Kim Hill's exit interview

Kim Hill signed off yesterday. Her legion of fans will be bereft.

I am not one of them. Hill is ferociously intelligent and can be an incisive interviewer. The problem is that she used her skills very selectively – purring with approval for people she liked, but occasionally eviscerating those she didn’t. Don Brash comes to mind.

Hill has a long memory. During the last segment of her final show, my name came up. (I didn’t hear this; a friend told me.)

The following is from RNZ’s account of Hill's exit interview with her colleague Bryan Crump:

"Her punchy and penetrating interviewing style has not been without critics, she says.

"The British writer Tony Parsons, who hung up on Kim during an interview before saying 'You've got your head up your arse' [I think that should have been after saying 'You've got your head up your arse'] and New Zealand journalist Karl du Fresne, who once called her [a] 'dominatrix', come to mind.

"'[du Fresne] hated me because I hadn't given a very nice interview with [former Australian prime minister] John Howard and also I say 'filum' [an Irish pronunciation of 'film'] ... Because he criticised me saying 'filum', I've never been able to stop in case he thinks he's won. So I do it all the time now.'"

I’m sure she didn’t mean to be taken literally when she said I hated her. Just for the record, I don’t hate anyone. But I think it says something about Hill that she still remembers something I wrote 13 years ago. I’ll take that as a back-handed compliment.

For what it's worth, my column about that 2010 Howard interview is here.

We stand to lose something of inestimable value

I’m a recovering Kim Hill listener. That is to say, I used to listen to her show regularly but haven’t done so for years (for reasons which I won’t bother elaborating on, but which many readers of this blog will understand and possibly sympathise with).

Last Saturday morning, however, I was heading to Wellington in the car and turned on the radio to hear the 9 o’clock news, and when Hill came back on the air after the bulletin and told us who her next guest was, I was curious enough to stay tuned.

Back in May, when her pending appointment as Governor-General was announced, I heard Dame Cindy Kiro being interviewed by Kathryn Ryan and was cautiously impressed. I wrote then that Kiro came across as intelligent, personable, thoughtful, warm, grounded and articulate.

I felt even more positive after hearing her on Hill’s show last Saturday and see no reason to revise any of those adjectives. In fact I can add a new one: humble.  Kiro obviously didn’t get any head starts in life and wears her lofty status lightly and unpretentiously.

Now here’s the thing. At one stage Hill questioned her about the exquisite korowai (cloak) that she wore for her swearing-in ceremony. Kiro spoke reverently about its history and the honour of wearing it, but then segued very neatly to the vice-regal chain of office and other British traditions and symbols associated with the job of Governor-General.

Whether intentional or not (and I suspect it was), it was a useful reminder to Hill and her listeners that New Zealand’s British heritage is central to our constitutional arrangements - indeed, to the way our society is organised - and therefore equally worthy of being honoured. “All of these things have a history that connects us,” Kiro said.

She then went further. Talking about her whakapapa, she declared: “I’m proud to be Maori and I’m proud to be British. I’ve spent a lifetime occupying both spaces.”

This struck me as a quietly radical statement, given the febrile mood of the times and all the polarising rhetoric about the supposedly baneful effects of colonisation.

We’re accustomed to people of part-Maori ancestry reciting their tribal affiliations in detail but not mentioning the presumably inconvenient fact – often obvious from their surnames and facial features – that they also have European antecedents.

Kiro, on the other hand, not only acknowledges her British father, who came from a mining town in the north of England, but is unapologetically proud of that side of her lineage. In fact she made a point during the interview with Hill, who didn’t strike me as being terribly interested in exploring Kiro’s paternal ancestry, of stressing the traditions that connect us – not just Maori, but British too.  “I’m comfortable in both worlds and that’s what I want for the country.”

Heading down from the Remutaka Pass (now quite properly given its correct spelling after decades of bastardisation as “Rimutaka”), I gave a little whoop of approval.  Kiro’s embrace of both sides of her heritage stands in stark, refreshing contrast to the ruling cabal’s relentless emphasis on the things that supposedly divide us.

She could have gone a step further and said that the relationship between the two main races in New Zealand is possibly unique in the way that each has absorbed some of the best qualities of the other. We stand to lose something of inestimable value if this is undermined by the politics of division.

Kiro's reminder of our shared heritage couldn’t come at a more urgent moment, because race relations are currently under greater strain than at any time since the 19th century. The proponents of the poisonous ideology known as identity politics, who hold that Maori interests can never be compatible with those of Pakeha, are doing their best to drive a wedge between two races that have historically enjoyed a mostly harmonious and respectful relationship that the rest of the world looks at with admiration and not a little envy.

The Covid-19 pandemic has come at an opportune moment for these agitators. At a time when social anxiety is already stretched to breaking point, they have exacerbated the tension by promoting the inflammatory falsehood that Maori have been disadvantaged – the implication being through wilful discrimination – by the vaccination rollout.

In fact Maori, except for a very few in remote places, have had the same opportunities as everyone else to line up for their shots, and have been criticised by some of their own MPs for their reluctance to come forward.

Significantly, vaccination rates are lowest in areas with a high Maori population, such as Northland, Tairawhiti and Rotorua. While there are remote areas in some of those regions (the far North and the East Cape, for example) where a special effort is needed to reach everyone, in most locations it’s no more difficult for Maori to find a vaccination clinic than it is for the rest of the population.

In my own town of Masterton, whose population is 21 per cent Maori, the latest figures show that 61 per cent of local Pasifika people have had two jabs compared with only 44 per cent of Maori. The figures for first jabs are 79 percent for Pasifika and 64 percent for Maori. The question has to be asked: if Pasifika people can find their way to a clinic, why not Maori?

They can hardly claim ignorance of the risks from the pandemic. There can be no one alive and sentient in New Zealand who doesn’t know that Covid-19 has the potential to kill, or that vaccination greatly reduces the risk of illness and death.

Yet despite enormous outlays of public money and all manner of incentives – free food, entertainment, prizes and specially equipped buses with names created to appeal to the hard-to-reach (e.g. "Shot Bro") – the Maori vaccination rate remains stubbornly low. Even the Super Saturday Vaxathon, which was specially targeted at young Maori, produced an underwhelming result.

Maori activists (or more correctly, part-Maori activists who acknowledge only one part of their whakapapa – the part that gives them political leverage) continue to claim, contrary to all the evidence, that this is the result of a racist system that marginalises Maori.  But it’s not unreasonable to ask whether, after decades of being told that their needs are different from the rest of the community, some Maori now have such a heightened sense of entitlement that they expect a mobile clinic to pull up at their front door.  

