A few random thoughts post-election

■ My friend and former boss Robin Bromby, long domiciled in Australia but still a keen observer of New Zealand affairs, makes an interesting point in an email.

He asks, “When has a Wellington MP led his party to an election win? The last Wellington area MP to become PM after an election was Walter Nash in 1957. But the job now seems to be taken mainly by Aucklanders.”

Robin’s right, of course. Auckland dominance of politics used to be a point of controversy; now it seems to be accepted as the natural order of things. Jim Bolger was the last elected PM not from Auckland.

Chris Hipkins is from the Hutt, but he wasn’t elected as prime minister. Bill English – Wellington-based, though originally from Southland – is another who became prime minister as a result of his predecessor’s resignation. The same was true of Jenny Shipley, another South Islander.

Metropolitan dominance continues in the newly formed government. Shane Reti (Whangarei) and Louise Upston (Taupo) are the only senior ministers from outside Auckland and Wellington. The days of political heavy hitters from the provinces such as Norm Kirk and Keith Holyoake are long gone.

■ On Morning Report this morning, RNZ deputy political editor Craig McCulloch described the new coalition government as “a much more right-wing government than New Zealand has seen for some time”.

It was a revealing choice of terminology. Technically it’s accurate – but who can recall RNZ political reporters (or any mainstream media journalists for that matter) referring to the former government as "left-wing", still less noting that it was arguably the most left-wing in the country’s history? 

In recent years the media have tended to favour the polite term “centre-right” for the National Party. Perhaps the inclusion of ACT and New Zealand First in the coalition means journalists will now feel justified in using “right-wing”, which carries unmistakeable connotations of disapproval. But why wasn’t the same labelling criterion applied to Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party? Is it, to paraphrase George Orwell, a case of left-wing good, right-wing bad?

To his credit, though, McCulloch made a point of highlighting the fact that seven of the 20 ministers in the new cabinet are of Maori descent – more than under Jacinda Ardern.

■ Later on the same show, Corin Dann interviewed James Shaw about the Green Party’s opposition to the proposed lifting of the ban on oil and gas exploration. The questioning could be described as friendly, gentle and polite. Shaw was allowed to speak virtually uninterrupted, as should be the case if you accept that the primary purpose of an interview is for the subject to get his or her points across.

That was followed by Ingrid Hipkiss interviewing oil and gas industry spokesman John Carnegie on the same issue. The tone was markedly different: more interruptions and generally more interrogative. Of course that may simply mean Hipkiss has a different interviewing style, but the contrast was noticeable.

Next up was the new prime minister, and this time Corin Dann adopted a much more adversarial approach than with Shaw – not hostile, exactly, but certainly a lot more aggressive, and with frequent interruptions. At times, especially on the subject of tobacco sales to minors, it was hard to avoid the impression that the rather excitable Dann was pushing a line of questioning driven by personal feelings.

At what point does an interview cross the line between being searching but neutral and one where personal opinion seems to get in the way? There’s no definitive answer to that question, but it’s worth recalling that Geoff Robinson spent nearly 40 years as host of Morning Report and never found it necessary to adopt a hectoring approach. He was never less than calm and polite and no one ever had a clue what his own feelings were. Were his listeners any less informed? I don’t think so.

More to the point, however: was Jacinda Ardern, in her regular appearances on Morning Report, subjected to the same robust treatment as Luxon this morning? I don’t recall it happening, but no doubt that’s my faulty memory.

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.

Who are the real conspiracy theorists, and who represents the real threat to democracy?

Today's Morning Report devoted seven minutes to a promotional plug for a new RNZ podcast called Undercurrent, which promises to expose rampant mis- and disinformation that we are told threatens to contaminate the coming election.

In the news story that introduced the plug, we were informed that Greens co-leader James Shaw was assaulted by a “conspiracy theorist” in 2019.  

That’s interesting. I’d never heard Shaw’s assailant, Paul Harris, described in that way before. RNZ’s own story about Harris’s sentencing said he had wanted to talk to Shaw about the Greens’ stance on abortion – a subject that was evidently on his mind because his wife had just had a miscarriage. That impression was reinforced by his lawyer’s comments in court, and again when Harris interrupted the judge’s sentencing remarks with an interjection about the number of babies being aborted every day.

