RNZ's non-exposé of the year

It’s hard to imagine a more spectacularly pointless exercise than RNZ’s “investigation” of the language used by National leader Christopher Luxon.

Pointless, that is, unless the objective was to discredit Luxon by presenting him as a reciter of repetitive, predictable and boring election-year rhetoric – or worse, as an unscrupulous dog-whistler trying to exploit public anxieties.

In fact, RNZ’s research findings confirm that Luxon is doing what all opposition leaders do and have always done: namely, zeroing in on areas where the government is perceived as vulnerable. Quelle surprise!

RNZ journalists Farah Hancock and Guyon Espiner trawled through 28 hours of interviews from between July 2022 and May 2023. In a report misleadingly headlined What hours of interviews reveal about the obsessions of our political leaders (misleading because it's almost solely concerned with only one party leader), they breathlessly inform us that Luxon used the word “tax” 233 times – about three times as often as Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins over the same period.

Conclusion: Luxon thinks talking about tax might be to National’s advantage while Labour leaders tend to avoid the subject because it’s not in their interests to draw attention to it. Astonishing!

But wait, there’s more. Luxon said “spending” 179 times – nearly five times more than his opponents. He used the word “crisis” 91 times whereas Ardern used it only 11 times as prime minister and Hipkins hasn’t mentioned it at all.  

Luxon also referred to the cost of living 86 times and on 49 occasions described it as a “cost of living crisis”. A key theme, Hancock and Espiner concluded, is “Luxon’s relentless use of words associated with basic economics”. Shame! 

Presumably we're supposed to be surprised - perhaps even shocked - that the leader of the opposition is hammering issues that polls reveal to be uppermost in the minds of voters. 

Hang on – it gets worse. Luxon brought up words like “health”, "hospitals”, “education” and “teacher” far more often than Ardern or Hipkins. Who’d have thought? What gives Luxon the right to emphasise policy areas where he thinks the government’s record is weak? Off with his head!

In another “Eureka!” moment, RNZ’s incisive investigative journalists noted that the National leader was happier talking about farming than Ardern or Hipkins, who used the word only eight times between them (to Luxon's 114). Hancock and Espiner described it as “startling” that the Labour leaders avoided talking about farmers and farming. But startling to whom? Of course Ardern and Hipkins don’t want to talk about farming, and with very good reason. Why risk drawing attention to the fact that farmers, who generate most of this country’s wealth, regard the government as hostile?

RNZ doesn’t explain why it decided to embark on the complicated and unprecedented (its own word) exercise of analysing more than 200 interviews and breaking its findings down into multiple charts likely to be of interest only to political obsessives. More important, neither does it explain why Luxon appears to have been chosen as the focus of the investigation rather than Ardern and Hipkins, who - as the people in power - are the politicians whose actions and statements call for closest critical scrutiny.

Of course RNZ can (and probably will) argue that this was a legitimate journalistic project aimed at analysing political rhetoric in a totally neutral and objective way without seeking to influence how we think about our political leaders.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it’s likely to be seen. Rather, it will be widely perceived as a heavy-handed and unsubtle hit job on Luxon.

That impression is reinforced by the opinions of the “experts” RNZ invited to comment on the findings. Josie Pagani, who has historically been associated with Labour, rather disdainfully dismissed Luxon’s apparent preoccupations as “National’s classic hits”.

Pagani pointed out that Luxon rarely used terms like “inequality” or “working-class”. But someone who has made a career of following politics, as Pagani has, would know that those words are not part of the vocabulary of the National Party. Almost by definition, anyone who uses them is likely to be on the left of politics. No blinding insights there, then.

RNZ also went to media trainer Janet Wilson, who has worked for the National Party but couldn’t, judging by her newspaper columns, be described as a National supporter. She took a swipe at Luxon for using corporate jargon such as “outcomes” and “going forward”. But given that these terms are routinely used by public servants, academics and politicians of all shades, it seemed a carping criticism. Yes, Luxon does speak the bloodless language of the Koru Club, but voters are likely to have noted that for themselves.

Question: was RNZ unable to find a single “expert” who was prepared to point out the obvious – namely, that Luxon is doing what all politicians do, which is highlight opponents’ weaknesses and by so doing, present themselves as offering a better alternative?

