An epic display of dummy-spitting

As a believer in free speech, I would never question John Campbell’s right to unburden himself of a long, whiny lament about where New Zealand is going under the new government.

I do object, however, when it’s published on the website of a taxpayer-owned broadcaster, TVNZ, which has an ethical obligation to observe editorial balance and political neutrality.

If you wanted proof that brazenly activist journalism is not only accepted but encouraged, even by state-owned media, there it is, right there. Clearly, TVNZ is untroubled by the fact that the man it calls its Chief Correspondent adopts an unashamedly political posture and sets himself up as an outspoken adversary of a democratically elected government.  It’s a measure of his ego that he can take such a provocatively defiant stance and expect to get away with it.

And it’s not as if this was the first such column. In an epic display of dummy-spitting, Campbell has grizzled repeatedly about the election outcome – here, here and here. I’m surprised he hasn’t demanded we vote again and keep doing it until we get the right result.

That he doesn’t like the new government is not so much the issue here. That’s his right as a citizen. What’s offensive is that he misuses his position as a high-profile journalist – one who has spent a large part of his career in the state-owned broadcasting system, with all the power and privilege that confers – by petulantly and very publicly railing against a government that his fellow New Zealanders voted for. The Labour Party may be beaten and demoralised, but that’s okay because Campbell has set himself up as the de facto Opposition.

It possibly doesn’t occur to Campbell – nor to TVNZ, obviously – that his political partisanship seriously compromises his journalistic credibility among the many New Zealanders who voted Labour out and welcomed the policy U-turns that he finds so egregious. What chance do New Zealanders have of hearing politically neutral comment from the state-owned TV network’s Chief Correspondent? What chance of a straight, unbiased account of any contentious issue about which Campbell holds strong opinions? The answer, it seems, is zero. That being the case, shouldn’t it matter to TVNZ that viewers who object to Campbell’s posturing are likely to switch off or turn away whenever his face comes on screen?

Nearly three months on from the election, Campbell still appears unable to accept that the country voted emphatically for change. I suspect that like many journalists, six ecstatic years under Labour misled him into thinking that a radical left-wing government was now the natural order of things. He exemplifies the elitist metropolitan commentariat which, for those six years, so dominated media discourse that dissenting opinion was all but smothered. 

Nowhere in his anguished lamentation does Campbell acknowledge that the government he objects to was legitimately elected by ordinary people exercising their one chance in every three years to influence public policy. Perhaps he avoided mentioning this because he’s too polite to come right out and say his fellow New Zealanders are thickos, racists and reactionaries, although the implication is clear enough.

The falsity of his carefully crafted image as a Man of the People has thus been laid bare. He displays nothing but contempt for the government and, by extension, for the people who elected it. He has made a career out of oozing empathy, but his goodwill toward his fellow New Zealanders stops short of accepting their right to vote for a government he doesn’t approve of.

Having said all that, let’s give Campbell his due. He writes very well, albeit a bit too emotively. He is achingly sincere. You can feel his pain. I think he genuinely cares about his fellow New Zealanders. The thing is, so too, no doubt, do Christopher Luxon, David Seymour and – who knows? – perhaps even Winston Peters. That presumably is why they entered politics.

The mistake Campbell makes, as is frequently the case with the sanctimonious Left, is that he thinks he has a monopoly on virtue and compassion.

On a broader note, the government has a problem. It owns two powerful media organisations, TVNZ and RNZ, that are essentially hostile to it and will function as centres of resistance to its policies. Democratically speaking, this is intolerable. The obvious solution is for the government to send a signal by sacking the TVNZ and RNZ boards, but the question then becomes: would it replace them with strong, competent, independent directors, or would it succumb to the temptation to install political toadies? I wish I could be confident of the answer.

To finish on a personal note, I hesitated for a long time before writing this because my wife and I were good friends of John Campbell’s parents. They are (or were, in the case of his late father) lovely people. The two degrees of separation that characterises New Zealand society sometimes makes things awkward, but there it is.

 

What's wrong with NZ journalism: No. 227 in a series

Christopher Luxon suggests New Zealand needs more babies, and a hysterical TVNZ reporter – possibly fresh from binge-watching The Handmaid’s Tale – draws a parallel with Nazi eugenics.

National announces that it will reintroduce prescription fees, and it’s immediately interpreted as an attack on women and linked with Luxon’s personal position on abortion.

A microphone picks up a comment from Luxon about New Zealand being wet, whiny and inward-looking, and it becomes the political furore-du-jour.

A journalist discovers that the National leader arranged for the use of a taxpayer-funded Tesla, which he’s entitled to do, and he’s attacked as a hypocrite because his party opposed government subsidies for buyers of e-cars.

See what’s going on here? They’re all variants of “Gotcha!” journalism, the purpose of which is to make the target look bad, stupid or both. The odd thing is that the person in the media cross-hairs is invariably the National leader, just as it was under the hapless Judith Collins.

It should go without saying that all politicians are fair game. Having put themselves forward for office and persuaded us to vote for them (or at least for their party, since under MMP most politicians are not directly answerable to the electors), they invite our critical scrutiny. Exposing chicanery, inconsistency and double-talk in politics is a legitimate – indeed, essential – journalistic function. No party should be spared.

And it’s not as if Luxon and National are alone in feeling the heat. Labour too has been under pressure for all sorts of reasons: cabinet ministers failing to sort out obvious conflicts of interest or correct misstatements to the House, another abandoning ship, the health and education sectors in turmoil, crime rampant, living costs out of control, the economy in recession, farmers in rebellious mood … .

The media have publicised these issues, as they must if they expect to hold onto their steadily diminishing public respect and trust. Labour is the party in power, after all, and its actions and policies affect everyone. These are real issues that have an impact on the country’s wellbeing, not only now but far into the future.

For that reason, government is where media scrutiny should be most intense. National, by comparison, can only present itself as a government-in-waiting, a role in which its statements have no real bearing on people’s lives, at least for now.

That’s not to say National’s feet shouldn’t be held to the fire if its policies and promises don’t stack up. Yet something seems seriously out of whack in the way political reporters repeatedly attempt to stir up controversy over National Party flubs and gaffes that are essentially inconsequential. Artificially confected issues are taking priority over real ones to the point where you could be excused for wondering whether the media regard it as their duty to divert attention from the government’s failings.

Certainly, I don’t see Chris Hipkins or Grant Robertson being subjected to the same aggressive examination as Luxon, other than by Mike Hosking in his Tuesday morning interviews with the PM. The “Gotcha!” game seems to be played almost exclusively at the expense of right-of-centre politicians.

However I can confirm that it’s having an effect, if not the intended one. It’s made me feel some sympathy for Luxon when previously I regarded him and many of his shadow cabinet ministers with disdain.

Let’s take the above examples one by one.

■ Answering questions about immigration settings at a public meeting in Christchurch, Luxon said: “Immigration's always got to be linked to our economic agenda and our economic agenda says we need people.

“I mean, here's the deal: essentially New Zealand stopped replacing itself in 2016.

“I encourage all of you to go out there, have more babies if you wish, that would be helpful.”

Cue splenetic fury from media who bizarrely saw it as pointing to a scenario in which women are made to stay home and breed. Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian story in which a patriarchal regime forces women to produce children) has a lot to answer for.

Cushla Norman of TVNZ appeared to lapse into a momentary state of delirium when she asked National’s deputy leader Nicola Willis whether Luxon was aware of Lebensborn, Nazi Germany’s policy of creating racially pure Aryans. The only possible excuse for Norman’s question, which was grossly offensive if intended seriously, was that she was briefly unhinged by outrage.

Luxon subsequently tried to pass off his comment as tongue-in-cheek, but he needn’t have. It’s a fact that the birth rate has fallen to below replacement level, meaning that if present trends continue New Zealand may not have enough workers to support an ageing population – a serious problem now afflicting Japan.

Increased immigration is one way around the problem; increasing the birth rate is another. Luxon was entitled to raise it as an issue that we should start thinking about. But the media, fixated as they are with gender politics, immediately saw it as a threat to women’s autonomy – ignoring the fact that Luxon raised it merely as a possibility, and in any case couldn’t make it happen even if he wanted to.

He and Willis then erred by trying to explain the comment away as a joke, which was one step short of apologising. By doing so they risked creating the impression that the outcry over Luxon’s comment, irrational though it was, might have been valid.

Luxon and Willis need to understand that trying to ingratiate themselves with aggressive, sanctimonious journalists gets them nowhere. They would earn more public respect if they learned to stand up for themselves in the face of fatuous media hectoring.