But it apparently suited RNZ to portray Shaw’s attacker as a conspiracy theorist – a far more sweeping description that implied Harris was influenced by sinister malefactors in social media. That served the purpose of suggesting extremist online platforms were implicated in the assault on Shaw when there was nothing in media coverage to suggest that was the case. 

I suspect RNZ decided to pin the damning label of “conspiracy theorist” on Harris because of his involvement in an unrelated incident connected with the anti-mandate occupation in the grounds of Parliament last year, for which he was convicted of disorderly behaviour. But to conflate his assault on Shaw with online conspiracy theories bordered on dishonesty, which does nothing to encourage confidence in the integrity of the podcast Morning Report was promoting.

The item then neatly segued into an ominous-sounding but unsubstantiated claim from Shaw that his ministerial colleagues are now scared to go out in public for fear of being abused or accosted.

You can see what’s going on here. An assault on a senior politician is attributed to undefined conspiracy theories, for which no evidence is presented. These same nefarious conspiracy theories are then blamed for deterring politicians from going about their business in public – an assertion that we’re expected to believe simply because Shaw said it, although I’ve seen nothing to indicate that it’s true.

The implication is that democracy is imperilled. But wait: Undercurrent will save the day by exposing the shadowy far-Right forces that are manipulating public opinion for their own malignant ends and scaring the hell out of our elected representatives. The podcast is compiled and presented by Susie Ferguson, so we can be assured of its absolute objectivity and dogged pursuit of the truth. In fact we can be doubly confident, since Kate Hannah of the unimpeachably reliable Disinformation Project is involved too. (You can see the two of them stoking each other’s paranoia on the Undercurrent website.)  

Ferguson provided a clue to the ideological tone of the series this morning when she cited the Posie Parker incident in Auckland as an example of supposedly extreme beliefs. It was clear that in Ferguson’s eyes, Parker, whom she described as an anti-trans rights activist, was the problem - not the violent mob that succeeded (with police help) in denying her the right to speak.

The Morning Report item continued with the deliberately muddied voice of someone from an outfit called Fight Against Conspiracy Theories (FACT) Aotearoa revealing some of the offensive content circulating in what Ferguson called the murkier recesses of social media.

That merely tells us there are some seriously disturbed people lurking in cyberspace, which we probably knew already. Anyone who goes hunting for them is bound to find them, just as you might uncover a few unspeakably vile creatures by trawling through a sewage pond.

But knowing these people exist doesn’t tell us how much, if any, traction their views get among the wider public. I’m guessing hardly any at all, since most New Zealanders have more useful and important things to do with their lives than spend their days diving down creepy internet rabbit holes.

In fact it’s likely that by constantly drawing public attention to the supposed threat posed by far-Right platforms such as Telegram, the Disinformation Project is perversely giving them far wider exposure than they might otherwise get and creating the impression that they wield more influence than they do. An own goal, in other words.

In any case, who are the real conspiracy theorists? The label can just as accurately be applied to people like Hannah and her equally tiresome sidekick Sanjana Hattotuwa (who also predictably popped up on Morning Report) as to the people they purport to be protecting us from. They’re all swimming in the same toxic cesspool. The two sides of the disinformation debate feed off each other, ramping up divisive rhetoric that’s alien to most New Zealanders. In the meantime ordinary people just get on with their lives, oblivious to all the shadowy intrigue.

Why we should place our trust in outfits such as the Disinformation Project, which consistently refuses to disclose the source(s) of its funding, or FACT Aotearoa, whose website reveals nothing about the people behind it, isn't clear. (Click on the comically mislabelled “About Us” button on the FACT website and you’ll find not one identifiable individual.)

Why should we believe organisations that are just as shadowy as the people they claim to be guarding us from? If they truly championed the values of an open, democratic society, as they profess to do, they should have nothing to hide.  

Transparency is a core democratic principle. If they genuinely believe in what they’re doing, why can’t they be up-front about who they are and where they get their money? And please spare us the self-serving cant about not wanting to expose themselves to attack by far-Right vigilantes, which was presumably the reason the gutless FACT spokesman had his voice disguised this morning. For all the hysterical fear-mongering, New Zealand is still an open society where people with all shades of political opinion assert their right to free speech every day with no fear of retribution.

Perhaps more to the point, who poses the bigger threat to democracy in New Zealand: outfits like the Disinformation Project and FACT Aotearoa, or the subterranean agitators they claim to be protecting us against?  To answer that question, you have to ask where the real power resides.

