Memo to Tova O'Brien: spare us the moralising

The words journalist and moralist happen to share the same last five letters, but beyond that they have nothing in common. So what makes some television journalists think their job entitles them to share their sanctimonious (and often simplistic) moral judgments on the events of the day?

Their function is to report the news and leave viewers to form their own conclusions. They have no more moral authority than a bus driver or supermarket checkout operator.

Newshub’s political editor Tova O’Brien is an habitual offender. She was at it again last night, self-righteously declaiming – prompted by leading questions from newsreader Mike McRoberts – on the government’s failure to anticipate and head off every personal misfortune suffered as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

O’Brien reported that a woman had her publicly funded breast surgery cancelled and had to pay for an operation with her own money. Another cancer patient had to be told by phone rather than face-to-face that the illness was terminal. A woman miscarried but her husband wasn’t allowed into the hospital to comfort her. A new mother said she felt “disempowered” because she was unable to have the water-birth that she had planned and complained about being treated like an animal, which I suspect might have been just a tad melodramatic.

Oozing empathy and indignation, O’Brien lamented that Kiwis (we’re always referred to using the folksy term “Kiwis”, never as New Zealanders) had to face these “heartbreaking” experiences alone. Tragedies that were impossible to bear were made even harder, she said. Later she resorted to the emotive phrase “horror stories”. Of course.

But hang on. New Zealand is in the middle of an unprecedented medical and economic emergency that no one saw coming. The ground is shifting day by day, almost hour by hour, under the government’s feet as it scrambles to deal with issues no New Zealand government has faced before. Inevitably, a lot of people will suffer sad and painful consequences; politicians and bureaucrats can’t anticipate every personal tragedy and salve every psychological wound.

Oh, but O’Brien thinks they can and should. Fortunately for her, journalists are able to take refuge on the moral high ground. They are in the privileged position of observing and critiquing without actually having to take responsibility for finding solutions to the myriad unforeseen problems they report. They are even free to grandstand at the prime minister’s daily press conference and insist that something be done, then note with smug satisfaction that the prime minister has promised to act.

O’Brien has previous form. It was she who led the media charge against Health Minister David Clark when he broke the lockdown rules. Clearly, she wanted a scalp to hang on her belt. Okay, so Clark acted stupidly and embarrassed the government. Even cabinet ministers do dumb things. But O’Brien pursued him so fiercely that I half-expected her to call for the reinstatement of the Nuremberg war tribunals. 

Again, fortunately for O’Brien - in fact all journalists - their own lives aren’t subject to the same remorseless scrutiny that public figures must endure. If they were, they too would be revealed as flawed – in some cases deeply flawed – human beings. (And lest this be misconstrued, I'm not alluding here to O'Brien, whose private life I know nothing about.)

What, then, makes them think they’re entitled to impose their bumper-sticker moral judgments on their audience, night after night? They certainly can’t claim to represent public opinion. Few people are in a worse position to gauge what the public is thinking than press gallery journalists, trapped as they are in their own little self-absorbed Wellington bubble.

Why can’t they just stand back, tell us what’s going on, free of emotive or moralistic embellishment, and leave the viewers to decide for themselves what to make of it all? They might find that by doing so, they’ll win back some of the respect journalists have lost.

One morepork, two moreporks

You sometimes have to smile at the confusion that can result from misguided attempts to display cultural sensitivity.

Many New Zealanders (me included) long ago dropped the “s” from the plural form of Maori names and words, since there’s no “s” in the Maori language. Hence Maoris became Maori, tuis became tui, pauas became paua and so forth – this despite a valid argument that as long as the words were being used in English, the English practice of adding the “s” should be followed.

Where it starts to get a bit silly is when people become so locked into the habit of dropping the “s” that they reflexively start doing it with non-Maori words too. There’s an example in a story about native birds in today’s Dominion Post, which quotes a Te Papa bird expert as saying that “morepork were common around Wellington”.

Hello? Morepork is an English word (onomatopoeic, since you ask – the same bird is found in Tasmania, where it’s called the mopoke). Ergo, the same practice should be followed as with the plurals of other English bird names – for example, thrushes, seagulls, hawks. So, moreporks and fantails, though not tuis and wekas – or rurus or piwakawakas, come to that. 