■ The reaction to National’s prescription fees policy was similarly infected by identity politics fever. The promise to reverse Labour’s axing of fees will affect all prescriptions, but was widely framed in the media as an attack on women’s access to contraception.

Newshub headlined its story Election 2023: National to make women pay fee for contraception prescription if elected. The first line of Amelia Wade’s story read “The National Party says it will reintroduce the fee for contraception prescriptions if it wins the election”, thus creating the impression – I suspect deliberately – that National had specifically targeted contraception.

In fact Newshub could just as legitimately have angled its story on the policy’s impact on injured rugby players having to pay for anti-inflammatories or people needing cold and flu remedies, because they’ll be affected too. By presenting the policy as anti-women, Newshub turned the announcement into a scare story about the danger for women of voting National.

Luxon probably didn’t realise it at the time, but he became a marked man when, in 2021, he said he was pro-life and regarded abortion as tantamount to murder. It’s a moral position he was entitled to take, but it meant that every statement he makes about women’s issues is bound to be skewed by reporters who view opposition to abortion as tantamount to misogyny.

■ That brings us to the “wet and whiny” episode, when a 1News microphone caught Luxon making apparently disparaging remarks about New Zealanders.

Fair cop, you might say – except that it was another “Gotcha!” moment which, in the context of the other recent “Gotcha!” moments, looked suspiciously like part of a media gang-up.

Remember, again, that National is not in power. Luxon’s careless off-the-cuff comments don’t have any real consequences. Yet the media seem obsessed with catching him out, just as they were with Judith Collins during her ill-fated and inept spell as National leader.

Even Luxon’s explanation – that he wasn’t talking about New Zealanders so much as the demoralising effects of the Labour government (although he didn’t make that as clear as he might have) – was spun in a way that made it look feeble and unconvincing.

Here’s a suggestion for the National leader: don’t back-pedal and don’t look like you’re constantly apologising and retreating. Own what you say.

Luxon could have turned the “wet and whiny” controversy to his advantage by doubling down and lamenting the country’s low morale under Labour. The media would have lashed themselves into a frenzy, but many voters would have nodded their heads in agreement. At the very least, they might have respected Luxon for being up-front. A bit of bluntness would be refreshing. As it is, he too often seems cowed in the face of media attacks and ends up resorting to bland, hollow corporate-speak.

■ And so to the non-issue of the taxpayer-funded Tesla, which Luxon reportedly asked for – as he was entitled to do as Opposition leader – before changing his mind. NZ Herald deputy political editor Thomas Coughlan, who broke the story, framed it as hypocrisy, given that National had slammed Labour’s policy of subsidising wealthy Tesla buyers through the clean-car discount.

This is what’s known as false equivalence. There is no contradiction between Luxon asking to use a government-provided Tesla while also objecting to taxpayers’ money being spent to help the Remuera and Thorndon elites acquire them on the cheap. After all, the Opposition leader is entitled to a state-funded, “self-drive” (as opposed to chauffeur-driven) car, and it makes no difference whether it’s a Tesla, a Ford or whatever. Taxpayers would pick up the tab regardless. Even Herald political editor Clare Trevett acknowledged on RNZ this morning that the car is a legitimate perk of office.

Coughlan reported, incidentally, that “horrified staff” talked Luxon out of getting a Tesla, indicating that his advisers were intimidated by the possibility of adverse media coverage. There’s part of the problem, right there; I suspect he’s poorly served by excessively risk-averse minders. 

Footnote: “Gotcha!” journalism isn’t confined to national politics. There was another egregious example last week – again in the Herald – when Wellington city councillor Nicola Young was falsely and absurdly accused of racism.

During a council discussion about a proposed Chinese garden on the Wellington waterfront, Young referred to it as the “Uyghurs’ Park”. It was obvious, from the way she immediately corrected herself, that it was tongue-in-cheek, but you had to wade two-thirds of the way through reporter Melissa Nightingale’s overwrought story to see what Young was getting at.

She was alluding to the source of funding for the garden, which is reportedly coming from Wellington’s sister cities in inland China rather than the local Chinese community, as originally proposed. But former Green Party councillor David Lee, who is Chinese, emailed councillors challenging them to “call out” what he called an "offensive soundbite". Somehow Lee managed to interpret Young’s words as showing “total contempt for the Chinese community”. Really?

Predictably, Young’s fellow councillor Tamatha Paul – never slow to stir the identity politics pot – and race relations commissioner Meng Foon joined with gusto in condemning Young, although neither took the trouble to explain just how her comment could be construed as racist. Certainly, many Herald readers would have been left scratching their heads.

I know Young and suspect her main failing, an inexcusable one, is that she’s a conservative on a council still dominated – in terms of noise, if not numbers – by far-Left activists. The attack on her bore all the hallmarks of a political hit job in which the Herald and its reporter obligingly colluded.

In the meantime, Wellington continues to slide ever deeper into a hole. Retailers are abandoning the CBD because crime and antisocial behaviour have become intolerable. Last year, the city recorded the largest fall in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s rankings of the world’s most liveable cities – from fourth to 50th. But the capital’s benighted and betrayed citizens can rest assured that councillors like Paul are tirelessly championing their best interests.

Wellington is dying, and even its woke-friendly daily paper The Post – whose precursor titles celebrated the city as “Absolutely Positively Wellington” and the “coolest little capital” – can't ignore the evidence of its terminal condition.

Why social cohesion should be the key issue in 2023

I’ve thought for some time that social cohesion will be a key election issue – perhaps the key election issue – next year. If it isn’t, it should be.

This belief may simply reflect my own anxieties, but it gained some weight this week when Victoria University politics lecturer Bryce Edwards reported a survey that showed mounting concern among New Zealanders about social division.

Even during the 1981 Springbok tour, generally regarded as a high-water mark of polarisation in New Zealand, the country wasn’t split in the way it is now.

On that occasion there was a clean, sharp fault line over a single issue. After the Springboks went home, things slowly settled down. It even became permissible to enjoy watching rugby again. And of course the battle over apartheid eventually became a distant memory after the transfer of power from whites to blacks in South Africa.

But in 2022, there are multiple social cracks spreading in all directions, and no promise that the fractures will heal.

Where Bryce Edwards and the respondents to the survey he reports may be wrong, I suspect, is in identifying inequalities of wealth and housing as the key factors “tearing the country apart”, in Edwards’ words. I think there’s much more to it than that.

Certainly those glaring economic disparities exist and are growing more obvious. They are in large part a long-term consequence of the country’s economic restructuring during the 1980s.

I was one of the many who broadly supported those changes, some of which were essential and long overdue, but there’s no denying they fundamentally re-arranged New Zealand’s social furniture in ways that I don’t think were foreseen. What we thought of then as an unavoidable but temporary social dislocation ended up becoming structurally embedded.

New Zealand pre-Rogernomics could fairly claim to be an egalitarian society. No one could pretend that’s still true. Extremes of wealth and poverty become more marked with every year.

Almost as disturbingly, a status-conscious, consumerist culture celebrates conspicuous, ostentatious displays of wealth – in everything from clothes to food, cars and houses – in a way that was unthinkable 50 years ago. I find it hard to reconcile this new New Zealand with the country I grew up in.

But economic inequality is only one contributor to the worrying decline in social cohesion that Edwards wrote about this week. At least equally insidious, although far harder to measure, is the pernicious effect of identity politics.

This encourages us to think of ourselves not as a community with shared interests, values and aspirations but as a collection of minority groups with disparate and often conflicting goals.

Identity politics promotes a neo-Marxist view of society as inherently divided between the privileged – for which read white and male – and a plethora of aggrieved groups struggling against oppression and disadvantage. These include women (even though they make up half of Parliament and occupy the country’s three most powerful positions), Maori, immigrant communities, religious minorities, people with disabilities or illnesses (including some that are avoidable, such as obesity) and those asserting non-mainstream sexual identities.  

We are told these perceived disadvantages are the result of structural imbalances of power that can be remedied only by a radical reconstruction of society. It’s effectively a zero-sum game in which power must be transferred from those who are perceived as having it to those who feel excluded. This creates conditions in which society runs the risk of going to war with itself.

Even traditional liberal democratic values that most of us thought were unassailable are under attack. These include freedom of speech, which the proponents of identity politics condemn as a tool of oppression and an instrument of hate against vulnerable minorities, and the principle that no group of citizens should enjoy greater rights than any other.

