On Magic Talk and Maori wards

[UPDATE: Media outlets are confirming today that Sean Plunket has left Magic Talk amid the familiar, ritualistic "I would like to thank Sean for his contribution to the station" bromides. Nothing in the Mediaworks statement allays the misgivings outlined in this piece.] 

Where do I start? Okay, let’s begin with Sean Plunket.

Reports suggest the Magic Talk host has been, at the very least, put on gardening leave while his employers consider his future. This follows the sacking of John Banks for not challenging a caller who said Maori were a Stone Age people.

The self-anointed arbiters of what’s permissible on air, such as Duncan Greive of The Spinoff and Hayden Donnell of RNZ’s Mediawatch – both of whom are dancing, metaphorically speaking, on Banks’ grave – now assert the right to decide what line talkback hosts should take. Whatever this is, it’s not free speech.

Attacks on freedom of expression are coming from multiple directions: from a government that proposes to place new limits (conveniently vague at this stage, so as not to cause too much alarm) around what people may say on subjects such as race and religion; from woke vigilantes in mainstream and social media who campaign for the defenestration of non-woke broadcasters; and from cowed media bosses and corporate advertisers who show no commitment or loyalty to the values of the free, capitalist society in which they operate, and for whom defence of democratic values is less important than winning brownie points on left-leaning social media platforms.  

It was inevitable that with Banks gone, the vigilantes would be emboldened to go after Plunket – not for anything he’s said or done lately, but for historical transgressions. The existence of even one right-wing talkback host is an affront to the avenging angels of wokedom, who won’t be content until ideological homogeneity applies across the entire media.

In Magic FM and its owner, Mediaworks, they picked a company that was unlikely to put up much of a fight in defence of free speech. Mediaworks’ television arm, Three, has long been captured by the woke left – a fact apparent to anyone watching Newshub’s 6pm News or The Project – and its radio holdings consist almost entirely of music stations. Plunket must feel very isolated and vulnerable.

And I’m sorry, but I have to take issue here with something David Cumin of the Free Speech Coalition said recently about the Banks sacking. Cumin rightly rebuked Vodafone, Spark and Kiwibank not only for pulling their advertising from Magic Talk but for threatening to use their commercial power to influence the station’s future choice of hosts. But he also said, of Banks’ firing: “On the face of it, this seems to be a private company making a choice about who it employs, which it has every right to do” (the italics are mine).

I agree only partly. Companies operating in the field of news and current affairs have a responsibility not shared by purveyors of other commodities. As shapers of public opinion and providers of information of vital public interest, the news media perform a role central to the functioning of democracy.  This imposes obligations of fairness, accuracy and balance; but as long as we profess to be a free and open society, it also requires them to reflect the full spectrum of public opinion. 

So while it may be true in a general sense that companies  are entitled to employ whoever they like, in the news media this right is tempered by public interest considerations. Old-style media companies understood this and took their role very seriously; it was ingrained in the industry culture. I doubt that this remains true in 2021, when the traditional media business model has been blown to pieces and the focus is on survival.

Media companies must also be prepared to stand up to bullying advertisers, which brings me to a relevant anecdote. In the late 1980s, not long after I became editor of The Dominion, the chief executive of the newly corporatised Telecom – then the paper’s biggest advertiser – objected to the tone of the coverage his company was getting in our business pages and pulled all its ads. The boycott tore a gaping hole in our budget - this at a time when trading conditions were tough already - and caused the advertising manager to have conniptions. Pressure was applied on the board of INL, the Dom's parent company. But Mike Robson, then the managing director of INL and a seasoned newspaper man, backed the paper and stood firm. Our coverage of Telecom’s affairs continued unchanged and in due course, the company’s advertising resumed.

Would the same happen today? I’m not so sure. The general manager of Mediaworks, Cam Wallace, came from Air New Zealand – a corporate culture far removed from that of news and current affairs. Would a Magic FM manager be confident that Wallace would back him if a big advertiser tried to dictate the choice of hosts or their editorial line? Hmmm.

