What this photo tells us about the state of political journalism

 

Many readers will have seen this picture. It shows three political journalists sprinting across the forecourt at Parliament.

My first thought on seeing the photo was that something or someone very frightening must have been chasing them. But no, the three women were themselves the chasers. They were in pursuit of Christopher Luxon's hired car as he arrived at Parliament for the first time as National leader.

Apparently the reporters were taken by surprise when Luxon was driven to Parliament from his apartment across the street rather than walking, thus presumably thwarting their plans to waylay him. They then had to take to their [high] heels to keep up, something for which they were clearly ill-prepared. 

My second thought was: do they realise how ridiculous they look? Admittedly it probably didn’t occur to them that the moment would be caught on camera, but the photo reminded me why I've made it a lifelong rule never to run unless my physical safety is in imminent danger. I've missed a few trains and buses as a result, but I'd like to think I've avoided the indignity of being seen doing something for which I'm clearly not suited. This photo reinforced the soundness of that rule, though I must say the reporter on the left (whom I couldn't identify) ran quite elegantly despite wearing inappropriate footwear, which suggests she may have done this sort of thing before. 

The question remains: why were they running, exactly? Luxon's limo would be pulling to a halt in a few seconds, giving them a chance to do what political journalists typically do in such situations, which is ask trite and pointless questions that they have no real expectation of being answered in any meaningful way.

Perhaps the three runners share the same instinct as sheep and cattle, whereby if one starts running, even when there's no obvious reason, all the others do too, as if by some mysterious trigger. Or to use another animal comparison, maybe, like dogs, they just can't resist the urge to chase anything that appears to be trying to get away from them. 

Chasing cars, of course, is a common canine sport, though the dog never quite knows what to do if and when the car stops. But let’s not take that analogy any further.

Setting aside these possible explanations, my guess is that the journalists were running because of that well-recognised psychological disorder common among press gallery journalists: FOMO, or fear of missing out.

In the few seconds between Luxon getting out of his car and disappearing inside Parliament Buildings, hounded by a scrum of over-stimulated reporters all asking questions that were unlikely to reveal anything even if they were answered, there might have lurked a sound-bite. Who knows? It might have been as trivial as Luxon commenting on the weather, but hey – with skilled editing, any meaningless remark has the potential to be stitched into a package for the 6pm bulletin that conveys a sense of intense political drama and momentous events unfolding even when nothing much is happening. Newshub does it almost every night.

And what, say, if Luxon had tripped and fallen as he tried to fight his way through the media pack? What would Jessica Mutch McKay (that's her on the right) have said to her bosses if TV3 had captured the moment and TVNZ didn't, and her only excuse was that she and her camera person were five seconds late getting there? There's big-time professional humiliation, right there.

The photo, then, tells us quite a lot about the state of political journalism. It's less concerned with the substance of politics than it is with the excitement of the chase and the ambush, the irrational, adrenalin-charged excitement of the media scrum and the  desire to bail politicians up, catch them out, trip them up and trap them into saying things that will backfire on them; the “Gotcha!” moment.

Not all these elements are present in the picture, of course, but nonetheless it encapsulates the sense that coverage of politics, for broadcasting journalists especially, has become an infantile game in which almost all sight has been lost of journalism's key purpose, which is to inform the public about things that actually matter to them.

Media coverage of politics has become a circus in which the media themselves act as ringmasters. To their shame, politicians are complicit in this, allowing alpha journalists such as Tova O'Brien to bully and goad them. Politicians are thus instrumental in trivialising politics and demeaning themselves. They should remind themselves that they at least have the honour of being elected and publicly accountable (those who represent actual electorates, that is – list MPs not so much), which is more than can be said for journalists. In that sense politicians have the moral high ground over their tormentors. They need to remember this and stand up for themselves.

A friend of mine who has experienced political journalism from both sides recently suggested, not entirely jokingly, that we need a politician like the late Robert Muldoon to put egotistical reporters in their place. Neither my friend nor I were admirers of Muldoon and his take-no-prisoners attitude toward journalists, but the relationship between politicians and reporters today is just as unhealthy as it was then – albeit with the roles reversed. 

