Little stands to capture the 'Anyone but Whanau' vote

The least surprising news of the day is that Andrew Little has confirmed he will run for the Wellington mayoralty. I imagine the announcement will come as relief even to people not normally disposed to look favourably at a Labour Party stalwart. “Anyone but Whanau” is likely to be the catchcry, and I’m sure Nick Mills was right when he said on his NewstalkZB talkback show this morning that Little has to be the hot favourite – though there’s still a gap in the field for a late contender who combines political nous with the charisma that Little lacks.

The former Labour leader doesn’t strike me as a visionary, and nothing he said in an interview with Andrea Vance in The Post today has changed that view. No one should expect him to magically recapture the vibe that made Wellington New Zealand’s most exciting city in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Perhaps the best Wellington could hope for under a Little mayoralty is that he would be a far more competent and grounded manager than the incumbent. That wouldn’t be hard, I hear the cynics chorus; but it might be a modest first step on the city’s road to recovery.

 
Footnote: I haven't lived in Wellington for more than 20 years, so have no skin in this game. But I'm still a frequent visitor and grieve for the city that used to be.

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Andrew Little signals a tilt at the Wellington mayoralty

So former Labour leader Andrew Little is considering a crack at the Wellington mayoralty. He gives the impression he hasn’t yet made up his mind but my guess is that he deliberately put the word out that he’s a potential candidate just to gauge the public reaction – and my guess, again, is that the feedback will be overwhelmingly positive, because Little would stand out in an uninspiring field and certainly presents a very plausible alternative to the incumbent disaster, Tory Whanau.

I note that Wellington NewstalkZB host Nick Mills, who has himself declared an interest in running, gave Little a glowing endorsement on his talkback show this morning. Mills has a big audience and Little will doubtless be encouraged by his approval. 

If Little goes ahead, and if he wins, he will join a long and growing list of former central government heavyweights who have made the transition to local politics. Auckland’s former mayors include ex-ministers Christine Fletcher (not a heavyweight, exactly, but she did hold ministerial portfolios), John Banks and Phil Goff. Former minister Fran Wilde served one term as Wellington mayor, later became chair of Greater Wellington Regional Council, and this year will contest the mayoralty of South Wairarapa, where she now lives. In Christchurch, Lianne Dalziel won the mayoralty after stepping down as a minister in 2004 and served three terms in the top job.

Nelson has had two mayors who were formerly MPs: Philip Woollaston and the incumbent, former National cabinet minister Nick Smith. Other former MPs turned mayors included John Carter (Far North), Harry Duynhoven (New Plymouth), Jill White (Palmerston North), Sandra Goudie (Thames-Coromandel) and more recently Ron Mark (Carterton). There may be others I’ve missed; this doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive list.

There was occasional traffic in the other direction too. Hamilton mayor Mike Minogue became a National MP (and a constant irritant to party leader Robert Muldoon), as did Mark Blumsky in Wellington. Another former Hamilton mayor, Bruce Beetham, served for six years as the Social Credit MP for Rangitikei, while Georgina Beyer jumped from the mayoralty of Carterton to a seat in Parliament as the MP for Wairarapa. Later came Jono Naylor, ex-mayor of Palmerston North, and Lawrence Yule from Hastings, both of whom served one term as National MPs. Green MP Celia Wade-Brown is another who rode into the House of Representatives on the back of a mayoralty, albeit a wholly undistinguished one.

Cynics hearing the news about Little are likely to nod their heads knowingly and mutter about politicians being addicted to the dopamine hit of politics and being unable to stay away. A mayoralty might have special appeal for such people because it’s seen as conferring individual power and control in a way that a cabinet seat might not. But there’s something to be said for seasoned politicians turning their skills and savvy to local government, especially when a city is in such a stricken plight as Wellington.

This post has been amended with additional information since it was first published. Thanks to my research assistant Mark Unsworth.

Correction: Eamon Sloan, a regular follower of this blog, tells me the Andrew Little story was on the Post's front page. The statement in my original post that the Herald broke the news therefore appears to have been wrong. I apologise for the error and have deleted the reference. I partially absolve myself because I could find no mention of the story on the Post's website. 

My war with the NZTA: Part Deux

Here’s a piece of advice for anyone contemplating a road trip: carefully check the NZTA website beforehand for any road closures.

This never used to be an essential precaution. It is now. And again the question must be asked: what has changed that requires state highways to be so frequently closed, causing huge inconvenience and disruption, when it wasn’t necessary in the past?

The obvious answer is that it’s part of a wider bureaucratic obsession with “safety” – here I pointedly use inverted commas – that has steadily strengthened its grip on the country to the point where it’s a drag on the economy and an impediment to progress.

