Police swoop on hateful bulldozer

 I was going to blog on this but Stephen Franks and the Free Speech Coalition have done it for me. Stephen’s statement draws attention to yet another of the multiple attacks being mounted on freedom of expression. (Note the Stuff story’s warning about an “offensive image”. Good grief.)

A complaint regarding an allegedly “offensive and racist” sign led to a visit from the police. The Marlborough man was ordered to cover the sign. Under what power? There is no offence of causing people to be offended – yet. We can thank our forebears for the essential principle that freedom of expression means nothing if it does not protect the speaker from those claiming to be offended. The handwritten sign was perfectly legal. 

Free Speech Coalition spokesperson Stephen Franks says “Whoever took this 'initiative' in the police should be told to pull their head in. The definition of a free country is being able to express your opinion on your own property without having cops knocking at your door.

“The way to deal with a sign you don’t like is to make your own sign, not call the police.

“The council claim this sign breached a bylaw against road signage clutter. That is patent nonsense. It was no more distracting than graffiti, and much less than the numerous Marlborough signs desperately seeking patrons for cellar doors, restaurants and accommodation. The assertion is a serious abuse of Council power, without regard to the protection for free speech in the NZ Bill of Rights Act.  

"I was in Parliament when we considered Council powers. With Nandor Tanczos, I managed to have the Local Government Act amended to prohibit by-laws which conflict with the Bill of Rights. The sign is not 'threatening, abusive or insulting,' which is the threshold for our offence of Racial Disharmony, in the Human Rights Act.”

“Is this is a trial run for police power to crush ‘non-crime hate incidents'  - a UK practice? Our useless Human Rights Commission is now chaired by an imported UK Corbyn acolyte, here to help Minister Little bring in his hate-speech law. FSC fears that our HRC will seek police powers to investigate, record and threaten people for ‘incidents of hate’ that are nevertheless legal. 
 
"This was ruled out by the Royal Commission on Hate Speech Laws for the very reason that such a practice is a massive, unwarranted expansion of police powers over people’s ability to speak freely. Minister Little, what do you say about the police harassment of the Marlborough Man?" 

Amen to all that.

On Magic Talk and Maori wards

[UPDATE: Media outlets are confirming today that Sean Plunket has left Magic Talk amid the familiar, ritualistic "I would like to thank Sean for his contribution to the station" bromides. Nothing in the Mediaworks statement allays the misgivings outlined in this piece.] 

Where do I start? Okay, let’s begin with Sean Plunket.

Reports suggest the Magic Talk host has been, at the very least, put on gardening leave while his employers consider his future. This follows the sacking of John Banks for not challenging a caller who said Maori were a Stone Age people.

The self-anointed arbiters of what’s permissible on air, such as Duncan Greive of The Spinoff and Hayden Donnell of RNZ’s Mediawatch – both of whom are dancing, metaphorically speaking, on Banks’ grave – now assert the right to decide what line talkback hosts should take. Whatever this is, it’s not free speech.

Attacks on freedom of expression are coming from multiple directions: from a government that proposes to place new limits (conveniently vague at this stage, so as not to cause too much alarm) around what people may say on subjects such as race and religion; from woke vigilantes in mainstream and social media who campaign for the defenestration of non-woke broadcasters; and from cowed media bosses and corporate advertisers who show no commitment or loyalty to the values of the free, capitalist society in which they operate, and for whom defence of democratic values is less important than winning brownie points on left-leaning social media platforms.  

It was inevitable that with Banks gone, the vigilantes would be emboldened to go after Plunket – not for anything he’s said or done lately, but for historical transgressions. The existence of even one right-wing talkback host is an affront to the avenging angels of wokedom, who won’t be content until ideological homogeneity applies across the entire media.

In Magic FM and its owner, Mediaworks, they picked a company that was unlikely to put up much of a fight in defence of free speech. Mediaworks’ television arm, Three, has long been captured by the woke left – a fact apparent to anyone watching Newshub’s 6pm News or The Project – and its radio holdings consist almost entirely of music stations. Plunket must feel very isolated and vulnerable.

