Camp Freedom revisited

Where should the balance be struck between public safety and individual freedom? At what point should the latter be curtailed to protect the former? More than four years after the anti-vaccination encampment that ended in mayhem outside Parliament, the answer isn’t clear.

New Zealand in 2020 was threatened by a global pandemic. No one knew how serious it might be.

As it turned out, we escaped relatively lightly. The Royal Commission on Covid-19 cited statistics that showed case numbers here were much lower than in most comparable countries. Deaths per capita in New Zealand were among the lowest in the OECD.

Our geographical isolation may have had something to do with that, but defenders of the Ardern government argued that it was primarily the result of decisive official action to contain the spread of the disease. Those measures included lockdowns, draconian travel restrictions and vaccination mandates that had the effect of punishing people who refused to take “the jab” by excluding them from jobs and community activities such as sport and church.

These were actions that no free society would have contemplated in ordinary circumstances and they caused immense social and economic disruption, the impact of which is still being felt as retail and hospitality businesses struggle to recover.

To all intents and purposes, New Zealand became a police state where people’s daily lives and freedom of movement were subjected to strict controls. But by and large, the public accepted these as necessary because the government didn’t know what it was dealing with or how many might otherwise die.

A generous spoonful of sugar, in the form of reassuring words from the prime minister, helped the medicine go down. “Be strong and be kind” – but especially “be kind” – became Jacinda Ardern’s catchphrase. Urged on by her daily pep talks from the Beehive, the vast majority of New Zealanders fell into line notwithstanding abundant evidence of official dissembling and incompetence in the management of the pandemic. And the government, citing relatively low mortality figures, was able to claim vindication for its strategy.

But there was always a substantial body of opinion that pushed back. It wasn’t clear at the time how big that dissident group was, since its existence was largely unacknowledged by mainstream media that unquestioningly supported the government and treated the non-compliant minority as pariahs.

It wasn’t until the occupation of Parliament’s grounds in February 2022 that the country grasped the scale of this underground resistance. The protest seemed to come out of nowhere but had been gathering momentum for months out in the heartland.

I was in Wellington on the day the convoys of the non-compliant rolled into town from opposite ends of the country and remember being astonished at the unprecedented spectacle of the streets around Parliament choked by protest vehicles. Even the police seemed to be caught completely off guard.

If the scale of the protest was the first surprise, there was another to come. Most protests at Parliament last a few hours at most and then the participants drift away. This one was different. The protesters and their vehicles were still there the next day and the day after that, in steadily increasing numbers and with comprehensive resources (paid for by Russia, Trevor Mallard astonishingly claimed - with no elaboration - before a bemused audience at this year’s Featherston book festival) that suggested they were there for the long haul. They ended up staying for more than three weeks before being driven out in a violent police operation that trashed all their equipment.

A third surprise, for me, came with the release in September 2023 of the documentary film River of Freedom. This served as a powerful corrective to the overwhelmingly negative and often wildly inaccurate, if not dishonest, media coverage of the protest camp and the motives of the people who took part or otherwise supported it. In particular, River of Freedom presented a compellingly different narrative to that of the hysterically overwrought Stuff documentary Fire and Fury, which came out the previous year and framed the anti-vax protest as being masterminded by agents of the far Right.

I wrote at the time that for me, the most striking scenes in River of Freedom (the title was inspired by cabinet minister Michael Wood’s contemptuous characterisation of the protest camp as a “river of filth”) were not the ones showing the fiery climax of the occupation at Parliament. “Dramatic though those were,” I wrote, “we had seen them before. No, I was most struck by scenes we hadn’t seen; namely, the ones that showed enthusiastic crowds lining the protest routes all the way from Cape Reinga and Bluff to the capital.

“Even out in the countryside, boisterous supporters – too numerous by far to be dismissed as a mere rent-a-mob display – turned out in force to wave placards and cheer as the convoys rolled past. Motorway overbridges were shown jammed with well-wishers, even in foul weather.

“Clearly, something unprecedented was happening out in heartland New Zealand, but where were the mainstream media? Precious little of this was reported in the press or shown on the TV news. To all intents and purposes, the rolling protest was rendered invisible.”

River of Freedom reinforced a strange sense that there were now two New Zealands – one approved by the political, bureaucratic and media establishment, the other a rough-and-ready Kiwi equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s deplorables.

With no advance promotion other than word of mouth and social media, the film played to packed houses. My first attempt to see it was thwarted because screenings in Masterton were sold out. Stuff film critic Graeme Tuckett, who wrote an admirably fair review of the movie (but without straying too far from his employer’s pro-Ardern editorial line), struck the same problem in Wellington, where it took him a week to get a ticket. The movie ended up playing in 54 cinemas, mostly in the provinces, and in September 2023 became the most watched film in the country.