Whether intentionally or not, the story was presented in such a way as make Luxon look bad. The implication seemed to be that he was seeking to manipulate public opinion by the repeated use of key phrases (RNZ used the emotive term “carpet-bombing”, which is loaded with negative connotations), as if this was somehow underhand and improper. In fact it’s just politics as normal. They all do it.

Regular readers of this blog will know I'm no admirer of Luxon,  but he's entitled to expect fairer treatment than this, especially from a publicly funded broadcaster. 

On a day when RNZ’s reputation is, by its own admission, damaged by the revelation that stories on the Russian invasion of Ukraine were tampered with, apparently by a rogue employee, the Hancock-Espiner project was an additional hit to its credibility that was entirely self-inflicted. If there were an award for Non-Exposé of the Year, RNZ would have it in the bag.

 

 

 

Guyon Espiner on booze

Guyon Espiner has written a critical book - a very critical book - about booze called The Drinking Game. It's about the place of alcohol in New Zealand society and it draws heavily on his own experiences.

There’s the big problem, right there. Espiner admits he was a problem drinker. The reader is bombarded with anecdotes about the times he drank to excess. There’s an almost boastful tone to some of these stories.

But most people who drink are not problem drinkers, as Espiner admits, and at the end of his book I was left wondering what the point was.

The Drinking Game purports to be a critical analysis, but a self-confessed problem drinker is no more capable of writing a balanced book about alcohol than a vegan is capable of writing a balanced book about the meat industry, or an atheist about the Catholic Church.

The entire book is coloured by Espiner’s own experiences, but they’re not typical. And because they’re not typical, you have to ask what relevance they have to people who are able to drink without getting blotto (which, at the risk of labouring a point, means most of the population).

His revelation that he has Type 1 diabetes, which finally provided the incentive he needed to give up drinking, makes him even more atypical. Yet he persists with the theme that his own experiences are somehow applicable to everyone.

Espiner has burrowed deeply into the academic literature, of which there’s no shortage. Almost all of it is hostile to alcohol (and to capitalism, I suspect), but ignores the ability of most people to drink without harming themselves or those around them. He relates cautionary tales about alcoholics, but again misses the point that alcoholics make up only a small minority of drinkers.

He lets himself down in places with sloppy research. He writes that Mac’s Brewery was founded in Dunedin (wrong; it was Nelson) and that Claytons was a zero-alcohol beer (it was non-alcoholic, but it wasn’t a beer). He even manages to place Bagram air force base in the wrong country despite having been there himself. Nit-picking readers might wonder what else he got wrong.

Like the finger-wagging academics he approvingly quotes, he rails against the supposedly malign influence of the booze barons and their hold over weak or venal politicians. If Espiner is to be believed, they wield an almost mystical power (an impression likely to be reinforced by the overwhelming vote in Parliament this week against Chloe Swarbrick's bill that would have banned alcohol sponsorship and advertising in sport). 

He also bewails the fact that alcohol has been “normalised”. But alcohol is normal, and has been for millennia, as Espiner acknowledges. He even grudgingly acknowledges alcohol’s benefits as an agent of social bonding and creativity: “Humans need to drink alcohol to be human,” he writes. Then he swiftly moves on, presumably because that bit doesn’t align with his overall theme.  

It’s possible to nod in agreement with some of Espiner’s points. Yes, New Zealand’s liquor laws did lurch from one extreme to another, to the point where many would agree there are now far too many outlets and licensing hours are ridiculously loose. Even people in the hospitality business say so.

But Espiner doesn’t give due credit to the early stages of that liberalisation process, which made social drinking immeasurably more civilised and inclusive than it used to be. He’s too young to remember the scungy, men-only public bars of the 1960s and 70s and the days when only the rich could afford to patronise the tiny number of restaurants that were permitted to serve wine.

Espiner can be an entertaining writer, though he tends to be rather too fascinated by himself. He’s also a capable journalist who has recently been lauded, justifiably, for his investigative work exposing the political lobbying racket. But there’s no more zealous crusader than the reformed sinner, and there’s an almost evangelical tone to his book that could be summarised as: “I gave up drinking! You should too!” But most people don’t need to.

Incidentally, the cover of Espiner's book carries a melodramatic plug ("This is real, it is raw, and it lays out the truth about booze") from his friend Patrick Gower, who made a documentary last year in which he too admitted a drinking problem. And you might wonder about the timing of a recent Morning Report item in which Corin Dann - who with his wife, Living Sober website manager Lotta Dann, is acknowledged in Espiner's book as a key source of advice and support - interviewed anti-alcohol activist Boyd Swinburn about the access to politicians enjoyed by liquor industry lobbyists, which Espiner had highlighted in his RNZ series. It all starts to look decidedly clubby. 

