Booze, smoke, psychopaths and sexual harassment: when journalism was fun

I was invited to talk to the Greytown Lions Club last night about my life in the media. At the end, someone said he thought my speech deserved a wider audience and asked if I was going to publish it. I didn’t intend to but then thought: it’s a piece of social history, so why not? So here it is.

I entered journalism straight from school. That was the way things were done back then. Not now; you need a tertiary qualification, and preferably a university degree.

Why did I become a journalist? Probably because my mother had suggested it might be a good career for me because I was reasonably good at English, and I didn’t want to go to university. My burning passion was really music, but you couldn’t build a career on music. I had to satisfy myself with playing in bands on the side, which I did for several years.

I received my introduction to journalism in the reading room of the Evening Post in Willis St, Wellington. The reading room was where every word that went into the paper – everything, including all the classified ads and racing results – was checked before publication so that any errors could be picked up and corrected.

Reading rooms are gone now – history. Reporters are expected to correct their own mistakes. But don’t ask me how they’re expected to correct their errors if they don’t realise they made them in the first place.

My job title was copy holder – the lowest of the low. I worked alongside a more senior person called a proof reader. It was mind-numbingly tedious, menial work for which I was paid $21 a week – $23 if I was rostered to work a few hours extra on Saturday afternoons for the Sports Post, which came out late on Saturday and contained all the latest sports results.

I think the Evening Post management reasoned that if you could survive a year in the reading room, you could survive anything. But it was a good introduction to newspapers because it gave me an opportunity to observe how everything worked. It was also a fascinating place in human terms because of the weird and wonderful variety of people who worked there. The Evening Post reading room was a magnificent collection of cranks, oddballs and eccentrics – some likeable, others not so much.

Over in Mercer St, at the Dominion, where I worked later, the reading room also had a culture all its own, but a very different one. At the Dom, the readers tended to be long-haired dopeheads, dropouts, student radicals and anarchists.

Looking back now, I realise that the newspaper industry of that era had a wonderful tolerance of non-conformists. In the 1960s and 70s newsrooms were populated by a wondrous assortment of drunks, philanderers, egotists, neurotics, bohemians and assorted ne’er-do-wells. Many of them had the saving grace that they were articulate, well-read, well-informed and easy to like.

People gravitated to newspapers from all sorts of backgrounds and with all manner of personal idiosyncrasies. Newsrooms were smoke-stained and noisy from the clatter of typewriters and the barking of impatient chief reporters and subeditors. Today’s newsrooms seem bland and homogeneous by comparison, full of earnest people – mostly youngish middle-class university graduates – silently tapping away at keyboards. I bet we had far more fun.

University degrees were virtually unheard of in journalism. Most of the people I worked with came from working-class backgrounds and like me, got into journalism straight from school. But all that changed after the first journalism school was set up at Wellington Polytechnic in 1967. By the 1980s it had become virtually impossible to become a journalist without first completing an academic course.

That was a retrograde step. Journalism went from being something you learned on the job to something you were taught in a classroom. It also changed in the sense that it became more heavily based on theory rather than practice. It became subject to academic capture and we saw the intrusion of an ideological approach that encouraged budding journalists to think their primary purpose was to challenge the institutions of power rather than simply to provide people with important and useful information. 

Along the way, what the late Warwick Roger liked to call the Mongrel Factor – the dogged, hard-headed, competitive and slightly disreputable spirit that motivated some of the best reporters – fell out of favour. I’d have to scratch my head very hard these days to think of any reporters who qualify for the admirable term “mongrel”.

My first reporting job at the Evening Post, after I had escaped the reading room, involved covering the Wellington Magistrates Court. On a busy morning at the No. 1 Court there would be as many as six junior Evening Post reporters sitting at the press bench under the supervision of a more experienced hand named Fran Kitching, better known now as Dame Fran Wilde.

We covered every case that came up, taking it in turns to write our stories in long hand on copy paper. Every so often a messenger would turn up and take a bundle of stories back to the office. It sometimes took days or even weeks before some of those stories were published because unless they were particularly important or newsworthy, they would be set in type and kept until there was a convenient space in the paper for them.

We covered all cases apart from very minor traffic offences. That was a much fairer arrangement than we have now, when reporters are so thin on the ground that they have to cherry pick which court stories to cover. Reporting of the courts appears to have become quite random, with only major cases such as murder trials being guaranteed coverage.

From the point of view of defendants, it’s a lottery. Some criminals may go through the courts unnoticed by the media while others have their names splashed in the papers. You see this in the Wairarapa Times-Age, where weeks pass without a single court case being reported even though the local district court has been sitting. Then suddenly, for no obvious reason, someone will be named and shamed on the front page. I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for the criminals, but it’s not fair that some are publicly exposed while others escape scrutiny.

There’s also an important public interest element here. The reporting of criminal cases serves two purposes. One is that it serves the public good by alerting communities to the bad people in their midst. The other is that the fear of having their name in the paper can serve as a deterrent to criminals, especially in smaller communities where everyone knows everyone. But newsrooms have been so hollowed out that most of the time the court press bench is empty. New Zealand is hardly unique in this regard. The British journalist Nick Davies memorably wrote a few years ago that you were more likely to see a zebra in an English court than a reporter.

The Evening Post when I started there in 1968 was cosy, comfortable and complacent. It felt a bit like a government department but it was highly profitable, thanks largely to the enormous volume of advertising in its pages. I pick up Stuff papers today and see page after page without a single ad, and I wonder how the hell the company makes a profit. More often than not the most prominent ads are “house ads” promoting Stuff’s own publications, and therefore not generating any revenue.

The Evening Post, which was owned by the Blundell family, was also very conservative – so much so that it was one of the last papers in New Zealand to put news on the front page. Prior to that, page one had consisted entirely of classified ads. I think it was the Wahine disaster that finally persuaded the Post to put news on page one, but even then it struck an awkward compromise by putting news on the top half and ads on the bottom – a bizarre and possibly unique arrangement that persisted for quite some time.

Having said that, the Post was extraordinarily thorough in its saturation coverage of Greater Wellington affairs. You couldn’t fart or sneeze in Wellington without it being reported in the pages of the Post.

In 1969 I was poached to write a twice-weekly column for the Evening Post’s morning rival, the Dominion. When I say that, I don’t mean that all I did was write a column. No newspaper, least of all the lean and hungry Dom, could afford to pay a wet-behind-the-ears 18-year-old just to write a column, so I simultaneously worked as a general reporter.

The Dom had a very different workplace culture from that of the Post. It was edgy, stimulating and slightly anarchic. My friend the late Barrie Watts, who was then the Dom’s features editor, described the paper as being staffed by anti-social misfits and amusing psychopaths fuelled by prodigious quantities of alcohol. It was only a slight exaggeration. 

I was startled on arriving at the Dom to find I had to provide my own typewriter. The company supplied only two typewriters and they were both chained to desks, which surely tells you something about the place.

In my first week there, a notoriously irascible subeditor named Black Jack McKinnon bellowed for all the newsroom to hear: “If Mr du Freznee [I suspect he mispronounced it deliberately] hasn’t learned how to spell ‘accommodation’ by this time tomorrow, I’ll stand on him on this desk and kick his fucking arse.” Needless to say I never misspelled accommodation again.

That too tells you something about newspaper culture in those days. If you got something wrong, you could expect to be pulled up very sharply. Workplace bullying codes wouldn’t permit that sort of bracing humiliation now.

Sexual harassment too was taken as a given. I recently had a coffee with a former Evening Post reporter, a woman now quite prominent in public life (not Fran Wilde), who recalled her boss saying to her not long after she started: “There are breast men and there are leg men. I’m a leg man and I’d appreciate it if you wore a skirt rather than pants.” You can imagine how far you’d get with that sort of line today.

Newspapers can be high-pressure workplaces. You’re creating a brand-new product pretty much from scratch every day and you’re working to tight deadlines. Information has to be gathered, stories written, edited and proofread and pages laid out within very tight time frames. Tempers can get strained and volcanic rages were commonplace. Usually they were relatively harmless – phones being yanked out of their sockets, typewriters hurled on the floor, that sort of thing – but occasionally it turned a bit uglier.

I remember late one night when a Dominion reporter named Ron Malcolm, a pugnacious Scotsman and former British Army paratrooper, was at his desk writing a report of that evening’s Wellington City Council meeting. Chris Smith, the deputy chief subeditor, holding space open for Ron’s story with one eye anxiously on the clock, loudly suggested Ron pull his finger out. Ron responded by inviting Chris out to the lift foyer for a chat, then without a word decked him. Rising groggily to his feet, Chris said “That was a dumb thing to do, Ron”, whereupon Ron knocked him down again – then walked out, never to work at the Dominion again. He did, however, later turn up as a tutor on the Wellington Polytechnic journalism course.

I relate this story not because I approve of Ron’s behaviour – far from it – but as an illustration of the rumbustious journalism culture of that era.