These trends have been evident for years but have greatly accelerated under the Labour Party government, the more so since Labour was given power to govern alone in 2020. The government itself is a symbol of the ascendancy of identity politics, with a powerful Maori caucus that functions as a virtual government within a government.  

Identity politics originated in the Marxist social science faculties of universities but has penetrated all corners of the community. No sector is immune to its reach.

Its spread has been greatly assisted – albeit accidentally – by events such as the Christchurch mosque atrocities, which activists unashamedly exploited as an opportunity to promote the canard that New Zealand is a haven for hateful white supremacists, and the Covid-19 pandemic. The latter event, although initially conducive to a message of national unity, exposed a yawning divide between those in authority and those whom the political establishment viewed, to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous term, as deplorables.

A striking feature of many of the loudest voices promoting identity politics and rebuking New Zealanders for their supposed failings is that their accents identify them as arrivals from other countries. For saying this I will be labelled as a xenophobe, but I welcome the fact that New Zealand is now home to multiple ethnicities. Multiculturalism has greatly enriched and enlivened our society.

What I resent is the disproportionate influence wielded in New Zealand affairs by vociferous, highly assertive relative newcomers – in academia, the bureaucracy and politics – who see New Zealand as a perfect ideological blank space on which they can leave their imprint. I suspect they can’t believe their luck in stumbling on a country with a population that’s either too passive, too naive or simply too distracted by other things – jobs, mortgages, sport, bringing up kids – to realise their country is being messed with. We have always been suckers for articulate, confident voices from overseas; it’s part of our national inferiority complex.

The news media’s role in all this upheaval should not be underestimated. Social division has been promoted and magnified, deliberately or otherwise, by media outlets that relentlessly focus on issues that highlight perceived differences and supposed inequities.

The mainstream news media formerly served as an important agent of social cohesion by providing a public space in which issues could be civilly explored and debated. They have largely abandoned that role in favour of one where they constantly promote ideological agendas and hector readers, viewers and listeners with their own radical, unmandated vision of what New Zealand should be like.

In the process they have alienated much of their core audience, betrayed their trust and driven them to online channels that serve only to accentuate, and in some cases exploit, the deepening stress fractures in New Zealand society.

The result is that what was previously a unified and, by world standards, generally contented country is now a sour, rancorous babel of competing voices. Distrust, fear, resentment and sullen anger have displaced the broad consensus that sustained New Zealand for decades regardless of which political party was in power. Where all this could lead is impossible to say and frightening to contemplate.

 

 

How the term 'far Right' has been twisted to reflect the media’s world view

When will left-leaning media commentators (please excuse the tautology) accept that the frequently heard term “far Right” is often no longer applicable?

“Far Right” implies an extreme fringe. But election results in several countries, including Brazil, have shown that so-called far-Right candidates command wide electoral support – enough, in many cases, to win elections. Jair Bolsinaro won the presidential race in 2018 and missed out by the narrowest of margins in the latest poll.

If we’re to believe media pundits, the "far Right" have won power in Italy and the supposedly far-Right Sweden Democrats were the big winners in that traditionally liberal country’s elections in September, to the great dismay of the Western political elite.

Meanwhile Republican candidates who are routinely (and I suspect lazily) labelled as far-Right have a very good chance of outpolling the Democrats in the United States mid-term elections. And of course the ultimate urban liberal nightmare, the “far-Right” Donald Trump, is on track to return to the White House in 2024.

Oh, and I read this morning that the far Right could hold the balance of power after the latest elections in Israel.

In the last French presidential elections, "far-Right "candidate Marine Le Pen was beaten but still won 41.5 per cent of the vote. That’s not exactly extremist fringe territory. India, Poland and Hungary all have governments that media commentators regularly describe as far-Right, presumably because in the latter two cases they have the audacity to resist the grand left-wing ideological project known as the EU. But those governments wouldn't have been elected unless voters approved of their policies.

So what’s going on here? How are we supposed to define "far Right" when it’s obviously not as far out as the mainstream media want us to believe?

The truth is that “far-Right” is an entirely arbitrary term, used to disparage any politician or party whose policies the left-leaning commentariat dislikes - or perhaps more precisely, fears.

This was borne out by a BBC radio current affairs programme broadcast just before the Italian elections in which the term was used to describe Giorgia Meloni, now the Italian prime minister, and her Brothers of Italy party.

A brief on-air discussion took place in which the presenter of the show and the journalist covering the elections considered whether “far-Right” was a fair and accurate label. They promptly reassured themselves that it was, specifically citing Meloni’s policies on LGBTQ rights and abortion.  

Problem solved, then; no further discussion needed. It was a striking demonstration, obligingly conducted in public view, of the way a media elite assumes the right to dictate the political narrative by its use of language.

“Far-Right” is often used in conjunction with the equally damning word “populist”. But a populist politician, by definition, is one who appeals to the people. Isn’t that the essence of democracy?

Here, I suspect, is the core of the problem. “Populist” is used as a derogatory term because the progressive elite, deep down, don’t trust democracy and don’t think ordinary people, ignorant proles that they are, can be relied on to make the right choices.

For the same reason, the political elite want to control the public conversation by regulating what we are allowed to say or hear. Uninhibited political debate is dangerous. People might get the wrong ideas – hence the moral panic over disinformation.

Do the journalists and academics who so freely use the misleading term “far Right” realise that the world has moved on from the days when it described fringe nationalist groups with little hope of electoral success? Possibly not.

I think they’re in denial. They don’t want to admit that the so-called far Right has moved to the political centre, and that this is an entirely natural and predictable reaction to stifling woke authoritarianism.

 

 

 

The Mahuta saga: shameful not just for the government, but for the media too

Five months after details began emerging online, the mainstream media were finally forced this week to report conflict of interest allegations swirling around Nanaia Mahuta and her husband.

I don’t think I’ve ever known the New Zealand media to so resolutely ignore an obvious political scandal. It made a striking contrast with their saturation coverage of National’s problems with Sam Uffindell. But ask yourself: which of those two controversies raised more disturbing questions about integrity in politics?

A New Zealand journalist friend of mine who has spent most of his long working life in Australia was astonished that the Mahuta story didn’t provoke an immediate and explosive reaction when it first surfaced. He remarked that even in New South Wales, “where corruption is expected at all levels of government”, the awarding of lucrative contracts and appointments to Mahuta’s husband, Gannin Ormsby, and other members of their whanau would have led to heads rolling.

The aggressive Australian media, despite their leftist leanings, would have been all over the story. But here only one mainstream news outlet, the New Zealand Herald – and more specifically its reporter Kate MacNamara – doggedly pursued the issue and extracted, bit by bit, damning details of what appeared to be flagrant favouritism in the way lucrative work was dished out to Mahuta’s family connections.

Other news organisations mostly maintained a resounding silence. It wasn’t until this week that the steadily mounting pile of allegations finally reached the point where the government was forced to act, though it did so in the gentlest possible manner by announcing a Public Service Commission “review”. By this time Labour was not only enmeshed in allegations of nepotism, but the even more serious C-word was being mentioned: corruption.

Labour had the audacity to spin the review as being motivated by its own virtuous concerns about propriety, but it wasn’t fooling anyone. Any self-respecting government would have cringed with embarrassment and shame from the outset, but Labour presumably feels cocky because it largely enjoys immunity from rigorous media scrutiny. Not only is the prime minister deferentially treated in media stand-ups (even Robert Muldoon got a tougher time in press conferences), but questions and exchanges in the House that reflect badly on the government – including attempts by Opposition MPs to extract information about Ormsby’s government contracts – are routinely ignored by the press gallery.

The announcement of the Public Service Commission review meant that the media could no longer ignore the issue, but even then you had to dig deep on Stuff’s website to find any mention of it. And on Newshub’s 6pm News, the tone of political editor Jenna Lynch’s coverage – in which she referred to the story surfacing in “nasty corners of the internet” – appeared grudging, implying that she had to report it but didn’t think we should give it much credibility.

Inevitably, sceptics will wonder whether news organisations’ reluctance to report the scandal is connected with their acceptance of taxpayers’ money from the Public Interest Journalism Fund. Of course it may not be, but media recipients of funds from the Pravda Project, as I call it, are now stuck with the suspicion that they are ethically compromised and that every story they cover (or more importantly, as in this case, don’t cover) is likely to be treated as potentially tainted by political influence. Perhaps media bosses should have thought of that risk before they signed up to the fund.