What makes things worse is that the media have almost entirely abandoned coverage of parliamentary proceedings – that is to say, debates and select committee hearings where important issues are debated and decided, and where our laws are shaped. This stuff is way too dry and tedious for the media, who prefer to confront MPs outside the debating chamber and pepper them with questions about the latest confected controversy-du-jour.

Parliamentary proceedings appear to interest the media only when there’s blood on the floor or when (as happened yesterday) there’s the tantalising prospect of a showdown or shootout. As a result, we sometimes learn about new laws months after they have been passed, by which time they have taken effect and are starting to bite – often to the complete surprise of those affected by them. I often wonder whether there's anyone even sitting in the press gallery, that section of Parliament that Edmund Burke honoured by labelling it the Fourth Estate – one he described as "more important [by] far" than everyone else sitting there. 

Where, for example, was the press gallery last month when Parliament quietly changed the law to allow “iwi representatives” – for which read nominees of unelected vigilante Hone Harawira, a politician booted out of Parliament by the very people he purports to speak for – to obstruct people going about their lawful business on public roads? Was there no one in the gallery that day? (It was a Saturday, after all – sleep-in day for exhausted hacks.) Or were the journalists obligingly looking the other way?

Nearly two weeks passed before news of the law change filtered out. Inexplicably, National and Act were silent; missing in action. Winston Peters issued a statement, but it was ignored. Despite saturation media coverage of Covid-19, this unprecedented interference with New Zealanders’ common law rights strangely went unreported. It was only when Police Commissioner Andrew Coster was interviewed by Mike Hosking that the public became aware of the law change.

Hosking’s fellow NewstalkZB presenter Heather du Plessis-Allen subsequently ripped into the government for going to ground and refusing to answer questions once the news got out about iwi-manned roadblocks, but she let her media colleagues off the hook. They were complicit too, either though dereliction, laziness, incompetence or connivance.  

The government’s action might have been “shady as all hell”, as du Plessis-Allan says, but governments get away with these things only if the media let them. And as long as cynical politicians can rely on the mainstream media being distracted by sideshows and political soap operas, they will continue to escape tough scrutiny on things that really matter.

 

In New Zealand today

■ Susie Ferguson is a disgrace. Interviewing Hone Harawira on Morning Report this morning about the police decision to shut down iwi checkpoints on highways in the Far North, she seemed at pains to avoid even the remotest hint that the checkpoints weren’t legitimate in the first place.

I would have been content if she had asked Harawira just one crucial question – namely, by what authority did he and his fellow activists set up the checkpoints? Harawira holds no public office and is accountable to no one. He has no public mandate. On the contrary, Maori voters in Te Tai Tokerau rejected him in the 2014 and 2017 general elections. He leads a far-left political splinter group called the Mana Movement, which won a resounding 0.1 per cent of the party vote in the last election it contested. So who or what gives Harawira the right to stop traffic on public roads?

My beef, however, isn’t with Harawira. He’s a seasoned political opportunist who will seize every chance to assert Maori autonomy, which is what the checkpoints are about. He owes the public nothing.

Ferguson, on the other hand, occupies a position of public influence and authority which she regularly abuses. This morning she ingratiated herself with Harawira by asking soft, leading questions (for example, “Are you concerned that the government is making decisions that are not in the best interests of Maori as regards this current outbreak?”, to which there was only going to be one answer) and murmuring assent to his replies.

The crucial question raised by unauthorised iwi checkpoints is this: either New Zealand is a society based on the rule of law, in which authority is exercised by people who are publicly accountable, or it’s a free-for-all where anyone with sufficient audacity (which Harawira has by the bucketload) can claim rights not available to others, such as pulling motorists over and disrupting traffic on the pretext that they want to give people information that’s freely available elsewhere. But Morning Report and Susie Ferguson delicately tiptoe around such inconvenient issues.

■ Duncan Greive, founder and managing editor of the left-wing news and commentary site The Spinoff, has unblushingly outed himself as an enemy of free speech.

