Why shouldn't ACT have a go? The Left's been at it for decades

David Seymour’s announcement that ACT may stand candidates in council elections triggered a discussion on Nick Mills’ talkback show on Newstalk ZB this morning about whether political parties should get involved in local government. But that mischievous genie escaped from the bottle a very long time ago.

The Labour Party has long regarded local politics as fertile ground, both at district and regional levels, and always fields a slate of Wellington City Council candidates with the party’s formidable organisational resources behind them.

Frank Kitts, Wellington’s longest-serving mayor (1956-74), was elected on the Labour ticket; so were Jim Belich and Fran Wilde. Four of the current councillors owe their loyalty to Labour, though only one (Teri O’Neill) acknowledges her allegiance in her profile on the council’s website.

Wellington Regional Council chair Daran Ponter is a Labour man too, as is Lower Hutt mayor Campbell Barry. So Labour is a powerful force in local government, though it largely flies under the radar in terms of public visibility.

Then there are the Greens. Wellington got its first Green councillor, Stephen Rainbow, way back in 1989. Rainbow has moved a long way politically since then, shifting to the libertarian right to the extent that the current government felt comfortable appointing him as chief human rights commissioner, but there has been a more-or-less constant Green Party presence at the Wellington council table in the past few decades – to say nothing of two disastrous Green mayors, Celia Wade-Brown and Tory Whanau (who is Green in all but official designation).

So what about the other side? For decades Wellington had the conservative Citizens’ and Ratepayers’ Association, which was widely viewed as a National Party proxy. Its main purpose was to keep Labour out of power, in which role it was often successful. Sir Michael Fowler was a popular Citizens’ mayor (1974-83) and the Citizens’ Association often commanded a majority around the council table. But Ian Lawrence (1983-86) was the last Citizens’ mayor and the Citizens’ Association now seems defunct, not having stood a candidate since 1997. National itself has never stood candidates in council elections.

So now ACT is thinking about having a go – and why not? We should brace ourselves for howls of outrage, but ACT would only be doing what the Left has done (and very effectively) for decades.

Polkinghorne unchastened

In the New Zealand Herald this morning, Steve Braunias reports on the opening of the inquest into the death of Pauline Hanna, wife of Auckland ophthalmologist Philip Polkinghorne.

The circumstances of her undignified death are well known, having been exhaustively reported when Polkinghorne went on trial last year for her murder. He was acquitted, but the law still requires that an inquest be held.

Braunias reports that before yesterday’s hearing, Polkinghorne “teased” the officer in charge of the murder investigation. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you’d be working at Countdown,” he told Detective Sergeant Chris Allen – the clear implication being that he didn’t deserve to keep his job as a cop.

We don’t know whether it was said with a smile or with malice, but either way it will probably confirm the impression the country had formed of Polkinghorne during the trial – namely, that he’s an arrogant prick with a massive sense of entitlement.

Most men in Polkinghorne’s situation, having had their appalling behaviour exposed during a sensational trial that generated headlines for weeks, would have felt chastened. They would have been relieved at the not guilty verdict, gratefully taken it as a win and left matters to rest rather than rake over the coals.

But not this raging egotist, apparently. He has scores to settle.

A lamentation for hard news photos and the people who took them

My wife’s not exactly an avid sports fan, but she was moved to remark on a brilliant Associated Press photo on the back page of today’s Wairarapa Times-Age. It shows New Zealand cricketer Kyle Jamieson flat on his back, staring goggle-eyed as the ball rolls away from him moments after he’s missed a crucial catch in the final of the 2025 Champions Trophy against India. The expression on his face registers shock, dismay and disbelief.

My wife commented that it was a terrific photo and I agreed. It suddenly occurred to me, looking at it, that the only really striking photos we see in the print media these days are of sport. The hard news picture, as it’s known in the trade, is almost a relic of the past.

The defining events of our time – the 1951 waterfront dispute, the Wahine disaster, the 1981 Springbok tour protests, to name just three – were captured forever on film by great photographers.

I had the honour and privilege of knowing some of them – people like Barry Durrant and John Selkirk at the Dominion, Phil Reid and Ian Mackley at the Evening Post. There are countless others I could mention.

They were hungry and competitive. They lived for big stories and would go to great lengths to get the right shot from the right angle at the right moment. The best of them had an almost uncanny ability to anticipate situations before they happened and strategically position themselves.

A famous example was the picture taken by Barry Durrant of the moment in 1968 when a blast of explosives blew away the last wall of rock in the underground tailrace connecting Lake Manapouri and Deep Cove – part of the Manapouri power project.

