part, Van Velden says the issue of a “sea of cones” was brought up at almost every public meeting she attended on a recent road trip. So why has it taken so long for the government to wake up, and why it has responded with such a timid, half-arsed response?

Instead of faffing around with useless hotlines, the government should be asserting its authority by getting tough on the NZTA. After all, the traffic management racket wouldn’t – couldn’t – exist without the NZTA’s endorsement and approval.

What we’ve got here is a cosy, symbiotic relationship between the NZTA, roading contractors and traffic management companies. Over the past 10 years or so the latter have proliferated like … well, like road cones. This unholy three-way alliance is holding the country hostage and playing us all for suckers.

And what’s the government’s solution? A bloody hotline. Good grief.

I don’t mind admitting this has become personal for me. I do a lot of driving. Over the past three years I’ve covered every region and every provincial city in the country with the exception of Invercargill (the closest I got was Gore). And every time I set out on a road trip I brace myself for the delays and disruptions that I know are inevitable. 

We go along with this costly and unnecessary pantomime because we’re passive, compliant people. That was shown during the Covid pandemic, when we meekly fell into line with authoritarian controls that, in retrospect, are now acknowledged as oppressively over the top (and yes, I admit I was one of the fall-into-liners).

Traffic management depends on that same deference to authority. The NZTA and its traffic management bullies wield the power and we have little choice but to do as they instruct. I mean, what are your options when you’re forced to make a wholly unnecessary one-hour detour (as I did not long ago) or crawl at 30kmh through road works that have been in progress for months and even years and where nothing is happening? You can only fume impotently.

Sure, you could abuse the traffic management people standing around in their hi-vis vests (standing or sitting around being quite literally what they do most of the time, usually staring at their smartphones). But what would that achieve? They’re certainly a big part of the problem, but they didn’t cause it. The fault lies with the NZTA bureaucrats, who are safely insulated from public wrath; and beyond them, with the politicians who allowed the grotesque traffic management racket to flourish in the first place and only now are waking up to the great bloated nuisance it has become.

Oh, but I forget; the politicians have taken bold and decisive action: they’ve set up a hot line to report excessive use of road cones. Problem solved, then.

Looking for some facts to substantiate my jaundiced view of the hi-vis highwaymen, I recently asked the NZTA to provide me with figures showing the proportion of the national roading budget devoted to traffic management. I had seen speculative estimates ranging as high as 40 percent, which struck even me as unlikely.

Extraordinarily, it turns out that the NZTA has not historically separated out traffic management costs from its overall expenditure. This in itself suggests slack budgetary management and a remarkable lack of concern about how public funds are spent.

I would have thought that the cost of traffic management was the type of significant information NZTA board members would expect to have at their fingertips. That they apparently didn’t think to routinely request it every year doesn’t inspire confidence in their competence.

The NZTA told me, however, that it had recently undertaken a project – as if the thought had only just occurred to it – that sampled its contracts, and from this it was able to calculate average TTM (temporary traffic management) costs. These indicated that TTM over the past three years accounted for between 9 and 9.5 percent of total spending on road maintenance, operations and capital contracts. 

At first glance, that may not sound outrageous. But when you look at it in dollar terms, a different impression takes shape. 

In the years 2021-24, NZTA spent $786 million on traffic management. $786 million! That was out of total state highway costs of $8.4 billion. In 2023-24, the cost of TTM was put at $317 million (assuming the NZTA got its calculations right).

It goes without saying that $786 million buys a helluva lot of road cones, high-vis vests and expensive trucks and utes and with their ostentatious flashing lights. This may explain why so many of the trucks and utes appear to be new. 

It’s also clear from the NZTA response to my inquiry that there’s no systematic collection of reliable information relating to the cost of traffic management. That’s how I interpret the NZTA’s statement that “We have collected TTM actual and physical works costs from suppliers for a sample of contracts where costs were recorded and accurate, and we have calculated TTM costs percentages accordingly.”

Here’s an obvious question: if the NZTA doesn’t have complete and accurate records showing what TTM is costing, as that statement suggests, how can it know whether it’s getting its money’s worth?

You might think that a switched-on board of directors would want to know whether the money was effectively spent. Has any work been done on costs versus benefits? Does the NZTA have any idea how many lives have been saved or serious injuries avoided by its road-cone control freakery?

If any research has been done, let’s see it. If it hasn’t been done, why not?

Has anyone bothered to weigh the supposed safety benefits of the traffic management racket against the incalculable delay, frustration and inconvenience caused to road users? And I don’t just mean hapless private motorists like me.

Infuriating though it is to have my travel constantly disrupted, the far more serious impact is on commercial traffic. God alone knows the cumulative economic cost of holdups in the supply chain caused by trucks and tankers sitting idle for long periods at temporary red lights, forced to make detours or made to drive at ridiculous speeds through long sections of road works where nothing is happening.

The counter argument, of course, is that roads are part of our essential infrastructure and must be kept in good condition. That requires maintenance work. People understand that and will accept a reasonable amount of inconvenience. But it bears repeating over and over again that the contagion of traffic management New Zealand-style is a new phenomenon.

For decades our highways were built and maintained, often in very challenging places, without the need for heavy-handed traffic management, forests of road cones and lots of bullying trucks with flashing lights. We did it then. What makes it impossible now?

Part Two to come ...

Part