In a commentary on John Banks’ sacking by Magic Talk, Greive suggests the station’s boss, former Air New Zealand executive Cam Wallace, should either restrain Magic Talk’s other conservative talkback hosts – he names Peter Williams and Sean Plunket – or “ease them out”. The problem, evidently, is that they express and invite right-wing opinions, which makes Magic Talk something of an outlier in an otherwise overwhelmingly woke media environment.

Greive then goes on to say: “… This is not just a question for Wallace and his board. It’s a question for us, for New Zealand. Because the views espoused by Banks and his caller, dismal as they are, remain out there and available on any number of platforms. His axing doesn’t change that.”

Translation: New Zealand will never achieve ideological purity until it’s purged of dissenting conservative opinions. Greive laments that such opinions persist, but there’s a remedy: the spittle-flecked, drooling knuckle-draggers who hold them should be denied a public platform. How very open and inclusive.

He goes on to sneer not only at talkback audiences but writers of letters to the editor as well, observing that such people are “older and further from the centre of society’s gravity than they once were”. Translation: old people should shut up and stand aside in favour of younger, wiser heads.

Well, at least we now know exactly where we stand with Greive and The Spinoff. He wishes to assert the right of free speech for himself but deny it to others.

■ Wellington’s abject humiliation continues. Earlier this week, sewage flowed in the central city after an ancient pipe burst. Yesterday a geyser erupted in the Aro Valley; same cause.

Interviewed by Corin Dann on Morning Report this morning, mayor Andy Foster made a valiant effort to sound confident and in command, but he’s not fooling anyone. He talks as if the city’s epidemic of failing pipes took everyone by surprise, but hang on; Foster has been on the council since 1992, so can hardly plead ignorance of the city’s decay. What was he doing all that time?

Ageing infrastructure isn’t Wellington’s only problem. The city is burdened with an ineffectual mayor struggling to assert control over a fractious council dominated by shrill, woke harpies. Its finest public buildings lie empty and its most ambitious projects (the Shelly Bay development and the laughingly named Let’s Get Wellington Moving initiative) are bogged down by indecision, sclerosis and litigation.

How long will it be, I wonder, before the city’s long-suffering citizens – especially those old enough to remember prouder times – stage an insurrection?

They might be polite bullies, but they're still bullies

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, April 30.)

Pssst. Don’t mention the checkpoints.

That seems to have been the rule followed by politicians and much of the media in the five weeks since Hone Harawira and his supporters took the law into their own hands and began stopping travellers in the Far North.

The official response has been to either ignore the checkpoints or pretend they are a non-issue. On the few occasions when interviewers have asked hard questions about them, government politicians and police have danced around the question of whether they’re legal.

If they were confident of their legality, they would surely say so. That leads us to conclude they are not. They are, in fact, an audacious and calculated challenge to the rule of law.

Until this week, even Opposition MPs seemed strangely hesitant about raising the subject. Either National was frightened of being labelled as racist, or it didn’t want to risk being seen as less than 100 per cent committed to the fight against Covid-19.

In the mainstream media, the issue has been treated as a minor diversion; an inconsequential sub-plot to the main narrative. NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking tried unsuccessfully to pin down the prime minister on the issue this week, but otherwise there has been little critical examination of the checkpoints’ legality and still less of what they might lead to, which is potentially an even more problematic issue.

Meanwhile the checkpoints have spread like … well, like a virus.

From the Far North and the East Coast, they have spread to Maketu in the Bay of Plenty, to Murupara on the fringe of the Urewera and now to Taranaki. In recent days, iwi elsewhere have asserted control over lakes and rivers by means or rahui, or bans – again, of dubious legal status.

Along the way, there has been a significant shift in the justification for the highway checkpoints. At the start, their purported purpose was to protect vulnerable Maori communities in remote places – an objective many people could sympathise with, even though the checkpoints were set up with no mandate or legal authority other than a nod and a wink from the police (and in Northland, from the mayor).

But the original pretext began to look less convincing once checkpoints started materialising in places where there were no isolated communities to protect, and it looks even less so now that the government has announced that the coronavirus is technically eliminated, which means the worst risk has passed. It's worth noting that Tairawhiti, which includes the East Coast, is one of four regions with no current cases of the virus.