So John Banks' exchange with his caller about "Stone Age" Maori offended people. I found it offensive too (as well as plain stupid), but that’s one of the prices we pay for living in a free society. The people we have most to fear from are not shoot-from-the-lip provocateurs like Banks, but the authoritarian zealots who insist that they be silenced. The threat these censorious prigs pose to a democratic society is potentially far greater and more far-reaching than anything a bigoted talkback host might say to his limited band of followers. As the British columnist Bernard Levin once put it: “Any legally permissible view, however repugnant, is less dangerous promulgated than banned.” 

I constantly hear and read things that offend me, but I don’t react by insisting I should be protected from them. All I demand is that there should be room in the public conversation for a multitude of competing voices. That’s how democracy works: by exposing people to a range of views and trusting them to make up their own minds.

Trust; that’s a crucial factor here. The Left has always had a problem with trust. Leftist apparatchiks fret that people who are left to make up their own minds will make the wrong choices, so seek to lead them by limiting the range of ideas and opinions they are exposed to – which is why freedom of expression is such a crucial battleground in the so-called culture wars.

But of course there are other looming threats to liberal democracy, and none more urgent than Nanaia Mahuta’s proposal – disgracefully kept secret until the 2020 election was safely in the bag, and now being bulldozed through Parliament under urgency– to impose Maori wards on city and district councils by removing voters’ right to veto them.

This idea is obnoxious and anti-democratic on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. It strips away the majority’s right to determine the form of local government representation, it provides Maori (or more correctly, part-Maori) candidates with a short cut to power by bypassing the need to win popular support, and it will result in the election of candidates who feel responsible only to constituents who claim Maori ancestry. In all these respects, it subverts democracy. 

It also promises to solidify the Left's grip on local government, since Maori candidates mostly lean left. If there were such a historical figure as Gerry Mander, he’d be quietly whistling with admiration. 

The Maori wards proposition is built on a deliberate and dishonest falsehood. The argument goes that because there are not as many Maori councillors as the promoters of Maori wards think there should be, the only possible explanation is that a racist voting system is loaded against them.

But as Don Brash has pointed out: “The proportion of councillors who identify as Maori has been steadily increasing in recent years, and now almost exactly matches the proportion of Maori New Zealanders in the total population – 13.5% of all councillors were Maori in 2019, while according to the 2018 census Maori New Zealanders made up 13.7% of the total population.”

In other words, there is no deficit when it comes to Maori representation in local government. Democracy has done its job admirably by ensuring that Maori representation is almost exactly proportionate to the number of Maori in the general population. 

And even if that weren’t the case, the answer wouldn’t lie in rigging the system to favour Maori candidates. All that’s required is for more Maori to stand for office, and for other Maori to support them; or as an exasperated Kelvin Davis put it following council elections in 2016, “to get off their arses and vote”.

In fact the record has shown time and time again that where good Maori candidates put themselves forward, non-Maori voters too will support them and propel them into office. That rebuts the specious proposition that a racist system is loaded against them.

Here’s another canard: the reason voters have rejected Maori wards whenever the issue has been put to a referendum is that voters are racist. But I don’t believe for a moment that people vote against Maori wards because they don’t want Maori councillors. They do it because they intuitively understand that democracy is supposed to be colour-blind, and that candidates should get elected on the basis of merit rather skin colour. Voters get that, even if the Year Zero cultists in the government don’t.

Yet another patently false argument is that since voters are not able to veto geographically based wards, allowing them that right in respect of Maori wards can only be racially discriminatory. But the crucial difference is that geographical wards are created and arranged for reasons of administrative efficiency and equality (as far as possible) of representation. That has long been the case, not just in New Zealand but in democracies the world over. Exclusive Maori wards introduce another, entirely different, dynamic. It’s a huge leap from geographical wards to race-based ones, and I’m sure Mahuta is smart enough to know it.

Oh, and here’s another thing. If I were Maori, I would regard the creation of Maori wards as patronising in the extreme, since it assumes that Maori are incapable of getting elected without a leg-up.  As Simon Bridges said in Parliament, it’s an insult to suggest that Maori need special treatment.

The sad thing is that we can expect all these valid and cogent arguments against Maori wards to be dismissed as simply racist. Maori activists and their accomplices in the woke left have so distorted the definition of this word that they fling it at anyone who opposes their agenda, even for the most honourable and defensible reasons.