In the final analysis, The Drinking Game repackages a familiar message, albeit through a personal lens: liquor is too widely available, it’s too cheap, it’s advertised too much and politicians are incapable of resisting lobbying pressure from the industry. And of course booze is hazardous, at least for people who can’t control their intake.

We’ve heard all this before, ad nauseam. But Espiner isn’t entirely clear about what he thinks should be done about it, and in the end he gets us no closer to solving the old conundrum: should the majority of people who drink safely and responsibly be penalised because of the unfortunate things that happen to the minority who don’t?

(Disclosure: In a past life I was a wine writer, in which capacity I was provided with free wine for review purposes. I'm aware that in the eyes of some neo-wowsers in academia, that made me complicit in the liquor industry's attempt to enslave the population.)

 The Drinking Game, published by Allen and Unwin, $36.99.

It's not just Sam Uffindell who's on trial here

Some more thoughts on the Sam Uffindell saga:

■ The tyro Tauranga MP front-footed the media yesterday about his boarding school transgression (he was reportedly ordered to by his boss) and came across as sincere and contrite. But in the meantime another depth charge has gone off with the claim by a former student flatmate that she fled their Dunedin flat in fear – through a window, in fact – because of Uffindell’s menacing behaviour. What else might be lurking in his past and waiting to be disclosed?

■ Christopher Luxon has acted decisively in standing Uffindell down, but the damage is done. Will this be one of the shortest parliamentary tenures in New Zealand history? And how will the voters of Tauranga react if they’re subjected to another by-election so soon after the last one? Will they punish National by transferring their support to the ACT candidate, who commendably used a chance to come clean about past mistakes by revealing a teenage drink-drive conviction while Uffindell chose to “confess” a much blander (and politically self-serving) failing – namely, not bringing his family home to New Zealand earlier. (I like David Farrar’s suggestion, reported here by Bryce Edwards, that Uffindell could have seized the opportunity to make an impressive speech about lessons learned from his past, particularly in regard to bullying.)

■ National’s culture and processes are as much on trial as Uffindell. Now the collateral damage has spread to senior MP Todd McLay, who’s accused of knowing about the King’s College incident but inexplicably failing to tell Luxon or deputy leader Nicola Willis. Former party president Peter Goodfellow is also implicated (surprise!), raising further questions about why Goodfellow was allowed to remain in a position of power – he’s still on the party board – when so many egregiously wrong-headed selection decisions were made on his watch.

■ The media love indulging in schadenfreude, or pleasure in others’ misfortunes, and never more so than when the politician whose feet are being held to the fire is a conservative. But journalists and interviewers need to mind their own behaviour. Guyon Espiner should be ashamed of his show-offy tough-guy questioning of Luxon on Morning Report today. (“Yeah no, mate – we’re not going to go through all that, mate”, Espiner said, cutting off Luxon in mid-sentence. His point was fair enough; he wasn’t going to allow the interview to be taken over by talking points prepared by National media advisers. But it was the arrogant, smart-arse way Espiner did it that grated. “Mate”, as a form of address, can be friendly or it can be used as an aggressively macho challenge more appropriate to a public bar argument. In this case it was the latter.) And bearing in mind that the whole Uffindell scandal is largely about being transparent, how about some transparency from RNZ?  On First Up, Nick Truebridge interviewed Shane Te Pou for more than six minutes about the Uffindell furore without disclosing that Te Pou – who admittedly is an astute and perceptive commentator – is a former Labour Party activist, and therefore not to be regarded as a neutral observer. It shouldn't be assumed that RNZ's listeners knew that; they were entitled to be told. Or does RNZ assume its audience takes it as a given that its commentators lean to the left unless explicitly stated otherwise?

Correction: In the original version of this post I said the candidates in the Tauranga by-election revealed their greatest regrets in a candidates' debate. In fact it was in response to questions from the Bay of Plenty Times.

 

 

 

If you want to see what real hate speech is like, check out the attacks on Don Brash

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, December 27).

Don Brash could be excused for feeling a little bruised as 2017 draws to a close.

The former leader of the National and ACT parties used his Facebook page to criticise Guyon Espiner, one of the presenters of Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report, for repeatedly showing off his fluency in Maori.