This being the case, you might expect the vigilantes to pack up and go home. But not only are the checkpoints still there, there are more of them. This suggests that the purpose is something other than the protection of Maori communities.

Join the dots. Iwi activists watched what was happening in the Far North and the East Coast, noted that no one tried to stop it, and decided to organise their own checkpoints elsewhere. All of which was utterly predictable.

Under the smokescreen of the coronavirus crisis, the activists are boldly advancing a separatist agenda. Their objective is clear from their statements that they are policing their “borders”, which implies tribal sovereignty. And the longer they are allowed to get away with it, the messier it’s likely to be when the legally constituted authorities who are supposed to govern this country intervene.

For the moment, public unease has apparently persuaded the police to take a more active role in the checkpoints. But it’s clear they are involved only in a supporting role, if they’re present at all.

Pressed to clarify the situation, Jacinda Ardern and police commissioner Andrew Coster have kicked for touch with statements of masterful ambiguity. Coster sounds much surer of himself when he’s wagging his finger at dangerous lawbreakers driving the family Honda to the beach to take the dog for a walk. This is called picking the low-hanging fruit. 

Note that I use the word checkpoint rather than roadblock. That’s because the roads, to my knowledge, aren’t physically blocked.

Defenders of the checkpoints say no one is forced to stop. But a powerful psychological factor comes into play when motorists see people – often quite large people – standing on the road wearing masks and hi-vis jackets, surrounded by traffic cones and holding signs saying “stop”.

Most people’s natural instinct is to comply, whether they’re obliged to or not. That instinct is likely to be reinforced if people on the checkpoint are wearing gang insignia, as at Murupara. Small wonder that those defending the checkpoints insist that people are happy to stop.

And having stopped, many people are either too timid or too uncertain to refuse to give personal details or answer questions about where they are going, even though their interrogators have no right to ask such questions.

Intimidating people into stopping when they're not legally required to is bullying, pure and simple. Sure, the vigilantes might be polite. But that merely makes them polite bullies.

Footnote: This column has been amended since publication yesterday morning to take into account National's questioning of Andrew Coster at the meeting of the Epidemic Response Committee later on the same day. But the question remains: what took them so long?

Coster: a masterclass in fudging

So the police are belatedly having second thoughts about the roadblocks set up by iwi vigilantes. But it’s several weeks too late, and even now Police Commissioner Andrew Coster can’t bring himself to categorically state what is obvious to everyone  – namely, that the checkpoints are illegal – or make a commitment that they will be removed.

Interviewed on radio this morning, Coster floundered as he tried to justify what plainly cannot be justified. He indicated that the police would be more actively involved in what are euphemistically called “community checkpoints” but left listeners unclear as to whether they would be allowed to continue.

In the meantime, checkpoints that were originally justified on the basis that they were protecting vulnerable Maori in remote places, such as the Far North and the East Coast, have materialised at locations where there’s no such justification, such as Maketu in the Bay of Plenty, where a Mongrel Mob member reportedly prevented a 70-year-old man from going to buy milk.

The figleaf of justification is further diminished now that health authorities are making real headway against Covid-19, meaning the risk of infection is being reduced by the day. Yet the checkpoints remain. This gives a clue to their real purpose, which has less to do with keeping elderly Maori safe than with asserting Maori control and defying the law to do anything about it.

Challenged on whether the checkpoints were illegal, Coster took refuge in bureaucratic flannel. He said while it was understandable that local communities were concerned about the coronavirus, they were not “specifically authorised” to undertake “checkpoint-type activity”. That’s a masterful bit of fudging.  

His rationalisation seems to be that police were willing to tolerate checkpoints at the outset, but the situation has changed now that the risk of widespread infection has receded. That’s a convenient way of retrospectively justifying the dangerous precedent the police created by allowing Northland activist Hone Harawira to go ahead without any mandate or authority. (It bears repeating that Harawira lost his parliamentary seat in 2014 and was roundly rejected by Maori voters again in 2017, raising questions about who, if anyone, he represents.)  

The time for the police to act firmly was weeks ago, at the outset. Why they failed to step in is unclear. Timidity? Misplaced cultural sensitivity?