And I’m sorry, but I have to take issue here with something David Cumin of the Free Speech Coalition said recently about the Banks sacking. Cumin rightly rebuked Vodafone, Spark and Kiwibank not only for pulling their advertising from Magic Talk but for threatening to use their commercial power to influence the station’s future choice of hosts. But he also said, of Banks’ firing: “On the face of it, this seems to be a private company making a choice about who it employs, which it has every right to do” (the italics are mine).

I agree only partly. Companies operating in the field of news and current affairs have a responsibility not shared by purveyors of other commodities. As shapers of public opinion and providers of information of vital public interest, the news media perform a role central to the functioning of democracy.  This imposes obligations of fairness, accuracy and balance; but as long as we profess to be a free and open society, it also requires them to reflect the full spectrum of public opinion. 

So while it may be true in a general sense that companies  are entitled to employ whoever they like, in the news media this right is tempered by public interest considerations. Old-style media companies understood this and took their role very seriously; it was ingrained in the industry culture. I doubt that this remains true in 2021, when the traditional media business model has been blown to pieces and the focus is on survival.

Media companies must also be prepared to stand up to bullying advertisers, which brings me to a relevant anecdote. In the late 1980s, not long after I became editor of The Dominion, the chief executive of the newly corporatised Telecom – then the paper’s biggest advertiser – objected to the tone of the coverage his company was getting in our business pages and pulled all its ads. The boycott tore a gaping hole in our budget - this at a time when trading conditions were tough already - and caused the advertising manager to have conniptions. Pressure was applied on the board of INL, the Dom's parent company. But Mike Robson, then the managing director of INL and a seasoned newspaper man, backed the paper and stood firm. Our coverage of Telecom’s affairs continued unchanged and in due course, the company’s advertising resumed.

Would the same happen today? I’m not so sure. The general manager of Mediaworks, Cam Wallace, came from Air New Zealand – a corporate culture far removed from that of news and current affairs. Would a Magic FM manager be confident that Wallace would back him if a big advertiser tried to dictate the choice of hosts or their editorial line? Hmmm.

So John Banks' exchange with his caller about "Stone Age" Maori offended people. I found it offensive too (as well as plain stupid), but that’s one of the prices we pay for living in a free society. The people we have most to fear from are not shoot-from-the-lip provocateurs like Banks, but the authoritarian zealots who insist that they be silenced. The threat these censorious prigs pose to a democratic society is potentially far greater and more far-reaching than anything a bigoted talkback host might say to his limited band of followers. As the British columnist Bernard Levin once put it: “Any legally permissible view, however repugnant, is less dangerous promulgated than banned.” 

I constantly hear and read things that offend me, but I don’t react by insisting I should be protected from them. All I demand is that there should be room in the public conversation for a multitude of competing voices. That’s how democracy works: by exposing people to a range of views and trusting them to make up their own minds.

Trust; that’s a crucial factor here. The Left has always had a problem with trust. Leftist apparatchiks fret that people who are left to make up their own minds will make the wrong choices, so seek to lead them by limiting the range of ideas and opinions they are exposed to – which is why freedom of expression is such a crucial battleground in the so-called culture wars.

But of course there are other looming threats to liberal democracy, and none more urgent than Nanaia Mahuta’s proposal – disgracefully kept secret until the 2020 election was safely in the bag, and now being bulldozed through Parliament under urgency– to impose Maori wards on city and district councils by removing voters’ right to veto them.

This idea is obnoxious and anti-democratic on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. It strips away the majority’s right to determine the form of local government representation, it provides Maori (or more correctly, part-Maori) candidates with a short cut to power by bypassing the need to win popular support, and it will result in the election of candidates who feel responsible only to constituents who claim Maori ancestry. In all these respects, it subverts democracy. 

It also promises to solidify the Left's grip on local government, since Maori candidates mostly lean left. If there were such a historical figure as Gerry Mander, he’d be quietly whistling with admiration. 

The Maori wards proposition is built on a deliberate and dishonest falsehood. The argument goes that because there are not as many Maori councillors as the promoters of Maori wards think there should be, the only possible explanation is that a racist voting system is loaded against them.