The Disinformation Project has the ear of government. Its advice is accepted uncritically in the corridors of power. The mainstream media have similarly been captured. The result is that the authoritarian strictures of the DP go uncontested. It is largely left to Hannah and a coterie of censorious neo-Marxist academics to decide what constitutes “disinformation” – which could be anything that challenges the far-Left consensus of the ruling elite – and therefore supposedly presents a threat to social cohesion.

By way of contrast the extreme far Right, which we are supposed to regard as the real threat, exists in the shadows and on the margins. It wields no power and its existence would probably pass largely unnoticed if it were not, paradoxically, given disproportionate exposure by the anti-conspiracy theory conspiracy theorists (for that’s what they are).

 

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

Some more thoughts on the Sam Uffindell saga:

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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?

Why we should be concerned about a TVNZ-RNZ merger

I sometimes get the feeling that the lobby group that calls itself the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union is seen by journalists as a front for the National Party. This would explain why it doesn’t always get the media attention it deserves.

The perception of political partisanship is understandable, given that one of the NZTU’s co-founders was opinion pollster and Kiwiblog owner David Farrar, who is closely associated with National.

But it’s also unfair, because since its establishment in 2013 (under a National government, as it happens), the NZTU has generally been consistent and even-handed in its attacks on the wasteful use of taxpayers’ money. It was often critical of National when the party was in power and has even supported Labour policies.

If anything, this places it more in ACT’s ideological territory than National’s. National may profess to believe in limited government, but the party has often been happy to spray money around if there was political advantage to be gained.

The NZTU has further demonstrated its worth by monitoring local government spending. Some of the outrageous rorts perpetrated by councils and their misnamed bastard children, the so-called council-controlled organisations, might have escaped public attention if it weren’t for the union’s vigilance.

Whistle-blowers such as the NZTU should be especially valued in an election year, when political parties go all-out in a shameless bidding war for votes. The public needs to be constantly reminded that it’s our money they’re generously volunteering to spend – and in many cases, waste.

The Provincial Growth Fund calls for particularly close scrutiny, although we probably have to accept that we’ll never know the true cost of the prize demanded by Winston Peters in return for his puny 7 per cent share of the vote at the last election.

That’s because the PGF – alternatively known as the New Zealand First Survival Fund – makes nonsense of all normal rules relating to transparency and accountability.  

But it wasn’t irresponsible spending that prompted one of the NZTU’s recent public statements. Demonstrating that it also keeps an eye on wider public-interest issues, the union asked some sharp questions about the government’s proposal to merge the two state-owned broadcasters, RNZ and TVNZ.

People forget that we have been down this road before. State radio and television co-existed under the same organisation, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, until 1975, when they were split into separate entities.

What’s more, both radio and TV earned revenue from advertising without compromising the public service broadcasting ethos – so contrary to broadcasting purists’ fears, it’s possible to manage the conflict between the two.

But the media environment is very different now, and as the NZTU statement pointed out, the prospect of a TVNZ-RNZ merger raises other issues. These relate to such crucial democratic concerns as freedom of expression and diversity of information sources.

At a time when most privately owned media outlets are struggling to survive, a taxpayer-funded super-broadcaster would wield enormous power. Cushioned by state funding while still free to earn commercial revenue, it could push private competitors to the wall. A probable consequence is that New Zealanders would be deprived of alternative sources of information and opinion. 

Almost inevitably, such a monolithic broadcaster would lean politically to the left. That’s the default setting of state-owned broadcast organisations internationally, and there’s no reason to suppose things would be different in a New Zealand super-broadcaster. The evidence is there already.

As NZTU spokesman Louis Houlbrooke said: “In today’s opinion-led, personality-dominated media environment, journalism tends to push one political narrative or another.

“This is tolerable when audiences have a choice of outlets – we can always switch to a different channel. However, problems arise when the government tries to convert commercial operators into ‘public service’ platforms, with taxpayers forced to fund material they find politically distasteful.”

Houlbrooke urged Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi to instruct consultants PwC, who are putting together a business case for the merger, to include a requirement for political diversity.

Well, I won’t be holding my breath. As things stand, there’s a real risk that a left-of-centre government will green-light the merger proposal without much, if any, consideration of the need for an informed democracy to have access to a wide range of information and opinion. After all, it suits Labour and the Greens to have a powerful broadcasting organisation that’s broadly sympathetic to their political agenda.