And we still don’t know whether the checkpoints will be disbanded. Coster said the police were now “actively working to ensure that there is a police presence or indeed preferably that the checkpoints cease because the risk to our communities is lower”. More fudging.

On Morning Report, Corin Dann put it to Coster that residents of Muriwai Beach, near Auckland, were concerned about a possible influx of outsiders once the country goes to Level 3 and asked what the police would do if Muriwai locals – whom  I guess are overwhelmingly Pakeha – took matters into their own hands and established a roadblock.

His reply was a masterpiece of bureaucrat-speak. “Level 4 controls have aligned with the way various communities have gone about trying to manage movement that is inappropriate. But we cannot have communities running checkpoints preventing movement that is permitted under whatever level we’re in.” He went on to say police would ensure that “people who are entitled to use the road are free to do that”.

Interpret that how you will, but I took it to mean the police would not look favourably at any attempt to set up a checkpoint at Muriwai. So why is it apparently okay at Maketu? And when, exactly, did the police decide that people’s freedom of movement shouldn’t be infringed? Form your own conclusions.

The one thing most people would heartily agree with Coster on was his statement that “it’s not in anyone’s interests to let things escalate to the point where you have a bigger problem than you started with”. Er, precisely.

Meanwhile, he’s warning that the police will crack down on anyone deemed to be travelling beyond their permitted area once we go to Level 3. “Our message is very clear,” Coster told Mike Hosking on NewstalkZB. Except that it isn’t. The police talk tough when it comes to pulling errant motorists into line but tip-toe around people who blatantly defy their authority.

At last, some pushback - albeit half-hearted - against Harawira's vigilantes

Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is slowly stirring as if from a long, deep slumber.

The first signs of life became apparent last week when Northland MP Matt King shook himself awake and called on the police to shut down the unlawful checkpoints set up by Hone Harawira’s followers in the Far North, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting vulnerable Maori communities from Covid-19.

That it took more than three weeks for anyone from the National Party to question the legality of the checkpoints points to the potency of whatever sleeping draught the party had ingested. But at least it was a start.

King was prodded into action following a complaint from a man who said he and his wife had been prevented from driving to nearby Kaihoke for groceries – on the face of it, a flagrant interference in their freedom of movement, imposed with no legal mandate whatsoever other than an informal nod of approval from the local police and the district mayor, the undistinguished former MP John Carter.

Newshub reported that the couple were detained against their will after refusing (quite rightly) to tell their interrogators where they lived. Four of the masked vigilantes allegedly surrounded the couple’s vehicle and took photos of the number plate. Terrified, the wife phoned 111 for help.

After several minutes the couple were told to move to a holding area for further questioning and seized the opportunity to drive off. By the time they made their return journey, police had apparently intervened and the blockade was no longer operating, although the people manning it were still at the roadside.

According to King, other members of the public, including a paramedic, had told of being made to stop and take flyers. People found the checkpoints intimidating but were too scared to say anything.

So … private citizens going about their lawful business have been stopped, detained and intimidated. And the police, who are entrusted to uphold the rule of law (and are normally ultra-zealous about deterring anyone impertinent enough to usurp their role), have looked the other way.

Just why the police have chosen to so cravenly abdicate isn’t clear, but a possible explanation is that they have been instructed not to get offside with local iwi activists. Anything to keep the peace, even if it means risking the goodwill of people whose natural instinct is to respect the law.

The media, previously diligent in their disinclination to subject Harawira’s Tai Tokerau Border Control (apparently that’s what the vigilantes call themselves) to any critical scrutiny, reported King’s statement and added an empty assurance by deputy police commissioner Wally Haumaha – the same Wally Haumaha who survived a Police Conduct Authority investigation which found he had humiliated and intimidated two women subordinates – to the effect that police had “advised” people running the checkpoints on the “appropriate” way to conduct themselves.

Not a word about their legality, or the right of iwi enforcers to usurp the role of properly constituted authorities such as the police and district council. Nothing to see here, folks.