Now Gaylene Barnes, the director of River of Freedom, has collaborated with movie publicist Siân Clement to produce a follow-up book called Heart of the Protest. It’s a substantial piece of work: 423 pages, liberally illustrated and comprehensively footnoted with references to sources. It sets out how the protest came about, documents in detail the occupation of Parliament’s grounds and introduces the reader to key participants.

The book doesn’t pretend to be impartial. It's as relentlessly positive in its depiction of Camp Freedom as mainstream media coverage was dismissive and disparaging.  But like Barnes’ film, it serves as a valid and necessary counterpoint to the often grossly lopsided narrative presented by mainstream journalists and commentators who made no attempt to engage with the anti-vax protesters, preferring to portray them as, at best, a motley collection of oddballs and, at worst, dupes of shadowy malevolent alt-Right agitators and, bizarrely, white supremacists. (Did they not notice the number of brown faces and the distinctly Maori vibe of the protest? Probably not, since the closest most reporters got to the protest was looking down – literally and figuratively – with Mallard from the balcony of Parliament.)

Heart of the Protest manages to be less emotionally incontinent than Fire and Fury (which, it should be noted, was made with taxpayer funding via NZ on Air, and therefore had the greater obligation to be even-handed). Perhaps the book’s greatest fault is that in its desire to give a voice to a wide range of protesters, it becomes tediously repetitive.

And the range of protesters was wide, including people who had willingly been jabbed themselves but objected on principle to others being forced to accept vaccination and losing their jobs if they didn’t. And while the protesters included some who were named in the media as inciting anti-vax fervour for nefarious ends (which were never specified), the worst that most people in the book could be accused of – including the authors themselves – is sheer earnestness. Their distress at what they saw happening to friends and families as a result of lockdowns and vaccination mandates, to say nothing of their hippy-ish delight in the communal togetherness of the protest camp, was palpable and genuine. Arguably, the book should come with a publisher’s warning that it contains more hugging, tears and New Age-speak than some readers will be able to tolerate.

Heart of the Protest reminds us of some things that we might otherwise be tempted to forget, such as the complicity of journalists and opposition parties when what was sold to us as compassion morphed into coercion and authoritarianism. People whose function was to question, scrutinise and challenge those in power went missing in action.

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that politicians emerged from the pandemic with less dishonour than the mainstream media. The government could claim justification for its actions on the basis that it was dealing with an unprecedented crisis. That, however, didn’t release the media from their duty to hold those in power to account. It was the media’s choice to function as the state’s PR apparatus and in doing so, they may well have contributed to the well-documented decline of public faith in journalism.

Parallels with other events in New Zealand history? The 1981 Springbok tour is an obvious reference point. On that occasion too, a determined minority took direct action over what they saw as a compelling moral cause and ended up in a head-on confrontation with the forces of authority. Robert Muldoon’s National Party government was rewarded with a narrow win in the subsequent general election.

Ardern’s government had no such luck. By the time the 2023 election rolled around, the mood of the country had changed. Ardern’s magic had lost its potency and perhaps sensing that, she had stepped down.

But a more striking point of comparison is the epic 1951 waterfront dispute, when the state exercised its power to force militant wharfies and their allies in other unions into submission, even to the extent of criminalising statements of support for the unionists and prohibiting gestures of help such as food donations to their families. On that occasion, a National government used emergency powers in the Public Safety Conservation Act to enforce media silence and minimise public resistance. National resoundingly won a subsequent snap election then, too.

Both events provided a lesson in how easily a society can be persuaded that the suspension of basic rights – freedom of speech in 1951, freedom of movement and the right to refuse medical treatment in 2021-2022 – is justified in the public interest, and how easily people who don’t fall into line can be “othered”. New Zealanders who opposed lockdowns and mandates were seen as letting the side down. In a New Zealand Herald opinion poll at the time, only 12 per cent of respondents supported the protest camp.

But the passage of time has a way of altering the public perception of such events. Seventy-five years on, the suspension of fundamental civil liberties during the waterfront dispute seems inconceivable by the standards of a modern liberal democracy, just as the harsh treatment of conscientious objectors during wartime – then regarded as uncontroversial – now strikes many people as shocking.

Then there was Bastion Point. Much of the country cheered (I admit I did) when the police ended Ngati Whatua’s occupation of their ancestral land in 1978, but the public today would probably take a much more sympathetic view of the iwi’s protest.

Whether the anti-vax movement will eventually be the subject of similar historical revisionism remains to be seen, but River of Freedom and now Heart of the Protest at least introduce a semblance of balance into what was previously an overwhelmingly one-sided narrative. They also provide an alternative perspective without which the question posed at the start of this article can’t properly be answered.