By promoting a fundamentally anti-democratic idea that supporters of genuine democracy feel compelled to oppose, the activists force their opponents into positions where they can then be conveniently dismissed as being motivated by blind prejudice. To paraphrase Edmund Blackadder, it's a tactic so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel. 

 

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?

Orwell saw this coming

 John Banks can be a hard man to defend, but defend him we must.

The former cabinet minister and mayor of Auckland has been banished in disgrace from radio station Magic Talk, where he was filling in for regular morning talkback host Peter Williams, after suggesting Maori were a Stone Age culture.

According to a report on the leftist news and commentary site The Spinoff, a caller identifying himself as Richard said Maori were genetically predisposed to crime, alcohol and educational under-performance. “Richard” said he was not interested in his children learning about Maoris’ Stone Age culture, to which Banks reportedly responded: “Your children need to get used to their Stone Age culture because if their Stone Age culture doesn’t change, these people will come through your bathroom window.”

The response was drearily predictable. Social media lynch mobs called for Banks’ head. Magic Talk advertisers Vodafone, Kiwibank and Spark virtually fell over each other in their eagerness to display their woke credentials by pulling their ads, while NZ Cricket joined the pile-on by threatening to review Magic Talk’s broadcast rights to Black Caps matches played in New Zealand.

I’m struggling to decide which was more objectionable: Banks’ statement or the nauseatingly sanctimonious platitudes from advertisers parading their commitment to “diversity and inclusion”.

Of course Banks issued the standard obligatory apology, in which he tried to shift responsibility for the furore onto his caller before acknowledging, almost as an afterthought, that he had made some negative generic comments about Maori “that could have been misconstrued as racist”.

None of this would have surprised anyone who has followed Banks’ turbulent career as a politician and radio host. He has a long history of running off at the mouth and making impulsive errors of judgment that he later had cause to regret. He seems unable to help himself. But Magic Talk management must have known this when they offered him the slot. They’re as culpable as he is.

The important question here is this: which poses the greater threat to our liberal, open democracy – Banks’ inflammatory statement, or the rush to shut him down? 

He expressed a provocative opinion that’s possibly shared by some of his listeners. Yanking him off air doesn’t get rid of the opinion. On the contrary, it can only accentuate the perception that freedom of speech is under attack, and intensify the resentment of those who feel excluded from the public conversation.

To put it another way, we have far more to fear from the prigs and bigots trying to silence him than we do from Banks himself. We live in a robust democracy that has demonstrated over many decades that it’s perfectly capable of dealing in a civilised way with contentious opinions. The free exchange of ideas is how democratic societies evolve and advance. What has changed is not the existence of such ideas, but the frightening insistence that they be stifled.  

This is happening with the connivance – indeed, encouragement – of virtue-signalling corporate advertisers, and more alarmingly with the enthusiastic backing of mainstream media outlets that should be manning the barricades in defence of free speech. The promiscuously loose use by reporters of subjective terms such as “racist”, a word for which there is no settled definition, is proof of the media’s abandonment of traditional journalistic principles.

Meanwhile, to their everlasting shame, gutless politicians, intimidated into silence by the venomous rhetoric of neo-Marxist activists, look the other way.

Both the range of subjects New Zealanders feel free to discuss, and the language they may use in discussing them, are being constantly narrowed down. George Orwell saw all this coming, but if he were still alive I don’t imagine he would derive any satisfaction from seeing how right he was.

TV3: too clever for its own good

You sometimes have to  wonder about TV3's news judgment.

There's  a place for aggressive reporting that pushes the boundaries, and Patrick Gower has become the pacesetter in the parliamentary press gallery - at least in the electronic media. But some of the channel's decisions lately have been downright silly.

It greatly overplayed its exclusive on Kim Dotcom's ownership of a signed copy of Mein Kampf. (Memo to TV3: "exclusive" doesn't necessarily mean it should lead the bulletin.) More recently, it excitedly led with a non-story about Justice Minister Judith Collins firing a pistol in circumstances which, under what could only be called a nitpicking interpretation of the gun laws, might have been technically illegal (but even if it was, didn't amount to a hill of beans). TV3 should note that for all the hype, neither of these stories led anywhere. They were largely ignored by other media, and rightly so.