But public anxiety at the way these blockades are operating – and not just in the Far North, but on the East Coast and reportedly in the central North Island as well – has reached such a level that National MPs can’t ignore it. The party’s agonisingly slow awakening continued yesterday during a meeting of Parliament’s epidemic response committee, where Gerry Brownlee brought up the case of an elderly man who was prevented from going to buy milk by a member of the Mongrel Mob.

The man’s MP, Anne Tolley, said she understood that the people manning the checkpoints wanted to protect their communities [from infection], but in New Zealand people should have the right of passage. “If it’s not managed well, I’m worried it could get out of hand.”

Coming from a senior representative of a party that supposedly stands for individual freedom, this was an astonishingly half-hearted defence of a right that’s taken for granted in all liberal democracies. But at least it prompted police minister Stuart Nash into a belated denunciation of “ratbags and renegades” manning illegal roadblocks.

Unfortunately, Nash’s tough-sounding talk was so qualified as to be meaningless. He said that where roadblocks were set up without the support of the local community or the police, “the police will take this very seriously”.

That’s bound to have Harawira quaking in his jandals. As most people realise, the time to crack down on the illegal checkpoints was several weeks ago, when they first appeared. They’re now an established fact, and any attempt to dismantle them could get messy.

It follows that the longer the checkpoints are allowed to continue, the greater the risk that iwi separatists will regard it as their de facto right to police their own “borders” – and by implication, assert sovereignty in other areas of public life, which you can be sure was Harawira’s goal from the get-go. The ultimate objective, as I’ve said before, is the formation of an Indigenous People’s Republic of Te Tai Tokerau.

National’s lame performance continued on Morning Report this morning when the party’s shadow police minister, Brett Hudson, called for “clarity” over the legality of what he euphemistically called “community checkpoints”. If the government was going to condone them, Hudson said, it needed to publish guidelines on how they should be legally operated.

Wow, there’s a ringing defence of individual rights for you. You can always count on the Nats to man the barricades when personal freedom is under attack.

In line with Radio NZ’s fastidious insistence on editorial balance, Morning Report followed the Hudson interview with a phone call to Tairawhiti activist Tina Ngata for her take on the checkpoints. She took an ingenious line, arguing that “community traffic management” is nothing new.

“This sort of activity has been happening for a long time," Ngata said, citing the role of Maori wardens in traffic management and stretching credulity by implying the checkpoints were no different from locals taking charge of traffic at events such as galas and tangis. 

A crucial difference is that Maori wardens enjoy quasi-official status, and have done for a long time. Their activities are sanctioned under the Maori Community Development Act of 1962, and by virtue of their long history they function with the implied consent and goodwill of the community. 

The people manning the Northland and East Cape roadblocks enjoy no such legitimacy. Besides, I've never heard of anyone feeling intimidated or coerced by a Maori warden; on the contrary, their presence is usually a calming influence.

Ngata also said no one has been forced to stop. Perhaps that’s true in her East Coast rohe, but try telling that to the drivers who felt intimidated in the Far North, or the elderly man who was turned back at Maketu.

The justification advanced by the people manning the checkpoints is that they are doing so with the aim of protecting remote communities. Any reasonable person can sympathise with that objective, but it falls far short of justification for allowing self-appointed guardians to take the law into their own hands. Viewed against the backdrop of a long push for Maori nationalism, it should be seen for what it is: an attempt to advance a race-based separatist agenda.

This challenge to the rule of law is happening in plain sight, and no one – not even the National opposition – is doing anything about it, other than impotently tut-tutting.

Footnote: As I was writing this post, prime minister Jacinda Ardern was reportedly asked a question at her daily press conference about the legality of the checkpoints and indicated  she supported them. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere other than on Maori TV, where it was reported in te reo.  The mainstream media generally maintain a studied indifference to the issue - with the honourable exception of Stuff columnist Martin van Beynen, who wrote what I thought was a rather restrained column about it last Saturday.

Harawira's opportunistic try-on in the Far North

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Hone Harawira and his mates are manning checkpoints on main highways in the Far North to intercept tourists and turn them back, ostensibly to protect their people from Covid-19. He describes it as a border-closing exercise. And the police, whose statutory duty is to maintain law and order, appear to have meekly gone along with this brazen usurpation of their authority by a failed MP (he was tossed out by his own Maori voters in 2014) with no legal mandate whatsoever. So too, we are told, has the local mayor, former National MP John Carter.