Drinking was central to that culture. There was always a substantial core of Evening Post journalists who hit the pub every afternoon – or in the Dom’s case, at night in a short lull before the final rush to get the paper out and just before the pubs closed. Some of my workmates were high-functioning alcoholics. Every city had its own journalists’ pub – so much so that the Journalists’ Union’s monthly paper always carried advertisements advising what pub to visit if you were from out of town and wanted to find local newspaper people. In Wellington it was the Britannia in Willis Street, which was conveniently located almost next to the Evening Post and just a short walk from the Dominion. Journalists from both papers drank at the "Brit" but rarely mingled – partly because they kept different hours, but also due to the fact that the two papers were competitors with quite different workplace cultures and a certain degree of mutual animosity.

That animosity persisted after both papers came under the ownership of the same company in the late 1970s, and even when the two titles were merged to become the Dominion Post in 2002.

I’m ashamed to admit that for much of my time as a news reporter at the Dom, I was clueless. Even when I was appointed as the paper’s industrial reporter, which involved covering the paralysing union disputes that in those days were on the front page virtually every day, I was often pathetically ignorant of what I was writing about and relied on sheer blind instinct. It didn’t help that most of the union officials I dealt with were deeply suspicious of the Tory press. But I was fortunate in being able to establish good relationships with a few key people such as Jim Knox of the Federation of Labour and Pincher Martin of the Seamen’s Union.

In 1972 I moved to Melbourne and got a job with the Melbourne Herald. That was, as they say these days, a whole different level. The Herald was an afternoon paper with a circulation of half a million – more than ten times that of the Dominion. It shared a fortress-like building on Flinders St with its morning stablemate, the Sun News-Pictorial – circulation 650,000. It was a golden era of newspapers. The Herald printed eight editions a day, the first coming out about 11am and the final at 5 o’clock. The final edition often looked entirely different from the first because the paper was constantly being remade through the day as fresh stories broke.

I would have a story on the front page of the first edition and watch with mounting dismay as it gradually receded further and further inside the paper as the day progressed and more important news broke. Sometimes my story might disappear entirely.

You could go for weeks without getting anything published at all, which was unheard of on a New Zealand paper. I remember one of my colleagues shouting the public bar at the Duke of Wellington Hotel, where the Herald journos drank, because he’d had a story published after a drought of three months.

Most Herald reporters routinely got bylines – in other words, had their names published on their stories – but strangely, it happened to me only once. My byline was on a front-page story in the first edition but mysteriously disappeared in later editions, although the story remained in place. The vanishing byline was no mystery to a colleague of mine named Sam Leone, because a similar thing had happened to him. Sam explained to me that we both had foreign-looking names and the Herald apparently preferred to showcase reporters with familiar-sounding Anglo-Saxon names – an astonishing attitude in a city with a big migrant population.

Despite that, I loved my time at the Herald. It was like a giant living organism. The newsroom had a fleet of black Holdens and the police reporters - there were six of them with their own room at police headquarters - were driven around by their own dedicated chauffeur in a big black Chev Impala. The company even had its own resident doctor.

The Herald and the Sun merged many years ago, becoming the Herald-Sun. It’s still the biggest-selling paper in Australia but it’s a pale shadow of its illustrious precursors.  My wife and I walked past the Herald building on a recent visit to Melbourne and there’s very little trace remaining of its glory days. A great institution, brought down by disruptive technology that choked off the flow of advertising revenue and led to ruinous and self-destructive internet rivalry.

My next gig was with the National Business Review back in Wellington. The interesting thing about NBR is that it was a weekly paper launched by former Victoria University students whose previous journalism experience, such as it was, was with the student newspaper Salient. With one exception (the managing editor, Reg Birchfield) they had no background in the newspaper industry, but they saw a gap in the market and their audacious gamble paid off.  Somehow, more than 50 years later, NBR has survived despite all the turbulence in the newspaper industry, although it’s now under different ownership and published online only.

By 1976 I was back at the Evening Post, editing the TV page and writing daily television reviews. Somehow I ended up on the panel of a Friday night TV show called The Media, which was memorably spoofed as The Tedia on David McPhail's satirical show A Week Of It. The one story I’ll relate about The Media, and it’s at my own expense, concerns the show that we made in the week that Fawlty Towers made its debut in New Zealand. As the TV critic on the show, it fell to me to review John Cleese’s brilliant new comedy and I gave it the thumbs down. Worse still, I compared it unfavourably with an American comedy series that had also made its debut that week. Suffice it to say that Fawlty Towers still enjoys a worldwide cult-following while the Tony Randall Show –the one I glowingly reviewed on national TV that night in 1976 – sank without trace. So much for my judgment.

I then spent four years writing for the Listener. Again, it was then in its glory days, with a circulation approaching 400,000 – by far the largest magazine circulation, per head of population, in the world. But I wouldn’t delude myself that this was entirely due to the quality of the content. In fact the Listener at that time was state-owned and benefited from having sole rights to publish the full week’s TV and radio programmes, which guaranteed a massive readership. The Listener did, however, have a great team of writers, including such names as Tom Scott, Helen Paske, Phil Gifford, Denis Welch, Karen Jackman, David Young, Gordon Campbell and Pamela Stirling.

The magazine was ridiculously profitable and there was little pressure to produce. We had the luxury of almost unlimited time in which to write our stories, though some of us took more advantage of it than others. The late Stephen Stratford, a subeditor on the magazine, once wrote that “months passed – indeed, entire seasons – between stories by Vernon Wright [one of my fellow writers] and Karl du Fresne”. I have to admit it was basically true, though I did produce stories for the Listener that I’m quite proud of. 

After that, my career took a radical lurch. I went to the Nelson Evening Mail as news editor and never enjoyed a job more. I relished being back in an environment where I was subjected to the discipline of tight daily deadlines. It was a great team and a happy workplace. We worked hard, but we were out of the office by early to mid-afternoon. By then I had three kids with one more to come and the civilised working hours were an opportunity to establish some sort of regular family life. But then I ruined it all by being awarded a journalism fellowship to the UK for three months and as a result of that, being invited to rejoin the Dominion as its news editor – which I ill-advisedly did.

From there I progressed to the editorship of the Dominion in 1989. All I’ll say about that is that I stand before you as the embodiment of the Peter Principle, which holds that you rise to your level of incompetence. I never quite understood what this meant until it happened to me. Basically the Peter Principle means that you ascend through an organisational hierarchy because you’re good at what you do, until you reach a point where you realise you’ve gone one step too far. I’m not going to say I was a failure as a daily newspaper editor; merely that I didn’t enjoy the job, didn’t feel temperamentally cut out for it and therefore wasn't convinced I was suited to the role. I had gone from an editorial function that suited me to a managerial one that didn’t. So I quit after two years, much to the astonishment of many of my newspaper colleagues and fellow editors. Some regarded rising to the editorship of a metropolitan daily paper as a career pinnacle. Why would you turn your back on it? But I didn’t see it that way and I never wasted a millisecond wondering whether I’d done the wrong thing by resigning. For me it was a liberating act.

My last 10 years as a full-time newspaper journalist were spent as an assistant editor back in familiar territory at the Evening Post, mostly writing editorials, feature articles and columns under the editorship of my friend Sue Carty, whose own career was subsequently cut short by multiple sclerosis (which now, thankfully, seems to be in remission). When I accepted a voluntary redundancy deal in 2002 I was able to reflect that I’d come a long way in the 34 years since I’d started in the Post’s reading room. By my calculation it was about 30 metres.

In the past 20-odd years I’ve had an active freelance career. I found myself working for the Listener again under the editorship of my old colleague Pamela Stirling, though this time I wrote as a freelance contributor rather than an employee. I’ve been a columnist and a blogger and I’ve written books on subjects as diverse as wine, music and freedom of the press. I’ve had a lot of fun, and earned useful pocket money, compiling daily quizzes that were published throughout the country. I’ve enjoyed being my own boss and I’ve managed to make a relatively comfortable living at a time when journalism has been in a very fragile state.

I could easily detain you for the rest of the night talking about the wretched state of journalism in 2025 and why it’s sunk so low, but that would be too much of a downer. Some of my earlier remarks might give you a clue as to where I think we started going wrong, but that’s possibly a subject for another time. Thank you for listening patiently.

What privilege sounds like in 2025

We hear a lot about privilege these days. We’re told it’s an economic and political weapon that an affluent, selfish, male-dominated white capitalist society uses to keep disadvantaged minority groups in their place.

Wrong. Privilege in New Zealand in 2025 is the phenomenon that enables a small, effete and highly politicised media elite, cushioned by public funding, to capture and monopolise a crucial organ of public opinion and seek to influence the course of public debate.

If you want to know what privilege sounds like, just listen to RNZ. Privilege is an ad-free radio network that panders to your prejudices and stokes your biases; that caters, in effect, to entrenched left-wing bigotry. RNZ and its shrinking audience embody this privilege.