Now the channel has suffered the unusual humiliation of being rebuked from the bench of the High Court and banned from further camera coverage of the John Banks trial - this, for showing footage last week of Banks absent-mindedly doing something nauseating with ear-wax while listening to the evidence against him.

What was the purpose of this shot? It was utterly gratuitous. It shed no light on the case, it was unnecessarily humiliating to Banks and it was repulsive to look at. Small wonder that Justice Edwin Wylie gave TV3 a whack around the ears.

There's not necessarily any disgrace in a media organisation upsetting the judiciary. In some circumstances it can be a badge of honour. But in this instance, the judge's indignation was entirely justified.

It was a case of TV3 once again getting a bit too clever for its own good. To the channel's credit, TV3 lawyer Clare Bradley, who was evidently party to the decision to screen the shot, now admits it was a bad judgment call.

Amen to that. Perhaps the channel will now dial back its propensity for shock and overkill.

Banks retains the capacity to surprise

I've made some savage comments about John Banks over the past couple of years - all of them, I believe, richly deserved. He has done and said some spectacularly stupid things and almost single-handedly destroyed ACT. But Banks is nothing if not a complex character, and he still has the capacity to stir admiration. His speech in Parliament this week  on education and child poverty, which I thank Keeping Stock for drawing to my attention (via Lindsay Mitchell), helps explain why Banks is still held in grudging respect even by many of his political opponents. (Helen Clark is one who reportedly has a soft spot for him.) It's a powerful, heartfelt piece of oratory of a like all too rarely heard in Parliament, and its eloquence is only heightened by the constant heckling of Hone Harawira - arguably Parliament's most boorish man, despite some pretty intense competition from other aspirants to the title. 

Charter schools: a good idea, badly handled

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 31.)

BY THE TIME you read this, Parliament may have passed the legislation introducing charter schools.

It’s a worthwhile experiment that almost didn’t deserve to succeed. Like the poorly executed state asset privatisation policy, the charter schools proposal aroused avoidable suspicion and antagonism by the clumsy way it was handled.

Charter schools went unmentioned in the 2011 election campaign. The proposal emerged into the light only later, as part of ACT’s coalition agreement with National. Yet we can assume there were discussions between the two parties long before that.

If a policy is worth adopting, its backers should have the confidence to toss it into the public arena and be prepared to explain and defend it. Instead, opponents were able to portray the charter schools idea as having been introduced by stealth, as if it were something to be ashamed of – which it wasn’t.

The impression that it wasn’t quite kosher was reinforced by the peculiar decision to place charter schools outside the Official Information Act. Again, this enabled the usual array of interest groups bent on protecting the status quo in education to howl that the government had something to hide.

And it didn’t help that the politician nominally behind charter schools, associate education minister John Banks, is arguably the most discredited man in Parliament. The more he was kept out of public view the better.

It fell to former ACT president Catherine Isaac, chairwoman of the partnership schools working group, to go to bat for the proposal, which she did coolly and professionally. But she often seemed to be battling alone against a phalanx of well-organised (and largely taxpayer-funded) opponents.

It became almost a textbook example of how to allow the other side to dictate the running. But if the worth of the charter schools proposal can be measured by the sheer fury of the opposition, as I believe it can, then we’re on to a good thing. And if we’re not, monitoring will soon expose any shortcomings.

After all, it’s not as if the entire primary school sector is being handed holus-bolus to a dodgy Las Vegas-based corporation run by men who drive around in stretch limos with tinted windows, even if some of the wilder statements made by charter schools opponents gave that impression.

* * *

PART OF ME sometimes wishes that the Chinese security men who roughed up Greens co-leader Russel Norman outside Parliament a couple of years ago would come back and do the job properly.

There’s something deeply irritating about the way Dr Norman pops up like a hyperactive jack in the box night after night on the television news. He looks so pleased with himself – as well he might, since he’s in the safe position of never having to do anything other than criticise.

He reached a 10 on the irritation scale last week when he crowed that small retail investors – the so-called “mums and dads” – had ended up with a relatively small proportion of shares in Mighty River Power.