There’s another possible explanation for the media’s hands-off approach, and that’s their terror of being labelled as racist. Mahuta is protected by virtue of being the government’s most senior Maori minister and a highly placed member of the powerful Tainui tribal hierarchy. Shane Te Pou, a commentator much favoured by news organisations despite his Labour Party connections (which are almost never acknowledged), was certainly quick off the mark in dismissing scrutiny of Ormsby’s affairs as racist.

For her part, Mahuta pretends that technically adhering to Cabinet Manual guidelines on conflicts of interest absolves her of any fault. It doesn’t, and as a seasoned politician she must know it. Simply declaring a conflict doesn’t magically make it acceptable. A comparison has been drawn with dangerous goods on an aircraft; you don’t get to board the plane just because you’ve declared you’re in possession of them. Besides, there’s the tricky issue of public perception, which the Cabinet Manual warns should be considered in situations where any suspicion might arise. Clearly that didn’t happen when contracts were being showered on Ormsby like confetti, apparently with no contestability and in one instance even without a written contract.

Meanwhile senior ministers Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins continue to spin the feeble line that conflicts of interest are inevitable in a small place like New Zealand. Really? Are they seriously suggesting that in a country awash with Maori consultancies, Mahuta’s tight little family circle was the only source of expertise on a range of Maori issues that extended across youth suicide, waste management, housing, hui facilitation and conservation? Pull the other one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, the Uffindell affair is a sideshow - but that doesn't let National off the hook

Some commenters on this blog have chided me for joining the criticism of the National Party over the Uffindell fiasco. The implication is that I’ve added my rather insubstantial weight to a media offensive calculated to cause maximum damage to National at a time when things were otherwise looking good for the party. Conspiracy theorists are even speculating that Labour sympathisers in the media have known about Uffindell’s past for months but chose to break the story now as a distraction from the government’s shredded credibility across a range of issues that grows wider and more obvious by the day.

My response to those who suggest I shouldn’t support what is seen as a media gang-up against National is that no matter how bad Labour is, we shouldn’t let the major opposition party off the hook for its own failings. It’s not only possible but legitimate to hold what some people might regard as the contradictory ideas that while Labour is a disaster, National doesn’t automatically present an overwhelmingly attractive alternative. Only dyed in the wool National supporters would turn a completely blind eye to the party’s faults on the basis that the other lot is worse.

People accuse me of being anti-National, but I want the Nats to be an effective opposition and it irritates me that they aren’t. While it’s true that I’ve never been a supporter of the party, that doesn’t mean I don’t want it to be good at its job – which, right now, is to expose and highlight the damage Jacinda Ardern’s rogue government, possibly the most destructive in our history, is doing to the country. It’s in the interests of all voters for the main opposition party to do its job properly, and it can’t do that if it’s constantly distracted by the need to extinguish self-ignited bushfires. The media may delight in exploiting those screw-ups, but they don’t cause them.

Having said all that, it’s true that in the big picture, the Uffindell affair is a mere sideshow – albeit one that has come at a convenient time for Labour. It has given the media an excuse to shift the focus from issues of far greater concern, such as (to mention just two):

■ The Auditor-General’s finding that the Three Waters proposal would allow the four so-called water “entities” to operate without proper accountability, which is what critics of the scheme have been saying from day one. In a submission to Parliament, Auditor-General John Ryan said the Three Waters legislation “could have an adverse effect on public accountability, transparency and organisational performance” – an admirably polite and restrained way of saying Nanaia Mahuta’s plan overturns virtually all established principles relating to the management of publicly owned infrastructure assets.

Significantly, most media coverage of Three Waters continues to play down or completely ignore its most offensive feature – namely, the imposition of 50-50 co-governance with unelected iwi interests via deliberately convoluted and opaque mechanisms. RNZ’s otherwise thorough coverage of the Auditor-General's statement gave the co-governance issue only a brief, passing mention. Stuff managed to avoid it altogether. Sceptics, noting this strange reluctance to confront the taniwha in the whare, can hardly be blamed for wondering if it’s connected with the media’s acceptance of government funding conditional on endorsement of still-undefined Treaty principles.

Meanwhile we have been given fresh reason to be highly sceptical about Three Waters. A Wairarapa iwi organisation has complained that under the draft legislation, its voice and autonomy will be diminished because it will be only one of 40 iwi in the proposed entity “C”. “We believe,” Rangitane o Wairarapa told the government, “that the Crown has an obligation to listen to and honour each of the voices of the iwi, not through consensus [which the tribe described as “not how we work in te ao Maori”] and not by determining six people represent 40-plus iwi.”

You can see where this could lead. Brace yourself, if the legislation goes ahead in its present form, for disputes of the type that have repeatedly dogged Treaty settlement negotiations.

■ Then there's the broader but related issue of Labour’s attack on democracy and the principle of one person, one vote. The most recent manifestation was the passing of legislation granting the powerful Ngai Tahu iwi the right to appoint – that’s right, appoint, not elect – two members to the Canterbury regional council. The Ngai Tahu councillors will have full voting rights but won’t have to submit themselves for election and will presumably be accountable only to the tribal hierarchy. That’s how easily democracy is dismantled.

The supposed justification arises from a radical re-interpretation of the Treaty under which democracy is subverted in favour of automatic, guaranteed representation for people of Maori ancestry. The sponsor of the Ngai Tahu bill, Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene, airily pronounced that “Ngai Tahu are entitled to this representation. They’re entitled to this representation because that is the promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and this is a modern-day expression of that promise.” There you go, then – 182 years of constitutional practice and precedent discarded in a few words.

All this is in line with Maori Development Minister Willie Jackson’s decree earlier this year that democracy has changed from being what he derisively called “the tyranny of the majority”. But if democracy no longer means that the majority ultimately holds sway, which after all is its key defining feature, then the game is up: New Zealand is no longer a democracy and we will have to find a new name for whatever mongrel form of government has replaced it. Pardon me, but did I miss the reference to this revolutionary change in Labour’s 2020 election manifesto?

Jackson makes no attempt to disguise his contempt for the notion that in a democracy, all citizens should exercise equal rights, labelling it a “political stunt”. He attacks what he calls “dog whistle” politics by opponents of the Ngai Tahu legislation while he himself unashamedly indulges in what might be labelled kuri whistling that can only promote racial division and separatism. He’s the Labour Cabinet’s resident brown-neck, aggressively championing race-based policies that threaten to drive a wedge between New Zealand’s two main racial groups and ramp up antagonism among extremists on both sides.

This is the same Willie Jackson who, when it suits him, has a highly selective view of who counts as Maori, as was made obvious when he disparaged ACT leader David Seymour (who claims Ngapuhi descent) as a “useless Maori” because he opposes separatist government departments such as Te Puni Kokiri.

The message couldn’t be clearer: if you sign up to Jackson’s radical ideology, you’re a good, authentic Maori. If you exercise your democratic right to dissent, you risk being dismissed as someone who doesn’t deserve to call themselves a true Maori. Jackson is a loudmouth and a bully. At the risk of stretching an analogy to breaking point, he’s the Labour government’s attack kuri.

Alongside these big issues, of course, are the continuing, everyday reminders of the shortcomings of a government whose ambition greatly exceeds its ability to deliver. Look no further than the Te Pukenga Polytechnic debacle for evidence of that. Two other examples from today: new migration figures that show a continuing net loss as people leave the country for better prospects elsewhere (many of the departees were Brits and Americans, presumably disillusioned with life under the sainted Ardern), and a Treasury forecast that an extra 3423 public servants and consultants will be needed to fulfil commitments made in the latest Budget – an increase of 6 percent when most New Zealanders think we have more than enough bureaucrats and jobsworths already. The Treasury noted a particular demand for climate and Maori policy advisers. Quelle surprise ….

It's not just Sam Uffindell who's on trial here

Some more thoughts on the Sam Uffindell saga:

■ The tyro Tauranga MP front-footed the media yesterday about his boarding school transgression (he was reportedly ordered to by his boss) and came across as sincere and contrite. But in the meantime another depth charge has gone off with the claim by a former student flatmate that she fled their Dunedin flat in fear – through a window, in fact – because of Uffindell’s menacing behaviour. What else might be lurking in his past and waiting to be disclosed?

■ Christopher Luxon has acted decisively in standing Uffindell down, but the damage is done. Will this be one of the shortest parliamentary tenures in New Zealand history? And how will the voters of Tauranga react if they’re subjected to another by-election so soon after the last one? Will they punish National by transferring their support to the ACT candidate, who commendably used a chance to come clean about past mistakes by revealing a teenage drink-drive conviction while Uffindell chose to “confess” a much blander (and politically self-serving) failing – namely, not bringing his family home to New Zealand earlier. (I like David Farrar’s suggestion, reported here by Bryce Edwards, that Uffindell could have seized the opportunity to make an impressive speech about lessons learned from his past, particularly in regard to bullying.)