■ The authors of Heart of the Protest struck resistance from the book trade, so you may not find the book in mainstream book shops. However it’s available for $39 (plus postage) from the River of Freedom website, which also lists outlets that stock it.

Mallard in Fantasyland?

I attended two sessions at the Featherston Booktown Festival on Saturday. One, on the state of the news media, was almost totally useless. I walked out before it had finished. The other, however, was not only entertaining but produced one of those “Did he just say what I thought he said?” moments from former Speaker and Labour Party minister Sir Trevor Mallard.

In the panel discussion on the media, Duncan Greive from The Spinoff was the only speaker who brought any insight to bear. The contributions of the other participants – Mike McRoberts from NBR, TVNZ’s Te Aniwa Hurihanganui and moderator Michelle Duff – were shallow, predictable and carefully modulated to elicit murmurs of sympathy and agreement from the full hall.

It would have been a whole lot livelier if Sean Plunket, Michael Laws, Heather du Plessis-Allan, Peter Williams or even Barry Soper had been invited to speak, but that was never going to happen. Book festivals are not noted for their openness to ideas and opinions that challenge prevailing orthodoxies. There are audience sensibilities to be considered.

The preceding session on politics was a lot more rewarding. The subject was the turbulent politics of 2017-2023: the Ardern years. And while there was the same non-threatening quality about the speakers, two of them – Chris Finlayson and Trevor Mallard – at least spoke with the advantage of first-hand, close-up experience. Two journalists, Stuff’s Henry Cooke and the aforementioned Hurihanganui, seemed to be there to make up the numbers and didn’t have a great deal to contribute.

It was a crowd-pleasing session, deftly chaired by Toby Manhire from the Spinoff. Finlayson, nominally the right-wing voice on the panel, was never likely to upset anyone and was presumably invited for exactly that reason. He’s the Left’s favourite conservative: an old-school National Party liberal who quickly earned the crowd’s favour by making it clear he doesn’t have much, if anything, in common with the “Muppet” government (his term) that’s now in power. He remarked that because of the coalition government’s “blowback” on Maori issues, he now feels more like the opposition.

The fact that Finlayson has long been out of politics not only renders him acceptable to left-leaning book festival audiences - since he's no longer in a position of power - but frees him to be frank, all of which makes him ideal for the festival circuit. He’s an engaging raconteur and can be tartly humorous, as when he talked about the many “WTF moments” when National was chaotically in opposition, drolly referring to one former party leader as “Muller the Brief” and to another, Simon Bridges, as a shit.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard Finlayson say that if he had won the then Labour-held Rongotai electorate, which he contested for National with no expectation of winning and plainly no desire to do so, he would have demanded a recount. It’s a good self-deprecating joke that bears repeating.

For his part, Mallard, having been Speaker during the anti-vax occupation of Parliament's grounds, was plainly concerned with putting a favourable spin on his involvement in that unprecedented brouhaha. He told the audience that a lot of “marginal people” were involved in the protest camp – people who had “gone down rabbit holes”, including mentally ill individuals he knew from his Hutt South electorate; in other words, nut cases and no-hopers.

I wonder if anyone else in the hall felt, as I did, that this was a less than empathetic way for a Labour MP – one who makes much of the fact that he represented the battlers from working-class Wainuiomata – to brush aside the concerns of people who are social casualties. Henry Cooke pointed out that many of the protesters had lost their jobs because of the vaccination mandate (although I don’t recall Stuff taking the trouble to make that clear at the time) and Te Aniwa Hurihanganui acknowledged that they were a “real mix of people”. Mallard justifiably copped a lot of flak for his arrogance and indifference to the protesters’ grievances during the occupation of Parliament’s grounds and I wondered on Saturday whether he had learned anything from the experience. Perhaps not.

He also criticised the police for taking too long to deal with the protest encampment (oh, so it was their fault, to paraphrase Basil Fawlty) and he defended the use of water sprinklers – which were seen, along with the notorious Mallard-instigated Barry Manilow broadcasts, as an attempt to dislodge the occupants – as being necessary to wash away human waste. That was a new one on me and I wondered whether it was a convenient justification post-event.

But the big surprise – one that even had the stranger next to me turning to me with a look of disbelief – was Mallard’s claim that the protest camp was funded by Russia. Yep, that’s right: Mallard reckoned someone paid for millions of dollars – yes, millions – worth of camping equipment that mysteriously turned up in Parliament’s grounds. Protesters suddenly had money to spend and he had no doubt that money came from offshore – Russia, he said.