A party of dignitaries had assembled for the occasion but Durrant didn’t go for the obvious picture of cabinet minister Ralph Hanan pushing down the plunger to set off the explosion. Instead he turned his camera on the observers, hoping to capture the expressions on their faces.

He got more than that. The tunnellers had over-estimated the amount of explosives needed to do the job and the massive blast blew the safety helmets off the heads of the official party. Durrant was one of half a dozen photographers present but he was the only who got the shot of the shock wave blowing the VIPs’ hard hats off.

As news editor of the Dom in the 1980s, I could be confident that each day would produce at least one standout picture for the front page. There was fierce competition among the photographers (we had five or six) for the prestige of a front-page byline.

Now the old-school news photographer is an almost extinct species, like so many other casualties from the golden age of print (in fact almost literally extinct, since newspapers now use the pompous term “visual journalist”).

Reporters are expected to take their own pictures. Some do their best, but it’s not the same.

There are still a handful of skilled and dedicated news photographers around, but they are pitifully few. Our major newspapers are largely dependent on static or stock shots to illustrate their stories. You can go days, even weeks, without seeing an authentic hard news photo. Ones that make you mutter "wow", such as this morning's sports pic, are even rarer.

What happened? Some of the best photographers were “let go”, to use a ghastly euphemism, during the serial industry retrenchments that accompanied the shock of the digital revolution. I know of one who ended up working as a postie; another who bought a motel. They were a huge loss, one that accelerated the gradual and painful decline of newspapers.

 

A tip for Luxon: ignore your media coaches

Commenting on Christopher Luxon’s inability to express himself clearly and honestly, Stuff columnist Janet Wilson, a former National Party communications adviser, opined recently that the prime minister errs by concentrating on “talking points” – “learning by rote to a point where he is nothing but a talking robot” – and struggling to “meaningfully engage in conversation”.

But who’s at fault here? I suspect the reason politicians like Luxon get into trouble is that they rely far too much on media coaches. They are schooled to stick to pre-determined “talking points” which quickly become clichés and jargon that voters see straight through.

Luxon is hardly the first politician to fall into this trap. And though she’s harsh in her criticism of him, I believe people like Wilson (who runs her own media training firm) are part of the problem.

Communications advisers are a relatively recent phenomenon that has contaminated the political process by getting in between politicians and the public and blurring their message. They are obsessively risk-averse and wield altogether too much influence. Some politicians, and I suspect Luxon is one, become far too dependent on them and afraid to trust their own judgment and instincts (assuming they have any).

Previous generations of politicians didn’t have this problem; they spoke directly, said what they thought and were generally respected for it, even if people didn’t agree. Their message wasn’t filtered through layers of obfuscatory flim-flam.

Some politicians still operate that way. Winston Peters is an example and so is David Seymour. Chris Hipkins too gives the impression that he gives genuine and spontaneous responses to questions, though he’s politically far more astute than Luxon and much more nimble.

Of course there remains the possibility that the reason Luxon sounds shallow, unconvincing and unsure of himself is that he’s shallow, unconvincing and unsure of himself. Even so, he could hardly do any worse if he ignored whatever media advice he’s getting.

When principle sinks in a swamp of legalism

In a past life, many years ago, I informally sought advice from a highly respected Wellington lawyer, the late Sandra Moran, over a legal issue that had been weighing on my mind.

It involved what I thought was an important point of principle, and I vividly remember Sandra warning me off by saying, very emphatically: “It costs a lot of money to establish a point of principle.” I didn’t have a lot of money, so I didn’t proceed.

At the time, I was astonished by what Sandra said. Surely principles are at the heart of the law and should be promptly and decisively confirmed by the courts? Of course I was naïve. Judges are generally restricted to applying the law as it’s written. Points of principle may be established in the courts, but often only after years of legal argument.

I was reminded of that this morning while reading NZME court reporter Ric Stevens’ account in the New Zealand Herald of a case that has been dragging on for years and is still far short of resolution.

It’s a case that cries out for justice, but the law keeps getting in the way.

Ida Hawkins’ 16-year-old daughter, Colleen Burrows, was raped and murdered by a gang associate on a Hawke’s Bay riverbank in 1987. One of her killers, Sam Te Hei, served 31 years in prison. A younger co-offender was released in 1998.

After he was paroled, Te Hei succeeded in a claim against the Crown for breaches of his rights while in jail. He was awarded $17,664.