The risk now is that the slow Maori uptake will delay the achievement of the government’s national vaccination target, and thus prolong the profound economic hardship and social disruption caused by lockdowns.

In that case, there’s potential for a backlash against Maori, which is in no one’s interests. Perhaps it was in recognition of this unpalatable prospect that the government a few days ago committed another $120 million of taxpayers’ money to boost Maori vaccination rates – a handout which in itself can only reinforce resentment that the rest of the country is having to pick up the tab for Maori who are not pulling their weight as part of Jacinda Ardern’s much-vaunted team of 5 million.  

A backlash, of course, might be exactly what the promoters of identity politics want. Open hostility and competition between Maori and Pakeha would further their separatist agenda and place at risk New Zealand’s now-fragile status as a country of generally (some might say overwhelmingly) harmonious race relations.

Which brings me back to Cindy Kiro. The new Governor-General could do the country no greater favour than by using the influence of her office to refocus attention on the values and interests that all New Zealanders – Maori, Pakeha, Pasifika and the multiple other ethnic groups that have made their home here – share in common.

 

Lotta Dann and the liquor debate

I was name-checked (I believe that’s the fashionable term) by Kim Hill on Saturday morning during a discussion about alcohol. (For the record, I don’t normally listen to Hill, but a friend texted me to say my name had come up during an interview. Naturally I later accessed her show via the RNZ website, praying she had defamed me and that I might enjoy a comfortable retirement on the proceeds. Sadly, the reference wasn’t legally actionable.)

Hill’s guest was Lotta Dann, who has written a book called The Wine O’Clock Myth. Dann is a recovering alcoholic who had her last drink eight years ago and now has a website, Living Sober, that offers encouragement and support for women with a drinking problem. In her book, which was also the subject of a feature story in Stuff’s YW magazine the previous weekend, she criticises the “normalisation” of alcohol and the liquor industry’s use of advertising that portrays drinking as glamorous and sophisticated. According to Dann, getting drunk with the girls can start out as an enjoyable social habit but end up leading women into some dark places. All of which I know to be true.

Early in the interview, Hill chimed in: “I can hear Karl du Fresne on the line as I speak, insisting that wine is a civilised beverage and that it’s only the outliers who make it a problem, and that the liquor industry should not be regulated for the sake of a few people who can’t take their booze.” This was probably intended as a dig, Hill and I not being mutual admirers, but it’s not a wholly inaccurate summation of the many columns I’ve written over the years about alcohol and the endless debate about how tightly it should be controlled.

Briefly restated, my position is that most New Zealand drinkers do consume alcohol moderately and responsibly. Our per capita liquor consumption is not high by international standards. Most of us are perfectly capable of enjoying a few drinks without causing mayhem on the roads, bashing our partners and kids or becoming alcoholics. But it’s pointless to deny (and I never have) that alcohol is a potentially dangerous and addictive drug that can cause serious social harm. The debate is all about where to strike the difficult regulatory balance between benefit and harm. 

For decades we had an extremely strict, religiously influenced regulatory regime that placed tight controls on liquor consumption and produced perverse, counter-productive consequences such as the notorious six o’clock swill and the advent of the suburban booze barn. From the 1970s onwards, the trend was one of gradual liberalisation.  It would be dishonest to pretend it hasn’t produced some undesirable outcomes, such as the boom in consumption of RTDS by young women and the proliferation of cheap  liquor outlets, but I would argue that New Zealanders are far more civilised drinkers now than they were 50 years ago.

The debate, still, is about how far governments should go to protect the minority of problem drinkers by regulating alcohol – through advertising rules, the legal drinking age, pricing mechanisms and so forth – without unfairly penalising the majority of people who drink moderately and responsibly. We still haven’t got the balance quite right and may never do, but we can't allow alcohol policy to be dictated by a noisy coterie of state-funded wowsers, moralists and control freaks in the bureaucracy and academia who bombard us with anti-alcohol propaganda, who don’t believe New Zealanders can be trusted to make responsible choices about drinking and who are also, I suspect, fundamentally hostile to capitalism.

But back to Lotta Dann. She seemed to agree with my proposition that alcohol causes no harm to people who can control their consumption. Her concern, which I totally understand, is for those people who can’t. But she went on to say: “Our [liquor] environment only pushes one side and doesn’t acknowledge there’s a dark side to this addictive drug”. I dispute that. No one who reads newspapers, watches TV or listens to the radio can fail to be aware of the shrill warnings constantly emanating from the neo-wowser lobby. The question is whether alcohol policy should be predicated on the harm it does to a minority without proper regard to the benefits enjoyed by the majority. It’s always going to be tricky.

As an aside, I know many people who, like Dann, have overcome their addiction to alcohol. They include some of my oldest and closest friends. I have huge respect for them. But at the same time, I wonder whether recovering alcoholics are necessarily the best people to determine what is best for society as a whole when it comes to liquor issues, since their perspective is likely to be coloured by their own problematic relationship with drink. Dann raises valid concerns and appears to have helped a lot of women. That can only be good. But someone who has personally struggled with alcoholism has seen the worst consequences of alcohol consumption, so may not be the most objective authority.

■ The Wine O’Clock Myth: The truth you need to know about women and alcohol, is out now.

Expect to hear this Big Lie repeated endlessly

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, November 1.)

On Radio New Zealand recently, Kim Hill interviewed an Irish poet named Doireann Ni Ghriofa. Don’t ask me to pronounce her name, but she sounded a very pleasant, gentle person.

She had a lovely voice that was even more beguiling when she spoke in her native Irish, which sounded like the sort of fairy language Tolkien might have invented.

Ni Ghriofa was brought up bilingual and writes poems in Irish (aka Gaelic). She recited a couple of them, then gave us the English translations.

One of these poems was about pregnancy. Ni Ghriofa has four small children, so presumably she loves kids. That impression was confirmed by the poem, which she wrote when she was carrying her second child.

In the English version, Ni Ghriofa marvels at the “jumble of limbs”, the “shadow stirring under my skin” and her “swollen middle suddenly punctuated by nudge of knee or ankle”.

She writes of piecing this “jigsaw” together until she could recognise the parts of her baby’s anatomy, right down to its “wee feet”. She finished with the charming line: “Then you grew, little stranger, and I grew to know you.”

It was a poem that thrilled at the human taking shape inside her – all of which seemed strikingly at odds with what she and Hill had been discussing only minutes before.

Hill had asked about the recent referendum which overwhelmingly approved the liberalisation of Ireland’s abortion laws.  Ni Ghriofa welcomed this “progressive” development as heartening for her generation of Irish women and a change that needed to be made.