Whoa! That came completely out of left field. My astonishment was shared by my fellow  journalist David McLoughlin, who was also at the session and like me, thought Mallard’s claim was bizarre. No explanation was offered as to why Vladimir Putin should spend millions paying for anti-vax protesters to camp in comfort in the most distant capital in the world. Payback for New Zealand supporting sanctions against Russia following the Ukraine invasion, perhaps? Not totally implausible, but it's the sort of far-fetched scenario that only an over-active imagination might come up with. Neither was it clear why the allegation had never emerged before.

Certainly there was feverish talk in 2022, some of it from the excitable, conspiracy-obsessed Sanjana Hattotuwa of the Disinformation Project (remember them?), about alleged Russian-sourced disinformation. Canada too was identified as a source of malevolent anti-vax propaganda, Jacinda Ardern noting the supposedly incriminating evidence that Canadian flags were being flown in the protest camp. But Russia spending millions on tents and sleeping bags? That was a new one.

Surprisingly, despite two political journalists being on stage with Mallard when he made the allegation, nothing has been reported, at least to my knowledge. Here was a former senior government politician – the Speaker of the House of Representatives and subsequently ambassador to Ireland – alleging malign foreign interference in our domestic affairs. I would have thought there was a story in it (“Russia funded Wellington protest camp, says Mallard”), but apparently not. Perhaps Cooke and Hurihanganui decided it was just Mallard running off at the mouth and not worth taking any further. But previous generations of political reporters, their news antennae twitching furiously, would have been pursuing him for elaboration.

What, if anything, should we make of it? For me it had echoes of former Waitakere mayor and Labour grandee Bob Harvey’s startling allegation in 2000 – similarly unsubstantiated – that the CIA was involved in the death of Norman Kirk, which had even his friend Helen Clark looking sideways at him. Mallard’s claim has the same slightly loony, off-the-wall quality. If he has evidence, he should front up with it. Otherwise people will be justified in concluding it was a case of Mallard in Fantasyland.

Why the Maiki Sherman-Lloyd Burr incident is a matter of public interest

 A good and respected friend – like me, a former newspaper editor – takes the view that the furore over TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman’s alleged verbal abuse of Stuff press gallery journalist Lloyd Burr is not news; that at best, it would warrant a mention in a gossip column.

Fair enough, but I differ. If the high-profile journalists who provide the public with political news and comment are bitchy, entitled, childish, over-stimulated and perhaps inclined to run off at the mouth after a few drinks at the end of a long day, I think we deserve to know. That knowledge is potentially very helpful in judging how much notice we should take of them, or indeed whether we should take any notice of them at all.

You can be sure that if MPs behaved in the same scandalous way and the media learned about it, they’d be all over the story. Ah, people might say; MPs are different. They’re public figures, elected and accountable – which is true. But high-profile journalists like Sherman wield more power than many politicians, and certainly a whole lot more than your anonymous, run-of-the-mill list MP.

They effectively set the political agenda. They present themselves as people the public can trust and whose opinions we should respect. That being the case, any character flaws that become apparent – such as might be evident from the hurling of vicious personal insults over drinks in a senior minister’s office – become a matter of legitimate public interest; the more so when the alleged antagonist is employed by a taxpayer-funded broadcasting organisation and therefore has a special obligation to behave in a mature and responsible way.

It’s true that we may not yet know the full facts of the incident. It’s the nature of these things that the complete truth often emerges bit by bit over time. While it doesn’t seem to be in dispute that Sherman used the word alleged (to wit, “faggot”), it’s been reported that she was responding to a racial provocation. Either way, the incident presents an unflattering picture of the country’s supposed journalism elite and won’t do anything to lift public trust in the media from its woeful level. Again, that makes it a matter of public interest (and by that I don’t necessarily mean something the public is interested in, because for all I know the public isn’t, and probably regards the affair as akin to a school playground squabble).

Just to complicate things, some commentators are questioning blogger Ani O’Brien’s motives in breaking the story. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I’m assuming they were honourable. I even sent her an email congratulating her for exposing what had happened while the mainstream media resolutely looked the other way. But O’Brien does run a political consultancy and it’s undeniable that politics has never been murkier than now, with political agendas and connections that are not always out in the open.  

Pushing the views that suit them

It’s verging on dishonesty for RNZ to describe political commentator Janet Wilson as a former National Party press secretary, as it did yesterday in an item about the reported unrest in the National caucus, as if her former status endows her opinion with special force or credibility.

For the record, Wilson described National as a “slow-slip political earthquake” and “a miasma of nothingness”. These were damning words. The unmistakeable implication was that if Wilson is dissing Christopher Luxon then the party must be in a truly dire predicament – because after all, isn’t she supposed to be on National’s side?

Wilson is often critical of National and appeals to the media for exactly that reason. The subliminal message is that the party has been abandoned even by its own supporters.