In such circumstances, the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (PVC) Act entitles victims of a crime to claim some or all of the money awarded to the criminal. Ida Hawkins did so and initially succeeded. She went to the Victims’ Special Claims Tribunal and was awarded $15,000 for emotional harm – paltry compensation for the anguish of losing a teenage daughter in appalling circumstances and then being harassed and intimidated by the Mongrel Mob, but at least she would have had the satisfaction of knowing Te Hei had been prevented from profiting out of his murderous act.

You can probably predict what happened next. Te Hei (or more precisely his lawyers) successfully appealed to the High Court on the basis that another piece of legislation – the Deaths by Accidents Compensation Act 1952 – didn’t create a right to damages for emotional harm, and this remedy was not available under the general law either.

Mrs Hawkins then went to the Court of Appeal, where her case was heard in the middle of last year. The court’s decision was released this week – too late for Mrs Hawkins, who died last July. In the meantime another daughter, Tracey Peka, obtained a court order allowing her to continue the legal fight.

Stevens’ story in the Herald describes the 34-page judgment from the Court of Appeal as “largely technical”. The veteran court reporter wrote: “It represented a win for the family in the sense that it upheld their appeal and kept their case alive, even as it found against some of their arguments.

“The court said that Hawkins did not have a claim under the Deaths by Accident Compensation Act for her emotional injury. Nor could she make a wrongful death claim under common law [law developed by the courts rather than decreed by Acts of Parliament], and the PVC Act did not provide a standalone basis for her claim either.

“However, the justices said: ‘We have … concluded that Mrs Hawkins may have a common law claim for her mental injury arising from the circumstances of the rape and death of her daughter Colleen. If she does, it appears that such a claim would be confined to exemplary damages.’ ”

Did the court then determine that Mrs Hawkins (or her family, given that she’s no longer alive) was entitled to Te Hei’s ill-gotten gains, or at least a share of them? Oh no, that’s not how the system works. The court referred the matter back to the Victims’ Special Claims Tribunal which had heard the case in the first place.

The appeal judges said they were sending the case back for reconsideration and suggested the tribunal might seek further evidence and call for written submissions. They noted that the case involved complex legal issues.

So here we are, five years after the decision that gave rise to Mrs Hawkins’ claim, and the case will again get swallowed up by the system. For how long? That’s anyone guess. Common law evolves at a glacial pace and we’re expected to just be patient while Their Honours deliberate.

To use the vernacular, the Court of Appeal judges kicked the can down the street - in fact possibly beyond that into the long grass.

There will be more dry legal argument and more lawyers’ fees. In the meantime Mrs Hawkins has died and I imagine costs will have more than eaten up any compensation she might have been able to look forward to had she lived. Indeed I would imagine that arguments over costs have the potential to keep the case grinding on even longer.

This seems a case of an important principle being lost in a swamp of nitpicking legalism. While judges and lawyers debate arcane points of law, a terrible injustice goes uncorrected.

Most reasonable people would have no difficulty deciding that Mrs Hawkins’ entitlement to compensation for harm and wrongdoing far outweighs that of her daughter’s murderer, but that’s not how the system works.

It should be simple, but it isn’t. Sandra Moran was right.

Marching blindly into the post-journalism era

Herewith, two unrelated (or perhaps not) examples of the insidious bias that pervades the mainstream Western media. Neither is necessarily of any great consequence on its own, but each is telling in its own way.

■ In a 470-word story on the jailing of former US senator Bob Menendez following his conviction on bribery and corruption charges, the BBC could find no room to mention that he was a senior Democrat.

You can be sure that if he was a Republican, i.e. a Trumpist, we would have been told in the first few lines.

The BBC’s story did mention that Menendez’s son was a Democratic congressman, but that was all.

Inadvertent oversight? Hmmm.

We were told that Menendez, who accepted bribes from foreign governments, notably Egypt, was a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – but still no mention of his party.

And if you clicked on a link to the BBC’s earlier story about his conviction last July, you learned that Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for Menendez to resign. But even then there was nothing to indicate that Schumer was talking about a member of his own party, and readers could have been excused for assuming Menendez was a Republican. 

The headline read Senator Bob Menendez found guilty in bribery scheme. It’s dollars to donuts that if he was from the other side of the aisle, it would have said: Republican senator found guilty in bribery scheme.

Only towards the bottom of that 687-word story was there any indication that Menendez was a Democrat, and even then it wasn’t explicit.  

There are two possible explanations here. One is that the BBC’s stories were written and edited by journalists so incompetent or amateurish that they didn’t think Menendez’s party affiliation was significant.