The implication was that partial privatisation was all a con, designed to enrich already wealthy institutions and big investors. What Dr Norman failed to mention was that mums and dads had almost certainly been frightened off by fears that the newly announced Labour-Greens electricity policy would render their investment worthless. In other words, what Dr Norman criticised as a political trick by the government was in fact the entirely predictable consequence of his own cynical machinations.

Perversely, the Labour-Greens policy ensured that the big sharemarket players ended up with a disproportionately large slice of the partially privatised company – hardly something for the Left to be proud of.

While I don’t relish the thought of the Greens finding themselves in government, there would be some consolation in the prospect of Dr Norman having his own feet held to the fire for a change.

In the meantime he should realise the public doesn’t have an infinite appetite for tiresome carping. It might be in his interests to dial it back a bit.

* * *

THERE IS a connection, though it may not be obvious, between free breakfasts in schools and police pursuits of rogue drivers.

When police become reluctant to pursue law-breaking drivers for fear of causing a fatal crash, more people are encouraged to try it on. 

In the same way, when parents realise it doesn’t matter if they don’t provide breakfast for their children because the school will, more will decide it’s okay to send the kids off each morning with an empty stomach.

Just as police often get the blame when a fleeing driver wraps his car around a tree, so it will become the government’s fault that children are hungry, even though their parents may have the resources to feed them. Both involve a transfer of moral responsibility.

Child poverty is an appalling thing, but you have to wonder where all this might lead. Once people are relieved of personal responsibility for their actions (or failure to act, as in the case of negligent parents), almost anything becomes possible.

 

2012: year of the buffoon?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, January 2.)

In the week before Christmas I was invited to take part in a radio programme where we were to discuss, among other things, the good and bad of 2012.

Worryingly, I had to scratch my head to think of anything that had happened in 2012. I put this down to my many years as a daily newspaper journalist, a career which revolves around the event of the moment. Once a story has been written and published, it’s expunged from the memory bank to make room for the next one.

It follows that casting one’s mind back over an entire year was a tall order. But I duly went back through my files and slowly, little by little, it all came back to me.

Here, then, is my highly selective resume of 2012.

It was a year in which, bizarrely, a large and buffoonish-looking German named Kim Dotcom became a national celebrity and caused enormous political embarrassment.

Buffoonish-looking he may be, but Herr Dotcom is a very shrewd customer with a natural flair for public relations. He cleverly turned the controversy arising from an over-the-top police raid on his home near Auckland to his advantage, in the process becoming something of a folk hero.

Public support for Herr Dotcom (even his adopted name sounds like something created by a Hollywood scriptwriter) arose largely from the perception, not entirely unjustified, that America, determined to put him on the mat for alleged copyright infringement on a massive scale, had told the New Zealand government to jump and the response had been, “how high”?

Public unease at this perceived grovelling to the Americans would have been accentuated by controversy over the government’s sweetheart deal with the Sky City casino company and, going back further, to the furore over The Hobbit, which saw prime minister John Key swiftly moving to placate Warner Brothers to ensure production remained in New Zealand.

In each of these instances, the government’s opponents were able to portray the National Party as a pushover, ready to sell New Zealand’s soul.

There was a time, decades ago, when many New Zealanders accepted that we had no choice but to bow to powerful outside interests (usually British, in those days), but all that has changed. Since Britain abandoned us for the EU and we fell out with the Americans over Anzus, we have acquired a taste for asserting our autonomy.

The problem is that we are a small, vulnerable economy, often at the mercy of external forces. The government must seize what opportunities it can without appearing to compromise our sovereignty. Getting that balance right will present a continuing challenge for the government’s political management skills, which looked distinctly ragged in 2012.

It was a year in which Mr Key seemed to forget the words of the magic incantation that protected him against political damage during his first term, but whether he has learned anything is a moot point. His final act of the political year was to indulge in juvenile clowning on a radio station – not a good look when the education sector was in turmoil. 

Herr Dotcom’s other significant achievement was that he effectively destroyed the Act party, although not without a great deal of help from the pathetic John Banks and the man who unwisely installed him in Epsom, erstwhile Act leader Don Brash.