Because the morepork in this instance was mentioned in the context of birds that are commonly known by their Maori names, either the bird man or the reporter (I don't know which, because the bird man was quoted using reported speech) apparently couldn't see the distinction.

They might be polite bullies, but they're still bullies

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, April 30.)

Pssst. Don’t mention the checkpoints.

That seems to have been the rule followed by politicians and much of the media in the five weeks since Hone Harawira and his supporters took the law into their own hands and began stopping travellers in the Far North.

The official response has been to either ignore the checkpoints or pretend they are a non-issue. On the few occasions when interviewers have asked hard questions about them, government politicians and police have danced around the question of whether they’re legal.

If they were confident of their legality, they would surely say so. That leads us to conclude they are not. They are, in fact, an audacious and calculated challenge to the rule of law.

Until this week, even Opposition MPs seemed strangely hesitant about raising the subject. Either National was frightened of being labelled as racist, or it didn’t want to risk being seen as less than 100 per cent committed to the fight against Covid-19.

In the mainstream media, the issue has been treated as a minor diversion; an inconsequential sub-plot to the main narrative. NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking tried unsuccessfully to pin down the prime minister on the issue this week, but otherwise there has been little critical examination of the checkpoints’ legality and still less of what they might lead to, which is potentially an even more problematic issue.

Meanwhile the checkpoints have spread like … well, like a virus.

From the Far North and the East Coast, they have spread to Maketu in the Bay of Plenty, to Murupara on the fringe of the Urewera and now to Taranaki. In recent days, iwi elsewhere have asserted control over lakes and rivers by means or rahui, or bans – again, of dubious legal status.

Along the way, there has been a significant shift in the justification for the highway checkpoints. At the start, their purported purpose was to protect vulnerable Maori communities in remote places – an objective many people could sympathise with, even though the checkpoints were set up with no mandate or legal authority other than a nod and a wink from the police (and in Northland, from the mayor).

But the original pretext began to look less convincing once checkpoints started materialising in places where there were no isolated communities to protect, and it looks even less so now that the government has announced that the coronavirus is technically eliminated, which means the worst risk has passed. It's worth noting that Tairawhiti, which includes the East Coast, is one of four regions with no current cases of the virus.

This being the case, you might expect the vigilantes to pack up and go home. But not only are the checkpoints still there, there are more of them. This suggests that the purpose is something other than the protection of Maori communities.

Join the dots. Iwi activists watched what was happening in the Far North and the East Coast, noted that no one tried to stop it, and decided to organise their own checkpoints elsewhere. All of which was utterly predictable.

Under the smokescreen of the coronavirus crisis, the activists are boldly advancing a separatist agenda. Their objective is clear from their statements that they are policing their “borders”, which implies tribal sovereignty. And the longer they are allowed to get away with it, the messier it’s likely to be when the legally constituted authorities who are supposed to govern this country intervene.

For the moment, public unease has apparently persuaded the police to take a more active role in the checkpoints. But it’s clear they are involved only in a supporting role, if they’re present at all.

Pressed to clarify the situation, Jacinda Ardern and police commissioner Andrew Coster have kicked for touch with statements of masterful ambiguity. Coster sounds much surer of himself when he’s wagging his finger at dangerous lawbreakers driving the family Honda to the beach to take the dog for a walk. This is called picking the low-hanging fruit. 

Note that I use the word checkpoint rather than roadblock. That’s because the roads, to my knowledge, aren’t physically blocked.

Defenders of the checkpoints say no one is forced to stop. But a powerful psychological factor comes into play when motorists see people – often quite large people – standing on the road wearing masks and hi-vis jackets, surrounded by traffic cones and holding signs saying “stop”.

Most people’s natural instinct is to comply, whether they’re obliged to or not. That instinct is likely to be reinforced if people on the checkpoint are wearing gang insignia, as at Murupara. Small wonder that those defending the checkpoints insist that people are happy to stop.

And having stopped, many people are either too timid or too uncertain to refuse to give personal details or answer questions about where they are going, even though their interrogators have no right to ask such questions.