Now I can see, at a stretch, how a woman might celebrate her own pregnancy while supporting the right of other women to terminate theirs. But it’s still hard to grasp how a baby can be a source of such joy in one set of circumstances, yet be treated as an inconvenience to be discarded in another. Hill could have chosen to explore this paradox with Ni Ghriofa, but didn’t.

It can make sense only if the incipient human life is considered intrinsically valueless unless its mother happens to want it. Is that what we’ve come to? In which case, in what circumstances does a life become worth saving?

A similar question arose last year amid the general rejoicing at the news that Jacinda Ardern was having a baby. Many of the people who expressed delight at the prime minister’s pregnancy and the subsequent birth of Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford support the right of women to have an abortion, no questions asked.

But isn’t it odd that we placed such value on Neve’s life when hardly anyone batted an eyelid at the 13,285 unborn babies who were aborted last year? What sort of strange lottery determines that one baby becomes a source of national celebration while others are sucked from the womb and consigned to a hospital incinerator?

A similarly strange dichotomy occurs when skilled doctors perform miracles to save fragile newborns while elsewhere in the same hospitals, other doctors are paid by the state to kill them in the womb.

More than 40 years after abortion was made pseudo-legal, we seem to be no closer to resolving this moral conundrum. It’s an issue that now confronts us again as pressure builds for the few existing controls on abortion to be removed.  

The Big Lie, which you can expect to hear repeated endlessly, is that abortion is a health issue. This is now a feminist article of faith. But no amount of repeating makes it true, because pregnancy and childbirth are not illnesses or disorders, and it’s impossible to imagine anything less healthy for the unborn child than to have its life terminated.

The debate will be ugly – we know that from 1977. And the anti-abortion camp will be fighting with one hand tied behind its back, because the media are overwhelmingly pro-choice.

Broadcaster Alison Mau gave an early example of the fatuous arguments likely to be deployed when, in a predictably one-sided panel discussion on Radio New Zealand, she proposed that men should be required to get permission from certifying consultants before getting prostate checks, as women seeking an abortion have to do.

This reduced the whole issue to a puerile game of gender tit-for-tat. It got her a cheap laugh, but the nature and purpose of the two procedures are fundamentally different. Prostate checks are about identifying and treating a potentially fatal disease. Their purpose is to save life.

But pregnancy is not a disease, a foetus is not a tumour, and the consequence of an abortion is that life is extinguished, not saved. If a high-profile broadcaster like Mau can’t grasp that crucial difference, we’re in bigger trouble than I thought.

If RNZ caters to all New Zealanders, why have so many given up on it?

A recent Dominion Post column of mine headlined “Dinosaur versus Dominatrix” (reproduced on this site), about an on-air clash between Kim Hill and Don Brash, brought a couple of old-school broadcasting grandees out of the woodwork.

Ian Johnstone, a familiar face on TV screens from the 1960s till the 1990s, and Geoffrey Whitehead, a former BBC deputy political editor who became CEO of Radio New Zealand and now lives in retirement in Napier, both had a whack at me for criticising Hill’s hostile demolition job on Brash.

Both seemed to think that unleashing RNZ’s most aggressive interviewer against Brash, for the sin of criticising Morning Report’s Guyon Espiner over his use of the Maori language, was a perfectly legitimate thing for the state broadcaster to do.

I haven’t responded to either of my critics until now because more important things – family and holidays – have occupied my attention. But before I get on to Johnstone and Whitehead, there are a couple of points to be made about the furore that arose from Brash’s Facebook post about Espiner.

Was it a storm in a teacup, as the leftist comedian Jeremy Elwood (“leftist” and “comedian” are virtually synonymous these days) disingenuously wrote in a column? Yes, it was. But it was the Left that whipped up the storm, and it did so for a reason. It seized on Brash’s objection to the use of te reo on RNZ and turned it into a rallying point in the ongoing culture war between “progressives” and conservatives.

That’s the wider context in which the debate played out, and it explains the ferocity of the reaction against Brash. The aim was to make an example of him: to inflict such bruising punishment that opponents of the Left’s identity politics agenda would be fearful about the consequences of speaking out in future.

Kim Hill’s overtly hostile “interview” [sic] with Brash was part of this response, which brings me back to Johnstone and Whitehead. These two men clearly regard themselves as lofty guardians of the public broadcasting heritage and see it as their duty to correct those of us who, for reasons of ignorance, malice or political misguidedness, don’t properly appreciate it.

Johnstone wrote a piece in the Dominion Post in which he defended Hill's confrontation with Brash as “lively, challenging and entertaining”. It didn’t surprise me that he approved. Johnstone is a genteel old Leftie – too genteel by far to have attempted a Hill-style demolition job when he was still a broadcaster himself, but I’ve no doubt he would have quietly applauded. Brash’s neoliberalism would be anathema to him.

Johnstone adopted a patronising tone toward me, wagging a finger at me for my “comical hyperbole”. Here was the seasoned broadcasting veteran patiently explaining, for the benefit of the irksome johnny-come-lately (hell, I’ve been in the media for only 50 years – what would I know?), that what Hill did to Brash fell within the finest traditions of public broadcasting.

Strangely, he wrote of me: “I guess what he’d really like to say, but dare not, is that he thinks too many RNZ staff are ‘Left-leaning’.” I can’t imagine why Johnstone would think I dare not say that, seeing I’ve been saying it for years, but let me say it again, unequivocally. I not only think many RNZ staff are left-leaning; I know they are, because I know many of them personally and know their political views.

It’s virtually imprinted in the DNA of public broadcasting organisations that they lean to the left. One of the reasons people seek work with state broadcasting organisations is that they distrust capitalism and the profit motive, and regard state-owned media as pure and untainted. And since like attracts like, there evolves a self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing monoculture. That’s true of RNZ just as it is of the BBC, Australia’s ABC and National Public Radio in the United States (all of which I listen to).

This becomes a problem only if RNZ employees allow their political views to influence their work. Many of them don’t, and I respect them for it, but others make no attempt to disguise their political leanings. (I note that Finlay Macdonald, whose wife Carol Hirschfeld is RNZ’s head of content, recently used the RNZ website a to write a piece gleefully rubbing the National Party’s nose in  the dirt over the election outcome. It doesn’t say much for RNZ’s, Hirschfeld’s or Macdonald’s ethics that this cosy nepotistic arrangement is permitted, but it certainly says something about the political ethos of what is supposed to be a neutral organisation.)

Back to Johnstone. He rebukes me for saying that RNZ no longer regards its job as being to serve all New Zealanders, and he asks rhetorically whether I hear its daily news reports from all over the country, as if these contradict my argument. Well yes, I do, but they don’t prove a thing. RNZ generally – generally – plays with a straight bat when it comes to news reportage, and I’ve praised it in the past for adhering to journalism values that have largely been abandoned by other news organisations. The country would be much the poorer without RNZ’s news bulletins. But news reports are just a small part of what RNZ does, and Johnstone can’t expect to get away with the trick of cherry-picking his evidence to suit his argument.