The other is that the BBC (which is taxpayer-funded and therefore has a special obligation to be politically neutral) decided the Democratic Party should be spared the embarrassment of being associated with a corrupt senator. Either explanation is unacceptable, but the second is the far more plausible one.

■ An Associated Press report refers to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and other technology companies “trying to ingratiate themselves” with the Trump administration.

I’m sure that’s exactly what the loathsome Zuckerberg and other tech titans were doing, but it’s not the function of an AP reporter to tell us. There should be no place in a straight, factual news account for a loaded word such as “ingratiate” unless the reporter is quoting someone. 

A competent reporter, by simply conveying the facts of the story, can leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether Zuckerberg is cravenly sucking up to the White House. Readers are capable of drawing their own conclusions and should be left to do so without being led by the nose. But news stories are now often fatally contaminated by casual, pervasive bias and the intrusion of reporters’ personal judgments.

To allege that someone is trying to ingratiate himself involves such a judgment. Such things used to be the domain of editorial writers and columnists expressing what was clearly identified as opinion. But in 2025, all reporters consider themselves editorialists and the dividing line between "news" and comment has been all but erased.

When I read any “news” story about American politics, my eye goes straight to the bottom to identify the source. If it’s from AP, the Washington Post or the New York Times I know not to assume that it’s balanced and accurate (and by “accurate”, I mean not distorted by the omission of any relevant facts or background information that might not align with the reporter’s perception).

The Washington Post and the New York Times are entitled to spin the news as they think fit and accept the consequences, even if they compromise their credibility in the process. Their subscribers can always opt out if they don’t like what they’re reading. But wire services such as AP operate in a different context.

Because they are usually co-operative enterprises that supply news to media outlets from all points of the political compass, wire services have traditionally been careful to avoid any hint of bias. New Zealand’s own much-lamented NZPA was always rigorous in observing editorial neutrality. But that rule has been jettisoned at AP, whose reporters clearly feel no compunction about feeding the news through an ideological filter. AP political stories come heavily larded with journalists’ own perceptions which are invariably hostile to the political Right.

Stories about Trump, for example, routinely refer to his “lies” and “falsehoods”. These are terms that previous generations of news reporters would never have used unless they were quoting someone. They would have presented the facts and left it to readers to decide for themselves whether the president had a flagrant disregard for the truth (which is clearly the case, but I’m permitted to say that because this is an opinion piece).

The frequent use of the disparaging terms "far right" and "extreme right", to denote all but the mildest and least threatening politicians on the conservative side of the spectrum, is another means by which leftist journalists reveal their ingrained priggishness.

The now-habitual intrusion of personal opinion into “news” coverage isn’t just a breach of traditional journalism rules. On a purely pragmatic level it’s crazy because it accelerates public distrust of an already failing media industry.

It appears not to have registered with American journalists that Trump won the presidency despite overwhelming media opposition. The message was clear: the US mainstream media have rendered themselves largely irrelevant.

When journalists have fallen so clearly out of step with the public mood, they need to re-evaluate themselves. But there’s no sign of that happening, and so journalism blindly continues its determined and suicidal march into the post-journalism era.

 

 

 

A journey into the hinterland

 

Hedley's Book Shop in Masterton was packed on Friday night for the launch of my friend Simon Burt's book Route 52: A Big Lump of Country Unknown, published by Ugly Hill Press. 

It was actually a second launch, the first having been held two nights earlier in Waipukurau. Why the double launch? Because Waipukurau marks the northern end of Route 52 and Masterton the southern. They could hardly have an event in one town and ignore the other. Wars have been fought over lesser issues.

Once officially designated as a state highway but demoted when usage declined, Route 52 is the quintessential road less travelled, passing through the back country of the northern Wairarapa into southern and central Hawke's Bay and giving access to remote coastal settlements such as Akitio, Herbertville and Porangahau. 

I had the honour of speaking at the Masterton launch and this is what I said:

I’m not one to boast, but I reckon I’m unusually well qualified to launch a book about Route 52. I grew up in Waipukurau, where the road starts (or finishes, depending on which way you’re travelling) and I’ve spent the past 22 years living in Masterton, at the other end.

My ties to Waipuk, as we always called it, are permanently cemented by the fact that my parents and three of my brothers are buried in the cemetery there, within a few metres of each other. I also have a direct personal connection with something that’s mentioned briefly in Simon’s book. I refer to the torii, or traditional Japanese arch, that my father designed and built in the mid-60s on the top of the Pukeora Hill. It was put there to frame the superb view of Waipukurau that travellers saw as they came over the brow of the hill from the south – a view that’s rarely seen these days because the main highway was re-routed decades ago, although Dad’s torii is still there.