While the eyes of the country and the media have been on supermarket queues, toilet paper shortages and prime ministerial press conferences, Harawira appears to be using the health crisis as a smokescreen for an opportunistic grab for power – and he’s getting away with it.

Some commentators have rightly highlighted the risk that new rules imposed to control the spread of Covid-19 will lead to an abuse of state power, but an even greater danger to civil liberties is posed when Maori activists take it upon themselves to limit people’s freedom of movement. Politicians can at least be punished at the next election if they get things wrong or overstep the mark, but who is Harawira accountable to? No one.

We didn't see this coming, but perhaps we should have. Harawira comes from a whanau with a long history of bullying and aggressive behaviour.

His concerns about the threat posed to Maori health in the Far North by thoughtless overseas tourists might be entirely valid. Elderly Maori are especially vulnerable. But no one, Maori or otherwise, gave Harawira the right to take matters into his own hands (with the help of his rugby league-playing mates, whose presence at the roadblocks can be counted on to intimidate travellers into complying with their instructions/requests).

This is a classic try-on: a direct challenge to the authority of those who are supposed to be in charge, such as the police and district council. And far from resisting him, they’re cravenly waving him through.

Police deputy commissioner Wally Haumaha dresses up police co-operation with Harawira as a matter of supporting local iwi and encouraging people to work together. It’s not about putting roadblocks in place, he assured Radio NZ. But that’s exactly what it is, even if Haumaha prefers to use bullshit euphemisms such as “safe assembly points” or “community safety zones”.

Harawira was also interviewed on RNZ but predictably wasn’t asked the obvious questions, such as who appointed him as local commissar or where he got his authority. He talked of “weeding out tourists” and “politely” turning them around and sending them back to Auckland. He sounded like a man confident no one would try to stop him, and indeed claimed he was working with the police.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers the failure of the police to take action on previous occasions when Maori protesters defied the law by blocking public roads leading to disputed land, or allowed the iwi of James Takamore to keep his body against his family’s wishes when all the courts said it had no right to.

You could almost be excused for wondering whether Harawira fancies himself as a local version of the Middle Eastern and North African warlords who exercise total authority within their own domains and are answerable to no one.  The disgrace is that the people we rely on to uphold the rule of law are standing back and letting it happen.

This was not in the Left's script

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, September 24.)]

What an extraordinary election campaign. And what an extraordinary result.

I am writing this column on the morning after. By the time it’s published, most of the dust will have settled. But even at the time of writing, I think some firm conclusions can be drawn

Obviously the result can be seen as an endorsement of the National-led government. But for me the really significant point was that voters overwhelmingly repudiated concerted efforts by outsiders to sway the outcome.

New Zealanders were emphatically saying this was their election and they weren’t going to have it hijacked by agenda-driven activists, some of them with no stake in the country.

By outsiders I don’t just mean literal outsiders such as Kim Dotcom, the journalist Glenn Greenwald and the security leaker Edward Snowden. I include anyone trying to exert influence from the sidelines.

That means Nicky Hager, whose book Dirty Politics was obviously timed to derail National’s election campaign. It’s not that Hager was wrong to expose the unsavoury goings-on detailed in his book. National deserved to be shamed and Hager was entitled to the scalp of cabinet minister Judith Collins.

But questions remain about his motive, his method and most of all his timing. It’s reasonable to ask whether he was just as guilty of trying to influence an election as the furtive National Party funders he exposed in his 2005 book The Hollow Men.

The media firestorm over Dirty Politics dominated the first weeks of the campaign. When that subsided, it was Dotcom’s turn. But the momentum of the campaign shifted noticeably after the German’s much-touted “Moment of Truth” event in the Auckland Town Hall.

Again, it was a carefully orchestrated attempt to sabotage National. All those high-profile speakers, parachuted in or beamed in by video link from their various boltholes; it all looked a bit too obvious.