Stuff plays the same game, routinely introducing Wilson’s political columns by mentioning she has worked for National. It’s a useful, if slightly deceitful, way of trying to prove to readers that Stuff is politically even-handed, contrary to what its critics keep saying. (Stuff does the same with another political columnist, Ben Thomas, who was Chris Finlayson's press secretary so long ago that it's scarcely relevant.)

But the fact Wilson once worked for National tells you nothing about her political sympathies. She was just one of the many hired guns – sorry, I mean communications advisers – who ply their trade around the Beltway. She provided media training to John Key and was later employed on a relatively brief fixed-term contract as press secretary to the National leader (two, in fact – the hapless Todd Muller and then Judith Collins) during a chaotic period in 2020 when the party was in abject disarray.

Interestingly enough, her LinkedIn profile doesn’t mention that time. Perhaps she was burned by the experience and doesn’t want to remind anyone of it. Certainly she saw the Nats at their worst, which may explain why she so often seems hostile to the party and happy to undermine its leader.

This is not to say Wilson doesn’t have a valid perspective, but when all is said and done she’s just one opinionated commentator among many (in fact rather too many, you might say, considering the 28 comment pieces about Luxon’s leadership that political scientist Bryce Edwards included in his daily roundup this morning).

Moreover, like most commentators she’s fallible, as she proved when she rather rashly wrote National off after the 2020 election. Readers may recall the party made an emphatic comeback three years later. But Wilson remains a favoured commentator largely because her past association with National is seen as giving her opinions a special patina of authority.

The question is, would RNZ have been remotely interested in her view on National’s leadership imbroglio if she had said Luxon was secure and deserved to lead the party into this year’s election? Somehow I don’t think so.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I am not and never have been a supporter of National or Luxon and believe the party probably deserves whatever happens to it. I just wish the media weren’t so damned predictable in the unsubtle way they push opinions that suit them.)

Luxon still hasn’t got the hang of politics

“I’m not going to play that game,” Christopher Luxon said – rather lamely – when Tova O’Brien asked him how many Maori National MPs were in his cabinet.

“It’s not a game,” countered O’Brien, doubtless trying hard to conceal her glee at having so easily caught the prime minister out.

Oh, but it is a game. The game is called scalp-hunting and it’s commonly practised by journalists and broadcasters who mistakenly think their role is to make politicians squirm.

The funny thing is, no one can recall the game being played when Jacinda Ardern was PM. Ardern appeared to be surrounded by an invisible but impenetrable shield that protected her against awkward questions.

It wasn’t so much that such questions harmlessly bounced off her. They just weren’t asked. And if they were, as happened sometimes on Mike Hosking’s breakfast programme, her response was to stop going on his show.

O’Brien would have been thrilled at causing Luxon to stumble yesterday when he couldn’t answer her question. It was the equivalent of a bowler stumping the opposing team’s opening batsman with the first ball. You could almost see the thought bubble above her head: “Howzat!”

Luxon should have seen it coming. O’Brien has built her reputation on hatchet jobs and would have been eager to make an impact in her new role as presenter of TVNZ’s breakfast show. The hapless PM obliged by walking straight into her trap.

Then he compounded his mistake by saying that the newly promoted James Meager, who is of Ngai Tahu descent, is a cabinet member when he’s actually a minister outside cabinet. O’Brien pounced again and left Luxon looking like a possum in the headlights.

It was depressing evidence that even after four and a half years as leader of the National Party and two and a half as prime minister, Luxon still hasn’t got the hang of politics.

His rise to the top of the corporate ladder was no preparation for the shark tank he now swims in. He still exhibits two fatal frailties: he lacks a killer instinct and he’s far too keen to be liked. Those are dangerous political weaknesses that leave him vulnerable and make him an easy target for aggressive broadcasters and journalists, to say nothing of his political opponents.

Far from developing the agile - and sometimes necessarily forceful - verbal and mental responses essential in his position, he appears to rely on stilted, formulaic talking points supplied to him by his communications advisers. Not only do these not resonate with the public, but rigid adherence to them leaves him exposed and floundering when an unexpected question lands.

A more street-smart politician would have known how to deal with O’Brien’s mischievous query (and it was mischievous, since its clear purpose was not to enlighten viewers so much as to catch Luxon out).

Yes, it might be argued that Luxon should know how many Maori National MPs are in his cabinet. But his response should have been that the ethnicity of cabinet ministers is irrelevant. It's competence that matters.

He said he wasn’t going to play O’Brien’s game, but he did. Rather than feebly protesting at her question, he should have gone on the front foot and challenged her attempt to reduce cabinet appointments to a matter of identity politics. Luxon and his ministers need to constantly remind themselves that one of the reasons New Zealanders so emphatically rejected Labour at the last election was that they were desperate to be extricated from that ideological morass.