Brash objected because, as he pointed out, hardly any listeners to the programme would know what Espiner was saying. According to Brash, the presenter’s use of te reo is an example of “virtue signalling” – in other words, flaunting his moral superiority.

It was a legitimate comment about a high-profile figure employed by a publicly owned institution, but Brash’s Facebook post was the signal for one of the most brutal media gang-ups I can recall.

As the former leader of two right-of-centre political parties and the founder of a supposedly racist pressure group called Hobson’s Pledge, he’s considered fair game by the so-called “liberal” Left. And predictably, they piled in.

I put that word “liberal” in inverted commas because many of these people are angrily intolerant of opinions they don’t approve of. In other words, they are illiberal.

Many of the attacks on Brash were striking for their sheer malice and venom, and I’m not just talking about those that appeared in the Wild West of online social media. Some of the most vicious were published in mainstream media, where editors normally keep a check on spiteful and gratuitous personal attacks.

One columnist who makes his primary living as a comedian – a word which now seems interchangeable with “smug moralist” – harrumphed about Brash creating a “storm in a teacup” over te reo. But if there was a storm in a teacup, it was entirely due to the furious, over-the-top reaction from Brash’s attackers. All he did was write something on his Facebook page.

Brash was also subjected to an openly hostile interview (for want of a better word) with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand – a rare example of a state-owned broadcasting organisation publicly exacting utu against a critic – and was subsequently ridiculed for not pronouncing “whanau” correctly. If your name is Don Brash you can’t win, even when you try to play the game.

Brash, of course, has been a marked man ever since he delivered what is routinely described in the media as his “infamous” Orewa speech in 2004, when he was National Party leader. In that speech he espoused one rule for all New Zealanders and an end to special treatment in law for people of Maori descent.

“Infamous” it may have been in the eyes of some journalists, but it struck a chord with many New Zealanders. Brash took the National Party from its worst-ever defeat in 2002 to near-victory in 2005, which the Left explains by insisting that the 890,000 New Zealanders who voted for National were all racists. Yeah, right, as they say.

Since then, Brash has made himself even more unpopular with politically correct thinkers by forming Hobson’s Pledge, which has the mantra “one law for all”. The organisation takes its name from a statement attributed to Captain William Hobson at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi: “He iwi tahi tatou” – “We are all one people”.

In the eyes of his critics, Brash’s stance makes him a racist. But how do you define “racist”? A racist, to me, is someone who believes some races are inherently superior or inferior to others and discriminatory treatment is therefore justified.

By that definition, Brash could more accurately by characterised as anti-racist, since he opposes special treatment for a racial minority.

He mounts perfectly cogent arguments against racial privilege on the basis that it runs counter to the principle that everyone in a democracy should have equal rights. The most obvious example of Maori being treated differently is the anachronism of Maori seats in Parliament, which become very hard to justify when there are 23 MPs of Maori or part-Maori descent representing general electorates.

That’s not to say that Hobson’s Pledge doesn’t have members who are truly racist. It’s possible some are, although I would guess that many of the organisation’s members (I’m not one, incidentally) are simply older New Zealanders who are struggling to come to terms with the prevailing spirit of biculturalism. That may seem quaintly out-of-touch, but it doesn’t make them racist.

That raises another striking aspect of the attacks on Brash. A recurring theme was that he should shut up because he’s old, male and white, which apparently disqualifies him from having any right to express an opinion. We hear a lot of talk about the need to embrace diversity, but apparently it doesn’t extend to Pakeha men of a certain age.

We also hear a lot from the Left about the need for tougher laws against “hate speech” to protect vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities and the gay community. But ironically, the closest I’ve seen to hate speech in 2017, by far, was the outpouring of loathing for Brash.

Dominatrix vs dinosaur

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 15.)

Don Brash made two big mistakes recently.

The first was to think he could criticise a high-profile Radio New Zealand presenter on Facebook and get away with it. The second and much bigger mistake was to accept an invitation to explain himself on Kim Hill’s Saturday morning radio show.

Inevitably, Brash was savaged. It was as close as RNZ will ever get to blood sport as entertainment.

I gave up listening after 15 minutes. By that time Brash had been hanged and drawn and I didn’t care to stick around for the quartering. 

The metaphor is apt because being hanged, drawn and quartered was once the punishment for treason, and Brash had committed an act which was treasonous in the extreme: He had criticised Morning Report host Guyon Espiner for what Brash regarded as his excessive use of the Maori language.