As a publicly funded radio station, RNZ has an obligation to cater to the tastes, interests and opinions of all New Zealanders, not just to a pampered minority caste. RNZ makes no attempt to honour that principle; in fact, hasn’t done so for almost as long as I can remember.

I was amused to read a Stuff interview with RNZ CEO Paul Thompson a while ago in which he suggested RNZ needed to stop trying to be “all things to all people”.

That’s a joke. The truth is that RNZ means nothing to the vast majority of New Zealanders. It serves a steadily diminishing minority audience consisting largely of ageing listeners who hold what are misleadingly labelled as “progressive” political views. It rewards them with content that mirrors and reinforces their smugly virtuous world view.

Thompson has had innumerable opportunities to correct this but hasn’t. On the contrary, he continues to send signals that RNZ will continue down the same blind alley. Key appointments, such as that of Guyon Espiner to take over as host of Midday Report from January, serve as a contemptuous “up yours” to RNZ’s critics and the tens of thousands of listeners who have abandoned it.

RNZ has made itself so irrelevant to the majority of New Zealanders that many no longer realise it even exists. It has achieved this ignominious own-goal through decades of carefully refining its content so as to exclude virtually anyone whose opinions and interests are not consistent with those of its own employees.

Now it’s paying the price as its listeners fall away to the point where even RNZ’s bosses have to concede that the organisation has lost its way – something obvious for a long time to everyone except RNZ itself and its privileged supporters. Even in the midst of the anguished self-analysis prompted by tumbling ratings and a highly critical recent report written by one of its own former key executives, RNZ carefully avoided confronting the damning issue of its all-pervasive editorial bias and the harm this has done to its credibility.

It can hardly be coincidental that RNZ’s audience has declined over the same period that this bias has become steadily more overt and pronounced – something Thompson has seemed either unwilling or powerless to do anything about.

RNZ’s listeners are privileged in more ways than one. They not only enjoy a diet of information and entertainment that can be relied on not to challenge their entrenched perceptions (rather like a broadcast version of Britain’s achingly woke Guardian newspaper), but thanks to the involuntary largesse of the taxpayer they are spared the aural torture of having to listen to commercials. That wretched fate is reserved for the proles who listen to RNZ’s main competitor, NewstalkZB.

The fact that NewstalkZB has reversed the former dominance of the state broadcaster and now far out-performs it in the ratings, despite the deterrent effect of intrusive, wall-to-wall advertising, surely says something. But has anyone at Radio New Zealand House noticed?

Somewhere along the line it seems to have escaped the state broadcaster that a publicly funded radio station should try to reflect the interests, opinions and values of society at large. An alien tuning into a show such as Morning Report would never guess that New Zealanders historically have leaned more to the right than to the left. For 29 of the past 50 years they have elected National or National-led governments, including the present one. Does it occur to RNZ presenters and producers that their own values, opinions and preoccupations are way out of line with those of the people they ostensibly serve? Apparently not. They are blinded by their privilege.

Commercial radio is the flipside of the privilege enjoyed by RNZ and its listeners. NewstalkZB’s audience, which now represents the majority of New Zealand radio listeners (that is to say, those whom RNZ appears uninterested in catering for) have to endure a ceaseless barrage of intrusive and mostly inane commercial content. This is the reverse of privilege. These listeners are effectively an underclass, banished to a netherworld where they are condemned to aural torment.

I suspect the bosses of the old Radio New Zealand regarded it as a great relief when the state broadcasting network was broken up in the 1990s and the formerly government-owned commercial stations were flogged off to the private sector. This meant RNZ was freed from the obligation of catering to the hoi-polloi, with all their vulgarian tastes, and could concentrate on pandering to its preferred target market.

In the years since, a pervasive monoculture has evolved at RNZ. This is characteristic of publicly owned broadcasting organisations elsewhere in the world. Those at the top appoint like-thinking people to positions of influence with the result that the monoculture becomes self-perpetuating.

(Here I will insert my standard qualification that there are many employees at RNZ, including journalists, who do a conscientious, honourable job. It’s also true that not all RNZ programmes have a political spin. Nonetheless, a leftist groupthink permeates most of what RNZ does.)

None of this should be taken as suggesting that RNZ should change to reflect a conservative or right-wing agenda, which would simply trade one bias for another and leave us no better off. The only way for RNZ to restore editorial credibility is by reverting to a position of strict editorial balance, fairness and neutrality. This does not preclude taking a hard line with politicians and asking tough questions, but it does require that the approach should be consistent across the entire political spectrum regardless of producers’ and interviewers’ own prejudices.

In the meantime, listeners alienated by RNZ have the option of signing up for membership of a peculiar cult called the Mike Hosking Breakfast. They may not share the host’s fascination with strange things like Formula One racing and American football and they may not like the impression he conveys of never in his life having experienced a moment’s self-doubt. But at least they can get an alternative view of national and world affairs – one not available to them from the state broadcasting organisation that they pay for with the tax on their hard-earned wages.

Actually, quite a few listeners (I’m one of them) don’t want any spin from either the right or the left. They would rather be presented with straight, unfiltered information and left to make up their own minds. But even if some of Hosking’s listeners don’t agree with his conservative slant, they must concede that as the employee of a privately owned media outlet, he’s entitled to say whatever he likes, within legal limits.

That defence is not available to RNZ, which as a taxpayer-owned entity has a responsibility to ensure its coverage of news and current affairs is neutral, fair and balanced – an obligation that RNZ constantly disregards, with the obvious approval of its board and management. This is an abuse of power, pure and simple.

 

A gross failure of editorial judgment

There’s a story in the New Zealand Herald this morning about the death of former King Cobras gang leader Ulaiasi “Rocky” Pulete. Carrying the byline of Herald crime reporter Jared Savage, it’s written in the reverential tones normally reserved for an esteemed community leader, business person or sporting figure. Pulete is described as “a giant of the criminal underworld” and “highly regarded across the wider criminal fraternity”.

This is a former bank robber who graduated to the booming methamphetamine trade and orchestrated major drug deals from his prison cell. We’re told that during his long spells in jail, “Pulete carefully cultivated trusting relationships with other inmates and was considered one of the most well-connected criminals in the country”. The admiring tone of the story is reinforced by a photo of a grinning Savage posing with Pulete in 2021.

According to the story, Pulete had stayed out of trouble since his last release from prison in 2017 and been left permanently disabled by an accident in 2018. Savage appears not to consider the possibility that these two facts might be related.

Savage writes sympathetically about Pulete’s “ordeal” following his injury and his subsequent battles with ACC. The story goes on to say that while Pulete had left his criminal lifestyle behind, he was visited often by friends “with chequered pasts” – there’s a cosy euphemism for you – and members of rival gangs. “Despite no longer taking an active role in organised crime, police and criminal sources said Pulete remained trusted in the underworld and knowledgeable about the environment”. I half-expected to see him described as “a gentle giant”, which is a familiar cliché in this type of story.

Perhaps Savage thought he was telling us a redemption tale about a career criminal turning his life around, but that’s not the impression the story conveys. There’s not a word of acknowledgment, still less of remorse or regret, for the lives destroyed by the pernicious drug trade from which Pulete profited in his active criminal years. I think both Savage and his editors were guilty of a gross failure of editorial judgment for running a story that presented him as someone worthy of our respect.

John Barnett: entrepreneur, visionary and patriot

It was a shock to hear that John Barnett, a key figure in the New Zealand film and television industry, had died last weekend, aged 80. "Barney" was a remarkable man - a dynamic entrepreneur, but always personable and gifted with a formidable brain. I wrote the following profile of him for The Listener in 2013:

There’s probably not a living New Zealander who hasn’t been exposed to something John Barnett has had a hand in. If they haven’t watched Outrageous Fortune, they’ve seen Whale Rider, Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tale or Shortland Street. They may even have a fuzzy recollection of a 1974 children’s television drama series set around the Christchurch Commonwealth Games.

In the New Zealand film industry, only Sir Peter Jackson packs more heft than the man known to everyone as Barney. But Barnett was making films – successful and often courageous films, such as Beyond Reasonable Doubt – when Jackson was still working as a photo-engraver at Wellington’s Evening Post and shooting movies at weekends with a hand-held 16mm camera.

Of the 10 New Zealand films that have been most popular with domestic audiences, four (Whale Rider, Sione’s Wedding, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted and Sione’s 2: Unfinished Business) came out of the South Pacific Pictures studios, which Barnett has headed since 1993. Footrot Flats, another in the box office top 10, was Barnett’s too, but was made before his association with South Pacific.

He has also nurtured a string of successful home-grown TV drama series. South Pacific’s studios in suburban west Auckland are a veritable conveyor belt, cranking out TV drama – Shortland Street, Outrageous Fortune, Go Girls, Nothing Trivial, The Almighty Johnsons – on a scale unmatched by any other New Zealand company and by few even in Australia.

And before movies and television, there were other ventures. In 1971, Barnett was one of a group of audacious young investors who rescued the business paper National Business Review when it was on the brink of collapse. (The paper’s still going today, although under different owners.) He adroitly guided the career of humourist John Clarke during Clarke’s Fred Dagg era and for a time managed pop singers Sharon O’Neill and Mark Williams.