For all his faults (and God knows, there are plenty), Winston Peters wouldn’t have given O’Brien the satisfaction of claiming his scalp. That’s the difference between the two coalition party leaders, right there: Peters is a born politician whereas Luxon is still on trainer wheels.

The Last Post

That’s it then. The End. Finito.

That was my immediate reaction to the news that Stuff’s printing plant at Petone will shut down next year and printing operations will be relocated to Christchurch.

The paper most affected will be The Post, Stuff’s Wellington morning paper – known in a previous incarnation as The Dominion Post, a masthead whose name was itself an ungainly amalgam of its precursor titles The Dominion and The Evening Post.

The Post is on its knees already. It won’t survive this upheaval.

Printing the paper in Christchurch and then freighting it north by truck and ferry, as Stuff apparently proposes to do, will be a death blow to a paper whose heritage dates back to 1865. I was tempted to use the phrase "coup de grace" rather than death blow, but strictly speaking, a coup de grace is a swift and merciful end for a person or animal that is suffering. This will more likely be a cruelly slow and inevitable decline, and painful to watch for anyone who values newspapers.

The proposed move means The Post’s final editorial deadline would be pushed back to the early afternoon, at best. Nothing that happens after that time will be covered in its news columns. It will therefore abandon any claim to be a genuine morning newspaper, or even a newspaper at all. Whatever “news” it contains will be withered and stale by the time it reaches any remaining readers.

The Post will be forced to rely even more on soft, flabby content that isn’t time-critical. This means more long-winded and ultimately pointless opinion columns, more cheap filler material lifted from overseas sources and irrelevant to New Zealand, and more lifestyle-oriented fluff – such as articles about movies, television, the arts, gardening, interior design, food and fashion – that used to be the preserve of glossy (for which read women’s) magazines.

Already the Auckland-based New Zealand Herald consistently carries more – and sharper – Wellington news. Wellingtonians who want to be informed on what’s happening in their own city have to read a paper published 500 km away.

And The Post won’t be the only title affected by the move. Stuff’s other North Island dailies – the Taranaki Daily News, the Manawatu Standard and my own local, the Wairarapa Times-Age – will also be printed in Christchurch and trucked north, which means they too will be subjected to the uncertainties of Cook Strait weather, ferry breakdowns and the inevitable road delays caused by a New Zealand Transport Agency that seems blithely indifferent to the impact of its endless and needlessly disruptive roadworks.

Those newspapers will therefore lose even more of the vital sense of “localness” that makes them relevant to their communities. Already their newsrooms have been hollowed out to the point where coverage of local news is scant and superficial. With the shift to Christchurch, the factors of time and distance will mean the papers become still more remote from the readers they supposedly serve.

This is madness. Much as I feel for the journalists still employed on these papers, some of whom I know personally, it might be more merciful – and more realistic – to shut the papers down now and abandon the pretence that they will continue to mean something in their terminally enfeebled state.

How did Stuff arrive at this dismal juncture? The immediate cause is the acquisition by the wealthy property investor Troy Bowker of the land and building that houses Stuff’s Petone printing plant. Bowker is not favourably disposed to Stuff, I assume for ideological reasons (Stuff is left-wing, Bowker is decidedly not), and I sense that he derived some satisfaction from giving the company notice to clear out next year and take its printing press with it.

He would have known very well that this created an existential predicament for Stuff, notwithstanding Stuff owner Sinead Boucher’s insistence that the company was ready and prepared for it and will take it the massive disruption and expense in its stride. Bowker obviously doesn’t believe her and I’m not sure I do either.

But the real origins of Stuff’s decline lie much further back. It began with the creation in 1999 of Sam Morgan’s Trade Me, a bold use of digital technology that deprived newspapers of a vital revenue stream from classified advertising – those lucrative pages of small-type ads for jobs, cars, properties and second-hand goods. In Australia, classified ads were famously described as “rivers of gold” and the same was true here.

That was followed by a much wider migration of advertising from print to online. Display advertising – the industry term for big ads, often occupying a full page, placed by department stores, car manufacturers and big corporates such as banks and telecom providers – soon dried up too as advertisers realised they could target their ad spend more effectively online.

Simultaneously, newspaper publishers were panicked into a suicidal rush to place editorial content online at no charge to readers. The assumption was that advertisers would follow in due course, to the benefit of newspaper websites. They didn’t.

The result was that newspapers were left with the same cost structure (because good journalism, after all, costs money) accompanied by a catastrophic slump in advertising revenue and income from newspaper sales – because why would people pay for a paper when they could read the news free on their PCs and mobile devices, and hours before the paper came out?