The political taint that permeates much of what RNZ does is found elsewhere – in current affairs and magazine-style interviews and discussion programmes, in the subjects and interviewees selected, in the slant of the questions asked and the stance (either sympathetic or hostile) of the presenter, and in so-called “debates” that are anything but, because only people with views that are deemed acceptable (and who all conveniently agree with each other) are invited to take part.

Even then the picture is far from uniform across all of RNZ, because some of its programmes (Nine to Noon, for instance, and Morning Report, at least most of the time) are generally even-handed. I have huge regard for Nine to Noon host Kathryn Ryan.

I would never subject RNZ to blanket condemnation, because it continues to do a lot of things very well and conscientiously. In a moment of cultural sensitivity, I once labelled it a national taonga. But to those like Johnstone who insist that RNZ caters for all New Zealanders, I can only ask why so many people I know – intelligent, informed people with a keen interest in politics, society and culture – have long since given up listening to it because they object to the relentless political and ideological spin. They ask me why I still bother, and I reply that I listen to RNZ because it it’s my right to listen to RNZ and to expect it to adhere to its charter. I’m a part-owner of it, after all, and my taxes help pay the salaries of its employees. Call me bloody-minded, call me naïve, but if more New Zealanders, rather than giving up and switching to NewstalkZB or Radio Live, listened to RNZ and insisted that it cater to a true cross-section of tastes and political views, as is their right, perhaps it would feel obliged to lift its game.

As it is, RNZ will of course continue to be defended by people like Johnstone and Whitehead. They have spent their lives in public broadcasting and regard RNZ’s pervasive soft-Left bias and uncritical embrace of "progressive" causes as the natural order of things.

One last point. In his letter, Whitehead pompously suggested I didn’t understand the role of the public broadcaster. In fact I not only understand it perfectly well, but I believe in public broadcasting and have said so many times. Where I differ with Johnstone and Whitehead is in my interpretation of its role. It is not the function of the public broadcaster to act as an agent of social and political change or to promote ideological views that some of its presenters and producers think would benefit us all. In fact I would say that ultimately, the greatest threat to public broadcasting may come from those within who abuse its power and therefore undermine its standing and credibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dominatrix vs dinosaur

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

Don Brash made two big mistakes recently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom of speech, Rachel Stewart-style

New Zealand Herald columnist Rachel Stewart is a true champion of free speech. Except, that is, when someone wants to say something she doesn’t like.

In her column this week she savaged an occasional Otago Daily Times columnist named Dave Witherow. Witherow is guilty of the unpardonable sin of being (like me) an ageing, conservative male. In the eyes of the left-leaning bigots who have acquired almost total control of the public conversation in New Zealand, this automatically disqualifies him from having a valid opinion on anything.

What specifically pushed Stewart’s buttons is that Witherow wrote a column criticising Maori Language Week – or as he put it, “media apologists the length and breadth of the land prostrating themselves before the holy altar of te reo”.

He was especially critical of Radio New Zealand. “For the last couple of years,” Witherow wrote, “RNZ has been ahead of the pack in obsequiousness. Everything indigenous is sacrosanct, and even formerly redoubtable interviewers now shrink from the slightest demur when boring bigots drone on about the mana of all things native.”

Witherow used provocative language, as he’s entitled to do, and duly copped a barrage of self-righteous condemnation.

One of the more frenzied responses came from someone named Glenn McConnell, who was described as a Stuff reporter. That word “reporter” used to mean someone who reported, but that was before journalism training was politicised and new entrants to the profession were inculcated with the view that their mission was to correct the world’s iniquities. Many of them struggle to string three coherent words together, but they can spot sexism and racism a mile off and never hesitate to pass judgment. So McConnell had no compunction in labelling Witherow as a racist and accusing him of “casual bigotry”.

Hmmm. I wonder who the real bigots are here, but we’ll come back to that.

McConnell condescendingly allowed that most racists don’t know they’re racist. Ah, but he knows a racist when he sees one. Such are the superior moral insights conferred by modern journalism training.

Meanwhile, on the news website The Spinoff, Madeleine Chapman (no, I hadn’t heard of her, either) indulged in her own casual bigotry. She apologised for having to condemn yet another “bad column” (sigh – it’s just so tiresome having to constantly correct all these knuckle-dragging reactionaries) but justified it by saying she hoped it would be “the last goodbye to a generation of old men standing on their media platforms, yelling at clouds”.

You almost have to admire the conceit underlying that statement. Chapman seems to think the irresistible force of her argument will shock people like Witherow into silence. Good luck with that, as they say.

Another Spinoff contributor, Danyl Mclauchlan, categorised Witherow as representative of a “mostly older, mostly Pakeha subset of the population” whom he said were routinely provoked into outrage by Maori Language Week. Mclauchlan sneeringly referred to “drunken uncles at summer barbecues, bores holding forth in work tea-rooms and columnists and cartoonists on provincial papers”, all perpetuating their own ignorant versions of New Zealand history.  

(If I can slightly digress here, you can’t help but note a striking consistency in both Spinoff pieces. In an era when the Left is vigilant to the point of obsession in condemning stereotypes and prejudice, the one form of discrimination that’s not just tolerated but encouraged is the disparaging of older white males. The epithet “male, pale and stale” now serves as a coded synonym for someone who is misogynistic, racist, homophobic and stubbornly resistant to everything that’s progressive and enlightened. It’s a caricature, used to dismiss the legitimacy of anything that older white men might say or any opinions they might hold. So much for the Left’s supposed embrace of diversity.)

Witherow’s column also attracted the inevitable admonishment from Race Relations Commissioner Susan Devoy, who unfortunately has emulated her immediate predecessor, Joris De Bres, by morphing into a tedious, finger-wagging prig.  But the most poisonous attack, and I use the word deliberately, came from Stewart.

Stewart has the gall to say she believes in free speech – “absolutely” – before going on to say she “struggles with what basically amounts to gratuitous hate speech”. But she can’t have it both ways.

What she really wants is to deny Witherow a right that she claims for herself – that of free speech. She goes a step further by attacking the Otago Daily Times for publishing his column and therefore, in her eyes, being complicit in hate speech.

That’s why I describe her attack as poisonous. In a breathtaking display of moral and intellectual conceit, Stewart wants us to accept that her opinion is legitimate and noble while that of Witherow is hateful and contemptible. But she can’t exercise her own right of free speech while simultaneously seeking to deny it to others. A democratic society is built on the contestability of ideas. The moment any set of ideas is outlawed, democracy is diminished. Enlightened leftists (that is, those who can genuinely lay claim to the honourable term “liberal”) realise that. Stewart either can’t, or doesn’t want to.