He has been called the godfather of New Zealand film and television production – an overused term, but apt in Barnett’s case. People don’t exactly queue to ask favours of him at wedding feasts, as in the movie of that name, but he carries such weight in the industry that his patronage can make the difference between an idea coming to fruition or vanishing without trace.

Now his career is moving into a new phase. Last year Barnett, 67, handed the chief executive’s baton to his protégé Kelly Martin, former TV3 programming director. That was followed last month by an announcement that he had sold his remaining 40 per cent stake in South Pacific to his British partner, All3Media. But he remains the company chairman and still turns up at the Henderson studios a couple of days a week.

Industry observers wonder what he’s up to. As former Shortland Street producer Caterina de Nave told The Dominion Post, Barnett’s not the sort to go home to his pipe and slippers.

He confirms that he’s working on projects that he wants to see through to completion, and he mentions plans to expand into Australia. There are one or two ideas for new films, too, but he’s coy about details. As he puts it, announcing the impending arrival of a baby is never as exciting as presenting the baby itself.

His explanation for the changing of the guard at South Pacific is simple. He wanted a succession plan, and now the key elements are in place. Too often, he says, good companies fold the day the founder retires or dies.

Barnett didn’t establish South Pacific; it was created by the privatisation of the old drama department at TVNZ in 1988. But he has effectively made the company his own since taking over. And in hallmark Barnett style, he has left little to chance.

Forming an alliance with a British distribution company (initially Chrysalis, which was later acquired by All3Media) was an important part of his long-term thinking. All3Media is Britain’s biggest independent TV production and distribution company, so has marketing clout that a little-known studio in a far corner of the planet could never acquire on its own. But Barnett also ensured he had the domestic market covered. “One of the reasons Kelly Martin is the new CEO,” he says, “is that she had 12 years of programming at TV3, so she knows what the [New Zealand] broadcasters are looking for.”

There’s nothing to suggest, then, that South Pacific’s overwhelming dominance of local television and film production – a cause of resentment among some of Barnett’s competitors, even those who like and respect him – is at risk.

ON ONE LEVEL, Barnett – the son of British Jews who migrated before the Second World War and settled in Auckland – can be seen as the classic show business entrepreneur: an astute spotter and nurturer of talent, a shrewd negotiator and a clever strategic thinker who’s always a couple of moves ahead of the game.

But perhaps more important than that, he’s also a patriot who believes in telling New Zealand stories to New Zealanders. He persevered for 17 years before bringing Whale Rider to the screen and, early in his career, took a substantial risk making Beyond Reasonable Doubt, based on British author David Yallop’s book about the Arthur Allan Thomas case.

His latest project, the film White Lies (like Whale Rider, based on a story by Witi Ihimaera) is a period drama about a Maori medicine woman. It’s probably too low-key to be another big box-office hit, but Barnett thinks it’s a story worth telling.

The hard-headed side of Barnett’s personality, the one with an unwavering eye on the bottom line, is the one that asks of every new programme or film idea that comes across his desk: who’s going to watch this? “It has to be more than a bright idea,” he says.

“Who’s the audience?” is a question that the Film Commission, the state funding agency of which he has been both a member and a trenchant critic, hasn’t asked nearly often enough in the past, Barnett maintains.

The commission has a new board and management now, following a damning report co-authored by Sir Peter Jackson in 2010, but Barnett says for many years it was “badly, badly served”. Of the 150-odd New Zealand films made in recent decades, most with commission funding, he reckons 90 should never have proceeded. “They never had an audience.”

Some of those failures cost the taxpayer millions and earned as little $40,000 at the box office. Several were made by first-timers who never directed another film. “It cost three to four million to find out they were no good.”

The commission, he says, was prone to capture by arty filmmakers who would hang around its Wellington office. “They [the commission] would think, ‘This person looks like an interesting director – we’ll back him’.”  Barnett says no one thought to ask who would be interested in watching the finished product.

His own preference is to make a film about a subject that audiences are already familiar with. Eighty thousand people had read Whale Rider, the novel, before it was transferred to the screen – “you already knew who the audience was on day one.”

Similarly, Sione’s Wedding (which starred comedy performers the Naked Samoans, well known from the animated series bro’Town) and Footrot Flats had a head start at the box office because both involved performers or situations people could identify with.

With television it’s different. TV programmes can be targeted more precisely than films, Barnett says, and a TV network has the advantage of being able to promote a new show to the particular audience it wants to attract. But it’s still hit-and-miss. “You have to think about the channel that you’re on and the audience that’s going to watch,” Barnett says. “Would Game of Thrones work on TV1? I don’t think so.”

The broad brief for new programmes, he explains, comes from the client TV networks. A new show can attract New Zealand on Air funding only if it has a network willing to screen it.

Outrageous Fortune, for instance, came about because TV3 wanted something for an 8.30pm midweek timeslot, skewed to a female audience. Scriptwriter Rachel Lang came up with the concept of the feral West family after she heard on the radio that the median annual wage for women was $14,000, which got her thinking about how a family could be held together on so little money without resorting to crime.

Outrageous, as it’s known in industry jargon, ending up running for six series and selling in several overseas markets. A well-placed industry source told The Listener it was initially intended as a stopgap series whose success took everyone by surprise.

BARNETT is neither fazed nor affronted when it’s put to him that some industry players complain that South Pacific gets favoured treatment from funding agency New Zealand on Air. 

Such allegations are hardly surprising. Since 2004, South Pacific has received more than $128 million from New Zealand on Air for drama series of six episodes or more, compared with the $48 million allocated to its competitors. But Barnett has heard it all before and has a well-rehearsed answer.

“Every drama, every slot, is contestable. Everyone can pitch for it. You can’t get any money from NZ on Air unless a broadcaster has said, ‘We’ll broadcast this’.

“So we pitch to the broadcasters, and other people pitch to the broadcasters, and for some time the broadcasters have liked what we’ve pitched. But they haven’t only liked what we’ve pitched. I think if you talked to them they would say we deliver on time, we deliver on budget and we deliver to an audience.” Other producers do the same thing, he adds pointedly, “to a lesser degree”.

Committing to a drama series is a big risk for the networks, Barnett says, “and they’re happy with what we’re doing.”

He also argues that South Pacific ploughs a lot of money back into the industry: $8 million in the past two years on writers alone. “That’s more than three times what the Film Commission spends.”

Dozens of writers, actors, producers, directors and production crew have honed their skills in the Henderson studios, mostly on the set of Shortland Street. That gives South Pacific a formidable base – call it critical mass – that’s hard for smaller competitors to match.

For all the murmurings about South Pacific’s dominance, Barnett says he enjoys a good relationship with other producers and is quick to applaud when someone else pulls off a challenging project – as with rival company Screentime’s Siege: The Real Story, last year’s docu-drama about the 2009 Napier shootings in which police officer Len Snee and gunman Jan Molenaar died.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it provides South Pacific’s bread and butter, Barnett defends the New Zealand on Air funding model.  State subsidisation of the private sector may have been eliminated in virtually every other field, but he says New Zealand drama simply wouldn’t get made without help from the taxpayer.

An hour of television drama typically costs $600,000 to make, several times the $100,000-$150,000 of advertising it generates. Without state funding to cover that deficit, the TV networks would simply buy imported drama (average cost: $40,000 an hour).

“If that happened, you wouldn’t see any local programming,” Barnett says. “So the intervention of NZ on Air, as the agency that ensures New Zealand stories and faces are seen, is critical.”

Moreover, he thinks the NZ on Air model is “pretty well flawless”. Of roughly $1.4 billion that has been invested in programming over the past 20 years, he calculates that only about $3 million worth hasn’t found its way onto the screen. “That’s a pretty good hit rate, better than most government departments.”

This is not to say he thinks existing television arrangements are perfect. Like many in the industry, Barnett is unhappy about the dominance of Sky TV and thinks the pay-TV company should never have been allowed to acquire exclusive rights to broadcast major sports events that, in other countries, have to be available on free-to-air channels.

Barnett likes the Australian system whereby a 10 per cent levy is charged on all imported shows broadcast on pay-TV channels and invested in local production, but he doesn’t see it happening here. “I don’t think anyone will roll them [Sky] back on sport or put a local production impost on them. That horse got out of the stable quite a long time ago.”

At the same time, he acknowledges that Sky is astutely managed, and he admires the ability of its lobbyist, Tony O’Brien, to keep governments onside. Barnett also concedes that Sky has increased its commitment to local production, particularly in sport, and offers something “new and exciting” in terms of programming. “There is choice now that we never contemplated.”

Barnett still shakes his head in astonishment that TVNZ sold its cornerstone shareholding in Sky in 1999. “If they still held 35 per cent of Sky, TVNZ would be in a markedly different place now. As it is, they are playing catch-up.”