All of this raises another important issue highlighted by NZTU chairman Barrie Saunders, a former journalist with public broadcasting experience. [Disclosure: Barrie Saunders is an old friend of mine and a former colleague.]

As Saunders says, the future of state broadcasting is too important to be left to politicians and broadcasting chiefs with their own agendas. Labelling the proposed restructuring process “disgraceful”, he called for cross-party involvement and public input. Proper practice, he said, would be for the government to issue a White Paper for public discussion.

After all, as Saunders pointed out, there’s no urgency – unless, of course, the process is being driven by political self-interest.  

New Zealand or Aotearoa? Let the people decide

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, Stuff regional papers and Stuff.co.nz, December 11.)

It can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that for years, a determined campaign has been underway to rename New Zealand.

It’s being driven by activists, bureaucrats, teachers, academics, politicians and people in the media who think “New Zealand” is too Eurocentric and insufficiently reflective of the biculturalism that is said to define us as a country.

It’s not a formal, co-ordinated campaign but a spontaneous, unofficial one that started small and has steadily gathered momentum as more people take up the cause.

Radio New Zealand was an early adopter and remains in the front line of the push for change, as it is with usage of the Maori language generally. Aotearoa is frequently used by RNZ journalists and presenters in preference to New Zealand, and lately the same trend has been creeping into the print media.

In defence of the practice, it can be argued that every New Zealander knows what Aotearoa means. But some RNZ journalists go a whole lot further – for example, by referring to Christchurch as Otautahi and Auckland as Tamaki Makaurau.

That’s overstepping the mark. It’s arrogant and elitist, and shows contempt for listeners because it leaves them to guess what place the reporter is talking about. The intention, clearly, is to encourage people to adopt these names in everyday usage. But arbitrarily renaming cities is not one of the statutory functions of Radio NZ.

This is not to say there isn’t a good case for a public debate about the adoption of Maori place names. But let’s be transparent about it, and follow democratic process rather than having change imposed by gradual indoctrination.

That debate might start with the fact that “New Zealand” says nothing about us or our place in the world. It was conferred by historical accident and treats us not as a country in our own right, worthy of our own distinctive name, but as an offshoot of Europe.

We can only conclude that the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman displayed a mischievous sense of humour when he named New Zealand after a province of his homeland. By his own description, the country he sighted in 1642 was “a large land, uplifted high” (he was looking at the mountains of the West Coast).

So what did he do? He named it after a low-lying, mainly flat province that was largely reclaimed from the sea. Zeeland’s highest point, as far as I can ascertain from Google, is 54 metres.

It can be argued that this striking mismatch between name and place gives Aotearoa a head start in any debate about what we should call ourselves. It’s also more euphonious, more poetic and more descriptive. And it’s exclusively ours, not a 17^th century hand-me-down from Holland.

Another ground for objecting to “New Zealand” is that it conveys the Eurocentric implication that the country didn’t exist until Tasman gave it a name, although Maori had been here since the 13^th century.

But hold on a minute. There are other factors to consider, starting with the fact that we’ve been known as New Zealand for more than 300 years.

Admittedly other countries have changed their names. Ceylon became Sri Lanka, Persia became Iran and Burma became Myanmar, to name just three examples. The world got used to the new names and moved on, but it would be wrong to ignore the enormous economic cost and the long, hard process of adjustment and acceptance required.

And like it or not, the name New Zealand stands for something in the world – in trade, tourism, diplomacy, sport, war and the arts. It’s a powerful brand, built up over two and a half centuries. We mess with that legacy at our peril.

Then there’s the pronunciation to consider. Aotearoa isn’t a name that the world could effortlessly get its tongue around. Even well-meaning New Zealanders struggle with it, and they’re not helped by te reo purists who sneer when people get it wrong.

These are all factors that could be explored and weighed if we were to have an open debate, as we did over the national flag. There’s no reason why the Aotearoa/New Zealand issue couldn’t eventually be decided by referendum.

New Zealanders have shown they are not averse to the adoption of Maori place names. The acceptance of Taranaki as an alternative to Egmont, and increasingly of Aoraki in place of Mt Cook, is proof of that. Expect Whakaari to replace White Island before long, too.

There’s scope for many more places to revert to their Maori names as the significance of names bestowed during the colonial era recedes into the mists of history. How about Ahuriri instead of Napier, for starters, or Taitoko for Levin?