Brash described Espiner’s flaunting of his fluency in te reo as “virtue signalling” – in other words, displaying one’s superior moral and cultural values.

For this offence against the spirit of biculturalism, the former National and ACT leader was summoned for a discipline session with Radio NZ’s resident dominatrix.

The result was entirely predictable. Hill was acerbic and sneering from the outset.

She didn’t bother to conceal her contempt for Brash and neither did she bother to maintain any pretence that this was a routine interview, conducted for the purpose of eliciting information or expanding public understanding of the issue.

It was a demolition job, pure and simple – utu, if you prefer – and I doubt that it was ever intended to be anything else. Its purpose was to expose Brash as a political and cultural dinosaur and to punish him for criticising Hill’s colleague.

Had it been a boxing bout, it would have been declared a mismatch and called off after the first round. Hill was in her natural milieu – home-ground advantage, you might say, in her familiar personal domain with an unseen crowd of adoring fans urging her on. 

Hill doesn’t hesitate to use her command of the medium to chew up and spit out anyone whose political views she doesn’t approve of. Brash didn’t stand a chance.

But being Brash, he was civil. He addressed Hill throughout by her first name, as if hoping they could be mates. He would have had more luck trying to pat the head of a komodo dragon.

What on earth made him go on Hill’s show in the first place? Vanity, perhaps, or the misguided hope that he could appeal to Hill’s better nature. Faint chance.

Of course there will be those who say Brash is a political and cultural dinosaur who deserved everything he got. But the last time I checked, you were allowed to criticise Radio New Zealand in a Facebook post without having to undergo a public disembowelment.

Here’s where we get down to the real issue. RNZ is a public institution.  It belongs to us.

The public who fund the organisation and pay its presenters' salaries are entitled to criticise it. But can we now expect that anyone who has the temerity to do so will be subjected to a mauling by RNZ’s in-house attack dog? Or is this treatment reserved for despised white conservative males such as Brash, to make an example of them and deter others from similar foolishness?

Either way, Hill’s dismemberment of Brash was a brazen abuse of the state broadcaster’s power and showed contemptuous disregard for RNZ’s charter obligation to be impartial and balanced.

This is nothing new, of course. The quaint notion that RNZ exists for all New Zealanders was quietly jettisoned years ago. Without any mandate, the state broadcaster has refashioned itself as a platform for the promotion of favoured causes.

You’re more likely to see an aardvark driving a tractor down The Terrace than to hear a conservative voice, or even a middle-of-the-road one, on smug groupthink fests such as RNZ’s current series of Smart Talk.

Brash has a perfectly valid point. Whatever the benefits of learning te reo, it is not the function of the state broadcaster to engage in social engineering projects for our collective betterment – for example, by encouraging us to refer to Auckland as Tamaki Makaurau and Christchurch as Otautahi, as now seems to be the practice of some RNZ reporters.

RNZ does many things very well and my quality of life would be greatly diminished without it, but no one will ever die wondering about the political leanings of many of its presenters and producers.

And clearly, no one should expect any restraint to be imposed on them by their bosses – in fact probably less so than ever under an indulgent Labour-led government. 

Has the Radio NZ reshuffle backfired?

(First published in The Dominion Post, June 13.)

I NOTICE someone has started a “Keep Jim Mora in Afternoons” page on Facebook. I wonder if this is the tiny tip of a rather large iceberg.

Mora, of course, was for several years the popular host of Radio New Zealand’s Afternoons programme. In the recent reshuffle that followed the arrival of a new chief executive, Paul Thompson, former Morning Report co-host Simon Mercep took over most of Mora’s show.

Mora still hosts The Panel, the late-afternoon segment in which guests comment on the issues of the day, but it seems that many RNZ listeners are pining over his absence from the rest of the show.

When I last checked, the Facebook page had attracted 288 “likes” – hardly an earthquake, but my own unscientific soundings suggest Mora is widely missed.

While Afternoons had grown tired and needed refreshing, its failings had nothing to do with Mora, who was the consummate host for that style of programme: witty, intelligent, empathetic and well-informed. Mercep, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be making much impact.

This raises wider questions about what makes a good radio host. Mercep did an honest if unexciting job on Morning Report, but a news programme is all about gathering information. It doesn’t depend on the host’s personality.