■ National’s culture and processes are as much on trial as Uffindell. Now the collateral damage has spread to senior MP Todd McLay, who’s accused of knowing about the King’s College incident but inexplicably failing to tell Luxon or deputy leader Nicola Willis. Former party president Peter Goodfellow is also implicated (surprise!), raising further questions about why Goodfellow was allowed to remain in a position of power – he’s still on the party board – when so many egregiously wrong-headed selection decisions were made on his watch.

■ The media love indulging in schadenfreude, or pleasure in others’ misfortunes, and never more so than when the politician whose feet are being held to the fire is a conservative. But journalists and interviewers need to mind their own behaviour. Guyon Espiner should be ashamed of his show-offy tough-guy questioning of Luxon on Morning Report today. (“Yeah no, mate – we’re not going to go through all that, mate”, Espiner said, cutting off Luxon in mid-sentence. His point was fair enough; he wasn’t going to allow the interview to be taken over by talking points prepared by National media advisers. But it was the arrogant, smart-arse way Espiner did it that grated. “Mate”, as a form of address, can be friendly or it can be used as an aggressively macho challenge more appropriate to a public bar argument. In this case it was the latter.) And bearing in mind that the whole Uffindell scandal is largely about being transparent, how about some transparency from RNZ?  On First Up, Nick Truebridge interviewed Shane Te Pou for more than six minutes about the Uffindell furore without disclosing that Te Pou – who admittedly is an astute and perceptive commentator – is a former Labour Party activist, and therefore not to be regarded as a neutral observer. It shouldn't be assumed that RNZ's listeners knew that; they were entitled to be told. Or does RNZ assume its audience takes it as a given that its commentators lean to the left unless explicitly stated otherwise?

Correction: In the original version of this post I said the candidates in the Tauranga by-election revealed their greatest regrets in a candidates' debate. In fact it was in response to questions from the Bay of Plenty Times.

 

 

 

The cabinet minister and the RNZ editorial executive

A couple of updates:

Last week I posted complimentary remarks about cabinet minister Kiritapu Allan. Today I read that her partner for the past three years has been RNZ’s Maori News director Mani Dunlop. Presumably this was common knowledge around Parliament and in media circles but it was the first time I’d learned of it.

Why mention it? After all, Allan’s private life should be her own affair. Who can begrudge her the freedom to enter relationships with whomever she chooses?

I see no reason to revise my assessment of Allan. But at the same time, the disclosure of the relationship will have consequences. Politicians lead public lives and they inescapably invite the judgment of voters – not in this case because it’s a lesbian relationship (I would like to think New Zealand has passed the point where people object to the idea of a cabinet minister being lesbian, although doubtless many do), but because of who the other party happens to be.

Many people (I’m one) will feel uncomfortable that Allan is in an intimate relationship with an influential figure in one of the country’s major news organisations – one that happens to be state-owned.

I can’t put it any more strongly than that: just “uncomfortable”. I’ve always believed journalists and politicians should remain at arm’s length from each other, but that seems a futile ideal in a hothouse like Parliament where they mingle every day and are often on chummy terms socially (witness the Press Gallery Christmas party, a highlight of the politicians’ social calendar).  

Many journalists get a buzz from being on first-name terms with powerful people and are not beyond having their egos stroked by politicians eager to burnish their public image. The danger is that journalists’ credibility is fatally compromised if they choose to remain on good terms with a politician rather than risk damaging the relationship by reporting something that reflects badly on them.

Does it happen? You bet it does. Better to avoid that hazard by not getting too close to them in the first place. The old adage about supping with the devil comes to mind.

The picture is complicated in Allan’s case because RNZ seems untroubled by the unfashionable notion that it’s obliged, as a state-owned media organisation, to observe political impartiality. While many RNZ journalists conscientiously observe traditional principles of fairness and balance, the overall tone of the institution is overwhelmingly leftist and therefore sympathetic to the government. Dunlop herself has sometimes caused me to doubt her journalistic objectivity and accuse her of using her position to promote an ideological position.

The issue, then, is this: while in one respect the relationship between Allan and Dunlop is their own business, they must accept there are unavoidable wider implications.

One consequence is that sceptical RNZ listeners now have an additional reason to wonder whether, given the nature of the relationship between a senior editorial executive and a cabinet minister, the state broadcasting organisation can be relied on to observe strict neutrality in the way it reports politics, and especially in the way it presents and interprets news and opinion involving Maori. This applies no matter how conscientiously Dunlop tries to do her job, because it’s a matter of public perception, and public perception is impossible to control.  

The other inevitable upshot is that the large body of disaffected New Zealanders who already suspect their country is under the control of an elite cohort that calls the shots in vital areas of national life, notably politics and the media, will treat the Allan-Dunlop hookup as further evidence that they’re right.

Supporters of the couple’s right to decide how they live their private lives, free of judgment or interference by outsiders, may complain that this isn’t fair; but such is the febrile quality of New Zealand politics in 2022, for which the woke Left can largely take responsibility, that appeals to fairness don’t necessarily cut it anymore.

Oh, that other update: a reader of this blog has pointed out the latest development in the Judge Callinicos affair, which I’d missed (thanks Steve). To their great credit, some lawyers are refusing to let this scandal be buried. 

On virtue signalling, Kiri Allan, Three Waters and secret donations

Newly promoted minister Kiritapu Allan has said what a lot of people think but feel unable to say.

She lashed out in a tweet against “tokenistic” use of te reo by employees of DOC “as an attempt to show govt depts are culturally competent”. She told Stuff she encouraged the use of the Maori language, but wanted it used “with integrity”.

“You want to use te reo, you use it with integrity and use it responsibly,” Stuff quoted Allan as saying. “This isn’t a ‘everybody go out and use mahi and kaupapa’ and say you have a deep and enduring relationship with te ao Māori.”

Of course this shouldn’t apply only to DOC, where Allan was in charge before this week’s cabinet reshuffle resulted in her elevation to the justice portfolio. The same message could be directed at all government agencies where middle-class Pakeha public servants, eager to demonstrate their solidarity with the tangata whenua, indulge in an ostentatious display of virtue-signalling by using token Maori words and phrases. I wonder whether Radio New Zealand also got the memo.

Being Maori, Allan could get away with this rebuke. No Pakeha could; the cries of racism would be deafening. But to me it has always seemed patronising that many Pakeha liberals flaunt their cultural sensitivity with expressions such as “morena”, “nga mihi” and "doing the mahi” (the latter a term practically unknown in the Pakeha world until a couple of years ago).

If they were truly committed to the use of te reo, they would take the trouble to learn the language. I think that’s the point Allan was trying to make.

Many people do make the effort, of course, and good for them. The rest of us should stick to English, since it’s our lingua franca – the language everyone knows and understands. And the primary purpose of language, as Joe Bennett reminded us in a recent column for which he predictably got caned, is to communicate, not to signal cultural empathy or indulge in a form of verbal snobbery.

I like what I’ve seen of Allan. She’s Maori and lesbian, but she doesn’t appear to play the woke card and deserves better than to be dismissed as someone who got where she is simply by ticking fashionable diversity boxes.

She’s a former KFC employee who got a law degree – big ups for that, as they say – and who represents a real electorate (East Coast), so earned her seat in Parliament in the honest, old-fashioned way. She also impressed a lot of people with the gutsy, no-nonsense way in which she confronted a life-threatening cancer. And though I know we’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, she has an open, honest face. We now know she’s blunt too, a refreshing quality lacking in the majority of politicians on both sides of the House who prefer to play it safe.

I tested my opinion of Allan on Clive Bibby, a politically alert resident of her electorate. He largely confirmed my impression, saying that Allan had served the electorate well and National would have a hard job finding someone to stand against her (this from a retired Tolaga Bay farmer whose political inclinations are firmly to the centre-right).

Another good friend and long-term East Coast voter – again, not a natural Labour supporter – agreed that Allan was well-liked in the electorate. The fact that Gisborne’s population is 50 percent Maori probably helps, although her tribal roots (Ngati Ranginui and Tuwharetoa) lie outside the district.

Clive noted that Allan had resisted any temptation to serve as a flagbearer for the radical rainbow movement, which he thought was a smart tactic in conservative Gisborne. But he wasn’t sure that her impressive performance would be enough to save her in the event of the expected anti-Labour backlash in 2023, and he hoped she would secure a good position on the Labour list.