It didn’t help that some key media leaders – Boucher was one, as was Paul Thompson, now chief executive of RNZ but then executive editor of Stuff’s precursor, Fairfax Media – had an almost evangelistic faith in the digital revolution. The old newspaper model was being deconstructed and it was assumed that a brilliant new one would replace it. We’re still waiting.

Another baneful development was the sale of Independent Newspapers Ltd’s chain of newspaper titles – the ones now owned by Stuff – to Sydney-based Fairfax in 2003. INL was controlled by Rupert Murdoch but it was run by New Zealanders with a fierce commitment to newspapers.

Fairfax showed no such commitment either to newspapers or New Zealand. When the print media business became just too tough, the Aussies fled back to Sydney. They showed just how much they valued their New Zealand titles when Nine Entertainment, which by then had merged with Fairfax, sold them to Boucher for a token sum of $1. (The Petone building wasn’t included in the deal, for reasons that escape me.) 

Boucher herself then showed how much she valued her papers by changing the company name to Stuff. A company that took newspapers seriously wouldn’t have demeaned them by giving the company a frivolous name originally created for the INL website by whiz-kids from the advertising agency Saatchi, no doubt over a few bottles of expensive wine.

There have been other missteps along the way. Stuff recklessly alienated previously loyal readers by abandoning traditional journalistic principles of objectivity in favour of an overtly left-wing line that permeated all its news coverage and editorial comment. This coincided with, and no doubt contributed to, declining levels of public trust in the media overall. Stuff’s breast-beating front-page apology to Maori in 2020 for decades of supposedly racist coverage was dishonest as well as disgracefully unfair to generations of journalists who didn’t have a racist bone in their bodies.

This was consistent with the ignorance and disregard Stuff has regularly displayed for its editorial heritage. In 2023 it announced that The Dominion Post would be renamed The Post, a bland and meaningless name that conveyed no sense of the paper’s notable history. In fact it was a conscious disowning of the paper’s past. “We are under no one’s dominion,” then-editor Caitlin Cherry pompously pronounced, in a spectacularly fatuous statement that reflected the paper’s ideological obsessions. Cherry’s time as editor was short-lived and the inane change of masthead is the only reminder that she was ever there. The pointlessness of the change is evident from the fact that three years later, people still refer to the paper by its old name.

So now the paper formerly known as the Dom Post, and before that as two competing titles, The Dominion and The Evening Post, is about to take another step on its slow march to oblivion. It saddens me because I love newspapers and want them to survive; but it angers me too because at so many points along the way, the company that owns the paper has needlessly hastened its demise. And society as a whole is all the poorer for losing what was once a crucial source of reliable information about events of significance.

I often pass the Stuff printing plant on my way to Wellington on the Wairarapa train. It still displays the name of The Dominion Post. I was in that building on the night the new, state-of-the-art German press was used for the first time in 1990, when I was editor of the Dominion. It was a time of optimism and faith in the future of print. Now the press is to be dismantled and the building, by the sound of it, will be converted into apartments.

Much of what has happened in the years since the first papers rolled off that press was unavoidable. It was inflicted on the industry by the advent of digital technology. But the effects of the digital revolution could have been mitigated with better editorial and managerial judgment. Newspapers don't need to die; well-managed titles are still thriving overseas. 

For now, the Petone building is a poignant reminder of a time when newspapers mattered in New Zealand and the print media thrived; when the local paper was a vital part of daily life. Once the printing press and the Dominion Post sign have gone, the memory of that time will gradually recede to the point where it will be erased altogether. And The Post itself, which is already only a ghostly echo of what it used to be, will fade away too. Moving to Christchurch won’t save it, and anyone who says it will is either in denial or dishonest.

Correction: An earlier version of this post said Sinead Boucher bought the Stuff papers from Fairfax Media. In fact the seller was Nine Entertainment, of which Fairfax had by then become a part.

A masterclass in damage control, and Labour's PR flunkies didn't have to lift a finger

It has been fascinating to observe the media’s treatment of allegations against Labour leader Chris Hipkins by his ex-wife.

The first thing to note was the uniformity of the coverage. It was as if the political editors of the mainstream news outlets hurriedly got their heads together when the news broke yesterday and decided on a common approach.

The stories were all brief and couched in “nothing to see here, folks” language. They all made the same points: that the claims were “unsubstantiated” and that no one was accusing Hipkins of doing anything unlawful.

All the reports focused on Hipkins’ denials of his former wife’s damning claims. But crucially, not one explained what the allegations were. So the public were left in the dark.

Labour’s media team couldn’t have asked for a more obliging response. It has been a masterclass in damage control, and for all we know the Labour PR apparatchiks didn’t have to do a thing.