Afternoons, on the other hand, is very much driven by the charm of the host. And since Mercep took over, the show has lost its spark. I would be surprised if its audience hadn’t shrunk. RadioLive, which has developed a strong roster of hosts, will no doubt welcome deserters.

It’s reasonable to assume that Mercep was moved into the Afternoons slot because RNZ wanted to clear the decks for some fresh blood on Morning Report, its flagship programme. But I suspect the move may have backfired in more ways than one.

RNZ appointed Guyon Espiner and Susie Ferguson to replace Mercep and the sainted Geoff Robinson, presumably with the aim of carrying Morning Report into a new era.

But that created another issue. While Espiner is an excellent print journalist (as he shows in occasional articles for The Listener) and did a good job as political editor for TV One, radio is different.

In radio, the voice is all-important. Especially at breakfast time, it must cut through the household noise of boiling kettles, humming microwaves and running taps.

Ferguson’s voice has that vital “listen to me” quality, but Espiner’s is soft and his diction woolly. As a result, he’s not making the impact his bosses would have been hoping for. I wonder whether they’ve given him any voice training.

On TV, Espiner’s voice wasn’t an issue because it’s a visual medium. But radio is all about sound – a factor possibly not fully appreciated by Thompson (who comes from a background in the print media) when he approved Espiner’s appointment.

Mercep, too, is handicapped by a soft voice. So I wonder whether not one, but two, mistakes have been made: first in appointing Espiner to Morning Report (and assuming that what had worked on TV would also work on radio), and consequentially in moving Mercep to Afternoons.  No doubt RNZ’s audience figures will tell us in due course.

* * *

THE GREENS will have made few friends in politics with their proposal to decriminalise abortion. It’s nearly 40 years since the abortion wars divided the country, but the wounds were deep and most MPs would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie.

More to the point, the Greens’ abortion policy represents a dogmatic ideological stance that is at odds with their warm, fuzzy image and supposed concern for the weak and vulnerable.

From a pragmatic perspective as well as a moral one, it makes no sense. Abortion may technically still be a criminal offence (a fact little understood by most people), but when was anyone last prosecuted?

The truth is that any woman wanting an abortion can procure one, as Christchurch abortion consultant Dr Pippa MacKay has pointed out. The law is a sham: we have an abortion-on-request regime in everything but name, which is not what Parliament intended when it changed the abortion laws in 1977.

So what are the Greens trying to prove? Were the 14,745 abortions in 2012 not enough for them?

Green MP Jan Logie got one thing at least partly right when she said abortion was a health issue. It’s a health issue all right – not for women, for whom pregnancy is a natural and healthy state, but for the unborn whose lives are terminated.   

* * *

IT’S HARD TO imagine anything more worthy of being ignored than a hand-wringing statement by bishops and university professors on the wickedness of alcohol.

Presumably the academics and senior church figures who signed a recent plea for tougher measures to reduce New Zealand’s supposed “heavy binge-drinking culture” missed the latest World Health Organisation figures which show that our level of alcohol consumption is moderate by world standards and our rate of “heavy episodic drinking” relatively low.

On the other hand, perhaps they’d rather not let the facts stand in the way of a good old moral panic.

At least Bradford has principles, even if no one else does

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 30.)

WHATEVER else you might think of Sue Bradford, she sticks to her principles. You have to respect her for walking away in disgust from the Internet-Mana pantomime.

Who, other than the most gullible, is going to believe these two parties have genuine shared concerns? They are united only by rank opportunism.

Hone Harawira needs access to Kim Dotcom’s bank account, while Herr Dotcom seems driven by a personal grudge against John Key and a need for political friends who might help him avoid extradition. These are hardly a sound basis for a credible political party.

In his desperation to make the merger look honourable, Harawira argues that Internet access is a pressing issue for young Maori. This is a convenient but very recent conversion. When I last looked, digital access wasn’t even mentioned on the Mana website.

The $200,000 that Dotcom reportedly put into the Internet Party [note: since this column was written, we've learned the sum is $3 million] is a far more likely explanation for Harawira’s enthusiasm. But at least he had the decency to grin cheekily when he admitted coveting his new ally’s resources. Like Winston Peters, he often gives the game away by grinning when he knows no one is fooled. 

Unfortunately a mischievous grin can’t disguise the truth that this alliance is a cynical exploitation of a deeply flawed electoral system. Theoretically at least, there is a possibility that Internet-Mana will end up in a classic tail-wags-dog position of power that bears no relationship to its voter support.