But as Don Brash has pointed out: “The proportion of councillors who identify as Maori has been steadily increasing in recent years, and now almost exactly matches the proportion of Maori New Zealanders in the total population – 13.5% of all councillors were Maori in 2019, while according to the 2018 census Maori New Zealanders made up 13.7% of the total population.”

In other words, there is no deficit when it comes to Maori representation in local government. Democracy has done its job admirably by ensuring that Maori representation is almost exactly proportionate to the number of Maori in the general population. 

And even if that weren’t the case, the answer wouldn’t lie in rigging the system to favour Maori candidates. All that’s required is for more Maori to stand for office, and for other Maori to support them; or as an exasperated Kelvin Davis put it following council elections in 2016, “to get off their arses and vote”.

In fact the record has shown time and time again that where good Maori candidates put themselves forward, non-Maori voters too will support them and propel them into office. That rebuts the specious proposition that a racist system is loaded against them.

Here’s another canard: the reason voters have rejected Maori wards whenever the issue has been put to a referendum is that voters are racist. But I don’t believe for a moment that people vote against Maori wards because they don’t want Maori councillors. They do it because they intuitively understand that democracy is supposed to be colour-blind, and that candidates should get elected on the basis of merit rather skin colour. Voters get that, even if the Year Zero cultists in the government don’t.

Yet another patently false argument is that since voters are not able to veto geographically based wards, allowing them that right in respect of Maori wards can only be racially discriminatory. But the crucial difference is that geographical wards are created and arranged for reasons of administrative efficiency and equality (as far as possible) of representation. That has long been the case, not just in New Zealand but in democracies the world over. Exclusive Maori wards introduce another, entirely different, dynamic. It’s a huge leap from geographical wards to race-based ones, and I’m sure Mahuta is smart enough to know it.

Oh, and here’s another thing. If I were Maori, I would regard the creation of Maori wards as patronising in the extreme, since it assumes that Maori are incapable of getting elected without a leg-up.  As Simon Bridges said in Parliament, it’s an insult to suggest that Maori need special treatment.

The sad thing is that we can expect all these valid and cogent arguments against Maori wards to be dismissed as simply racist. Maori activists and their accomplices in the woke left have so distorted the definition of this word that they fling it at anyone who opposes their agenda, even for the most honourable and defensible reasons.

By promoting a fundamentally anti-democratic idea that supporters of genuine democracy feel compelled to oppose, the activists force their opponents into positions where they can then be conveniently dismissed as being motivated by blind prejudice. To paraphrase Edmund Blackadder, it's a tactic so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel. 

 

Thrashing a lame dog

As 2021 gradually ramps up politically, Newshub’s 6pm news bulletin has pretty much picked up where it left off in 2020 – that is to say, functioning as the government’s unofficial propaganda arm.

An example was its 6pm news bulletin on Monday, which opened with a folksy announcement of “a challenge for the team of five million” – as if this was some exciting new version of Top Town – and an invitation to viewers to help “save the planet”. What followed was essentially an exhortation to get behind the Climate Change Commission’s proposals for reducing carbon emissions. We came together to save the country from Covid-19, the message went; now we can do it again. Government spin doctors must have danced with delight.  

The supposed news item was presented in the form of a rallying call. It was couched in “let’s all do our bit” tones, rather as the BBC might have urged Londoners to keep their windows blacked out during the Blitz.  We were told that while the heavy lifting in the fight against global warming would be done by government and business, “there are lots of changes we [i.e. ordinary people - the plebs] can make”. There was no mention of the potentially massive economic disruption and upheaval that’s likely to result from the commission’s proposals. That might have frightened the punters.

The item was interspersed with a familiar Newshub speciality: namely, video clips of experts (at least we must assume they were presented as experts) explaining the significance of the climate change proposals. This would have been all very well if the talking heads had been identified, so that we could assess the merit of what they were saying, but they weren’t. For all we know they could have been paper-hangers or herd testers.