Mr Banks had been happy to accept Herr Dotcom’s generous help when he ran unsuccessfully for the Auckland mayoralty, but ungraciously disowned the German the moment he looked like becoming a political embarrassment. Herr Dotcom took his revenge by publicly exposing Mr Banks’ duplicity, and fair enough. Now Mr Banks’ reputation is in tatters and so is Act’s. (In fact the more I think about it, the more I'm forced to conclude that, given Mr Key's radio antics and Mr Banks' embarrassing attempts to wriggle out of his predicament, buffoonery may have been the defining quality of 2012.)

Many people will rejoice at the prospect of Act being obliterated at the 2014 general election, but I’m not one of them. It was a bold, radical and idealistic party – as idealistic as any party on the left – but like many idealistic parties, it suffered from a surfeit of talented but idiosyncratic and often undisciplined personalities.  Dr Brash’s ill-conceived takeover of the party sealed its fate.

But back to 2012. There was ACC and the Bronwyn Pullar fiasco, which claimed more victims than a cluster bomb. Yet I still refuse to buy Ms Pullar’s portrayal of herself (with a huge amount of help from TV3’s disgracefully partisan Sixty Minutes) as an heroic whistle blower. It’s my opinion she was driven from the start by pure, undiluted self-interest and adopted the mantle of crusader only after her attempt to exploit her highly-placed connections failed.

There was a sensational murder trial that resulted in an equally sensational acquittal. Ewen Macdonald, who was accused of murdering Scott Guy, shows every sign of becoming another cause celebre in the tradition of Arthur Allan Thomas, David Bain, David Tamihere and Scott Watson, with the obvious difference that those cases resulted in convictions whereas Macdonald will walk free. It’s as if New Zealand has developed a craving for murder cases that fail to produce, at least in the public mind, a satisfactory and definitive conclusion.

There was The Hobbit: all two hours and 50 minutes of it, and there are still (spare us!) two films to go. Sir Peter Jackson is the new Ed Hillary. Whatever one thinks of his films, he has done more than anyone since Hillary to put the country on the world map and make New Zealanders feel good about themselves. Even the late Sir Peter Blake was never this big.

There was an unholy mess in education – the result of an inexperienced but headstrong minister pushing too hard? – and mounting unease about child poverty and income disparity, with no shortage of suggested solutions (increased welfare payments, a higher minimum wage, meals in schools, more cheap rental housing) but a conspicuous failure to explain how a struggling economy could afford them.

There was noisy agitation for alcohol law reform and same-sex marriage. Parliament emphatically rebuffed campaigners on the first issue – not that that will silence the taxpayer-funded wowser lobby for long – but it remains to be seen how much traction the marriage reformers will get.

And then there’s potentially the most troubling and divisive issue of all: race, biculturalism and the Treaty. Of all the issues that bubbled away in 2012, this is the one most likely to change the face of New Zealand fundamentally and permanently. And it’s one on which the political consensus in Parliament seems entirely out of step with the mood of the electorate.

Banks is a disgrace

The media are reporting that John Key is under pressure to sack John Banks, but he shouldn’t have to. If Banks had any sense of honour (ha!), he would save Key the trouble by resigning. He must realise the game is up. Any good Banks may have done in public life – and I admit I’m scratching my head trying to think of an example – has been negated by the scandal over political donations. He is a disgrace to the electorate he professes to represent and to the party whose reputation he has destroyed.

WHAT'S THAT ABOUT SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL?

In a very real sense, whatever happens from now on in the John Banks-Kim Dotcom imbroglio is immaterial. The public has made up its own mind. Banks has lost where it ultimately counts most: in the court of public opinion. And he has only himself to blame, because Banks has made himself look every inch a guilty man. What has swung people against him is his extraordinarily evasive response to questions – the infantile references to cabbage boats, the pitiful “I don’t remember” mewing – which have been broadcast for all to see, and which are likely to be repeated ad nauseam until, like a maimed animal, Banks is put down.

There are now at least three counts against him. The first is that he was dishonest about the source of donations from Dotcom and SkyCity. The second is that when confronted, he was incapable of giving a straight answer. To those charges can now be added a third: that he abandoned his benefactor and former chum, Dotcom, when the German turned to him for help after his arrest. It’s distasteful enough that a sycophantic Banks should grease up to a billionaire entrepreneur as he did, but it looks almost reprehensible that he didn’t want to know Dotcom once the German was in trouble (which is presumably why the Dotcom camp turned on him by leaking the information that now has Banks writhing). No matter what people think of Dotcom, there is bound to be some public sympathy for him in the light of David Garrett’s claim on Kiwiblog that Dotcom sought assistance from Banks when he was banged up in Mt Eden (which is apparently in Banks’ electorate) but was ignored.