In the case of the NZTA, this obsession is exacerbated by an apparent culture of disregard for the needs and rights of the public. The long-standing principle that New Zealanders should be free to travel on public roads without let or hindrance, to use a delicious old legal phrase, has been systematically subverted to the point where we accept holdups as an inevitable fact of life.

No one can complain when roads are closed for essential and urgent repairs, as happened north of Napier after the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabrielle, but routine highway maintenance and improvement is surely another thing. Yet the Desert Road – part of the main artery between Auckland and Wellington – was closed for two months during summer, forcing traffic to take a 40-minute detour. Does the NZTA factor the cost and inconvenience of such disruption into its calculations, or does it just go ahead because it can?

My own experience, reinforced yet again by a recent road trip through Taranaki, the Waikato, the Central North Island and Hawke’s Bay, tends to confirm my long-held view that the NZTA views road users in much the same way as Basil Fawlty regarded his hotel guests – as nuisances to be managed with minimal inconvenience to the control freaks in charge.

Delays and disruptions were constant. Intriguingly, there seemed to be no consistency. I think it was on the outskirts of Te Kuiti that I saw at least 200 metres of road cones encroaching on the road where a single truck was working on a roadside power pole. Only an hour or so later, I passed several trucks and a big crew working on a much larger job but with a minimal number of cones and no disruption to traffic. Decisions seem to be left to the discretion of the specific site manager.

Inevitably I also saw sections of road cordoned off with cones where nothing was happening at all, and speed limits imposed for supposed road works that either hadn’t yet started or had been completed. This is routine. The inevitable result is public disregard for speed warning signs, which is the very reverse of safe.

At Tongaporutu, in northern Taranaki, SH3 was reduced to one lane, controlled by traffic lights, for a couple of kilometres when only a short section of roadside barrier was being replaced at one end. A clear case of overkill – but at least the road was still open, which was more than could be said for SH54, which links Feilding with SH1 north of Hunterville, when my wife and I tried to drive over it en route to Taupo in November.

On that occasion roughly 40 km of SH54 was closed to northbound traffic for what turned out to be about two hundred metres of work towards the northern end (we saw this on the return journey). Traffic was diverted back through Fielding and onto SH1 through Bulls, adding – at a rough guess – an hour to the travel time.

What made it worse was that because of poorly conceived signage, we were probably 20km along the road before we realised there was no way through. An electronic sign advising that SH54 was closed was placed in such a way that traffic coming off a side road from Ashhurst, as we did, couldn’t easily see it.

In any case, for the sign to mean anything you had to know you were on SH54, and I’ve driven that route countless times without having a clue what its official designation is.

It takes a particular type of dull, pedantic bureaucratic mind to assume that all road users know the official nomenclature of the highway they’re on. In this case, a sign saying “Highway closed ahead” or “No access to SH1” would have done the job, but no; logic and common sense don’t apply.

That was one of two recent instances in which an entire road was closed in one direction for what we later discovered was a short section of work that didn’t appear to involve major reconstruction. Why there couldn’t have been a simple stop/go arrangement for that section, leaving the road open to traffic in both directions, albeit with short delays, is a question only NZTA could answer.

Incompetence is one obvious explanation, but there’s also the possibility that making things easier for road users just isn’t a priority for the NZTA. I suspect such road closures may be indicative of the NZTA’s corporate ethos and its general attitude toward the public. It points to a culture of, at best, indifference and at worst, arrogance toward road users.

In the more recent instance, traffic between Ashhurst and Bunnythorpe (a part of New Zealand that I’m coming to view as some sort of terrestrial Bermuda Triangle) was sent on a long diversion caused by the laying of pipes beside a section of road (beside, not on) that was probably no more than 200 metres long.

The detour was a relatively minor inconvenience for us – perhaps an extra 10 minutes at most. But if you’re catching a plane or hurrying to an appointment, a 10-minute delay could make the difference between a good day and a bad one.

I should add that this happened when the road was unusually busy with traffic heading to the popular Central Districts Field Days, a factor that the traffic management planners either didn’t take into account or didn’t consider worth worrying about. Incompetence, indifference or a combination of the two? Take your pick.

All this points to the possibility of a deeper cultural flaw within the NZTA: namely, an inability (or perhaps stubborn refusal) on the part of NZTA planners and bureaucrats to place themselves in the position of the typical road user – i.e. the people the agency supposedly serves.

This is also obvious in comically illogical destination signage which unfailingly omits the place names most likely to mean something to the traveller.