Intimidating people into stopping when they're not legally required to is bullying, pure and simple. Sure, the vigilantes might be polite. But that merely makes them polite bullies.

Footnote: This column has been amended since publication yesterday morning to take into account National's questioning of Andrew Coster at the meeting of the Epidemic Response Committee later on the same day. But the question remains: what took them so long?

China must be held to account

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and on Stuff.co.nz, April 29.)

When – or should that be if? – the world gets on top of the Covid-19 pandemic, attention must turn to the issue of Chinese culpability.

In an ideal world, President Xi Jinping and the government of the People’s Republic of China would be presented with a bill for reparations, but that’s not going to happen. No amount would be big enough to atone for the massive economic and social harm done internationally, and China wouldn’t pay anyway.

Nonetheless, China – or more specifically the Chinese Communist Party, since the Chinese people are blameless – must be held to account. Beijing must be made to realise there are consequences for allowing the coronavirus to leak across China’s borders and for silencing courageous people who tried to alert the world to the looming catastrophe.

The first of those consequences is the loss of trust. The world must now see that the image China has assiduously cultivated over several decades – that of a benign emerging power willing to play by the rules – is a sham. To put things bluntly, China has played us for suckers.

Chinese culpability for Covid-19 starts with its tolerance of “wet” markets, where captive live wild animals are a potential breeding ground for lethal diseases.

At a stretch, wet markets – cruel and unhygienic though they are – might be condoned on the basis that they’re a long-standing cultural practice. But nothing could excuse China’s failure to warn the World Health Organisation about the disease, as it was obliged to do, or its punishment of whistle-blowers.

In the meantime, travellers were allowed to carry the contagion around the globe. If China’s aim was to cripple Western economies, it couldn’t have done a better job. Just saying.

And it wasn’t the first such time. In 2002, China allowed vital weeks to pass before notifying the WHO of the Sars pandemic.  As with Covid-19, the communist regime’s obsession with secrecy and self-protection outweighed its concern for even its own citizens, who were kept in the dark.

Countries that have previously courted Chinese favour, including New Zealand, should now be appraising their relationships with Beijing in a much more critical light.

Not only has China revealed itself to be untrustworthy, but its aggressive global ambitions can no longer be disguised or ignored. These are most apparent in the South China Sea, where China has put military installations on artificial islands, originally created for supposedly peaceful purposes amid strategic shipping lanes.

In a recent discussion on America’s National Public Radio, US foreign policy specialist Michele Flournoy, who’s tipped as a possible Secretary of State in the unlikely event that Joe Biden wins the presidency, said China for decades had pursued a policy of “hide and bide” – hiding its real agenda while waiting for the right time to drop its mask, as she put it.

Xi’s ascendancy to the Chinese leadership was the moment the mask fell, Flournoy said. To which she might have added that the coronavirus pandemic was the moment the West took off its blinkers and realised that China is interested in behaving as a good international citizen only when it suits it to do so. 

Meanwhile, China’s ascendancy continues. In trade, it’s using the so-called Belt and Road Initiative to extend its economic influence over a large swathe of the globe. Less conspicuously, and by means that are often incompatible with the way things should be done in transparent democracies, it is exploiting political, diplomatic, business, academic and cultural channels to acquire influence in other countries’ affairs – a trend highlighted by Professor Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University, a courageous lone voice on Chinese interference.

Regrettably, there seems to be no shortage of high-profile New Zealanders happy to be schmoozed by Beijing. John Key had an audience last year with Xi, who said he hoped the former prime minister would continue to enhance the friendship between the two countries. The state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Key as praising Xi for his “vision and leadership”. All very chummy.

Another former prime minister, Jenny Shipley, served until last year (when she was implicated in the disastrous collapse of Mainzeal, of which she was a director) on the board of the state-controlled China Construction Bank, one of the world’s biggest financial institutions. 

New Zealand, like many countries, has allowed itself to become economically reliant on China and cannot easily disentangle itself.

Even America took a fatally complacent view of Chinese expansionism, allowing China to steal millions of manufacturing jobs and build a vast technology sector based largely on American innovation.

Chanting the mantra of globalisation, Western leaders encouraged China to take an active role in world trade. America even sponsored China’s membership of the World Trade Organisation. 