The state-owned network, he says, has not been well-served either by political appointees on its board or by successive broadcasting ministers. He thinks it should have been privatised a long time ago, but it’s now probably too late.

THERE’S another side to Barnett, a more philosophical side. In thoughtful moments he talks about the liberating effects of living in a small country in the middle of the ocean, “where you can stand on the foreshore and there are no impediments.  There’s no other country just across the river, nothing close that you look at and think, ‘Gee, those guys are bigger than me’.”

That isolation, he theorises, not only gives New Zealanders a different world view, but encourages them to think that anything’s doable; there are no limits. He suspects this is what made Sir Peter Jackson believe in his ability to do things on his own terms, even when confronted by the power of Hollywood.

Mind you, the flip side is that for 100 years we didn’t believe we could have a culture of our own. He recalls that when New Zealand television screened the first locally made drama, Bruce Mason’s The Evening Paper, in 1965, reviewers and letter-writers fretted about what non-New Zealanders might think of it.

Barnett has also thought about whether being Jewish has influenced him (he’s active in the Auckland Hebrew congregation) and has concluded it has. He says he grew up being conscious of difference and able to see things from a different perspective.

That appears to have made him sensitive to issues faced by minority cultures – a theme of films such as Whale Rider and the more recent South Pacific production My Wedding and Other Secrets, in which a young Chinese woman had to deal with her parents’ reluctance to accept her white fiancé.

“We’re still a very assimilationist society,” Barnett observes. “We want people to be pretty much the same.” He says most people who saw the documentary Banana in a Nutshell, which inspired My Wedding and Other Secrets, couldn’t understand why the main character’s parents were against her marrying a European.

“Her parents wanted her to retain her Chinese culture. That’s something I’m absolutely familiar with. I looked at that documentary and thought, ‘That’s a Jewish story’.”

On objectivity, balance and honesty in journalism

Several weeks ago I listened to a discussion on America’s National Public Radio network about objectivity in journalism. The three participants included Adam Reilly, the politics reporter for the Boston TV station GBH, and Callum Borchers, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

The third guest on the panel, Juliette Kayyem, was not a journalist, but a politically well-connected former Democratic Party candidate for governor of Massachusetts and occasional columnist for the Boston Globe.

The discussion about objectivity took place in the immediate aftermath of the tragic July 4 floods in Texas and the question raised by Kayyem was whether media coverage had paid enough attention to the role of climate change.

This evolved into a more general discussion about objectivity and balance. Climate change has brought these issues to the fore in journalism, as has the polarising presidency of Donald Trump.

Kayyem said she wanted to believe in journalistic objectivity but confessed, with commendable honesty, that she didn’t understand the difference between objectivity and balance.

Borchers replied that the two shouldn’t be conflated and then proceeded to give his own off-the-cuff definition of journalistic objectivity. This went something like “discovering the truth as fully as you can and to the best of your ability without worrying if your story happens to piss someone off”.

That’s okay as far as it goes, but it’s a bit loose and fuzzy for my liking and too open to subjective interpretation. It leaves a lot of wiggle room for journalists who see themselves as being on an ideological or political mission, as many do. It doesn’t say anything, for example, about being open to competing views.

By comparison, balance is relatively straightforward. It’s the notion that journalism should fairly report conflicting sides of an issue. Many journalists and teachers of journalism sneeringly dismiss this as “both sides-ism”. They would prefer to decide for themselves which arguments are valid and ignore the rest.

TVNZ’s highest-profile journalist, John Campbell, is one of those who eschew the requirement of balance, and once ridiculed the idea by asking rhetorically whether the SS guards at Auschwitz should have been allowed to put their side of the story. But you can support almost any argument by choosing the most extreme hypotheticals. (In any case, it would have been revealing to learn how the Auschwitz guards justified their monstrous conduct. Journalists should be open to information from any source that throws new light on an issue.)

The positive thing about the Boston radio discussion is that here were four media commentators (the moderator, a loudmouth named Jim Braude, also weighed in) talking seriously, if only briefly, about the principle of journalistic objectivity. This should be applauded, given that the very idea of objectivity has been attacked as fantasy in recent decades by influential journalists and academics.

It’s also encouraging that objectivity is suddenly being cited in New Zealand as a journalistic value worth aspiring to. In a recent episode of The Detail, RNZ’s head of podcasts, Tim Watkin, stressed the importance of showing that journalists could take themselves out of the story. Watkin acknowledged the pressures that tempt the media to push the boundaries between facts and opinion, but he clearly viewed the discipline of objectivity as something that could help rebuild trust in the media.

Given that RNZ is struggling with a steadily shrinking radio audience and diminishing public trust in the media overall (two trends that are almost certainly interconnected), I thought it significant that Watkin should highlight those points.

What particularly struck me about the Boston discussion was that these intelligent, highly educated Americans (you can be sure they all have impressive degrees) were wrestling over a definition of something that generations of New Zealand journalists, virtually none of them educated beyond secondary school level, grasped almost intuitively.

This was that you tried to approach every story with an open mind, kept your opinions or feelings out of it, presented the known facts in a neutral fashion, followed the story where it led and didn’t allow any relevant information or individuals to be excluded simply because they didn’t align with any preconceptions.

Broadly speaking, that’s my idea of objectivity, and it’s not rocket science. Thousands of New Zealand journalists absorbed it almost by osmosis.

There were always some exceptions to the rule. “Name” writers were given some licence to state their personal opinions, usually under their byline. But in the news columns of newspapers, objectivity and balance were basic tenets of journalism. Unfortunately the current generation has been encouraged to ignore them.

It’s true, as Callum Borchers said, that balance and objectivity are not the same thing, but they overlap. A story that lacks balance is unlikely to be a truly objective one, even by Borchers’ flexible yardstick, because if it omits relevant facts or opinions, it can’t be the “full” truth (insofar as the “full truth” can ever be definitively established).

And while we’re on the subject of balance, let’s get some misconceptions out of the way. Kayyem raised the old canard that if someone says two and two equals five, then the balance rule insists they be given equal space with those who say two and two equals four.

This argument is often used to ridicule the idea that climate change sceptics should be given equal space with those who insist that climate science is “settled”. But at best the argument is sophistry and at worst, it’s dishonest.

It’s an unarguable, objective truth, able to be grasped by a five-year-old, that two and two equals four, but there’s nothing immutable about the theory of anthropogenic climate change, which a significant minority of scientists contests.

The global warming theory may be supported by the great majority of climate scientists, but the sceptics (or denialists, as the mainstream media prefer to call them) are right to argue that science is never “settled”. In fact science depends on the questioning of accepted wisdom and the possibility that we don’t yet know everything. There’s no point at which scientists can sit back and declare, “That’s it, then – we have nothing more to learn”. The advance of knowledge depends on the contestability of ideas and theories.

In any case, “balance” in journalism has never required that equal space be given to competing arguments. That’s another canard that I saw advanced earlier this year in a piece by Tim Hunter of NBR. “The idea that journalism should provide equal weight to all aspects of a debate would involve abandoning a key function of journalism, which is to sift the wheat from the chaff,” Hunter wrote. But he was attacking a straw man.

The argument is not that dissenting views must be given equal space. The important thing is to acknowledge that there are competing arguments, and thus show that whatever proposition or idea is being advanced (for instance, anthropogenic climate change) isn’t unanimously accepted.

But even this is too much of a challenge for the totalitarian ideological mindset that now governs much mainstream journalism. Hence you get major news organisations proudly declaring, as if it’s a point of honour, that they will give no coverage to climate change sceptics. This was an extraordinary and inexcusable turnaround for an industry that was largely founded on, and depends on, the principle of free speech.

And as it is for climate change, so it has been for other issues such as Covid vaccination, trans-gender rights and the Treaty of Waitangi. The mainstream media simply ignored any views that didn’t conform to their own. Or if they acknowledged them at all, it was only so they could be derided.

Even worse, media organisations signed up to a narrow and rigid interpretation of Treaty rights – one that allowed no room for dissent – as a condition of their eligibility for generous taxpayer-funded handouts under the former Labour government. Small wonder that trust in the media has plummeted. I don’t think editors and owners realised the damage they were doing to their credibility.

Now here’s another defining principle of objectivity in journalism: it means being prepared to write stories that express opinions or explore ideas that the journalist may not agree with.

Generations of New Zealand reporters accepted that rule without question. I worked with countless left-wing journalists who unhesitatingly reported statements that personally were anathema to them. But this would come as a radical and novel concept to many of the journalists currently helping to set the news agenda.

Some reporters (Marc Daalder of Newsroom is one, though there are plenty of others) can always be relied on to write stories that either promote ideas and opinions they support or disparage ones they don’t like. I get the impression people like Daalder would sooner have a limb amputated than devote space to an idea they find ideologically unacceptable – that is, unless they’re attacking it.