I’m digressing here, but I noticed, heading north at a roundabout on SH3 at New Plymouth, that the most prominent directional sign pointed to a place called Northgate. Not to Hamilton, not to Auckland, not even to Te Kuiti, but to Northgate – a location that no one from outside New Plymouth is likely to have heard of or be remotely interested in visiting, and which doesn’t rate a mention in my 2018 NZ Road Atlas.

Even Google isn’t sure where Northgate is, but the geniuses at NZTA who decide what names to put on road signs evidently think it’s the destination of most significance to travellers heading north out of New Plymouth and looking for confirmation that they’re on the right road.

This is a common characteristic of NZTA highway signage, which frequently points to no-account places (Tauriko, Pauatahanui and Ongaonga are other examples) to the exclusion of towns and cities whose names actually mean something.

None of the above should be surprising when you consider that the NZTA is a big, monolithic institution with no competitor to keep it on its toes and no politician with the guts or gumption to pull it into line.

The NZTA appears to be answerable to no one: a law unto itself. Labour MP Kieran McAnulty has admitted as much, revealing in 2023 that when he was a cabinet minister holding the associate transport portfolio he was powerless to influence the NZTA over its insistence on an irrational and deeply unpopular 80 kmh speed limit on SH2 (which is wide, flat and straight) through the Wairarapa. It wasn’t until more than a year after the election of the National-led coalition that sanity finally prevailed and the former 100 kmh limit was reinstated.

If it seems from all the foregoing that I have become mildly obsessed with the NZTA and the traffic management racket, I plead guilty. I should get out more often.

Oh, that’s right, I do get out often. It's just that every time I try to go anywhere, road cones dog me every step of the way.

 

My war with the NZTA: Part One

So let me see if I’ve got this straight: the government’s response to public fury and exasperation at the wasteful, disruptive and mostly useless traffic management racket is to set up a hotline where people can report excessive road cone use? God save us.

I predict this pathetically feeble non-solution, announced this week, will achieve one-fifth of SFA because hardly anyone will bother ringing an 0800 number to dob the traffic management racketeers in.

People will rightly be deeply sceptical about trying to engage by phone with an anonymous and remote bureaucracy, knowing they’re likely to be left hanging on the line for ages before anyone answers – and that their complaint will go nowhere anyway, disappearing into a yawning black hole. People are profoundly distrustful of hotlines, and with good reason.

And perhaps it’s just as well if no one bothers using the service. Given that it’s hard to drive more than 10 km on any state highway without seeing forests of road cones, interminable temporary speed limit signs and traffic management trucks holding up traffic, often for no discernible reason, the line would be clogged 24/7.

More to the point, however, the hotline is a contemptible copout that places the onus on us citizens to deal with the problem of sclerotic, cone-choked roads when the real responsibility lies with the politicians themselves.

They allowed the traffic management monster to run rampant and it’s their responsibility to cut it down to size, starting with a root-and-branch cleanout of the New Zealand Transport Agency from board level down – which would mean defenestrating the chair, former National Party leader Simon Bridges – and the imposition of a new corporate culture that emphasises consideration for road users ahead of do-nothing jobs and profits for the traffic management racketeers.

Prime minister Christopher Luxon and Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden (whose title gives you a rather large clue to where things started going wrong) both admit that excessive traffic management is a plague upon the land.

“You can drive around this country at different times of the day and you’ve got whole roads shut down, no one is doing any work and the cones are frankly just clogging up the joint,” Luxon said at his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday.

Setting aside the fact that no politician should ever feel the need to use that flatulent and empty word “frankly” in an attempt to sound tough, since we’re entitled to assume they’re always expressing their genuine opinion, we should probably at least be grateful that Luxon has finally cottoned on to an issue that’s been driving New Zealand road users mad with frustration for years.

For her part, Van Velden says the issue of a “sea of cones” was brought up at almost every public meeting she attended on a recent road trip. So why has it taken so long for the government to wake up, and why it has responded with such a timid, half-arsed response?

Instead of faffing around with useless hotlines, the government should be asserting its authority by getting tough on the NZTA. After all, the traffic management racket wouldn’t – couldn’t – exist without the NZTA’s endorsement and approval.

What we’ve got here is a cosy, symbiotic relationship between the NZTA, roading contractors and traffic management companies. Over the past 10 years or so the latter have proliferated like … well, like road cones. This unholy three-way alliance is holding the country hostage and playing us all for suckers.

And what’s the government’s solution? A bloody hotline. Good grief.

I don’t mind admitting this has become personal for me. I do a lot of driving. Over the past three years I’ve covered every region and every provincial city in the country with the exception of Invercargill (the closest I got was Gore). And every time I set out on a road trip I brace myself for the delays and disruptions that I know are inevitable. 