It didn’t help that Dotcom failed to deliver on his promise to expose John Key as a liar, and even less that he then angrily turned on journalists when they challenged him. Suddenly the public saw the less benign side of the fun-loving German.

No one can say with absolute certainty why people vote the way they do, but as the campaign went into its final days I sensed a stiffening public resistance to all these finger-wagging interlopers telling us how rotten our government was.

If I’m right, it’s highly ironic that it was the Left, not the Right, that was damaged.  Labour’s support collapsed and the Greens fell far short of the ambitious goal they had set themselves.

This was the law of unintended consequences kicking in big-time. It was not the outcome that the Left had scripted for itself.

Interviewed on Sunday morning, Labour leader David Cunliffe said the firestorms over Dirty Politics and state surveillance had sucked up all the oxygen in the campaign, leaving little opportunity for voters to consider policy issues.

I’m sure he’s right. The issues that the Left had been pushing, such as child poverty and the inequality gap, hardly got a look in.

The biggest irony of all, of course, is that Dotcom’s own party was humiliatingly wiped out, taking with it three-term MP Hone Harawira.

Both men will have learned a lesson. Dotcom will have learned that New Zealanders resent big-spending outsiders throwing their weight and money around (he acknowledged, to his credit, that his influence had poisoned the Mana Party), and Harawira will have learned about the dangers of Faustian pacts.

He was seen as compromising his principles, and his people punished him for it.

I felt a bit sorry for Colin Craig, who was thwarted by the vagaries of a flawed electoral system. The cheerleaders for MMP frequently remind us of the failings of the old first-past-the-post system, but they can’t ignore the shortcomings of one that denies a seat to a party that commanded more than four percent of votes while giving two to parties with less than one per cent support.

You have to wonder, too, whether distrust of MMP explains the marked falloff in voter participation since it was introduced. Voters are cynical about MMP because they realise that the system puts more power, not less, in the hands of the politicians. That was not the promise when it was introduced.

I almost felt sorry for Cunliffe too. He was more convincing by the end of the campaign than he was at the beginning – but given the history of leaders who lose elections, it’s unlikely he’ll get another shot.

What Labour must do now, urgently, is rejuvenate. Too many of its list MPs in the last term looked as if they were merely keeping their seats warm.

The need for a vigorous opposition is never greater than when a government has convincingly won a third term and risks becoming arrogant and complacent. Democracy prevailed on Saturday, but the concern now is whether it will be up to the job of holding the government to account over the next three years.

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.

 

Harawira shelters behind a double standard

I regard Maori Party MP Hone Harawira’s comment that he would feel uncomfortable if one of his children brought home a Pakeha as infinitely more offensive than the email that caused such a stir last year, in which he ranted about “white motherf**kers raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries”.

That email merely expressed a one-eyed interpretation of history, one that is not uncommon among radical Maori activists, and I was surprised at the outrage it provoked.

But Harawira’s latest statement in an interview with the Weekend Herald was something else. It expressed a deeply personal and divisive form of racism that we normally associate with white rednecks.

Harawira seems to be saying that no one with white skin is good enough for his children. This is racism by any definition. It promotes a racial separatism that is alien to our culture and history.

Imagine the reaction if a white politician made a similar statement about Maori. As ACT MP David Garrett said on the TV3 News last night, his political career would quickly be at an end.

But as happened last year, Harawira’s statement is being laughed off. Oh, that’s just Hone sounding off again, his protectors in the Maori Party tell us. When is someone going to make the point that Harawira is being given a degree of latitude that would never be extended to a white politician?

And what of our staunchly even-handed Race Relations Commissioner? True to form, Joris de Bres reportedly tut-tutted that Harawira’s statement was “unwise”, but added that the fuss would soon blow over. Oh, well that’s alright then.

I invite anyone to contrast the commissioner’s breezy tolerance of Harawira’s exercise of his right to free speech with the zeal with which de Bres pursued the newspaper editors who dared publish the Mohammed cartoons several years ago.

Readers of this blog will know that I believe in free speech, even when the views expressed are contemptible. Better out in the open than hushed up, I say. But free speech is abused when double standards allow a bigot like Harawira to mouth off in a fashion that no Pakeha politician would dare emulate.

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.