One “expert” was identified, but wrongly. Professor Bronwyn Hayward of Canterbury University – a cheerleader for the commission’s recommendations – was described as a scientist. In fact she’s a political scientist, a nonsense term that seeks to confer an aura of authority on an academic discipline that’s rife with ideological bias and totally devoid of scientific certainty.

The item ended with reporter Laura Tupou urging us to support the “overall kaupapa” (which means principle or policy, although that wasn’t explained) of a “clean green future for Aotearoa”. This wasn’t journalism; it was a PR exercise, made worse by Newshub’s expectation that viewers should know the meaning of a Maori word that only a small minority would be familiar with. Perhaps you could call it PR with a side-dish of social engineering.   

But wait, there was more. Further into the bulletin we found political editor Tova O’Brien indulging in her favourite sport: National-baiting. The tone of her item on National’s first caucus meeting of the year was sneering, her questions to Judith Collins (“How many Maori MPs are there in your caucus?”) and National MPs freighted with taunts and provocations.

I wonder whether Collins will eventually adopt a strategy for dealing with O’Brien’s mischief. “Bugger off, Tova, you’re wasting my time” might be a good start. Viewers would probably applaud, regardless of their feelings toward the National leader.

O’Brien thus carried on where she left off last year. But here’s the thing: the National Party, for now at least, is little more than a sideshow. It’s a party in abject disarray after the humiliating election result that O’Brien’s relentlessly disparaging coverage on the campaign trail helped to bring about.

What National is doing (or more accurately isn’t doing) isn’t news. With only 33 seats in a 120-seat parliament, it exercises no real power – so why is Newshub’s political editor expending so much energy on it? It's like thrashing a lame dog.

The real meat of political journalism is in what’s being decided on the ninth floor of the Beehive. That really does matter. But here we observe a strange dichotomy. The same Tova O’Brien who’s fearless when tormenting the floundering National Party purrs like a kitten when reporting on Jacinda Ardern and her ministers. The contrast in the tone of her coverage is striking.

On Wednesday night, for example, she uncritically parroted the government’s PR line on the release of the Covid-19 vaccine, extravagantly declaring that “New Zealand has struck gold” while conveniently ignoring concerns about contradictory political messages on the timing of the vaccination programme and false promises from Chris Hipkins to the effect that New Zealand “would be at the front of the queue”. Who needs highly paid press secretaries when the government has O’Brien spinning on its behalf?

We’re now told it will be the latter half of the year before most New Zealanders get their jabs, which is probably fine with most people, given that the pandemic appears – for the time being, at least – to be under control. But are we really expected to believe that a journalist who repeatedly holds Judith Collins’ feet to the fire over confected, inconsequential trifles can’t think of a few awkward questions to direct at Jacinda Ardern about the government’s handling of issues that actually matter, such as Covid-19, climate change, poverty and the housing crisis? We hear a great deal about the fashionable notion that journalists should hold the powerful to account, but there’s precious little evidence of it happening in Newshub’s political coverage.

Oh, and one more thing. On the same night that Newshub urged us to join the Great Leap Forward into a zero-emissions future, The Project (which follows the news on the same channel) featured an interview with Dave Grohl from American rock band the Foo Fighters.

Nothing startling about that, you might think, except that the interviewer was the prime minister’s partner, Clarke Gayford. No explanation was offered for Gayford’s involvement in the show, other than that he was a fan of the band (which was soon apparent from his star-struck demeanour), and there was nothing to suggest the interview couldn’t have been done just as well – and possibly a lot better – by any of the three regular panellists. So what was he doing there?

I’m old-fashioned enough to think that the relationship between media organisations and politicians should be kept at arm’s length, and that principle should extend to politicians’ intimate partners. The ideological leanings of The Project team are hardly a secret to regular viewers, but Gayford’s interviewing gig on the show suggested a connection altogether too cosy and incestuous for comfort. 

In New Zealand today

■ Susie Ferguson is a disgrace. Interviewing Hone Harawira on Morning Report this morning about the police decision to shut down iwi checkpoints on highways in the Far North, she seemed at pains to avoid even the remotest hint that the checkpoints weren’t legitimate in the first place.