Successive US administrations, both Republican and Democrat, thought that if China was opened up to the world, the country’s leaders would reciprocate by playing a responsible part in international affairs, just as Germany and Japan did after America aided their revival following World War II.

 

In hindsight, it now looks a bit naïve. But to use an epidemiological metaphor, the lessons of the past few months may at least serve to inoculate the world against future delusions about China’s trustworthiness.

Guest post: Alwyn Poole

Alwyn Poole has kindly allowed me to post the following commentary. An innovative thinker on education issues, Alwyn was the founder of two successful partnership or “charter” schools (officially known as designated special character schools) in Auckland and co-founded Innovation Education Consultants.

The Value of a Life

It is astonishing how quickly key foundations of education and society can become twisted or subverted. A genuine proponent of education advocates important foundations: question everything, critique everything, suggest and evaluate counter scenarios (and other “experts”), ask who gains and who loses from a particular action, attack the argument and not the person. Children, youth and indeed all citizens need to apply these principles to current events and what appears to be deep moral confusion.

Everyone dies. It is maybe the least digestible fact of life, but the rate of death in every generation is 100 percent. I complained about this to my mother once and she placated me by saying that it wouldn’t happen to me. I was eight years old and at that stage accepted my immortality. In New Zealand in 2018, 33,225 human beings died. That is a little over 91 people per day. Apart from media coverage of road deaths and murders these deaths, by and large, pass unnoticed except for those close enough to attend the funerals.

In 2020 we have suddenly decided, as a society caught up in a global emergency, that these lives are more important than ever before. We have decided this to the extent that we have severely damaged significant sections of the economy, drastically restricted human rights, and allowed a very small sector of government to create edicts without due process or challenge.

New Zealand is a tiny country. If we were an American state we would rank approximately 24^th by population, making all comparisons of Jacinda Ardern’s job to that of Donald Trump fatuous at best. Her role is closer to that of governor of a small state. We are highly disconnected geographically and uniquely placed to make our own decisions. We are resource-rich and relatively well educated. We should be looking at the big health picture and not being dragged into an international bunfight to prove that we can deprive citizens of their rights better than any other for very little relative gain.

As of yesterday, 19 New Zealanders had died from Covid-19. It could be argued that without state intervention it could have been more. You could argue the same if you chose not to have speed limit enforcement or mental health services. If 2020 is reasonably typical we will see around 670 people die from suicide (2.5 men for each woman, and disproportionately Maori). We will see approximately 70 homicide deaths. If this year is typical around 200,000 of us will get influenza (even with the ’flu vaccine being widely available) and between 400 and 500 will die either “with” or “because of” this virus.

Around 30 percent of our premature deaths will involve cancer and many of those will be associated with lack of early detection, alcohol and an unwillingness to seek help. At the other end of life we have thousands of babies born each year with foetal alcohol syndrome; suffering that we could surely ameliorate with the right spending and education for pregnant women.

The UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, to which New Zealand is a signatory, says “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth”.  In New Zealand, we have suddenly decided that every life is of incredible value and yet we ignore this declaration. Justice Minister  Andrew Little looked uncommonly gleeful when changing the abortion law and telling Kiwis that they did not deserve a say through a referendum. There were 13,282 unborn children who lost their lives in 2018 in our life-valuing nation. It is also more than ironic that in this year’s elections, when we are desperate to save every life, we will be voting on euthanasia.

Turning to suicide, a very credible US study has concluded that the correlation between unemployment and suicide is that for every 1 percent increase in unemployment there is a 21 per 100,000 increase in suicides. In New Zealand, brilliant mental well-being campaigners like Mike King and Paul Whatuira have struggled to get even a sideways (excuse the pun) glance from government to support their wonderful work. If we truly value life as we now seem to have chosen to do, these two men and others like them should never have to ask again. We are all touched by suicide (my birth dad’s choice of exit was a shotgun to the head); it is time to do ALL that we can.

John Donne was brilliantly right: “Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

I miss my parents and many others. We are right to take a strong stand to value life and be against premature death. What we should now ask of our leaders is that they be consistent and place equal value on the risks, both physical and mental, for all people. One of the important roles of teachers in a crisis situation is to hear students’ questions and concerns with an open mind and allow them to work their way through things. Suppressing this process can only lead to conformity for the sake of it and a deep sense of helplessness.