We go along with this costly and unnecessary pantomime because we’re passive, compliant people. That was shown during the Covid pandemic, when we meekly fell into line with authoritarian controls that, in retrospect, are now acknowledged as oppressively over the top (and yes, I admit I was one of the fall-into-liners).

Traffic management depends on that same deference to authority. The NZTA and its traffic management bullies wield the power and we have little choice but to do as they instruct. I mean, what are your options when you’re forced to make a wholly unnecessary one-hour detour (as I did not long ago) or crawl at 30kmh through road works that have been in progress for months and even years and where nothing is happening? You can only fume impotently.

Sure, you could abuse the traffic management people standing around in their hi-vis vests (standing or sitting around being quite literally what they do most of the time, usually staring at their smartphones). But what would that achieve? They’re certainly a big part of the problem, but they didn’t cause it. The fault lies with the NZTA bureaucrats, who are safely insulated from public wrath; and beyond them, with the politicians who allowed the grotesque traffic management racket to flourish in the first place and only now are waking up to the great bloated nuisance it has become.

Oh, but I forget; the politicians have taken bold and decisive action: they’ve set up a hot line to report excessive use of road cones. Problem solved, then.

Looking for some facts to substantiate my jaundiced view of the hi-vis highwaymen, I recently asked the NZTA to provide me with figures showing the proportion of the national roading budget devoted to traffic management. I had seen speculative estimates ranging as high as 40 percent, which struck even me as unlikely.

Extraordinarily, it turns out that the NZTA has not historically separated out traffic management costs from its overall expenditure. This in itself suggests slack budgetary management and a remarkable lack of concern about how public funds are spent.

I would have thought that the cost of traffic management was the type of significant information NZTA board members would expect to have at their fingertips. That they apparently didn’t think to routinely request it every year doesn’t inspire confidence in their competence.

The NZTA told me, however, that it had recently undertaken a project – as if the thought had only just occurred to it – that sampled its contracts, and from this it was able to calculate average TTM (temporary traffic management) costs. These indicated that TTM over the past three years accounted for between 9 and 9.5 percent of total spending on road maintenance, operations and capital contracts. 

At first glance, that may not sound outrageous. But when you look at it in dollar terms, a different impression takes shape. 

In the years 2021-24, NZTA spent $786 million on traffic management. $786 million! That was out of total state highway costs of $8.4 billion. In 2023-24, the cost of TTM was put at $317 million (assuming the NZTA got its calculations right).

It goes without saying that $786 million buys a helluva lot of road cones, high-vis vests and expensive trucks and utes and with their ostentatious flashing lights. This may explain why so many of the trucks and utes appear to be new. 

It’s also clear from the NZTA response to my inquiry that there’s no systematic collection of reliable information relating to the cost of traffic management. That’s how I interpret the NZTA’s statement that “We have collected TTM actual and physical works costs from suppliers for a sample of contracts where costs were recorded and accurate, and we have calculated TTM costs percentages accordingly.”

Here’s an obvious question: if the NZTA doesn’t have complete and accurate records showing what TTM is costing, as that statement suggests, how can it know whether it’s getting its money’s worth?

You might think that a switched-on board of directors would want to know whether the money was effectively spent. Has any work been done on costs versus benefits? Does the NZTA have any idea how many lives have been saved or serious injuries avoided by its road-cone control freakery?

If any research has been done, let’s see it. If it hasn’t been done, why not?

Has anyone bothered to weigh the supposed safety benefits of the traffic management racket against the incalculable delay, frustration and inconvenience caused to road users? And I don’t just mean hapless private motorists like me.

Infuriating though it is to have my travel constantly disrupted, the far more serious impact is on commercial traffic. God alone knows the cumulative economic cost of holdups in the supply chain caused by trucks and tankers sitting idle for long periods at temporary red lights, forced to make detours or made to drive at ridiculous speeds through long sections of road works where nothing is happening.

The counter argument, of course, is that roads are part of our essential infrastructure and must be kept in good condition. That requires maintenance work. People understand that and will accept a reasonable amount of inconvenience. But it bears repeating over and over again that the contagion of traffic management New Zealand-style is a new phenomenon.

For decades our highways were built and maintained, often in very challenging places, without the need for heavy-handed traffic management, forests of road cones and lots of bullying trucks with flashing lights. We did it then. What makes it impossible now?

Part Two to come ...

Part 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polkinghorne unchastened

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A tip for Luxon: ignore your media coaches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When principle sinks in a swamp of legalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marching blindly into the post-journalism era

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

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

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

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

Inadvertent oversight? Hmmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

A journey into the hinterland

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                            Simon Burt