In any case, who defines “hate speech”? Stewart doesn’t explain, so I’ll attempt it for her. Hate speech, in the eyes of some on the Left (not everyone, by any means), can essentially be defined as any opinion that runs counter to identity politics. This is the ideology that seeks to polarise society by breaking it down into supposedly oppressed minority groups, all pursuing their own divisive agendas, and which assesses everything in Western civilisation – art, literature, history, politics, the media – in terms of class, race and gender.

Playing the “hate speech” card is one of a range of tactics now routinely employed to marginalise any opinion the Left doesn’t like. Others include dismissing any expression of conservative opinion as a “rant”, thus implying it’s the product of a deranged mind, or caricaturing even moderately right-of-centre opinion as extreme, as New Zealand writer Ben Mack did in a hysterical, pants-wetting Washington Post column describing New Zealand First as a “far right” party and its involvement in the coalition government as “terrifying”. (The headline read: How the far right is poisoning New Zealand. Notwithstanding my own detestation of Winston Peters and his role in the shonky formation of the new government, I didn’t recognise the country portrayed in that headline and I don’t know any New Zealander who would.)

“Denier” and “denialist” (which are used in the context of the climate change debate to imply that global warming sceptics are on a par with Jew-hating Holocaust deniers) are part of this repertoire of attack too, along with the terms “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobe” and “misogynist” – all of which are used to portray the person so labelled as either stupid, evil or both, and thus to shame or intimidate them into silence. The ultimate objective of this strategy is to redefine the boundaries of public discourse so as to exclude anything that doesn’t conform to the neo-Marxist agenda.

But here’s the thing. Stewart’s entitled to fume all she likes about hate speech, just as long as she doesn’t attempt to shut other people down. I’m not in the habit of attacking other columnists and wouldn’t be criticising her here if she hadn’t stepped over that line. (Incidentally, I don’t know of any conservative group that argues people like her should be silenced. It’s always those on the Left who seek to stifle opinions that upset them.)

Now, back to McConnell, the Stuff columnist who accuses Witherow of bigotry. But who are the real bigots in this debate? My Oxford dictionary defines a bigot as an obstinate and intolerant believer in a religion or political theory. If that accusation is going to be hurled at Witherow, then it should be thrown right back at some of those attacking him. People should never make the mistake of equating bigotry with conservatism. Some of the most resolutely closed minds I’ve encountered have belonged to diehard lefties.

Fortunately there are left-leaning commentators who see the danger of the route people like Stewart would take us down. They are prepared to defend Witherow’s right to an opinion, and the ODT’s right to publish it, even if they don’t agree with what he says. On Pundit, for example, Tim Watkin described Witherow’s column as insulting and narrow-minded (fair enough), but drew the line “when criticism becomes an attack on civil debate and free speech”. And in the Herald, veteran writer Gordon McLachlan chided Stewart for thinking her own opinion sacrosanct. She should accept, he wrote, that she was not in command of ultimate truths.

Amen to that, but I suspect Stewart is so wrapped up in her own conceit, and so lacking in critical self-awareness, that reasoned criticism will fly straight over her head.

This debate still has some way to run. It’s likely to be revived tomorrow when Radio New Zealand’s Kim Hill interviews Don Brash, who endorsed Witherow’s column and posted a statement on Facebook saying he was “utterly sick” of hearing Te Reo Maori on RNZ. Brash identified Guyon Espiner of Morning Report as the worst offender and accused him of “virtue signalling”. (Good on Espiner for learning Maori, but he does give the impression that he enjoys showing off his fluency. And it’s hard to see the point of the increasingly frequent usage of Maori on Morning Report, unless it’s to make listeners feel that they’re not being good New Zealanders unless they learn it too. RNZ needs to understand that it’s not the function of the state broadcaster to inspire us to good works – we can go to church for that – or sign up to some idealistic vision of biculturalism.)

I can’t decide whether Brash is being foolhardy or courageous entering the lion’s den with Hill, since he has about as much chance of fair treatment as I have of being crowned Miss Universe. In my experience, the only time Hill interviews conservatives, it’s with the intention of trying to demolish them or make them look stupid. But good luck to him.

RNZ must right its lean to the left

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

I have some advice – unsolicited – for whoever takes over from Peter Cavanagh, the chief executive of Radio New Zealand, who steps down toward the end of this year.

RNZ is a national treasure, but it’s a flawed treasure, and that makes it vulnerable. By correcting the most obvious of those flaws, whoever takes over from Mr Cavanagh could help protect the organisation against political interference.

RNZ’s vulnerability arises from the fact that it’s a non-commercial broadcaster owned by a government which, insofar as it could be said to be ideologically committed to anything, favours private enterprise.

In itself, that shouldn’t place the organisation at risk. RNZ has co-existed relatively amicably with National governments before. The very reason National has remained the dominant party in New Zealand since the 1950s is that it’s essentially pragmatic, and happy to live with a mix of private and public ownership.

But the political climate has changed in recent years. The global financial crisis has put pressure on the government to save money wherever it can.

John Key’s government is not ideologically averse to state ownership of key broadcasting assets. That’s obvious, since it continues to cling to Television New Zealand long after TVNZ abandoned any pretence of being a public service broadcaster (and probably long after anyone else would have been interested in buying it).

But at least TVNZ returns a profit, albeit a relatively modest one ($19.2 million after tax last year). RNZ does no such thing. It is funded by the taxpayer and generates no commercial revenue.

Its funding has been frozen since 2009, which suggests it doesn’t rate highly in the government’s priorities. In fact if Wellington gossip is to be believed, there are influential figures in the government who are at best indifferent, and possibly even hostile, to the state broadcaster.

Take Steven Joyce, for example. As the fourth-ranked minister in the Cabinet, he carries a lot of clout – probably more than his ranking suggests.

He is also a former broadcasting entrepreneur who built a small New Plymouth radio station into the RadioWorks network and pocketed $6 million when he sold his interest.

Mr Joyce is said to be less than sympathetic to arguments that RNZ deserves more money. And while there may be others in the Cabinet who don’t share his robust support for private enterprise (it would be interesting, for example, to know the attitude of someone like the Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson), the brutal reality is that National probably takes the view that there’s little electoral risk in upsetting RNZ listeners because most of them vote Labour anyway.

So what might the new RNZ chief executive do to enhance the organisation’s standing in a political climate that is less than favourable? One obvious step is to take a tougher line against the editorial bias that still permeates some RNZ programmes.

