What Diderot might have said about traffic cones

What the hell took him so long? That’s the only question arising from Transport Minister Simeon Brown’s belated crackdown on traffic cones.  

I wrote about the traffic cones lunacy nearly three years ago. It was a racket and a disgrace that had long been obvious even then.

I devoted another post to it in March last year and identified the traffic management cult as a prime symptom of the precautionary principle, which risk-averse regulators use as moral justification for imposing costly, wasteful and intrusive controls that defy common sense.

All the while, the problem has grown more intolerable. And we meekly fall into line even while cursing the irritation and inconvenience because we are essentially a passive, compliant people.

There’s an ideological element in all this. The urge to control human behaviour is central to the mentality of the bureaucracy, even in a supposedly liberal democratic state.

Traffic cones are just another means by which people can be made to submit to authoritarian edicts for which there’s no rational basis. The Covid-19 lockdown, which by common consent is now regarded as having been needlessly oppressive and damaging, can be seen in the same light.

While Brown’s belated initiative may be welcome, it’s also disappointingly half-hearted.  He says the government will be introducing a "risk-based" approach to traffic management, which raises the likelihood that decisions will be left in the hands of the same control freaks who got us into this mess in the first place.

The bottom line is that New Zealand built a network of state highways without a single traffic cone and no one, to my knowledge, has ever advanced a cogent reason why that needed to change. 

The 18^th century French philosopher Denis Diderot famously said that men could never be free until the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest. He might have added: “… and the last traffic cone is buried in a landfill”.

Here's the news: life will go on

I’ve asked this question before, but it’s time to ask it again: do TV journalists have any idea how precious and self-absorbed they look?

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests they don’t. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve witnessed an unedifying orgy of self-aggrandisement as Newshub journalists and broadcasters very publicly and ostentatiously mourn the imminent loss of their jobs.  

Paddy Gower, Mike McRoberts, Samantha Hayes, Lloyd Burr, Eric Young and Melissa Chan-Green have all invited us to share their grief, although Chan-Green, holding back tears, at least had the self-awareness to acknowledge that other people have faced tough times too.

Young, who I’ve always respected as a newsreader, deserves special mention for his maudlin display on a video released today. “There’ll be no time for self-indulgence,” he says of his final bulletin. Just as well, because we’ve seen far too much already.

It has been a strange combination of self-pity and self-celebration. The Newshub team are appealing for public sympathy while simultaneously bigging themselves up in a manner that many ordinary New Zealanders will find risibly over-the-top and more than a little self-centred.

They’re behaving as if they’re the first people ever to experience the trauma of losing their jobs, but of course it happens all the time. Businesses constantly fail, often with far more damaging consequences for those affected.

Untold thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled New Zealanders have been thrown out of jobs by technological change or economic upheaval and faced a far bleaker outlook than the relatively small number of skilled and talented people affected by the Newshub closure, some of whom have already acquired new and presumably well-paid jobs.

The difference, of course, is that all those anonymous victims of redundancy had no public platform from which to draw attention to their misfortune. Newshub journalists do, either via their own medium or through others in the media (such as the Herald’s Shayne Currie, who has assiduously reported all the hand-wringing). I’m sure it’s not lost on the public that they are exploiting a privileged position.

Yes, losing your job must be tough. It's also problematical, from a public interest standpoint, that there will be one less competitor in the news arena. But the Newshub journalists would probably win more sympathy, and certainly more respect, if they took it on the chin, just as thousands of anonymous workers had no choice but to do when they found themselves surplus to requirements.

I wonder, what makes the Newshub employees so special that their fate warrants all this wailing and breast-beating? What makes them think they have more emotionally invested in their work than all those other poor stiffs who fell victim to the cruel caprice of changing markets? An obvious explanation is that television is a uniquely ego-stroking medium. It can create the illusion, at least within the bubble of those working in the business, that the lives of the people who report and deliver the news are themselves a matter of vital public interest. Fatally, they come to regard themselves as celebrities.

It’s worth noting that this overweening egotism and sense of entitlement doesn’t afflict all journalists. Hundreds of print journalists have lost their jobs in recent years, with serious consequences for the public’s right to know what’s going on in their communities. They went quietly, without public fuss. What is it that makes TV journalists think their role is so uniquely precious?  

Similarly, when the Evening Post ceased to exist as a title when it was merged with The Dominion in 2002, it marked its own passing with a one-off commemorative issue that was notably light on self-congratulations. Hardly a word was published about the individuals who produced the paper. It was largely left to readers and public figures to write about what the Post had meant to them and to Wellington. (And bear in mind, this was a newspaper that had been an essential part of Wellington life for 137 years. Newshub, by way of contrast, came into existence only 35 years ago and was never more than a secondary player in its market.)

Well, here’s the news, to coin a phrase: life will go on. A timeline of Newshub’s history, published today in the Herald, graphically demonstrates that TV news and current affairs programmes come and go and are soon forgotten. The timeline serves as a striking reminder that television is essentially an ephemeral medium. Many of the shows mentioned have long since faded from the public memory, along with the names of the people who presented them. The same will happen to the 6 o’clock Newshub News, and possibly sooner than many of its grieving employees imagine.

Footnote (appended July 7): On Muriel Newman's Breaking Views page, a commenter named Gaynor responded to this piece by wondering where the mainstream media were when good people were losing their jobs because they chose not to have the Covid jab. No sympathy for them. A good point that I wish I'd thought of.