I would have been content if she had asked Harawira just one crucial question – namely, by what authority did he and his fellow activists set up the checkpoints? Harawira holds no public office and is accountable to no one. He has no public mandate. On the contrary, Maori voters in Te Tai Tokerau rejected him in the 2014 and 2017 general elections. He leads a far-left political splinter group called the Mana Movement, which won a resounding 0.1 per cent of the party vote in the last election it contested. So who or what gives Harawira the right to stop traffic on public roads?

My beef, however, isn’t with Harawira. He’s a seasoned political opportunist who will seize every chance to assert Maori autonomy, which is what the checkpoints are about. He owes the public nothing.

Ferguson, on the other hand, occupies a position of public influence and authority which she regularly abuses. This morning she ingratiated herself with Harawira by asking soft, leading questions (for example, “Are you concerned that the government is making decisions that are not in the best interests of Maori as regards this current outbreak?”, to which there was only going to be one answer) and murmuring assent to his replies.

The crucial question raised by unauthorised iwi checkpoints is this: either New Zealand is a society based on the rule of law, in which authority is exercised by people who are publicly accountable, or it’s a free-for-all where anyone with sufficient audacity (which Harawira has by the bucketload) can claim rights not available to others, such as pulling motorists over and disrupting traffic on the pretext that they want to give people information that’s freely available elsewhere. But Morning Report and Susie Ferguson delicately tiptoe around such inconvenient issues.

■ Duncan Greive, founder and managing editor of the left-wing news and commentary site The Spinoff, has unblushingly outed himself as an enemy of free speech.

In a commentary on John Banks’ sacking by Magic Talk, Greive suggests the station’s boss, former Air New Zealand executive Cam Wallace, should either restrain Magic Talk’s other conservative talkback hosts – he names Peter Williams and Sean Plunket – or “ease them out”. The problem, evidently, is that they express and invite right-wing opinions, which makes Magic Talk something of an outlier in an otherwise overwhelmingly woke media environment.

Greive then goes on to say: “… This is not just a question for Wallace and his board. It’s a question for us, for New Zealand. Because the views espoused by Banks and his caller, dismal as they are, remain out there and available on any number of platforms. His axing doesn’t change that.”

Translation: New Zealand will never achieve ideological purity until it’s purged of dissenting conservative opinions. Greive laments that such opinions persist, but there’s a remedy: the spittle-flecked, drooling knuckle-draggers who hold them should be denied a public platform. How very open and inclusive.

He goes on to sneer not only at talkback audiences but writers of letters to the editor as well, observing that such people are “older and further from the centre of society’s gravity than they once were”. Translation: old people should shut up and stand aside in favour of younger, wiser heads.

Well, at least we now know exactly where we stand with Greive and The Spinoff. He wishes to assert the right of free speech for himself but deny it to others.

■ Wellington’s abject humiliation continues. Earlier this week, sewage flowed in the central city after an ancient pipe burst. Yesterday a geyser erupted in the Aro Valley; same cause.

Interviewed by Corin Dann on Morning Report this morning, mayor Andy Foster made a valiant effort to sound confident and in command, but he’s not fooling anyone. He talks as if the city’s epidemic of failing pipes took everyone by surprise, but hang on; Foster has been on the council since 1992, so can hardly plead ignorance of the city’s decay. What was he doing all that time?

Ageing infrastructure isn’t Wellington’s only problem. The city is burdened with an ineffectual mayor struggling to assert control over a fractious council dominated by shrill, woke harpies. Its finest public buildings lie empty and its most ambitious projects (the Shelly Bay development and the laughingly named Let’s Get Wellington Moving initiative) are bogged down by indecision, sclerosis and litigation.

How long will it be, I wonder, before the city’s long-suffering citizens – especially those old enough to remember prouder times – stage an insurrection?

Orwell saw this coming

 John Banks can be a hard man to defend, but defend him we must.

The former cabinet minister and mayor of Auckland has been banished in disgrace from radio station Magic Talk, where he was filling in for regular morning talkback host Peter Williams, after suggesting Maori were a Stone Age culture.