But let’s do it the proper way, through open, public debate and consensus rather than by stealth. Until such time as New Zealanders indicate by democratic means that they want a name change, New Zealand should remain just that: New Zealand. 

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.

Noise: boy racers' only chance to make an impact

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, August 16.)

BOY RACERS are a curse where I live. It’s a flat town – no hills to soak up or deflect noise – and the air is often still. This means boy racers can be heard right across town, especially at night.

This of course is their intention. Their consuming desire is to be noticed.

Though not possessed of the sharpest intellects, they are smart enough to be dimly aware that they will never amount to anything in life.

Somewhere in the recesses of their amped-up, petrol-addled, baseball cap-clad brains, they sense that their only chance of attracting attention is by making a lot of noise in their ludicrous, pimped-up cars.

Noise is central to the boy racer culture because while you can avoid looking at them, you can’t ignore the high-decibel output of their car exhausts. They demand your attention.

That this intrusive noise interferes with people’s common-law right to quiet enjoyment of life doesn’t deter them. Quite the reverse – it’s the boy racers’ raison d’etre.

In recent months, however, I’ve been less conscious of them. Sure, there are still times when I hear them buzzing around the town in the small hours of the morning like so many demented mosquitoes, or pitifully amusing themselves by drifting and doing wheelspins. But it’s as if the noise has become more noticeable because it happens less frequently.

I don’t know whether this is because the police have cracked down on them or if it’s just another silly craze coming to a natural end. Perhaps a combination of the two.

Either way, it’s a good thing. The day the last luridly painted Subaru Impreza or Nissan Skyline disappears up its own ridiculously oversized exhaust pipe will be an occasion for rejoicing.

* * *

IT’S NEARLY nine months since Simon Mercep took over from Sean Plunket on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report, plenty of time to allow a measured assessment. And I have to agree with Listener columnist Joanne Black that the pleasant, mild-mannered Mercep is too similar to his co-host, Geoff Robinson.

Like many Morning Report listeners, I was surprised that Radio New Zealand didn’t replace Plunket with a woman, or at least someone with a style that contrasted more sharply with that of the veteran Robinson.

Mercep is a competent interviewer but lacks Plunket’s take-no-prisoners approach. Admittedly there were times when Plunket was more aggressive than he needed to be and his hectoring style became tiresome, but it worked overall because of the contrast with Robinson. It was the old good-cop, bad-cop dynamic.

Mercep has a soft, unthreatening voice that doesn’t command the listener’s attention. It lacks cut-through. Plunket is a big man with a voice and interviewing style to match. In rugby terms, he’s the equivalent of the enforcer in the front row of the scrum. You don’t need physical bulk on your side to interrogate people – Brian Edwards proved that – but I’m sure it helps psychologically. Mercep just seems too darned nice to unsettle his interview subjects.

As for Robinson, he’s a marvel: always composed and civil, but still capable of asking the hard questions. And he’s been doing it since 1975.

His ability to bounce from one interview to another with barely enough time to catch his breath, and to conduct them all intelligently and with authority, marks him as a consummate professional. But it also points to a strong team of producers and researchers working behind the scenes and feeding him the right material.

* * *

FROM THE “so what’s new?” category: a recent news report that overseas tourists don’t find Auckland visitor-friendly. Has it ever been?

Almost every time I fly into Auckland Airport, whether on a domestic or international flight, I’m struck by the inadequate signage and paucity of information. How visitors cope, especially those who don’t speak English, is a mystery.

But the airport is a fitting introduction to a city that always seems too busy going about its business to bother being friendly to outsiders; too busy taking tourists’ money to pause and smile.

If the airport-to-city bus is the visitor’s first encounter with Auckland, it’s a miracle that most don’t immediately turn around and fly out again.

Unless things have improved lately, waiting passengers are made to stand out in the weather at a poorly marked stop, surrounded by surly-looking airport staff having a cigarette break. I once waited an eternity for a bus and when one finally came into view, it carried on straight past me despite a sign indicating it was the city shuttle.

And when a bus finally deigns to stop and pick you up, you often encounter an unsmiling, non-communicative driver with the charm of a pitbull.

Some cities exude an aura of welcome and friendliness. People often say it about Wellington. But unless Auckland has undergone a remarkable cultural transformation, Rugby World Cup visitors are likely to be unimpressed.