He thinks Allan is marked for higher office – a view shared by political commentator Tim Watkin, who speculated this week that she and Michael Wood, who were both promoted in the “minor” (ha!) reshuffle, might be a Labour leadership team of the future.

Wood strikes me as a bit too polished and smiley for comfort (I’m reminded of a politician from a former era of whom it was said, “Behind the thin veneer there’s a thin veneer”), but Allan has an aura of authenticity – an impression reinforced by her obvious exasperation with the virtue-signallers. If we must have Labour governments – and history suggests they’re the yin to National’s yang – then we could probably do worse.

Then again, maybe I’m so desperate for something to feel positive about that I’m reduced to searching for promising omens on the Left. Certainly the picture is pretty bleak everywhere else.

The past week was a particularly depressing one. Consider the following:

■ The blandly named Water Services Entities Bill, aka Three Waters, passed its first reading – an event virtually ignored by most mainstream media outlets, reflecting their wilful indifference to an issue arousing acute agitation in the heartland (or as on-trend journalists would say, “across the motu”). Cynics will quite reasonably suspect that the media’s failure to subject the Bill’s co-governance provisions to anything resembling critical analysis is linked to their craven acceptance of the ideological conditions attached to funding from the Public Interest Journalism Fund, aka the Pravda Project. (You can read the Hansard record of the first reading debate here. It’s worth reading for Nanaia Mahuta’s speech, which raised the bar for bare-faced spin to a new level, and for Labour’s arrogant failure to explain, still less defend, the co-governance proposals that are driving much of the opposition to the Bill.)

■ Court proceedings over hitherto secret donations to the New Zealand First Foundation revealed that wealthy business people contributed large sums to the party in the clear expectation that it would promote their interests, leading inescapably to the conclusion that New Zealand may not be the transparent, corruption-free democracy we all fondly supposed it to be. As political scientist Bryce Edwards put it: “That wealthy interests were secretly donating large amounts of money both before and after [NZ First] was elected into office should raise questions of whether [the] Government led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was corrupted in some of its decision-making.” Coming on top of accusations of nepotism swirling around Mahuta – largely unreported in the mainstream media – the NZ First court case will leave many New Zealanders gravely concerned about integrity in public life and wondering whether Central America or the Middle East now serves as our political model.

Again, superficial media coverage would have left most of the country in ignorance of what was disclosed in court, indicating that news executives were either unwilling or unable to grasp the significance of the case. Only Newsroom reported the evidence in all its damning detail. Conclusion: we can no longer rely on the New Zealand mainstream media to fulfil their vital function as one of the last lines of defence against corruption and abuses of power. While the media may have no formal constitutional role in a country such as New Zealand, a democracy can only function properly if people are informed about matters of public importance. It goes without saying that when the media fail in that duty, democracy is at risk. Do the leaders of the media recognise and accept that responsibility? If they do, then the evidence suggests they exercise it very selectively.

■ There’s no shortage of other uplifting news I could mention from the past few days, such as the failure by police to make any arrests, despite multiple witnesses, for a shocking assault by Tribesmen gang members on a motorist in the Waikato; the forcible snatching from Lower Hutt of a Maori man’s body by his Northland whanau, against the wishes of the man’s widow and immediate family (a violent act subsequently justified by his cousin, Hone Harawira’s wife Hilda Halkyard, as being in accordance with tikanga); another week of ram-raids and shootings, including one while children were being dropped at school; and the government’s cynical and vindictive emasculation of the job of Children’s Commissioner, despite overwhelming opposition from submitters, and evidently for no better reason than that Labour was fed up with Oranga Tamariki being criticised.

Oh, and I shouldn’t forget that the health system is collapsing and schools have run out of teachers. I don’t personally blame Jacinda Ardern for all this, but it adds insult to injury to be told constantly by the international media that we should feel blessed to be living in blissful Aotearoa under the world’s most empathetic and inspirational leader.

What the public thinks about the Pravda Project

Don't hold your breath waiting to see anything about this in the mainstream media:

Poll reveals distrust of taxpayer-funded media - Taxpayers' Union

On the threats to free speech

I delivered the following speech (little of which would be new to regular readers of this blog) at a meeting of the Free Speech Union at Victoria University last night. Most of the approximately 80 people who attended were middle-aged or older, suggesting freedom of speech isn’t exactly top of mind for the students the FSU had hoped to attract. On the other hand, it’s possible the poor student turnout had something to do with the fact that posters advertising the meeting were repeatedly taken down and replaced with ones saying “Stop Hate Speech” and labelling the FSU as “racist, homophobic and transphobic hypocrites”. It’s hard to engage meaningfully with that level of undergraduate bumper-sticker mentality, but at least they didn’t try to disrupt the meeting.

My old friend and former journalism colleague Barrie Saunders, who’s also a member of the union and is here tonight, sent me an email last week ahead of this talk.

Barrie has always written very concisely and his email consisted of just one line. “Karl”, he said, “did you ever think ten years ago you would be speaking about free speech?”

The answer, of course, is no. Ten years ago we smugly believed that all the big debates about freedom and democracy had been won and we could all relax. Ha! More fools us.

The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama even wrote a book about it, called The End of History and the Last Man, in which he postulated that with the end of the Cold War, humanity’s ideological evolution had reached its end point and we could all bask forever in the sunlit uplands of liberal democracy.

How wrong he was, and how naive we were to believe it. Because in the past 10 years or so – and that’s how quickly it has happened – all our comfortable convictions about the unassailability of free speech have been turned on their heads. Suddenly we find ourselves fighting again for rights we assumed were settled.

We’ve become accustomed to hearing the words, “I support free speech, but ….” New Zealand is full of people in positions of power and influence who purport to defend free speech, but always with the addition of that loaded word “but”. You can’t say you support free speech and then, in the next breath, put limitations around it beyond the ones that are already clearly established in law and broadly accepted, such as those relating to defamation and incitement to hatred or violence,

We’ve been introduced to phrases unheard of a few years ago: cancel culture, speech wars, hate speech, gender wars, safe spaces, culture wars, trigger warnings, transphobia and no-platforming. We’ve acquired a whole new vocabulary.

We’ve seen the creation of multiple no-go zones where no one is permitted to say what they think for fear of offending someone or oppressing a supposedly vulnerable minority group.

We’ve seen the emergence of a media monoculture in which all mainstream media outlets adopt uniform ideological positions that effectively shut out alternative opinions, even when those marginalised voices may represent mainstream opinion.

We’ve seen traditional ideological battle lines totally redrawn as people on the left and right of politics unite around the need to save freedom of speech from a new and powerful cohort of people who have co-opted the term “hate speech” as a pretext for banning any opinion that they dislike.

We’ve even seen radical feminists, who were once at the cutting edge of politics, demonised as dangerous reactionaries who must be shut down because of their opposition to a virulent transgender lobby that appeared to spring out of nowhere.

All this has happened within a remarkably short time frame. Mainstream New Zealand has been caught off guard by the sheer speed and intensity of the attack on free speech and as a result has been slow to respond. But what’s at stake here is nothing less than the survival of liberal democracy, which depends on the contest of ideas and the free and open discussion of issues regardless of whether some people might find them upsetting.

I could recite a long list of incidents, but to save time – and for the benefit of people here who may not have closely followed the free speech debate – let me just remind you of some of the better-known ones:

First up, Don Brash – barred from speaking at what was intended to be a low-key Massey University seminar where he was invited to talk to political science students about his political career. Now regardless of what you think about his politics, the civil and scholarly Brash is no one’s idea of a dangerous demagogue. Yet the vice-chancellor of Massey, who as an Australian veterinary professor is eminently qualified to decide what opinions New Zealanders can safely be exposed to, cancelled Brash, citing “security” concerns – a fashionable pretext, as we’ll see shortly.

It later emerged that in reality, the vice-chancellor didn’t want Massey to be seen as endorsing what she described as “racist behaviours”. This was a reference to Brash’s involvement in the group Hobson’s Pledge, although Hobson’s Pledge is expressly opposed to racism and in any case had nothing whatsoever to do with the planned seminar.

Emails subsequently released under the Official Information Act showed the vice-chancellor frantically casting around for spurious “mechanisms” under which she could legally ban Brash from speaking. Even people fiercely opposed to Brash’s politics were appalled by this flagrant curtailment of his right to free speech.