According to a report on the leftist news and commentary site The Spinoff, a caller identifying himself as Richard said Maori were genetically predisposed to crime, alcohol and educational under-performance. “Richard” said he was not interested in his children learning about Maoris’ Stone Age culture, to which Banks reportedly responded: “Your children need to get used to their Stone Age culture because if their Stone Age culture doesn’t change, these people will come through your bathroom window.”

The response was drearily predictable. Social media lynch mobs called for Banks’ head. Magic Talk advertisers Vodafone, Kiwibank and Spark virtually fell over each other in their eagerness to display their woke credentials by pulling their ads, while NZ Cricket joined the pile-on by threatening to review Magic Talk’s broadcast rights to Black Caps matches played in New Zealand.

I’m struggling to decide which was more objectionable: Banks’ statement or the nauseatingly sanctimonious platitudes from advertisers parading their commitment to “diversity and inclusion”.

Of course Banks issued the standard obligatory apology, in which he tried to shift responsibility for the furore onto his caller before acknowledging, almost as an afterthought, that he had made some negative generic comments about Maori “that could have been misconstrued as racist”.

None of this would have surprised anyone who has followed Banks’ turbulent career as a politician and radio host. He has a long history of running off at the mouth and making impulsive errors of judgment that he later had cause to regret. He seems unable to help himself. But Magic Talk management must have known this when they offered him the slot. They’re as culpable as he is.

The important question here is this: which poses the greater threat to our liberal, open democracy – Banks’ inflammatory statement, or the rush to shut him down? 

He expressed a provocative opinion that’s possibly shared by some of his listeners. Yanking him off air doesn’t get rid of the opinion. On the contrary, it can only accentuate the perception that freedom of speech is under attack, and intensify the resentment of those who feel excluded from the public conversation.

To put it another way, we have far more to fear from the prigs and bigots trying to silence him than we do from Banks himself. We live in a robust democracy that has demonstrated over many decades that it’s perfectly capable of dealing in a civilised way with contentious opinions. The free exchange of ideas is how democratic societies evolve and advance. What has changed is not the existence of such ideas, but the frightening insistence that they be stifled.  

This is happening with the connivance – indeed, encouragement – of virtue-signalling corporate advertisers, and more alarmingly with the enthusiastic backing of mainstream media outlets that should be manning the barricades in defence of free speech. The promiscuously loose use by reporters of subjective terms such as “racist”, a word for which there is no settled definition, is proof of the media’s abandonment of traditional journalistic principles.

Meanwhile, to their everlasting shame, gutless politicians, intimidated into silence by the venomous rhetoric of neo-Marxist activists, look the other way.

Both the range of subjects New Zealanders feel free to discuss, and the language they may use in discussing them, are being constantly narrowed down. George Orwell saw all this coming, but if he were still alive I don’t imagine he would derive any satisfaction from seeing how right he was.

Wall of Sound, or Wall of Noise?

So Phil Spector has died. I was on holiday on a remote part of the coast with limited internet access at the time, so couldn’t have read the obituaries even if I’d wanted to. But let me guess that they almost unanimously hailed him as a flawed prodigy.

They would also, I imagine, have mentioned the so-called Wall of Sound – the recording technique Spector pioneered, in which masses of musicians were packed into the recording studio to create a dense, multi-layered aural barrage. I mean, why use only one drummer, one guitarist, one bassist and one keyboard player when you could have three or four playing each instrument in unison?

With Spector in the control room, the dial was permanently set at 11. That was supposedly his unique genius, and it led to preposterously hyperbolic comparisons with Wagner.

To be fair, lots of people admired him. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, for one, was in awe of Spector and yearned to emulate his sound, to the point that it became an obsession that almost literally drove Wilson mad. But if you ask me (and admittedly, no one has; the phone has inexplicably been silent), Spector didn’t produce a Wall of Sound so much as a Wall of Noise.

It was surely no coincidence that he was at his creative and commercial peak in the 1960s, an era when the American taste for bigness and excess was also evident in the grotesquely large, ostentatious cars rolling off Detroit assembly lines. Spector’s records were the aural equivalent of a 1960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with its enormous bulk, acres of vulgar chrome and tailfins that were both outlandish and utterly pointless.  