Public broadcasting organisations, by their very nature, tend to be left-leaning.  Australia’s ABC is perpetually under fire for partisan reporting and the prevalence of left-wing views in current affairs programmes; Britain’s illustrious BBC only slightly less so.

It’s not hard to understand how this comes about. Journalists distrustful of capitalism (and many journalists, being of an idealistic bent, tend to the left anyway) naturally gravitate toward state-owned media organisations, seeing them as untainted by the profit motive. This becomes self-perpetuating, since the more left-leaning an organisation becomes, the more it attracts other people of the same persuasion.  The result is often an ideological mindset that permeates the entire organisation.

But while this can be reassuringly cosy for the employees, publicly funded broadcasters have an obligation to make programmes that reflect the views and interests of the entire community – not just those the broadcasters happen to favour.

This is explicit in RNZ’s charter, which commits the organisation to impartial and balanced coverage of news and current affairs.

It’s the duty of the chief executive, who also has the title of editor-in-chief, to ensure this happens. But in this respect, Mr Cavanagh, an Australian who was recruited from the aforementioned ABC in 2003, has been missing in action.

Overall, RNZ presents a more balanced range of perspectives than it used to. But on some programmes, a stubborn left-wing bias persists.

Kim Hill is the worst offender. This is a problem for whoever runs RNZ, because she’s also its biggest name.

Chris Laidlaw lists to the left too, as does Jeremy Rose, a journalist and producer who frequently crops up on Laidlaw’s Sunday morning show. Rose appears to be on a lifelong mission to convince people that there are humane alternatives to nasty, heartless capitalism, and assiduously trawls the world looking for examples (worker-owned co-operatives in Spain are a favourite).

He’s perfectly entitled to believe whatever he pleases, of course, but he has no right to co-opt the resources of RNZ to pursue his fixation. It’s an abuse of power to use a taxpayer-funded medium to promote pet ideological causes.

And while I used to be a firm admirer of Nine to Noon host Kathryn Ryan, I’ve reluctantly been forced to file her under “L” too.

I had my first misgivings when she conducted a disgracefully partisan interview during the furore over the beleaguered Auckland employers’ leader Alasdair Thompson in 2011. I was reminded of that episode when I recently heard Ryan aggressively hectoring Chester Borrows, the Minister of Courts, over a government proposal to take action against the partners of welfare cheats.  

No one who heard the Borrows interview could doubt that Ryan allowed her personal views and emotions to override her professional obligation of impartiality (which, I stress, doesn’t preclude hard and rigorous questioning).

An editor-in-chief who was doing his job properly would crack down on such abuses, for two reasons.

The first and most important is that they breach RNZ’s duty to the public to present information fairly and impartially. The second, more pragmatic, reason is that the left-wing bias apparent in some of RNZ’s programmes is hardly likely to endear the organisation to the politicians who control its fate.

In saying this, I’m not suggesting for a moment that RNZ should become a tame government puppet. That would be far worse than the status quo. 

But we all have an interest in Radio New Zealand surviving, and a genuinely independent, non-partisan RNZ will be in a far stronger position to defend itself than one that consistently leaves itself exposed to allegations of bias.

 

Kim Hill: international radio personality of the year

I didn’t listen to Kim Hill this morning. I didn’t listen to her last week and I probably won’t listen to her next Saturday either.

I realise I may well miss something worth hearing, because she sometimes has interesting guests and she’s a very capable interviewer. But I have to weigh those factors against the likelihood that I’ll be irritated by her overweening ego, her increasingly exaggerated mannerisms and her disgraceful ideological bias.

It was announced this week that Hill had been named International Radio Personality of the Year 2012 at some awards ceremony in London. I don't wish to sound churlish, but I'm afraid that merely confirms my scepticism about such awards.

Setting aside the intrinsic conceit of this particular award (did every radio personality on the planet enter, as the title implies?), the problem is that entrants can be very selective about what they put in front of the judges.

I hold the view that the only people genuinely in a position to judge how well Hill does her job are her New Zealand listeners who hear her (or choose not to hear her, as in my case) week after week. (I've said the same about newspaper awards, which is why I no longer judge them. The only people who can say whether a paper is doing its job well are the local readers who get it every day.) And while Hill clearly has a devoted fan base that won't hear a word against her, most people I know - including many habitual Radio New Zealand listeners - have long since tuned out for much the same reasons as I have.

 

 

 

 

Kim Hill's fascination with tired old rock musicians

When she’s not fawning over fashionably left-wing writers and academics whose views she accepts unquestioningly, the other people Kim Hill loves to interview are faded rock musicians. And what appears to enthrall her most about them are their tales of drugs, debauchery and outrageous behaviour, which – judging by the way she eggs them on – she finds admirable.

One of her guests this morning was Dick Taylor, once moderately well known as the lead guitarist for 1960s band the Pretty Things, and still dining out on that group’s reputation for wickedness. But let’s be clear: their reputation for wickedness was about all the Pretty Things had going for them. Without it, they would have been just another among the dozens of British rhythm and blues groups, mostly consisting of middle-class art students plagiarising working-class American blacks, that briefly flourished during the British beat boom. Musically the Pretty Things were always second-tier, attracting attention mainly because their hair was even longer than that of the Rolling Stones and their general appearance more unkempt. It was the proud boast of their singer, Phil May, that he had the longest hair of any man in Britain, which generated interest from a British press still getting to grips with pop stars who didn’t look like Cliff Richard and the Shadows. It also amounted to an admission that his hair was the most noteworthy thing about him. The Pretty Things had two top 10 hits in the UK, which were probably as much attributable to their wild reputation as to their talent, and their popularity soon waned (although in fairness, I should acknowledge that they issued a single in 1974 that made it to No 104 on the US chart).

In New Zealand the Pretty Things are remembered mainly for a 1965 tour that shocked a deeply conservative press unaccustomed to attention-seeking publicity stunts by pop groups.  But the reports at the time were almost certainly exaggerated (much to the band’s delight, no doubt) and have become even more so with time. And here’s a tip for Hill: when she asks Taylor about an outrageous act supposedly perpetrated on that tour and he pauses as if taken aback before saying he’d rather not comment, that could mean the incident was just too appalling to discuss; but more likely, he just doesn’t want to admit that it never happened. The myths must be preserved.

Taylor today sounds like a pleasant enough but rather dull, ageing Englishman who’s probably thrilled and flattered to have an opportunity to recall his brief moment in the spotlight 47 years ago. But what puzzles me is that Hill, who would have been 10 years old at the time of the Pretty Things tour, seems endlessly fascinated by tired old stories about the excesses (which actually were remarkably mild by today’s standards) of has-been rock musicians, even to the point of sounding awe-struck. Very weird.