All of which brings us back to Tim Hunter of NBR. His sneering piece on LinkedIn, scornfully headlined How to be a journalist, was written in response to two blog posts by the lawyer Philip Crump, who was associated with the Canadian investor Jim Grenon’s bid for control of the board of NZME, publisher of the New Zealand Herald and owner of the NewstalkZB network.

Grenon’s raid on NZME was characterised in the media as an attempted right-wing takeover and Crump was seen as a co-conspirator. That alone made him a media target, but Crump went further by publishing posts in which he criticised media left-wing bias and suggested some rules that might help restore public trust in journalism.

Some of Crump’s suggestions were unexceptionable (be accurate with facts, present them objectively, don’t follow a pre-determined narrative, don’t assume you know “the truth”, don’t sacrifice balance for advocacy, allow readers to make up their own minds, avoid loaded language). I spent well over half a century in newspaper and magazine journalism, including substantial spells as an editor and news editor on daily papers, and his points struck me as eminently reasonable. But Crump’s piece provoked Hunter into a sneering, condescending and highly defensive response.

Crump’s sin, I believe, was that he had the impertinence, as an outsider, to suggest ways that journalists could do their job better and thus start rebuilding the public trust they have squandered. What made it worse was that he was perceived as tainted by association with conservatives who were protesting against a pervasive left-wing influence in the media. 

Red rag, meet bull (and never mind the validity of Crump’s arguments).

I can’t help wondering too whether some in the media resented Crump for showing them up by writing a series of explosive pieces analysing details of Labour’s Three Waters plan that the mainstream media preferred not to investigate and also exposing rampant nepotism and conflicts of interest involving a Labour cabinet minister. Crump’s assiduously researched articles, published in 2022 under the pseudonym Thomas Cranmer, were something of a masterclass in investigative journalism but were steadfastly ignored by mainstream media, presumably because they reflected badly on a government that most journalists supported and felt protective toward.

Before I go any further, I should disclose that Hunter and I have something of a history – albeit a brief and not very happy one. Hunter was a co-editor of NBR four years ago when I was invited to contribute a regular opinion column to the paper. The column was stillborn because Hunter disagreed with a couple of things I said in my inaugural piece and wanted two paragraphs deleted. I refused and withdrew from my contract.

Leaving aside the irony that I was invited to write a column because NBR presumably thought I had something of value to say but then tried to stop me saying it, my experience didn’t exactly imbue me with respect for Hunter. It follows that I don’t regard him as a paragon of journalistic values, although that’s how he presented himself in his attack on Crump.

Consider this: if Hunter didn’t want me as a columnist to express an opinion he didn’t agree with, how likely would it be that he would give space in the paper to any views he disapproved of? How committed could he be to the idea of editorial balance? For me, his credibility was shot to pieces.

I should make it clear that I don’t dispute the ultimate right of an editor to decide what goes in the paper, but the public is entitled to judge a publication on its openness to dissenting views and its commitment to fairness and balance. In my opinion, Hunter failed that test. I was in charge of opinion columns at Wellington’s Evening Post for more than 10 years, dealing with provocative writers as diverse as Bob Jones, Alan Duff, Marilyn Waring and Mary Varnham, and no one was ever censored because we didn’t like what they said.

That aside, Hunter’s response to Crump was a farrago of specious half-truths, red herrings and examples carefully cherry-picked to support his arguments.

For instance, Crump had urged caution when it came to the use of anonymous sources and said journalists often cited selectively chosen experts while sidelining dissenting expertise. I think that has unarguably been true in recent years, especially on issues such as climate change, the Treaty, vaccinations and mis/disinformation, not to mention anything to do with the so-called culture wars. But Hunter misconstrued this (wilfully?) as an argument against any use of anonymous sources, then tediously but predictably held up the example of the Watergate disclosures – 53 years ago – as evidence that non-disclosure of sources is sometimes vital.

This is a form of false equivalence. I didn’t interpret Crump’s piece as arguing against the use of anonymous whistleblowers, where reporters sometimes have compelling reasons to respect their sources’ privacy. I think he was referring more generally to the insidious use of supposed experts, who are not always named, to shape journalistic narratives. Mostly they are from academia and invariably they lean sharply to the left.

In any case, the argument is not so much about the use of “experts”, since they’re entitled to their opinions. It’s more about the suppression of legitimate voices because they don’t pass ideological tests.

Hunter then lays the blame for declining trust in the media not on anything the New Zealand media have done (or failed to do), but on Donald Trump’s fulminations about “fake news”. A convenient excuse; let yourself off the hook by blaming the US president.

Even less convincingly, he goes on to cite the appalling practices of the British tabloid press, implying they’ve given all the media – including our own – a bad name. (I bet Hunter, who is Scottish, was itching to blame Rupert Murdoch, whom British journalists hate. But he heroically resisted the temptation.) Later, when trying to deflect Crump’s criticism of sensationalism in the New Zealand media, he harks back to the British Sun and Daily Mirror of the 1980s and argues that sensationalist “clickbait” is nothing new.

I have a suggestion for him: try to keep to examples that are relevant to the here and now. Don’t muddy the waters with tired, self-serving references to Trump, Watergate and British tabloids. This is New Zealand in 2025 that we’re talking about.

In his desperation to discredit Crump’s arguments, Hunter even goes back to an issue of the Evening Post in 1885 in an attempt to prove that a certain style of journalism, in which the reporter eschews the traditional “who, what, when, where and why” approach to a story, is not new. But a specific instance from nearly one and a half centuries ago doesn’t negate the legitimacy of Crump’s general observation that the abandonment of the old, "straight" approach to story writing opens the way to more personalised and subjective takes on the news.

Ultimately, this debate is really about honesty: not just honesty in discussing the issues facing journalism, but far more importantly, honesty in the way journalists report contentious issues. A key reason people have lost faith in the media is that they suspect they are not getting the full story, and unfortunately their suspicion is too often justified.  

I thought Hunter’s vitriolic piece said far more about him that it did about Crump, and it was disappointing that those eagerly cheering him on from the sidelines on LinkedIn included a couple of senior figures from the journalistic establishment.  It would be a grave mistake to assume Hunter was speaking for all journalists, least of all those of us who recall a time when journalism enjoyed far greater trust and respect than it does now.

 

 

Echoes of Citizens for Rowling

Who remembers the Citizens for Rowling campaign? It was a concerted attempt by the Great and the Good to derail National Party leader Robert Muldoon’s election campaign in 1975.

The campaign’s backers didn’t like Muldoon’s combative, divisive brand of politics and argued that Labour’s gentlemanly Bill Rowling, who had assumed the prime ministership after Norman Kirk’s death in 1974, offered a far more desirable style of leadership.

Citizens for Rowling generated enormous publicity, circulating a nationwide petition and taking out ads in all the major papers, but the campaign was an ignominious failure. National won the election in a landslide, securing 55 seats to Labour’s 32.

For Muldoon, Citizens for Rowling was political gold. It played to his strength as a political counter-puncher and a man of the people, enabling him to portray Rowling’s backers as elitist and condescending.

So who were Citizens for Rowling? The driving force behind the campaign was the Canadian-born former TV current affairs interviewer David Exel, who enlisted the support of a bevy of high-profile names – among them, Everest conqueror Sir Ed Hillary, Anglican bishop Paul Reeves (later to become governor-general under a Labour government), academic and peace campaigner John Hinchcliff, civil libertarian and educationist Walter Scott, lawyer John Jeffries, businessman Sir Jack Harris and future Labour prime minister Geoffrey Palmer.

It’s that last name that particularly resonates 50 years later. Palmer, who was then an idealistic young law professor at Victoria University, is the only survivor of the leading Citizens for Rowling signatories. And sadly, he appears to have learned little or nothing during the intervening decades.

I’m forced to that conclusion because according to the NZ Herald today, Palmer is the leading signatory to an open letter opposing ACT’s Regulatory Standards Bill.

If you closed your eyes and concentrated hard, you shouldn’t have too much trouble guessing the names of at least some of the others. In fact they are almost comically predictable.

There’s Dame Anne Salmond, Professor Emeritus Jane Kelsey, Professor Emeritus Jonathan Boston (they do love their titles in academia), climate change bore Jim Salinger, old-school socialist Geoff Bertram, former CTU economist Bill Rosenberg and geeky law academic and activist Max Harris. The usual suspects, in other words - a select roll-call of the Left-leaning brahmin academic caste. 

The parallels with Citizens for Rowling are unmistakable and their efforts are likely to be just as ineffectual, because New Zealand society, for all that it has changed, still has a deep egalitarian streak that is stubbornly resistant to guidance from self-appointed elites.

To put it simply, many New Zealanders resent being told what to think. That was the lesson of 1975 and I don’t think much has changed.

There is more than just a faint whiff of patronising intellectual superiority in the posturing of Palmer and his fellow signatories. In their lofty eyries, they appear to labour under the naïve delusion that their open letter may help turn the tide against David Seymour’s Bill.