The stories also emphasised that the private Facebook post by Hipkins’ ex-wife, Jade Paul, had since been taken down – the clear implication being that at the very least she had had second thoughts, or that her claims were defamatory or untrue.

She has now said, however, that she stands by her post, which appears to have been triggered by a Labour Party election policy statement that she regarded as hypocritical.

“So many women are hurt by high profile men who just do what they want with no consequences,” Paul wrote in a subsequent post.

“We get told all of the time that if we speak out then our lives will be ruined, our kids will be impacted. We get labelled as ‘crazy’ or defamatory when we tell the truth.

“Today I have had enough.”

So what are Jade Paul’s claims? Essentially, that Hipkins treated her cruelly – for example, leaving her to drive herself home in a bloodied hospital gown after she miscarried because he was too busy to visit her and bring her clothes, and refusing to help after their brief marriage ended when she couldn’t afford groceries, saying their two children were her responsibility in the weeks she had them.

If true, the allegations are a damaging reflection on Hipkins’ character. In a brief statement, he rejected them “entirely” and said he didn’t intend to make any further comment. The stories also reported that Hipkins was taking legal advice (subtext: “I am the wronged party here”).

Will that be enough to settle public questions about the man who wants to be our next prime minister? I don’t think so.

The tone of the media coverage was summed up by a headline on the RNZ website: “Chris Hipkins’ ex-wife makes series of unsubstantiated claims about him”. It accompanied a relatively brief story by RNZ’s deputy political editor Craig McCulloch*.

It was a very peculiar headline in which the key word was “unsubstantiated”. It’s a word I don’t think I’ve seen before in hundreds of stories reporting accusations against politicians.

It neatly shifted the focus from the claims themselves to the fact that they were “unsubstantiated”. This could have been read as meaning they had no basis in fact (which is in itself unsubstantiated), or at the very least that they lacked credibility.

But “claims” are, by their very nature, unsubstantiated, and the media are not in the habit of inserting this loaded word in stories about allegations relating to politicians. Was this a case of RNZ acting on over-cautious legal advice, or did it decide the claims couldn’t possibly be truthful, that Hipkins’ reputation had been unfairly tarnished and it was the media’s duty to protect him by shutting the story down?

Here’s another thing to consider: would RNZ, and the media at large, have been so deferential if the accused politician had been, say, David Seymour? Hmm.

The claims against Hipkins presented the media with a crucial test. Public trust in journalists, as measured by opinion polls, has never been lower. That low level of trust is at least partially attributable to the public perception that journalists overwhelmingly lean left and that they give politicians of the left a free pass.

This perception was cemented during Jacinda Ardern’s prime ministership, when Beehive press conferences were an exercise in sycophancy and voices of dissent against the government were marginalised, ignored and shunned as pariahs. Bizarrely, National in opposition was subjected to harsher scrutiny – some of it merciless – than the party that was in power.

The government has since changed, and with it the tone of political reportage. Journalists and broadcasters who were obsequious toward the former government are notable for having magically rediscovered their killer instincts. Government politicians and policies are subjected to a level of aggressive scrutiny that was markedly absent during the Ardern years.

The disclosures by Hipkins’ ex-wife gave the media a chance to redeem themselves – to restore public faith in the willingness of political journalists to apply the blowtorch to the left as well as the right. And they blew it.

They could have reported the nature of the claims against Hipkins while making it clear they were unsubstantiated. That’s how the media in previous times would have dealt with the story.

There is a crucial matter of public interest here, and I don’t mean mere idle curiosity about the private lives of party leaders.

The accusations against Hipkins go to the heart of his character. New Zealanders are entitled to know what sort of man is putting himself forward to lead the country.

The claims against him may be false or unfair, but in other comparable countries – Australia, Britain and the US – you can be sure they would have been all over the front page. The public would have been told what he was accused of, Hipkins would have been given ample opportunity to defend himself and in due course the court of public opinion would have reached a verdict.

But no, not in New Zealand. Here the media try to extinguish the story as a non-event and expect the public to accept soothing assurances by a leading female Labour MP, Barbara Edmonds, that “marriage break ups are hard”, the implication being that Jade Paul has lashed out in anger because she’s hurting.

The tone of Edmonds’ statement struck me as patronising. It also raised an interesting question about Labour Party feminists and their solidarity, or lack of it, with a woman who claims to have been badly treated. Perhaps loyalty to the party takes priority over all other considerations.

I don’t know whether Jade Paul’s claims are true, although to me they have the ring of truth. They don’t strike me as the sort of stories someone would make up. But the bottom line is that the public are entitled to know what she has alleged, and it’s the media’s duty to tell them.

*The original version of this post wrongly described Craig McCulloch as RNZ's political editor.