 

Kim Hill reveals her warm, fuzzy side

I hadn’t consciously heard of Caitlin Moran until this morning, but when I listened to Kim Hill’s gushing intro to her interview with the British writer and columnist, I knew we were in for a love fest. And so it turned out.

Hill cooed with unabashed adoration for her guest. And of course she would: Moran is the sort of interviewee she likes – fashionably left wing, a feminist and a socialist (I didn’t know this before, but I do now); the type of guest whom we’ve learned from experience can expect a cruisy ride from a host noted for her take-no-prisoners approach with people she dislikes.

The famously incisive interviewer purred with delight as, between the two of them, they picked off some easy, predictable targets: David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Mitt Romney. No hard questions; no attempt to probe beneath Moran’s glib, faux-proletarian politics. (One simple question I’d like put to all these self-avowed socialists: give us an example of a socialist society that has worked. I’ll die waiting.)

The contrast with the hostile treatment given to guests such as John Howard, Owen Glenn and the American journalist Thomas Friedman couldn’t be more striking. Hill didn’t ask how much this champion of the working class earns (apparently in the vicinity of £250,000 a year), though she thought this a relevant question when she interviewed Friedman. There’s an obvious difference of course: establishing that Friedman was a wealthy man would have confirmed that he was just another greedy capitalist cheerleader, whereas it's so obvious that Moran gives all her money to the poor that the issue needn't be brought up.

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. I don’t mind being exposed to the views of people like Moran, no matter how much I might disagree with them. She’s clever, witty and articulate; what’s more, I accept that Cameron, Johnson and Romney are men who richly deserve to have their vanity and pomposity punctured.

What I object to are double standards and abuse of power. There’s a double standard here because Hill interviews left-wing guests far more often than conservative ones, but more to the point she adopts a markedly different approach with the latter than with the former. She fawns over guests whom she finds ideologically and politically simpatico (I swear at one point I heard her declare to Moran, “I love you!”), but takes a relentlessly aggressive line with people like Howard.

It’s an abuse of media power because Hill consistently uses her programme to promote views she approves of and attack those she doesn’t like. That would be acceptable from a privately owned radio station, but Radio New Zealand is owned by the taxpayers and has an obligation – recognised in its charter – to provide balanced and impartial coverage of current affairs. It does not exist to provide a platform for the views of a smug Wellington elite.

The bias even extends to the choice of music. The Moran interview was preceded by the latest satirical song from Randy Newman, darling of the condescending American intellectual left – a song entitled I’m Dreaming of a WhitePresident.  

I’d love to see the ratings figures for Saturday Morning with Kim Hill. One of its defining qualities is that Hill seems to assume all her listeners think just like her, but I wonder how many such people exist outside Green-voting inner-city ghettoes like Aro Valley and Grey Lynn. Most people I know, from across the political spectrum, look at me with a mixture of pity, wonderment and alarm when I mention that I still occasionally tune in.

Footnote: I’ve just read that Moran had her third child aborted, an experience she wrote about with what Diana Wichtel in the Listener described as industrial strength insouciance – “not a moment’s guilt, remorse, self doubt”. (Perhaps Moran felt she couldn’t afford another baby on her menial income.) To me this revealed far more about Moran than anything I learned from the Hill interview.

 

 

Bring us more caviar, waiter

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, December 21.)

THE RECENT Treasury update reminded us that the economy is in a parlous state. The Budget deficit is expected to top $11 billion, $2.4 billion more than was forecast only a few months ago. The government continues to borrow a staggering $250 million a week - some say more - to keep things ticking over.

These are figures to make your eyes water. Yet the country remains in a state of denial, partying as if the illusory boom of the Clark-Cullen years never faltered.

Economist Kerry McDonald, chairman of the government’s Savings Working Group, warns that we’re still spending too much and saving too little. Unless our high foreign debt is cut, he says, we risk a “sudden and destructive economic shock”.

Yet a timid National government refuses to ease the pressure by selling state assets, modifying our unaffordable super scheme or axing inherited Labour election bribes such as interest-free student loans and Working for Families.

On the contrary, it’s throwing even more money around, such as the extra $3.8 million in sports funding announced last week. Talk about mixed messages.

Perhaps the ever-chirpy John Key knows something we don’t. Maybe there’s a secret offshore oilfield about to come into production and wipe the national debt overnight. If so, he should tell us – that is, once he’s dealt with more pressing matters, such as singing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town with the breakfast DJs on The Edge.

Meanwhile, the national sense of entitlement continues unabated. Secondary teachers are threatening to strike again next year for higher pay and some arts organisations are indignant at being asked to supply more information to Creative New Zealand – the impertinence of it! – before they get their annual taxpayer handouts.

This serves as a reminder that it’s one thing for governments to buy support by doling out money when times are good, but quite another to claw it back when the going gets tough. Even when everyone knows the economy is taking, no one wants to take a cut.

On the property market, we’re told that demand remains strong for “high-end” houses and apartments in central Auckland and Wellington. It’s surely a mark of our capacity for self-delusion that yet another “premium” apartment development, this time in the former Overseas Passenger Terminal, will come on the market early next year. Just what we needed.

Perhaps the most bizarre symptom of the national mood of denial, at least among those who spend other people’s money, was the announcement that Wellington City Council has given a $10,000 grant to cover the cost of an outdoor exhibition of lesbian art called All the Cunning Stunts.

Crisis? What crisis? Let’s have more caviar, waiter. Just put it on the card.

* * *

TWO WEEKS after her encounter with John Howard, in which she treated the former four-term Australian prime minister as if he were only marginally preferable to a Nazi war criminal, Radio New Zealand host Kim Hill interviewed Don Letts, a peripheral figure in the British punk and reggae movements of the 1970s.

It was interesting to note the contrasting tone of the two interviews. With Howard, Hill relentlessly went for the jugular; but with the undistinguished Letts, whose politics seem firmly stuck in the 1960s protest era, she was chummy and empathetic to the point of being ingratiating.

His wistful lament that Brits no longer rioted in the streets like they did in the good old days – just one of several juvenile statements that a sharp interviewer might have asked him to elaborate on – passed without so much as a questioning eyebrow.

A tigress with Howard, Hill purrs like a kitten with anti-establishment figures like Letts. The inconsistency is striking.

* * *

IT’S A common complaint about America that it’s so big, Americans don’t understand there’s another world outside. They don’t need to.

I am made aware of this every time I try to order a Christmas or birthday present online for my son and daughter-in-law, who live in California. I have yet to find an American retail website that recognises any address other than an American one.

They rub salt into the wound by allowing you to go through every step of the process – selecting your gift, choosing a card to go with it, composing a message – then thwart you at the last hurdle, when you’re required to enter your personal details.

