On hatchet jobs and offence archaeology

I read something by Andrea Vance at the weekend. Why? Good question. I think I read Vance to assure myself that I’m not missing anything by not reading her. Figure that out if you can.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair, because she has done some good work. I remember a column of hers from 2021 in which she gave the government a robust and deserved serve for being obsessively secretive.

Regrettably her piece yesterday, which purported to be an analysis of electorates to watch in the 2023 general election, was marred by the familiar Stuff slant. This is now so embedded that you barely notice it.  

Referring to the Maungakiekie seat, Vance wrote that Labour candidate Priyanca Radhakrishnan had name recognition as a minister (oh yes, everyone’s heard of her), while National’s Greg Fleming had “attracted headlines for only the wrong reasons”.

To see what those reasons were, we had to go to another Vance story from April in which she recited a list of National contenders who had made dicks of themselves.

Her chief target then was Taieri candidate Stephen Jack, who revealed himself as an unreconstructed 1970s Neanderthal when he posted a video on Facebook that included the line, “I like my Covid like I like my women – 19 and easy to spread”. Even an after-dinner speaker at a rugby club prizegiving would baulk at that.

Vance then listed others who had similarly distinguished themselves, including Sam Uffindell, Jami-Lee Ross, Andrew Falloon, Hamish Walker and Jake Bezzant.

Fair enough: National does have a serious problem with candidate selection. I was reminded of that when I saw Uffindell standing behind Luxon at a policy announcement on the TV news a few nights ago. Uffindell seems such an unappealing candidate that if I were a National strategist, I’d go to inordinate lengths – possibly even drugging his drink or breaking his legs – to keep him out of the public view. That permanently blank face makes me wonder whether he even has a pulse. He’s a reminder of all that’s wrong with National’s random idiot generator, to use Vance’s witty phrase (credit where credit’s due). But how did Fleming make the list of shame?

For that we had to go back nearly 20 years to when he was chief executive of the Maxim Institute. Yes, you read that correctly: 20 years.

There’s a term for this tactic; it’s called offence archaeology. It involves trawling back through printed and online records – even going back decades, as in this case – in the hope of digging up a statement or event that might be used to smear a political enemy. It’s a tactic that's used almost exclusively against the Right, as on this occasion.

Vance’s story linked to a recent hatchet job on Fleming by Newshub’s Jenna Lynch – yes, that paragon of journalistic excellence – which recalled that while with the Maxim Institute in 2004, he issued a statement opposing the Civil Unions Bill. In it, he said civil unions were same-sex marriage in all but name and suggested the government might as well go the whole hog and formally recognise relations based on polygamy and incest.

Characteristically, Newshub presented the story in the most prejudicial manner possible, using the headline: National candidate Greg Fleming compared civil unions to polygamy and incest – thus neatly ignoring that his statement plainly wasn't meant to be taken literally. Lesson: never give the woke media an excuse to present a flippant or ironic statement as if it were intended seriously. If they can twist it to make you look bad, be sure they will. 

This was hardly surprising, of course, given Lynch's record. But then, like the other half in a tag wrestling team, Vance took up the attack. 

Vance clearly regarded Fleming’s 2004 press release as being on a par, in terms of offensiveness, with sending a pornographic image to a teenager (Falloon), assaulting a boy with a bed-leg (Uffindell) or having sex with staff members (Ross).

She called Fleming’s statement homophobic, a routinely overused word that means hatred or fear of homosexuals. But to oppose civil unions didn’t imply hatred of gays and lesbians. It was a rational and predictable response from a moral conservative to a Bill that profoundly changed the legal status of same-sex relationships, which many Christians regarded as wrong.

Oh, but I forgot: you’re no longer allowed to be a moral conservative, and to be Christian is even riskier. Christians are equated with sexual abuse, patriarchy and fundamentalism; think Gloriavale.

So Fleming’s statement on behalf of a legitimate conservative lobby group is disinterred nearly 20 years later and now results in him being equated with sleazebags and morons like Ross and Jack.

Sorry, make that ultra-conservative lobby group, which is how Vance described both Fleming and the Maxim Institute. I suspect that in the eyes of some press gallery journalists, pretty much anyone to the right of Luxon is ultra-conservative and therefore beyond the pale.

Funny how we never hear the term ultra-Left; presumably, only conservative people are capable of taking scary, extreme positions. (Wellington city councillor Tamatha Paul, who’s standing for the Greens in Wellington Central, got a mention in Vance’s story, but there was nothing to indicate that many Wellingtonians view her as a dangerous zealot. She’s on the right side, after all.)

Perhaps the saddest part about all this is that Fleming has responded exactly as we have come to expect from spineless National politicians when they find themselves in the gun from scalp-hunting journalists. He has given his tormentors the satisfaction of resiling from his statement in 2004 and assuring them he would never say the same thing now.  He’s taking his cue, of course, from his leader, who seems desperate to reassure the media that he won’t interfere with the right to kill unborn babies, regardless of what he might have thought about abortion when he entered Parliament.

It’s worth noting here that not content with impugning Fleming’s credentials, Vance also used her story about potential swing seats to take a snide swipe at former long-serving Nelson MP Nick Smith. “National insiders used to talk about ‘the Nick Smith Effect’ whereby locals stubbornly continue to vote for an incumbent for reasons that seem unfathomable to outsiders,” she sighed exasperatedly.

Those pathetic, benighted voters in Nelson! How could they be so stupid? Why didn’t they ask Vance for her advice about who to vote for? How could the locals possibly know what’s best for them?

She conveniently didn’t mention that the people of Nelson liked Smith enough to elect him as mayor last year with a stonking majority of more than 9000 votes. Here, writ large, is the lethal combination of intellectual arrogance, bigotry and elitism that continues to eat away at the credibility of political journalism.