Coster: a masterclass in fudging

So the police are belatedly having second thoughts about the roadblocks set up by iwi vigilantes. But it’s several weeks too late, and even now Police Commissioner Andrew Coster can’t bring himself to categorically state what is obvious to everyone  – namely, that the checkpoints are illegal – or make a commitment that they will be removed.

Interviewed on radio this morning, Coster floundered as he tried to justify what plainly cannot be justified. He indicated that the police would be more actively involved in what are euphemistically called “community checkpoints” but left listeners unclear as to whether they would be allowed to continue.

In the meantime, checkpoints that were originally justified on the basis that they were protecting vulnerable Maori in remote places, such as the Far North and the East Coast, have materialised at locations where there’s no such justification, such as Maketu in the Bay of Plenty, where a Mongrel Mob member reportedly prevented a 70-year-old man from going to buy milk.

The figleaf of justification is further diminished now that health authorities are making real headway against Covid-19, meaning the risk of infection is being reduced by the day. Yet the checkpoints remain. This gives a clue to their real purpose, which has less to do with keeping elderly Maori safe than with asserting Maori control and defying the law to do anything about it.

Challenged on whether the checkpoints were illegal, Coster took refuge in bureaucratic flannel. He said while it was understandable that local communities were concerned about the coronavirus, they were not “specifically authorised” to undertake “checkpoint-type activity”. That’s a masterful bit of fudging.  

His rationalisation seems to be that police were willing to tolerate checkpoints at the outset, but the situation has changed now that the risk of widespread infection has receded. That’s a convenient way of retrospectively justifying the dangerous precedent the police created by allowing Northland activist Hone Harawira to go ahead without any mandate or authority. (It bears repeating that Harawira lost his parliamentary seat in 2014 and was roundly rejected by Maori voters again in 2017, raising questions about who, if anyone, he represents.)  

The time for the police to act firmly was weeks ago, at the outset. Why they failed to step in is unclear. Timidity? Misplaced cultural sensitivity?

And we still don’t know whether the checkpoints will be disbanded. Coster said the police were now “actively working to ensure that there is a police presence or indeed preferably that the checkpoints cease because the risk to our communities is lower”. More fudging.

On Morning Report, Corin Dann put it to Coster that residents of Muriwai Beach, near Auckland, were concerned about a possible influx of outsiders once the country goes to Level 3 and asked what the police would do if Muriwai locals – whom  I guess are overwhelmingly Pakeha – took matters into their own hands and established a roadblock.

His reply was a masterpiece of bureaucrat-speak. “Level 4 controls have aligned with the way various communities have gone about trying to manage movement that is inappropriate. But we cannot have communities running checkpoints preventing movement that is permitted under whatever level we’re in.” He went on to say police would ensure that “people who are entitled to use the road are free to do that”.

Interpret that how you will, but I took it to mean the police would not look favourably at any attempt to set up a checkpoint at Muriwai. So why is it apparently okay at Maketu? And when, exactly, did the police decide that people’s freedom of movement shouldn’t be infringed? Form your own conclusions.

The one thing most people would heartily agree with Coster on was his statement that “it’s not in anyone’s interests to let things escalate to the point where you have a bigger problem than you started with”. Er, precisely.

Meanwhile, he’s warning that the police will crack down on anyone deemed to be travelling beyond their permitted area once we go to Level 3. “Our message is very clear,” Coster told Mike Hosking on NewstalkZB. Except that it isn’t. The police talk tough when it comes to pulling errant motorists into line but tip-toe around people who blatantly defy their authority.

Only New Zealanders can judge Ardern

The latest edition of the left-leaning American monthly magazine The Atlantic includes a piece about Jacinda Ardern that might be described as fulsome. Most journalists wrongly use this word as a synonym for extravagantly generous, as in “fulsome praise”. But strictly speaking, fulsome means nauseatingly sycophantic or excessive. To be truly fulsome, the praise must be laid on so thickly that the automatic reaction is to screw your nose up at the excess of it all.