I don’t think it will – not because their objections don’t have any substance, necessarily, but because the people most likely to be influenced by the letter are those who belong to that steadily shrinking portion of the population that still habitually reads the Listener and listens to RNZ, both of which can be relied on to reinforce their world view. Such people are programmed to suspect the worst of Seymour anyway and will earnestly nod their heads in agreement with Palmer’s open letter.

Of course the signatories are simply exercising rights available to everyone in a liberal democracy. But they are doing so in the obvious belief that their names, and hence their opinions, carry a lot more weight than those of the average citizen. In other words they are pontificating from a position of entrenched privilege, though I’m sure they don’t see it that way. (It’s worth noting here that this type of elitist posturing invariably emanates from the Left – a curious fact, given that the Left has always presumed to speak for the disadvantaged.)

To return to Citizens for Rowling: I disliked Muldoon intensely, but the campaign against him got my back up nonetheless. Citizens for Rowling gave the clear impression they didn’t trust their fellow New Zealanders to figure things out for themselves; that we needed guidance from mountaineering heroes, lawyers and high-ranking clerics.

I voted for Labour in the subsequent election, but I greatly resented this elite group’s attempt to use their public status to influence the outcome, and the election result suggested that lots of other New Zealanders probably did too. I predict this latest ill-conceived initiative will misfire for much the same reason.

Harlan County USA: still compelling after nearly 50 years

Last night I watched, for the second time, a documentary film called Harlan County USA. Made in 1973-74 but not released until 1976, it deservedly won an Academy Award for best documentary.

Harlan County USA is a cinematic record of the Brookside coal miners’ strike in south-eastern Kentucky, historically one of the most deprived and poverty-stricken corners of America.

The film, which is available on YouTube and runs for 103 minutes, is remarkable for a number of reasons. The first is that it was made by a small independent crew from New York led by producer-director Barbara Kopple. That an absolute outsider – a big-city, university-educated Northerner – was able to win the confidence of the miners in this isolated, insular, oppressed Appalachian community, and be granted access to the intimate detail of their lives, was extraordinary in itself.

More striking still is that the film has no narration, only a few brief excerpts from interviews, and a loose, almost anarchic structure. A couple of explanatory captions at the start lay the groundwork and set you on your way, but after that you’re on your own. Viewers have to construct their own narrative from what they see unfolding on screen and from the dialogue of the participants.

This isn’t always easy, because the southern accents are not easy to understand and people constantly talk across each other, just as in real life. This is classic cinema verite – capturing things as they are, with no filmmaker interference beyond the camera’s presence. 

Having said that, the film maker leaves no doubt as to whose side she’s on. The camera is always on the miners’ side of the picket line, giving a striker’s-eye view of the strike-breakers (gun thugs, the strikers call them) and their uniformed enablers from the police and sheriff’s office.

What gradually emerges is a compelling and sympathetic picture of an impoverished but proud community that refuses to bow down to far more powerful forces.

Harlan County USA reinforces some of the darkest stereotypes about the American South. A brooding air of menace hangs over the thickly wooded valley where the action unfolds. It’s not hard to imagine that a decade earlier, the sinister-looking convoys of pickup trucks and battered Detroit V8 sedans that force their way through the picket lines might have carried Ku Klux Klan vigilantes hunting for civil rights activists. (The participants in the Brookside strike, incidentally, are almost all white.)

This being America, we meet some scarily repugnant figures who could have stepped straight from the pages of a novel. One is the leader of the local strike-breakers, who wears an expression of pure unadulterated hate and fingers a semi-concealed pistol as if nothing would give him greater pleasure than to use it.

Then there’s the almost charismatically grotesque Tony Boyle, president of the United Mine Workers of America. In a sub-plot to the main narrative, Boyle is challenged for his job by a union faction that thinks he’s too friendly with the mine companies. His main rival is subsequently found shot dead in his home, along with his wife and daughter. Boyle is convicted of conspiracy to murder and spends the rest of his life in prison, where he died in 1985. (Kopple originally set out to make a documentary about the attempt to unseat Boyle but got sidetracked when she stumbled across the Brookside strike.)

Some things are implied in the film rather than overt. The director resists any temptation to sensationalise, dramatise or even spell out what’s happening on screen, leaving it to the viewer to figure out what’s going on. And sometimes things occur with such shocking suddenness – as when we learn a young miner has been fatally shot – that you ask yourself: did that really just happen? (The footage of his funeral, where his mother collapses from grief, is a hard watch.)

Two other features of Harlan County USA are worth mentioning. One is the musical soundtrack, which draws heavily on the “high, lonesome” bluegrass sound characteristic of that part of Appalachia. The songs of Hazel Dickens, in particular, grew out of the privations and injustices of life in a company-run mining town. Titles such as Black Lung and Cold Blooded Murder speak for themselves. The union anthem Which Side Are You On? is here too and has particular resonance because it was written during a miners’ strike in Harlan County 40 years earlier.

Even more noteworthy is that some of the most formidable and articulate characters on the miners’ side are their wives. When some of the men show signs of wavering (the strike went on for more than a year), it’s the women who stand firm.

In the end, the violent death of the young miner helps bring the union and the mine owners together. A contract is signed and the men go back to work. But there’s no sense of elation and as the postscript updates run over the closing credits, you’re left wondering how much, if anything, has really changed.

 

 

Bob Jones, Sitiveni Rabuka and me

The Newsroom website this morning has a long, affectionate tribute to Bob Jones, written by Tom Scott. One great character writing about another. It’s very entertaining. How could it not be?

It also served as a reminder of an era when Wellington was a far livelier and more stimulating place than it is now – a city full of rumbustious, larger-than-life individualists who lived life at 100 miles an hour and didn't bother with seat belts, metaphorically speaking.

I can’t claim to have known Jones well, but our orbits overlapped from time to time. I only once went to his big house on the hills overlooking the Hutt Valley, but I drank with him in his office on several occasions and lunched with him a couple of times. All a long time ago, I should add, and always at his invitation.

I also recall quite a few phone conversations. It was always him ringing me, never the other way around, and it was usually at a time when I had more important things to get on with, like getting a paper out. Jones loved to talk.

I remember reading years ago about a court case he was involved in. He was often caught up in litigation of one sort or another and I think this one involved a property purchase that had turned sour in a big way.

At one point Jones was in the witness box being questioned by counsel for the other side. He was challenged for supposedly not knowing about some detail that was in contention and replied to the effect that he was far too busy to be on top of every little thing relating to his property investments.

I remember thinking, “Yeah, right”. During the period under consideration by the court, he was often on the phone to me, at some length and never about anything important. In other words he gave the impression of having plenty of time on his hands. I suspect the truth was that the finicky minutiae of business bored him. Media and political gossip was far more interesting.

Jones had a love-hate relationship with journalists. He was endlessly, acerbically critical of them, but enjoyed their company – or at least those he respected, or saw as being potentially useful to know. I think he phoned them when he was bored or felt like an argument.

“Useful to know” ... I think that was central to Jones’ personality. He liked to cultivate people he perceived as being influential. These included politicians (especially politicians), sporting names, columnists and editors. They appeared to fall in and out of favour at Jones’ whim, and in line with their perceived importance at any given time.

Political compatibility wasn’t a requirement. He was as close to some left-wing politicians as he was to those on the right. He befriended leftie journalists too, such as the Stuff columnist Virginia Fallon, who wrote a generous tribute to him after his death. He would phone her and bait her, she recalled, but she couldn’t help liking him, despite Jones embodying many of the things she raged against.

Jones was also a name-dropper. He liked to remind you of all the important people he was in touch with. I found it odd that someone so famous seemed to find it necessary to do this, but he was not the only prominent person I’ve known with this quirk.

He could sometimes be seriously unpleasant to deal with – a bully, not to put too fine a point on it. Someone close to Jones once explained to me that his famous displays of irascibility were attributable to Addison’s disease, a hormone disorder for which he took medication. His staff recognised the warning signs and would keep their distance when his mood changed.

The flip side was that when he turned on the charm, he was affable, amusing and hard not to like. He was also extremely generous toward worthy causes and not the least bit interested in grandstanding about it or earning public applause.

I saw Jones’ less appealing side when he contributed columns to two papers I was involved with (first the Dominion, later the Evening Post). Jones was a columnist for various papers at different times and it always ended badly. Either Jones would spit the dummy or editors would decide that publishing his column wasn’t worth the hassle of constantly arguing with him.

He regarded his words as sacrosanct; so impeccably crafted that no ignorant and impertinent sub-editor had any right to touch them. Even a minor change to bring his punctuation into line with the paper’s house style – the sort of intervention all other columnists accepted without a murmur – would cause him to erupt with rage.

The truth is, he wasn’t quite the writer he thought he was. At his best he was witty, perceptive, outrageously provocative and totally original in the way he saw things. He was a contrarian through and through, but his syntax – the way he constructed his sentences – was highly idiosyncratic and often clumsily tortuous.

He also bristled at any restraints placed on him for legal reasons. Several times he offered to indemnify the paper against any legal action that might result from his columns. If he was prepared to pick up the costs of court proceedings and pay any resulting damages, he reasoned, what possible problem could there be? He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see that giving him a free hand would hopelessly compromise the editor’s autonomy and independence.