Resorting to subterfuge last week I tried to enter my son’s US address as my own, but even that didn’t work. The system obviously spotted an anomaly between my credit card details and address, and disallowed the transaction.

I’ve had similar problems with Australian retailers’ websites, but have learned how to deceive them into thinking New Zealand is part of Australia. Unfortunately the defences of US websites are much harder to crack. They refuse to recognise that there’s any country outside America – or if there is, that anyone from such a godforsaken place could possibly want to do business with them. So much for the global economy.

Howard deserved more balanced treatment than this

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, November 23.) 

WHEN I heard that Radio New Zealand host Kim Hill was going to interview former Australian prime minister John Howard last Saturday, I held out a naïve hope that this might mark a departure from the usual leftist thrust of her programme. Howard, after all, is emphatically a conservative – a political breed rarely heard on Hill’s show. 

More fool me. Hill wasn’t remotely interested in finding out what had made Howard the second longest-serving prime minister (after Sir Robert Menzies) in Australian history. She was simply looking for a scalp to dangle in front of her admiring audience. 

The interview was relentlessly adversarial from the word go. Hill revisited the same tired old political controversies that have already been worked over ad nauseam by her kindred spirits in the left-leaning Australian media, who despise Howard and are nonplussed and bitter over his popularity with the voters. 

Why wasn’t Howard prepared to negotiate a treaty with the Aborigines, Hill demanded to know. Why didn’t he apologise to them (as if Howard was personally responsible for their historical mistreatment)? How did he justify getting involved in Iraq? 

What about the disgrace at Abu Ghraib (as if Howard stood by and did nothing when Iraqi prisoners were being tortured)? Why did he still support the monarchy? (Never mind that the Australian people voted against republicanism in a referendum.) 

I waited for her to get around to the controversy over the Tampa refugees in 2001. Sure enough, that got worked over again too. 

It’s hard to believe that Hill genuinely thought she was going to extract some fresh revelation after all this time – perhaps a grovelling mea culpa? – but doubtless it played well to the chardonnay socialists who make up her core audience. All her questions were delivered in the smug, condescending and judgmental tone that has come to exemplify media elitism. 

For good measure, Hill threw in one or two gratuitous insults – such as “I’m trying to make sense of your thinking” [on Iraq], as if her guest was some sort of imbecile. Howard was remarkably tolerant of her provocations but the interview was prickly, at times teetering on the brink of outright acrimony. 

Hill finished by baiting Howard, again gratuitously, with a strange remark to the effect that he probably hadn’t enjoyed the experience of being interviewed by her. In other words, she seemed to be saying, hadn’t she done well to give him such a roasting? Howard was understandably nonplussed by the comment but somehow managed to remain civil. 

I’m no cheerleader for Howard and wouldn’t argue for a moment that former politicians should be treated with kid gloves, but he deserved more balanced treatment than this. After all, he must have done something right, since he won four elections in a row (to the despair of leftist commentators, who repeatedly made fools of themselves predicting he would fail). 

What’s more, he led a country that consistently out-performed New Zealand in almost every sphere, and with which we are now vainly and pathetically trying to catch up. 

Nowhere in Hill’s interview was there any acknowledgement of this. A Martian listening to it would have concluded that Howard’s prime ministership was an abject failure. In fact more than that – a moral disgrace. 

Just as well for democracy that politicians are ultimately accountable to the voters, not to media egos who enjoy the luxury of exercising – in Stanley Baldwin’s famous phrase – power without responsibility. 

 * * * 

WHEREVER you go in the world, backpackers look the same – bored, jaded and uninterested in their surroundings. 

I was reminded of this while travelling from downtown Auckland to Mangere airport on a shuttle bus recently. A young European couple in front of me barely glanced up as we drove through the suburbs. They wore an expression of blank indifference common to backpackers everywhere. 

Admittedly Auckland’s not Paris or San Francisco, but still, you’d expect them to show some interest. These affluent Generation Y kids troop listlessly from one adventure tourism attraction to the next, their MP3 headphones blotting out all ambient sound. 

The brief adrenalin rush of the bungy jump, luge or jetboat ride jerks them into a state of alertness only briefly before they shuffle back onto the bus and head off in search of the next buzz. I can’t help wondering why they bother to travel at all. They might as well stay at home and watch TV. 

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I RECENTLY booked two flights with Air New Zealand online and printed out the flight details. The first sheet of paper contained all the information I wanted: flight numbers, times etc. So what was on the superfluous second sheet of paper that my printer spat out quite needlessly? The words: “Good planets are hard to find – please think of the environment before you print this email.”

The bad and good of Islam

Kim Hill this morning had an interesting interview with Tim Winter, a.k.a. Shaikh Abdal-Hakim Murad, an erudite and articulate English convert to Islam. I didn’t hear the entire interview but his basic thrust seemed to be that Islam is greatly misunderstood in the West – hardly a new line, but quite persuasive when it’s argued as cogently as it was on this occasion. He said moderate, mainstream Islam is far removed from, and undeservedly tainted by, the extreme, militant political expressions of the faith as epitomised by organisations like Al Qaeda.

Taking the Taleban as an example, Winter likened them to tribal village hillbillies with little grasp – and a very warped grasp at that – of orthodox Islamic teaching. He also made the point that most Muslim immigration to Britain, which has become a wellspring of Islamic extremism, was from illiterate Pashtun villages in the more backward regions of Pakistan, where the version of Islam practised is (I’m paraphrasing here) a primitive local perversion of what credible Muslim scholars teach.

The problem is, as he pointed out, that the version of Islam we are confronted with in the media each day is the militant, extreme one that wants to exterminate all infidels. This has distorted our understanding of Islamic teaching and led to the fearful, anti-Islamic sentiment exemplified by opposition to the proposed Muslim cultural centre in downtown New York (not to mention European proposals to ban minarets, which ironically call into question our commitment to freedom of religion).

Even as I’m writing this I can hear people saying, “Yeah, yeah – we’ve heard all this before from apologists for Islamic extremism”. But at the very least, we have to acknowledge that Islam, like Christianity (Judaism too, for that matter), is not monolithic. Just as Christianity encompasses all manner of good and bad followers, from loony right-wing fundamentalists to neo-Marxists (both bad, in my view – the good Christians are somewhere in between), so the expressions of Islam range from the fanatical oppression of the Taleban and grotesque fringe groups like Somalia’s al Shabaab (reported today as having executed two illiterate teenage girls by firing squad for “spying”) to the civil, conciliatory variant personified by Hill’s guest this morning – and by some of the New Zealand Muslims whose reasoned and moderate letters I occasionally see in the papers.