It has always puzzled me that Brian Wilson measured himself against Spector and found himself wanting. Musically as well as physically, Wilson was a colossus compared with his pint-sized idol. I remain unconvinced that the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is the perfect album everyone says it was (although it included God Only Knows, one of the most exquisite pop songs ever written); but though Pet Sounds was supposedly influenced by Spector, it had subtlety and nuance in abundance. These are not qualities associated with Spector, any more than they are associated with the Cadillac de Ville (or, for that matter, the Harley-Davidson Electra-Glide, which came from the same era).

And here’s another thing. At the same time as Spector was being lionised for making noisy, overblown, bombastic music in LA, British producers and musical arrangers whom virtually no one has heard of – people such as Johnny Franz and Ivor Raymonde – were creating records which, while just as imposing sonically, also showed finesse, restraint and an appreciation of light and shade. Just listen to any of the big hits by the Walker Brothers or Dusty Springfield –  songs such as Make It Easy On Yourself, The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, All I See Is You, I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten – and you might see what I mean. These are big, powerful songs, but they resonate emotionally in a way that Spector’s records never did.

By way of contrast, check out River Deep – Mountain High, by Ike and Tina Turner. Spector regarded this 1966 recording as his magnum opus, the ultimate expression of his talent, but to my ears it’s a frenetic, undisciplined din with little to commend it other than its furious pace, noise and energy. (The original video’s worth watching, mind you.)

Spector was bitterly disappointed when River Deep tanked, peaking at No. 88 on the Billboard chart. Perhaps public taste had moved on by then; the 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville was notably more restrained than its predecessors, and all the better for it.

If it's a hate crime, where does the hate start?

Stuff reports today that someone damaged the Hatupatu rock, beside State Highway 1 near Atiamuri, with a sledgehammer. This could have been simply a mindless act of vandalism (God knows they’re common enough), but predictably, someone has suggested it was a hate crime.

I know the Hatupatu rock; I remember stopping there when our kids were little. They were familiar with the legend of Hatupatu, and how he hid in a cavity in the rock to escape Kurangaituku, the terrifying Bird Woman, because I had read them the story many times.

The hate crime theory has been advanced by South Waikato district councillor Arama Ngapo Lipscombe, who’s quoted as saying: “I am absolutely disgusted that anyone should choose to deface a wahi tapu site. It is a significant site that is part of our local and national history.

“It leads one to think that maybe this is a hate crime. A significant site to Maoridom has been deliberately attacked. There’s no other way to put it.”

Now it strikes me as a bit of leap to assume the vandalism was motivated by hatred, but perhaps we should consider that possibility. If indeed it was a “hate crime”, we need to ask how the putative hatred is being generated, and by whom.

Certainly the politics of race in New Zealand have become steadily more heated and polarising – not just between Pakeha and Maori, but also between the white majority and a few vociferous members (a small minority, as far as we can tell) of some immigrant communities.

Note that I say the politics of race rather than race relations, because relationships between people of different ethnicities in New Zealand – including Maori and Pakeha – remain overwhelmingly respectful and harmonious. But how long this will continue, when ideologically driven agitators are doing their best to create grievance and division, is a moot point.

It needs to be noted that the people dialling up the heat in the race debate are not hateful whites. The inflammatory rhetoric is coming from those who defame New Zealanders daily as racist oppressors and white supremacists.

To call it hate speech may be hyperbolic, but there’s no question which participants in the so-called culture wars are using language likely to incite ill-will and hostility. The danger is that the further this escalates, the greater the likelihood that inarticulate people who resent being harangued by incessant woke propaganda will decide to strike back in the only way they know how – for example, by attacking places and objects precious to Maori.

So while we can’t be sure the vandalism to the Hatupatu Rock was a hate crime, no one can rule out the possibility that it's a primitive backlash. The irony is that by jumping to the conclusion that it was a hate crime without any clear evidence, Arama Ngapo Lipscombe is guilty of cranking up the social tensions that make hate crimes more likely.