Journalist Uri Friedman pretty much satisfies that requirement with his profile of our prime minister. The tone is set by the headline: New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet. The following blurb carries on in similar vein, declaring that “Jacinda Ardern’s leadership style, focused on empathy, isn’t just resonating with her people; it’s putting the country on track for success against the coronavirus.”

Friedman writes: “Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.”

Make no mistake, Friedman dug deep before reaching these conclusions. His principal source seems to have been Helen Clark, Ardern’s mentor and former boss – a thoroughly objective observer, in other words.

Clark told Friedman that New Zealanders feel that Ardern “doesn’t preach at them; she’s standing with them”. She continued: “They may even think, Well, I don’t quite understand why [the government] did that, but I know she’s got our back. There’s a high level of trust and confidence in her because of that empathy.”

The other source quoted in Friedman’s article, an American who’s described as an international relations scholar at Victoria University and former US Defense Department official under the Obama administration, largely echoes Clark’s assessment. “She [Ardern] doesn’t peddle in misinformation; she doesn’t blame-shift; she tries to manage everyone’s expectations at the same time [as] she offers reassuring notes,” Friedman quotes Van Jackson as saying in an email. “She uses the bully pulpit to cue society toward our better angels—‘Be kind to each other’ and that kind of thing. I think that’s more important than people realise and does trickle down into local attitudes.”

Friedman goes on to cite Ardern’s “informal and informative” Facebook Live chats. “During a session conducted in late March, just as New Zealand prepared to go on lockdown, she appeared in a well-worn sweatshirt at her home (she had just put her toddler daughter to bed, she explained) to offer guidance ‘as we all prepare to hunker down’.”

Later in the article, he writes: “In a more recent Facebook Live, one of Ardern’s staffers walked into her office just as she was launching into a detailed explanation of what life would look like once the government began easing its lockdown. ‘Oh look, it’s Leroy!’ she exclaimed, assuring viewers that he was in her ‘work bubble’. A children’s toy was visible just behind her desk. The scene seemed apt for an era in which work and life are constantly colliding.”

That these folksy-sounding interludes may have been orchestrated to reinforce Ardern’s media image doesn’t appear to have occurred to Friedman. (I’m not saying they were, but a little journalistic scepticism might be in order.) He might also have noted the conspicuous placement of a photo of Michael Joseph Savage on a shelf behind her in a televised speech from her office in the Beehive. It would mean nothing to an American journalist, of course, but it would resonate with many New Zealanders, subtly conveying the impression that Ardern has inherited the mantle of New Zealand’s revered first Labour prime minister – the man entrenched in political mythology as the saviour who hauled the country out of the depths of the Great Depression.

For the record, I think Ardern has done a pretty remarkable job handling the Covid-19 emergency. At her daily press conferences she comes across as composed, assured and personable. There’s little hint of the immense pressure her government is under.

Considering that only three years ago she was a newly installed deputy leader of the opposition with no experience in government, still less any preparation for the demands of leading a country through not one but three major political crises (the Christchurch mosque attacks, the Whakaari/White Island eruption and now this), her coolness and apparent decisiveness under pressure is almost preternatural.

Moreover, I don’t believe her affability (or as Ardern would pronounce it, affabilidy) is phony. I don’t think anyone could fake that charm for all this time, and under all this intense scrutiny.

Neither do I doubt her sincerity. But when all is said and done, she’s a politician and will do whatever works for her. In her case that means oozing empathy, appearing on Facebook Live in a grungy sweatshirt and smiling a lot (even when what she’s saying isn’t particularly cheerful, a habit she may have picked up from Clark). Her response to the mosque attacks made her a global media superstar, and naturally she’s going to play to that strength.

Even so, Friedman has allowed his admiration for Ardern to override any sense of journalistic detachment. He could have approached any number of New Zealand sources for a more measured assessment of Ardern, but that’s probably not what The Atlantic and its readers want. Journalists (even those on The Atlantic) love stereotypes, and the image the world media have built around Ardern is that of a warm, caring Madonna.

The only acknowledgment that New Zealanders are not unanimously enamoured of the prime minister comes when Van Jackson suggests that Ardern, like Barack Obama, is “polarising at home [while] popular abroad”. It’s the most perceptive observation in the piece; Friedman would have done well to take note of it.