What’s more, the two parties have undertaken to review their relationship six weeks after the election. So if they get into Parliament, all bets will be off. Take that, suckers. 

The best we can hope for is some entertainment as the inherent tensions boil to the surface and Internet-Mana blows up like Krakatoa. How long, for example, before Mana office-holder John Minto – a conviction politician in the Bradford mould – spits the dummy? He can only fool himself for so long that the merger is in the best interests of the proletariat.

Even on their own, far- Left parties such as Mana have a glorious history of disembowelling themselves. Who knows what bloody mayhem could result when the hard-core Left hitches itself to a wholly incompatible ally like the Dotcom party?

 

* * *

MY FELLOW columnist Joe Bennett has written in these pages about his irritation at the tone of phony familiarity adopted by marketers in their sales pitches. I think I know what he means.

A few weeks ago I received a card from Telecom announcing its proposed name change. It began with the words “Hey there”, which is the type of fatuous greeting you might expect from a cashier at Starbucks.

Genesis periodically sends me emails with the subject line “Let’s chat”, apparently unaware that a chat is a two-way dialogue that requires consent from both parties.  Other companies begin their promotional messages with the words “Hi guys”, at which point I stop reading.

A common marketing misjudgment, one guaranteed to raise older people’s hackles, is the presumption that customers are happy to be addressed by their first names.

Members of the generation that was brought up to address each other as “Mr” or “Mrs”, at least until invited to do otherwise, are affronted when employees in the bank or insurance company, who are usually young enough to be their grandchildren, assume the right to call them “Joe” or “Mary”.

Most are too polite to say anything, but quietly grit their teeth in resentment.

The problem, of course, is that corporate marketing departments are run by Generation X-ers who assume that older customers will be flattered to be addressed as if they are teenage airheads.

I’m waiting for a bright young marketing graduate to send me an email with the introductory words, “Hey, dude”. It can only be a matter of time.

* * *

BIG GOVERNMENT is now so all-pervasive that many people find it hard to imagine life without it.

That was evident from a recent minor party leaders’ debate on TV3’s The Nation, in which ACT leader Jamie Whyte was treated as some sort of freak - or possibly even a traitor - for daring to suggest that New Zealanders don’t need constant intervention from the state in every aspect of their lives. This is clearly a dangerous heresy.

Only days later, Dr Whyte got a similar going-over from Guyon Espiner on Morning Report. It seems we’ve all become so accustomed to the smothering influence of Big Government – even to the extent of deciding whether we should have children – that we can’t comprehend any alternative.

Dr Whyte, of course, believes the state should get out of our lives, save for a few essential functions. It’s an idea worth exploring, but you get the impression that for a lot of people, it’s just too scary.

 

That guy on Q+A

It’s not easy finding positive things to say about TVNZ, but I think political editor Guyon Espiner has earned a big tick.

Espiner is steadily growing into his role as an interviewer on the Sunday morning political programme Q+A. He kicked off the year on an impressive note yesterday with an interrogation of Labour leader Phil Goff that was searching and incisive but never hectoring – not always an easy balance to strike.

As an interviewer, Espiner prepares well, is quick on his feet and has a pleasant manner. He has a slight tendency to interrupt too often, but there’s a fine line between giving interview subjects a fair suck of the sav and letting them control the show (as any politician will do, given half a chance). And he doesn’t shrink from the tough questions, to wit: “Are you a failure as leader?” – a question Goff answered with the same imperturbable smile he displayed throughout the interview. (He has inherited Helen Clark’s practice of grinning even when he’s being serious, which I find slightly unnerving.)

In his pieces to camera on One News, Espiner resists the temptation to grandstand and generally respects the boundary between analysis and editorialising – a skill his blustering counterpart at TV3, Duncan Garner, has yet to master (assuming Garner wants to, which may not be the case). And Espiner passes the most important test of any political journalist, which is that he leaves us guessing as to what his own political views (if any) are.

Best line from yesterday’s Q+A: “You don’t create wealth by taxing people” (Mike Moore). This should be tattooed on left-wing politicians’ foreheads.

Funniest line from yesterday’s Q+A: Asked by Paul Holmes whether he liked being in bed with the Nats, Hone Harawira paused for a moment before answering: “I wake up a lot.” He might have an anger problem, but he’s got a sense of humour too.