Now let’s move on to the Canadians Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who were barred from speaking at an Auckland Council-owned venue following the intervention of a grandstanding mayor – again, under the pretext that protesters might disrupt the event.

We still don’t know what poisonous beliefs the Canadians were supposedly peddling because we were never allowed to hear them. That cancellation was a catalyst for the formation of the Free Speech Union, which has taken a case all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to clarify whether threats of disruption should be allowed to override free-speech rights. The outcome of that case is currently pending.

The union has made it clear, incidentally, that it neither supports nor opposes whatever it is that Southern and Molyneux stand for. The point at issue is the right of New Zealanders to be exposed to opinions and ideas regardless of whether people like the mayor of Auckland and the Massey vice-chancellor personally approve of them.

The right of free speech, after all, means the right to hear as well as the right to speak. Our Bill of Rights Act doesn’t just talk about the right to speak freely. It refers to “the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind and in any form”. That seems pretty clear-cut and unambiguous. To deny New Zealanders the right to hear opinions that some politicians and public officials don’t like is a flagrant abuse of power and must be challenged at every turn, which is exactly what this union is doing.

Now, another notable case – notable for all the wrong reasons. Seven distinguished academics wrote a letter to The Listener questioning the notion that matauranga Maori, or traditional Maori knowledge, should be given the same status as science. That triggered what was possibly the most shameful demonstration yet of intolerance toward ideologically unfashionable ideas.

In an unprecedented pile-on, more than 2000 fellow academics, urged on by professors Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles, signed a letter denouncing the Listener Seven and implying they condoned something called “scientific racism”.

The sheer weight and vehemence of the denunciation sent an unmistakeable message to the academic community: express dissent at your peril. Both the Tertiary Education Union and the vice-chancellor of Auckland University, who should have led the way in defending the seven professors’ academic freedom, shamefully did exactly the reverse.

What started as an academic debate on an issue of public importance thus took on the character of a 14th century heresy trial. Two of the Listener Seven faced expulsion from the Royal Society – an organisation dedicated, ironically, to the advancement of science.

Once again it was intervention of the Free Speech Union, combined with an outpouring of international derision from luminaries such as Richard Dawkins, that persuaded the Royal Society to pull its head in. Last month the union was able to announce that the society had called off its witch-hunt – but too late, I would suggest, to salvage its credibility.

Those three examples give some indication of what the defenders of free speech are up against, but not all cases attract that level of public attention. Please allow me to touch on a few others that show how insidious attacks on free speech have become.

There was a mini furore at last year’s Featherston Booktown festival, where organisers cancelled a Harry Potter quiz for fear that it might distress the transgender community, given that J K Rowling is a vocal opponent of transgenderism. In another exquisite irony, the same book festival included a panel discussion on cancel culture. As I wrote on my blog, this was the point at which real life did its best to outdo satire.

The Booktown organisers could have driven a stake into the ground and politely told the objectors to bugger off but they didn’t, and the result was another grovelling capitulation to the enemies of free speech.

In yet another exquisite irony, there was the case of the late Jim Flynn, an internationally acclaimed emeritus professor of political studies at Otago University. Professor Flynn wrote a book entitled In Defence of Free Speech: The University as Censor, but was advised that his British publishers had changed their minds about publishing it because it raised “sensitive topics of race, religion and gender”. So a book about the dangers of censoring free speech for fear of causing offence was itself cancelled for fear of causing offence.

On a lighter note, there was a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority in 2019 about an advertising sign for Streets ice cream that said “ice cream makes you happy”. According to the complainant, the sign promoted an unhealthy relationship with food. Now you might think the  authority would have politely told the complainant not to waste its time, but no; it solemnly ruled that the sign should be removed because “the implicit claim that there is a link between ice cream and happiness could potentially undermine the health and wellbeing of consumers”. The enforcers of free speech are not noted for their sense of humour.

Another case that might at first glance be dismissed as flippant involved a bulldozer in Marlborough. At the height of the Black Lives Matter crusade following the police murder of George Floyd, the bulldozer owner, obviously feeling things had got out of hand, spray-painted the words “ALM Equal Rights for Kiwi Whites” on the blade of the bulldozer – the letters ALM standing for “all lives matter”. For this dangerous act of incitement he received a visit from the local police. A neighbour had complained that the words were racist and the police persuaded the bulldozer owner to paint over them.

The particularly disquieting aspect here is the involvement of the police. There’s a very real prospect that with the proposed criminalisation of so-called “hate speech”, it would fall to the police to determine which opinions cross the legal threshold. We have ample evidence from Britain of the dangers that arise when the police are politicised and over-zealous officers take it upon themselves to decide what speech is “safe”.

Now, speaking of the police, I want to refer briefly to the blogger Cameron Slater. It emerged late last year through an OIA request that Slater had been under police surveillance. A police intelligence analyst was concerned that Slater was publishing information that denigrated Labour party policies and individuals linked to them. Another officer expressed concern that Slater was “anti-government” and a senior sergeant suggested they should pay him a visit.

In other words there are people in the police who apparently think that anyone who criticises the government should be watched. This is how police states begin. Fortunately in this case, wiser senior officers stepped in before things got out of hand.

Of course Slater is a highly controversial figure and a lot of people dislike him, but it’s cases like this that test our real commitment to free speech. As the left-wing American activist and writer Noam Chomsky has said, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” [For the record, I don't despise Slater, though there have been many occasions when I've wondered about his judgment.]

Speaking of Chomsky, a striking aspect of the speech wars is that they cut right across the traditional battle lines between left and right. It’s a fact of history that suppression of free speech has far more often been used against the left than the right, which probably explains why veteran leftists such as Chris Trotter and Matt McCarten are supporters of the Free Speech Union. Martyn Bradbury is another on the left who advocates forcefully for freedom of expression; there's no one more vigorous in his tormenting of the woke. 

The reality is that the enemies of free speech have no fixed ideology. Control is enforced with equal brutality whether it’s Nazi Germany or communist North Korea. The only thing the enemies of free speech have in common is a desire to exercise untrammelled power and to forcibly suppress any speech which threatens that power.

As it happens, the present threat to free speech in New Zealand doesn’t come from either the traditional left or the traditional right. It comes from a powerful new cohort that largely controls the national conversation. This cohort is dominant in politics, the bureaucracy, academia and the media and regards the exercise of free speech as serving the interests of the privileged. Free speech to them means licence to attack oppressed minorities and is therefore something to be deterred, if not by law then by denunciation and intimidation.

Depressingly, this group is entrenched in universities and libraries – institutions that have traditionally served as sources of free thought and access to knowledge. Libraries were at the forefront of the effort to shut down the feminist group Speak Up For Women, which was targeted by aggressive transgender activists because it opposed legislation allowing men to identify as female. It was only after this union went to court on the feminists’ behalf that libraries in several cities were forced to back down and allow them to hold public meetings.

A common factor in these instances is the belief that people have a right not to be offended and that this right takes precedence over the right to free speech. It’s as if the woke elements in society have developed an allergic reaction to the robust democracy that most of the people in this room grew up in, where vigorous debate was seen as an essential part of the contest of ideas that democracy depends on.

If a statement can possibly be interpreted as a slur against one’s gender, race, body type or sexual identity, it will be, no matter how innocent the intention of the person who made it. Apologies will be demanded and the ritual humiliation of the transgressor inevitably follows.

The purpose is clear: it sends a message to others that they will get similar treatment if they’re bold or foolish enough to challenge ideological orthodoxy. Yet paradoxically, the same people who insist on the right not to be upset don’t hesitate to engage in vicious online gang-ups and ad hominem attacks on anyone who disagrees with them.

A recurring theme in the speech wars is the notion of safety – not safety from physical danger, which is how most people understand the term, but safety from anything that might upset people or challenge their thinking.

Some of us first became aware of this phenomenon in 1991 when the Christchurch nursing student Anna Penn was effectively expelled from her course after being branded as “culturally unsafe”. Since then the highly inventive concept of “safety” has widened further, to the extent that it’s now invoked if there’s any risk that some fragile soul might feel psychologically damaged by something written or said.

This confected notion of safety was made explicit in law earlier this year when Parliament passed the so-called Safe Areas Act, under which people can be prohibited from maintaining protest vigils within 150 metres of any place where abortions are performed.

In this case the word safety had nothing to do with real threats of violence or intimidation. A pro-life group wrote to all the country’s district health boards asking if they had received any complaints about harassment or intimidation from staff or women attending abortion clinics. None had. In any case, the Law Commission had already advised the government that the legislation wasn’t necessary because existing laws had the situation covered.