Perhaps Banks has learned that you can’t have it both ways: you can’t schmooze rich patrons without accepting that some sort of payback may be expected down the track. Old sayings about free lunches and supping with the devil come to mind. On the other hand, you get the feeling that Banks may be one of those men who just doesn’t learn.

Footnote: In an earlier post on this subject I wrote that a conviction for a breach of the electoral law would place Banks' Epsom seat at risk and therefore endanger the government's tenuous majority. In fact, as Duncan Garner pointed out last night on TV3, the government can count on safely retaining Epsom, but it would be left without a potentially helpful ally on its right.

COULD THIS BE POETIC JUSTICE FOR BANKS?

John Banks has some admirable qualities. I respect his courage and the way he rose above childhood circumstances that were, to say the least, unpromising. But I wonder whether he might ultimately be undone by the addiction to politics that we see in so many public figures who refuse to recognise when their time is up.

TV3’s Campbell Live last night made claims about Banks which, if true, could shatter whatever reputation he might have for political integrity. In a nutshell, Campbell Live alleged he did not disclose the source of generous donations from Auckland-based German internet tycoon Kim Dotcom at the time Banks was campaigning against Len Brown for the Auckland mayoralty. Even more damaging is the allegation that he asked for $50,000 from Dotcom to be split into two payments of $25,000 in an attempt to disguise the donor’s identity.

Campbell Live pointed out that while it’s not illegal to accept such donations, it’s a breach of electoral law to list them as anonymous – as happened in this case – when the identity of the donor is known. And John Campbell insisted: “The Dotcom camp is adamant Banks knew the money was from them.” Today’s New Zealand Herald strengthens the claims against Banks, quoting Dotcom himself on dates and details.

The Herald quotes Dotcom as saying last night: “John said, ‘Wait a minute’, [this was after Dotcom had offered the $50,000]. “It would be good if you could split it up into two payments of 25 [thousand dollars], then I don’t declare publicly who made it’.”

Banks was already under pressure before these latest claims for allegedly failing to disclose the source of a $15,000 donation from SkyCity. Such largesse from the casino operator would have been embarrassing because he has been a vocal opponent of gambling. (Len Brown received an equal amount from SkyCity and disclosed the donor.) That matter has now been handed to the police for investigation, as the Auckland electoral officer is obliged to do by law.

That the allegation relating to the SkyCity donation came from Labour MP Trevor Mallard, who can hardly claim to be the Mr Clean of politics, doesn’t diminish its potential to damage Banks. And that has serious implications for the National-led government, since – as the Herald reports – a conviction would place his Epsom seat at risk and therefore endanger the government’s tenuous majority.

Both Campbell Live and the Herald reported details that undermine previous statements from Banks playing down his relationship with Dotcom. Campbell Live showed video footage of him proposing a toast to Dotcom at the German’s birthday party and attending a New Year’s Eve waterfront party hosted by Dotcom, at which Banks and his wife were shown hugging their hosts.

One can only assume the video footage was supplied to Campbell Live by the Dotcom camp because, as the programme reported, Banks has kept his distance from Dotcom since the latter’s arrest on internet piracy-related charges. Dotcom might well feel his generosity to Banks hasn’t been reciprocated.

All this looks very bad for Banks, and it isn’t helped by the fact that he was strikingly vague, lame and evasive when John Campbell talked to him by phone (Banks wouldn’t appear on the programme). This was not the cocky, combative Banks we know from previous scrapes. He appeared to have suffered an almost total memory lapse when it came to recalling details of his contacts with Dotcom and the sources of the donations made to his mayoral campaign.

However you look at it, this is a worry. If he wasn’t being honest – well, he wasn’t being honest, and he deserves to be exposed; end of story. If, on the other hand, he genuinely couldn’t remember events that happened relatively recently, then one has to wonder about his mental acuity and question whether he’s fit for public office.