Not only do I have connections with Waipuk and Masterton, but I was born in Pahiatua. Strictly speaking, that’s not on Route 52, but it’s close enough to warrant a chapter in Simon’s book, which is good enough for me. Note that I pronounce it as Pahi-atua rather than Pie-a-tua, because my mother always insisted that that was the correct Maori pronunciation and I believe she was right.

Speaking of personal connections, I should note that Deborah Coddington was the perfect person to publish Simon’s book, because Deborah grew up at Wallingford in Central Hawke’s Bay, through which Route 52 passes, and she named her publishing company after the rural road her family lived on.

Like me, Deborah would have recognised many of the names in Simon’s book and would have personally recalled some of the people he writes about. And I suspect that also like me, the places where she spent her childhood left a permanent imprint on her, and the naming of her company, Ugly Hill Press, was a way of paying homage to her origins.

Anyway, on to Simon’s book. I think it’s a terrific book: part road trip, part personal memoir and part social history. Steve Braunias has described it as a psychogeographical travel book, which is an impressive word even if I’m not entirely sure what it means.

And although I’m sure Simon doesn’t think of himself as a journalist, the book also qualifies as an exemplary piece of journalism. I say that because it’s largely driven by Simon’s curiosity, and curiosity is an essential element – perhaps the essential element – of good journalism.

Simon was curious about the history of the places on Route 52 and the people who have spent their lives there, so he did what a good journalist would do – he set out to find out about them. He’s dug deep and done a daunting amount of research, but it never weighs the book down. It’s an easy and engaging read that you can dip into as the urge takes you.

One mark of good writing is that it flows so easily, it gives you no clue to the hard work that went into it. That’s true of this book.

Route 52 documents the social history of a remote part of New Zealand that we knew very little about. I can’t recall whether Simon actually uses this word, but his book is all about the hinterland, one nice definition of which is “an area lying beyond what is visible or known”.

I learned a lot from reading Simon’s book. I learned, for example, that the reason there’s a wide, park-like strip down the main street of Pahiatua was that the railway line was originally intended to run through the centre of town. I learned that the Wilder Settlement Road in Central Hawke’s Bay, which I was familiar with in my childhood, didn’t get its name because a settlement was built there; in fact the name came from a marital agreement under which land was made available to sons of the Wilder family as part of a dowry. That became known as the Wilder settlement. Who would have guessed?

I also learned that the claustrophobic, inky-black tunnel that my friends and I used to squeeze through in the hills near Waipukurau was created for an irrigation scheme that was later abandoned. And I discovered that Porangahau was once known as Coconut Grove because of the number of Rarotongans who lived and worked there to make up for a labour shortfall during the Second World War. Somehow I don’t think the name Coconut Grove would pass the PC test now.

It’s worth mentioning too that Simon has taken the trouble to delve into an area of history that remains sorely neglected. I refer to our pre-European history, and I was pleased to see that he devotes space to the superb information displays in Pukekaihau, which most people know as Waipukurau’s Hunter Park. These illustrated panels explain in rich detail the pre-European history of the Waipukurau district, and I recommend them to anyone passing through the town with an hour to spare.

Above all, Route 52 is a book about people – and I don’t mean well-known names or official poo-bahs or would-be celebrities who big themselves up on social media, about whom we already know far more than we want to know. Rather, it’s a celebration of New Zealand’s rural culture and a glimpse into the lives of farmers, shearers, shepherds and others, not to mention their resourceful and formidable wives, many of whom have spent their entire lives in the rugged and challenging landscape through which Route 52 passes. I was going to make the mistake of saying these are ordinary people, but many of them are anything but ordinary. A better word would be authentic.

Barry Crump used to write about such people, albeit in a fictional context, and so did Jim Henderson. The Christchurch Press journalist Mike Crean was another writer who had a talent for talking to ordinary people – sorry, I mean authentic people – and getting them to tell their stories.

Simon has the same skill and empathy, writing with a light and often whimsical touch but always respectful toward his subjects.  He has captured a part of New Zealand that is slowly but irrevocably disappearing – in fact, sometimes almost literally disappearing under a relentlessly spreading cloak of pinus radiata, which is a recurring theme in his book and gives it a slightly elegiac tone.

But that’s as much as you want to hear from me. Deborah asked me to keep my speech short, so it only remains to congratulate Simon on a great book and break an imaginary bottle of champagne – or perhaps that should be Tui – over its bow.

                                            Simon Burt