As one pro-life activist said, the law change addressed a problem that didn’t exist. It was passed solely to reinforce an ideological shibboleth.

The Safe Areas Act was a test of this union’s commitment to free speech because the union had to disentangle the implications for free speech from the polarising issue of abortion, on which many of its members have conflicting opinions. But the union emphatically opposed the legislation and said in its submission, and I quote: “It is not the speech of the majority that requires vigilant protection. It is the speech of the few that must be jealously guarded.”

Regardless of your views about abortion, there are several worrying aspects of this new law. First, it appears to introduce a highly subjective concept of entitlement to protection against emotional distress.

Second, the anti-abortion group Voice for Life is concerned that it could create a precedent under which anti-abortion opinions could be classified as hate speech under proposed new laws that the government has so far kept under wraps.

Third, it creates the impression that the right to protest is subject to an ideological test. There are now two categories of protest group – those that are acceptable and those that aren’t.

The right to protest is conditional on the protest being one that those in power approve of. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that Parliament would pass a law creating safe zones for people attending defence industry seminars. Yet in 2019 one such conference was cancelled because the organisers, citing past experience with aggressive protesters, were concerned about the safety of delegates. Needless to say the cancellation was greeted triumphantly by the disrupters.

Safety, then, is a highly elastic concept – critically important for women attending abortion clinics, even if no risk of harm exists, but not a problem if those who feel threatened are white guys in suits.

The enemies of free speech are blind to the contradictions in their position. They bang on about the right to be safe but applaud aggressive and intimidating behaviour against people they don’t like. And they demand protection against hate speech while freely indulging in it themselves on Twitter and other social media platforms, their purpose being to bully people into silence.

You don’t have to look far to find evidence of other inconsistencies. Chloe Swarbrick apparently saw no contradiction last year in writing a newspaper column eloquently extolling the right to protest while voting to deny that same right to anti-abortion activists.

Similarly, Trevor Mallard and Chris Hipkins are both proud of having once been arrested for protest activity. Yet both supported the Safe Areas Bill and apparently saw no inconsistency in denying others a right they once vigorously asserted for themselves.

But perhaps the most shameful aspect of the Safe Areas Act was that it sailed through Parliament virtually unchallenged, save for a few courageous individual MPs – none more so than three from the Labour Party – who followed their consciences and voted against it.

To their lasting shame, National and ACT, the two parties that should have fought it, waved it through. If there are any representatives of those parties here tonight, I for one would be interested in hearing why they so cravenly rolled over. If National and ACT don’t believe in such a bedrock democratic value as free speech, we’re entitled to wonder what they do believe in.

Now if I may go slightly off-topic, I’d like to talk about the New Zealand media. It’s only slightly off-topic because free speech goes hand in hand with a free press - but it’s now clear that proponents of free speech in New Zealand can no longer rely on the media for support. That was made obvious when NZME, owners of the New Zealand Herald, refused to accept a perfectly lawful advertisement from Speak Up for Women. That advertisement consisted simply of the dictionary definition of “woman” as an “adult human female”, followed by the kicker line “Say no to sex self-identification”. Wildly inflammatory stuff, clearly – too hot by far for the Herald.

I can claim to be something of an authority on freedom of the press if only for the reason that I’ve written two books about it. Back then the concern was with threats to media freedom from outside sources, principally the state. But ironically we’re now in a position where I believe the New Zealand media abuse their own freedom.

They have fatally compromised their independence and their credibility by signing up to a government scheme under which they accept millions of dollars in taxpayer funding and in return commit themselves to abide by a set of ideological principles laid down by that same government.

Defenders of the Public Interest Journalism Fund justify it on the pretext that it enables the media to continue carrying out worthwhile public interest journalism at a time when the industry is financially precarious. They bristle with indignation at the suggestion that their integrity is compromised. But it is. You need only look at the projects approved for funding to grasp that this is essentially an opportunistic indoctrination project funded by taxpayers.

From a free speech standpoint, however, it’s the ideological uniformity of the media that is of even greater concern. The past two decades have seen a profound generational change in the media and a corresponding change in the industry ethos.

News outlets that previously took pride in being “broad church” – in other words, catering to and reflecting a wide range of interests and opinions – are now happy to serve as a vehicle for the prevailing ideology. They have abandoned their traditional role of trying to reflect the society they purport to serve. The playwright Arthur Miller’s definition of a good newspaper as a nation talking to itself is obsolete. The mainstream media are characterised by ideological homogeneity, reflecting the views of a woke elite and relentlessly promoting the polarising agenda of identity politics.

The implications for free speech are obvious. What was previously an important channel for the public expression of a wide range of opinions has steadily narrowed. Conservative voices are increasingly marginalised and excluded, ignoring the inconvenient fact that New Zealand has far more often voted right than left.

Dissenters still succeed in getting the occasional letter to the editor published, but most are forced to turn to online platforms; hence the growth of websites such as Kiwiblog, the BFD, Breaking Views and The Platform, which now fill the yawning gaps created by the mainstream media’s highly selective management of news and comment.

But it’s worse than that, because the prevailing ideological bias doesn’t just permeate editorials and opinion columns. Its influence can also be seen in the way the news is reported – in the stories that the media choose to cover, and perhaps more crucially in the issues they choose not to cover. The Maori co-governance proposals in Three Waters, for example.

Underlying this is another profound change. From the 1970s onward, journalism training – previously done on the job – was subject to academic capture. Many of today’s journalists were subject to highly politicised teaching that encouraged them to think their primary function was not so much to report on matters of interest and importance to the community as to challenge the institutions of power.

Principles such as objectivity were jettisoned, freeing idealistic young journalists to indulge in advocacy journalism, push pet causes and sprinkle their stories with loaded words such as racist, sexist, homophobic and misogynist. In the meantime, older journalists who adhered to traditional ideas of balance and objectivity have been methodically managed out of the industry.

Worse even than that, we now have mainstream media outlets that actively suppress stories as a matter of official editorial policy, and even boast about it. I’m thinking here of climate change, a subject on which major media organisations have collectively agreed not to give space or air time to anyone questioning global warming or even the efficacy of measures aimed at mitigating it. This would have been unthinkable 20 or even 10 years ago. People are bound to wonder what else the media are suppressing.

I want to conclude by saying I’ve been a journalist for more than fifty years and I’ve never felt that freedom of expression in New Zealand was in greater danger than it is now. Robert Muldoon was a tyrant who tried to bully the media into submission, but eventually journalists and editors stood up to him. In the past few years, however, we've gone backwards. We now live in a climate of authoritarianism and denunciation that chokes off the vibrant debate that sustains democracy, and tragically the media are part of the problem.

There are positive signs however, and this meeting is one of them. As I said at the start, the sheer speed and intensity of the culture wars caught the country off-guard. Ours is a fundamentally fair and decent society, eager to do the right thing and rightly wary of extremism. For a long time we stood back and allowed the assault on democratic values to proceed virtually unopposed. We were like a boxer temporarily stunned by a punch that we never saw coming.

But the fightback has begun and is steadily gaining momentum. In giddy moments of optimism I even sense that the tide might be turning in the media. Even the most cloth-eared media bosses must eventually realise they have alienated much of their core audience, as reflected in steadily declining newspaper circulation figures and in opinion surveys measuring trust in the media.

To finish, and to remind us of what’s at stake, I want to quote words that may already be familiar to some of you. They came from the courageous Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller, who spent time in Nazi concentration camps for his opposition to Hitler’s regime:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.

“Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

“Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Thank you.

Footnote: ACT MP James McDowall, who was at the FSU meeting, responded to an invitation from Jonathan Ayling of the FSU to explain why ACT MPs all supported Louisa Wall’s Safe Areas Act. The combination of a muddy microphone and my lousy hearing meant I didn’t clearly hear what he said, but I gather he defended his party by pointing out it was ACT that engineered the removal of the Safe Areas provision from the original Abortion Legislation amendment bill when it came before the House in 2020, citing concerns about the need to strike the right balance between defending free speech and protecting women from harassment. My response to that would be: having done that, which was laudable, why then perform an apparent about-face by voting for Wall’s bill when it came before the House as a separate piece of legislation? ACT apparently believed the Wall bill got the balance right. I disagree, and so did nine National MPs, to their great credit. It struck me as a pragmatic move on ACT’s part, inconsistent with the party’s supposed commitment to individual freedom, and I can’t help wondering whether it had something to do with David Seymour’s antagonism toward the anti-abortion lobby.

You can join the Free Speech Union at www.fsu.nz