His offer of indemnity illustrated what I believe was a crucial point about Jones. He could afford to take risks that other people could never contemplate. His wealth made him bullet-proof.

As it happened, he was the cause of the only big defamation case in my journalism career that directly involved me as a named party. In essence it arose from a column Jones wrote for the Dominion claiming that Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, the leader of the coup that deposed the legitimate Fijian government in 1987, had repeatedly failed his School Certificate examinations while at Wellington College.

It was classic Bob Jones mischief – mischief was one of the defining qualities of his public life – but it obviously stung Rabuka. He sued for defamation (as I recall, the amount claimed was $1 million) and as editor of the Dom at the time, I was named as second respondent.

The proceedings dragged on for years and descended into pure farce. The case turned on whether the Fijian High Court had jurisdiction, which in turn hinged on whether the offending edition of the paper was available in Fiji. When it turned out that the only copy they could find was in the library at the New Zealand High Commission in Suva, Rabuka’s lawyers sent someone to sit in the library all day and see whether anyone looked at it. Four people did – so if Rabuka was defamed at all, it was only to those four visitors to the High Commission library. With its languid tropical setting, it was the stuff of comic novels.

I think the case eventually fizzled out for lack of interest. Certainly no one ever clapped a hand on my shoulder, and Jones' disparaging reference to Rabuka's scholastic record appears to have done no lasting harm. When I last checked, he was Major-General the Honourable Sitiveni Rabuka, CF, OBE, MSD, prime minister of Fiji.

Colonisation and the burden of guilt

A friend recently lent me a New Zealand book published in 2021 and called The Forgotten Coast, by Richard Shaw. The title is odd because it tells you nothing about the book’s contents. The same is true of the cover photo, which shows the author as a boy (at least we must assume it’s the author) holding up a wriggling eel that he appears to have just caught. Its relevance isn’t clear.

The book is unusual in other ways too. On one hand it’s the painstakingly researched biography of a brilliant young Catholic priest, a great-uncle of the author, who died tragically young from TB; on the other, it’s a breast-beating mea culpa over the injustices suffered by Taranaki Maori in the 19th century. Unable to make up its mind, it weaves uneasily between the two narratives.

Nonetheless I found The Forgotten Coast interesting because I have a few things in common with the author. Shaw, a professor of politics at Massey University, has deep family roots in Taranaki. His forebears were Irish Catholics and his great grandfather was part of the Armed Constabulary that took part in what is now called the invasion of Parihaka.

Shaw’s family settled on land confiscated from Maori and became prosperous farmers. These things trouble him, and his book involves a lot of anguished self-flagellation. He takes what some Australian scholars would call a “black armband” view of our history, meaning he sees aspects of it as deeply, ineradicably shameful. This obviously weighs on him personally.

Unlike Shaw I’ve never lived in Taranaki, but my maternal family roots are there and I could relate to his family history. My mother’s family were devout Irish Catholics too. Mum grew up in Hawera – my grandfather wrote a history of the town in 1904 – and my family tree on her side is Taranaki to the core. My grandparents and great-grandparents are buried in the Hawera cemetery (and a lovely cemetery it is, to be sure). I visited their graves only a few weeks ago.

I have other points of identification with the author. He recalls that as a pupil at Francis Douglas Memorial College in New Plymouth, he took part in a long-established Catholic secondary schools’ speech and debating contest called the O’Shea Shield. So did I, although a decade earlier, in 1967. (My school, St Patrick’s College, Silverstream, won the shield that year, but no thanks to me. My team lost its debate against an opposition lineup from Sacred Heart Whanganui that included my cousin Damian de Lacy and a confident verbal skirmisher named Ruth Richardson.)

More to the point, however, my great grandfather, like Shaw’s, was part of the colonial forces that he depicts as ruthless enforcers of Maori subjugation. John Flynn, my mother’s grandfather (pictured above in later life), wasn’t at Parihaka, but he was a combatant in the Battle of Te Ngutu o te Manu (the beak of the bird), north of Hawera, in 1868. That was the battle in which the celebrated Prussian adventurer Gustavus Von Tempsky was killed and his men were ignominiously routed by the brilliant guerrilla chief Titokowaru. Twenty soldiers lay dead or dying when the smoke cleared. John Flynn, who served with the Taranaki Rifle Volunteers, was lucky to escape alive; he was shot in the thigh and carried to safety by his comrades during an arduous seven-hour retreat through the dense bush.

My other maternal great-grandfather, Charles Quin, later commanded the Normanby Volunteer Rifles in the small Taranaki town of that name, although hostilities had subsided by then and he never fired a shot other than in target practice. So I’m waist-deep in connections with the colonial oppressors whom Shaw condemns. And it gets worse, because my forebears, again like Shaw’s, took up land made available by the government; land presumably taken from Maori, although I’m not sure whether, in Charles Quin’s case, it was acquired fairly or confiscated. I do know that he ended up with substantial holdings near Normanby and Eltham.

There’s little doubt that a great injustice was done in the way land was taken. As Shaw explains, the law was arranged to facilitate easy acquisition of Maori land by white settlers and to restrict what Maori themselves could do with it. Even worse, Maori were sometimes forced to sell land to repay debts imposed by the Crown.

Deplorable? Certainly, and Shaw doesn’t hold back. His assiduously researched, eloquently crafted and sometimes painfully introspective book generally supports the orthodox left-wing academic line that colonialism was a brutal assertion of white supremacy.

I can sympathise up to a point. Every time I drive anywhere in New Zealand I’m aware that this wondrously rich, beautiful and bountiful country was once all Maori. It’s not hard to understand their resentment that they now control only a small portion of it (albeit a steadily expanding one).

I can also share Shaw’s distaste at the way a colonial template has been super-imposed on our history as if Maori didn’t exist. This is evident in all sorts of small ways. Driving through Patea, for example, I can’t help but notice that all the streets have staunchly English names – Norfolk, Cambridge, Dorset, Victoria, Manchester – despite roughly half the population identifying as Maori. 

More problematical, however, is the author’s struggle to come to terms with his family’s role in the colonisation process. He writes at one point that he doesn’t bear personal responsibility for what happened in the past, which is obviously true, yet the entire book is shot through with guilt and shame.

Here he and I, for all that we may have in common (Taranaki, Irish Catholicism, ancestors who took up arms against Maori) part company.

I am neither proud nor ashamed of my forebears in the Taranaki Volunteers and the Normanby Rifles. They acted according to the prevailing attitudes and values of their time. To judge them according to 21st century standards is to engage in what is known as presentism: a tendency to interpret past actions and ideas according to our rather smug feelings of moral superiority. Shaw’s ancestors were creatures of their time, just as he is.

In any case, New Zealand history is complex and highly nuanced. The relationship between Maori and Pakeha was rarely straightforward. This was borne out by a recent Newsroom book review in which the historian Ron Crosby pointed out that more Maori fought on the side of the British Crown than against it – something you won’t read in histories that present the conflict as a straightforward one between Maori and the colonial invader, with no inconvenient caveats. In later life even Titokowaru became an advocate of peace between the races.

My own family history offers evidence of the ambivalence in Maori-Pakeha relations. Although John Flynn fought against Titokowaru’s Hauhau warriors, he spoke te reo and was on friendly terms with most Taranaki Maori – a fact attested to by his ability to travel unaccosted through the bush between New Plymouth and Hawera at a time when most Pakeha hesitated to venture beyond the safety of their towns.

Shaw himself refers to a tension between Pakeha who sincerely wanted to do the right thing by Maori and others (such as Native Affairs Minister John Bryce, who ordered the invasion of Parihaka) who had fewer scruples. He reminds us that New Zealand’s first Chief Justice, Sir William Martin, not only opposed confiscation of Maori land but pointed to Ireland as an example of how a “brooding sense of wrong” could leave a malign, long-lasting legacy. (That so many Irish, themselves victims of oppression and dispossession in their country of origin, should themselves become dispossessors of Maori is an irony not lost on the author.)

There are some things I can agree with Shaw on. One is that we need to know more about the totality of our history, not just the bits that shore up our comforting national mythology. He’s right when he says we pay more attention to Gallipoli and El Alamein than to the battles fought on our own soil.

That’s changing, as books such as the recently published Toitu Te Whenua, Lauren Keenan’s journey through the battlefields of the New Zealand Wars, demonstrate. But it’s a painfully slow process. The British, Americans and Australians celebrate their warts-and-all histories far less timorously than we do. How many people, for example, have spent their lives in Lower Hutt without knowing that eight British soldiers were killed in 1868 in a skirmish at Boulcott’s Farm, now the site of a local golf club?

It follows that we shouldn’t forget the past. We should face it squarely and try to remedy historical injustices wherever practicable (as governments have tried to do over the past several decades). But not forgetting is one thing; bearing a personal burden of guilt seems to me to be quite another.