There have been other articles in a similar vein. CNN carried an item headlined Lessons in leadership: New Zealand’s virus response which highlighted Ardern’s announcement that the Easter Bunny had been declared an essential worker – a bit of Kiwi whimsy bound to appeal to those accustomed to thinking of politics as staid and humour-free. A column in the Financial Times headlined Arise Saint Jacinda, a leader for our troubled times (was a subversive headline-writer taking the piss?) described Ardern as “a model of compassionate leadership”. London-based New Zealand freelance journalist Laura Walters suggested Ardern’s “clear and decisive” leadership made Boris Johnson look floundering and ineffectual. Meanwhile, back at home, Stuff columnist Sue Allen, whose background is in PR (or as they prefer to call it now, “communications”), wrote that Ardern’s daily press conferences were “appointment viewing”. (Allen also praised the clarity of the government’s pandemic messages, but in fact they were – and still are – often fuzzy, ambiguous and inconsistent.) And of course there was that piece in the Washington Post by the paper’s Beijing bureau chief, New Zealander Anna Fifield, which portrayed the government under Ardern as showing the way in the fight against the coronavirus.

There’s a common factor here. Many of the journalists cooing with approval are young(ish) women, like Ardern. It would hardly be surprising if they felt an affinity with her and wanted her to succeed. The same is probably true of the female journalists in the Wellington press gallery, which may explain the largely uncritical coverage Ardern gets domestically. The old journalistic notion that reporters should try to distance themselves emotionally from their subject has been suspended.

But an additional factor comes into play when the journalists are outsiders. Many overseas journalists’ perceptions of Ardern are coloured by their disdain for their own leaders. They look at Ardern – young, female, left-wing, intelligent, articulate, empathetic (that word again) and attuned to concerns like climate change and multiculturalism – and lament that their fellow Americans (or Brits, or Australians, or whatever) are too dumb or racist or myopic to elect someone like her. Behind every homage to Ardern penned by a star-struck journalist from overseas, there’s a sense of hurt and resentment that they’re saddled with leaders they see as yesterday’s politicians – male, stale, pale and worst of all, conservative.

New Zealanders lap all this up, of course. Friedman’s article was reported in the New Zealand media as if it were the voice of God. We love to be noticed, and never more so than when other countries look up to us. (After decades of sheep jokes from across the Tasman, it’s taken as the ultimate compliment that many Australians, especially those from the achingly woke inner-city suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, gaze longingly at our prime minister and fervently wish she were in The Lodge in Canberra instead of Scott Morrison. They just know that Jacinda would never have gone to Hawaii on holiday while her country was burning.)

But while we may feel a warm glow reading these adulatory appraisals of Ardern in the foreign media, they don’t amount to a hill of beans, as she must know. Because ultimately, it’s only what New Zealanders think of their leader that counts.

Years ago, I stopped being a judge in the New Zealand newspaper awards because I reasoned that the only people in a position to know whether a paper was doing a good job were the people who read it every day, 52 weeks a year – not a group of outsiders making their decisions based on what the paper considered were its four best issues of the year. The same applies to prime ministers. Only New Zealanders are entitled to decide whether Ardern is doing a good job.

There was a parallel of sorts in the 1980s and 90s, when extravagant praise was showered on Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson by overseas admirers of their economic reforms. While I supported many of those changes, it jarred with me that Douglas and Richardson were lionised on the international conference circuit. The reforms may have looked great when seen from the glass towers of New York and London, but the economic shock and dislocation experienced in New Zealand led to a far less sanguine view at home. That explains why Jim Bolger, noting Richardson's unpopularity, came to regard her as a liability and sacked her as Finance Minister.

But back to that Friedman piece. Arguably his biggest mistake was the premature assumption that Ardern and her government have shown the way to beat Covid-19. While that assessment may yet prove to be true, it’s almost certainly coloured by the writer’s obvious liking for Ardern and his desire for her to succeed. But defeating the disease is one thing; dealing with the economic mayhem created in the process is a potentially much tougher challenge. And in the end, all the glowing reports from overseas journalists will count for nothing, because only New Zealanders will be in a position to judge how well Ardern has done.