All this strikes me as rather tragic, and a vivid demonstration of the hazards that await politicians who linger too long on the public stage.

When Banks was defeated by Brown for the Auckland mayoralty, he should have read that as a signal that his time was up. But no, it seems he couldn’t contemplate a life where he wasn’t in the thick of things. At this point, Don Brash obligingly stepped forward and, in a spectacularly inept move, anointed Banks as ACT’s candidate in Epsom. In doing so he may well have sounded the party’s death sentence, since party loyalists rightly viewed Banks as a largely unreconstructed Muldoonist.

The scandal now enveloping Banks is highly unlikely to have arisen if he had not become the MP for Epsom, and therefore pivotal to the government. Had he quietly left politics no one would have had much interest in pursuing him. If Banks’ career finally comes to an ignoble end as a result of the current disclosures, it could be seen as poetic justice for a man who was pathetically desperate to cling to political power.

The funny business at the Cafe Urban

My first reaction, on hearing the Herald on Sunday had obtained a clandestine recording of John Key’s meeting with John Banks in Newmarket last Friday, was to let out a groan of dismay and disbelief. Did we really need this London-style tabloid sleaze?

Now, having learned the full circumstances, I’m inclined to take the paper’s side.

I could understand Key getting up on his hind legs, but I heard HoS editor Bryce Johns on Morning Report and his explanation of how it happened struck me as plausible. Besides, I worked with Bryce for several years and unless he’s changed, I don’t think he’s a journalist in the Clive Goodman/Rebekah Brooks mould.

Quite apart from anything else, leaving a recording device on the table right in front of the two politicians, even if it was in a little black pouch, seemed too clumsy by far to be a serious attempt at eavesdropping. It was sure to be spotted, and it was.

The fact that the paper chose not to report what was said during the conversation supports its case. The HoS appears to have acted ethically. This is not the behaviour of an editor bent on getting a sensational story that might blow the election wide open.

In any case, why go to the trouble of planting a recording device, and risking the inevitable hullabaloo that would ensue, if you weren’t going to take maximum advantage of it by splashing the taped exchange all over page one?

This affair has the potential to rebound on Key. He dismisses his exchange with Banks as “bland” but refused permission for the HoS to publish the transcript of the recording, on the ground that he didn’t want to give the paper the satisfaction of getting the story after behaving unethically (if indeed it was unethical).

The problem now is that there is real public curiosity about what was said, and about the contradiction between Johns’ claim that the recording is potentially game-changing (the political phrase du jour) and Key’s insistence that it’s really of no interest. The stakes have been raised to the point where it becomes increasingly likely that someone will divulge what was said.

TV3 disclosed tonight that it too has a copy of the tape, and there are likely to be others circulating. There are hints that the recording contains statements about ACT leader Don Brash that would not look good for either Key or Banks. I’m picking that it will all spill into the public arena sooner or later. That’s the way these things normally play out.

It demonstrates that even at this late stage in a carefully orchestrated and generally successful National campaign, things could still go pear-shaped for Key. It only takes one indiscreet comment, and Johns hinted at such a comment in the tape from the Café Urban.

In fact it would be exquisitely ironic – you might say poetic justice – if the meeting between Key and Banks blew up in their faces. It was a PR stunt staged to attract maximum media attention. People talk about the cup of tea as being symbolic, and so it was – not just in the strictly political sense, but also because it was symbolic of a tightly controlled media operation in which political journalists are expected to dance to a ballet choreographed by Beehive spin-meisters.

It was assumed the media would turn up en masse at the Café Urban and film the palaver; indeed the whole pantomime would have been pointless if they hadn’t. But the journalists and photographers were then expected to retreat to a respectful distance, noses pressed up against the window (almost literally), and allow the two men to go into a cosy huddle.

It was a highly public event, deliberately so, yet at crunch time Key insisted on asserting his right to privacy. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking there’s a bit of a contradiction, a double standard, here. The whole affair was conducted entirely on the politicians’ terms, for the politicians’ benefit, and to that extent, pretty much summed up what the modern election campaign, with all its jiggery-pokery, has become; and I have to admit I’d find it quite satisfying if something hideously embarrassing came out of it all.