Echoes of Citizens for Rowling

Who remembers the Citizens for Rowling campaign? It was a concerted attempt by the Great and the Good to derail National Party leader Robert Muldoon’s election campaign in 1975.

The campaign’s backers didn’t like Muldoon’s combative, divisive brand of politics and argued that Labour’s gentlemanly Bill Rowling, who had assumed the prime ministership after Norman Kirk’s death in 1974, offered a far more desirable style of leadership.

Citizens for Rowling generated enormous publicity, circulating a nationwide petition and taking out ads in all the major papers, but the campaign was an ignominious failure. National won the election in a landslide, securing 55 seats to Labour’s 32.

For Muldoon, Citizens for Rowling was political gold. It played to his strength as a political counter-puncher and a man of the people, enabling him to portray Rowling’s backers as elitist and condescending.

So who were Citizens for Rowling? The driving force behind the campaign was the Canadian-born former TV current affairs interviewer David Exel, who enlisted the support of a bevy of high-profile names – among them, Everest conqueror Sir Ed Hillary, Anglican bishop Paul Reeves (later to become governor-general under a Labour government), academic and peace campaigner John Hinchcliff, civil libertarian and educationist Walter Scott, lawyer John Jeffries, businessman Sir Jack Harris and future Labour prime minister Geoffrey Palmer.

It’s that last name that particularly resonates 50 years later. Palmer, who was then an idealistic young law professor at Victoria University, is the only survivor of the leading Citizens for Rowling signatories. And sadly, he appears to have learned little or nothing during the intervening decades.

I’m forced to that conclusion because according to the NZ Herald today, Palmer is the leading signatory to an open letter opposing ACT’s Regulatory Standards Bill.

If you closed your eyes and concentrated hard, you shouldn’t have too much trouble guessing the names of at least some of the others. In fact they are almost comically predictable.

There’s Dame Anne Salmond, Professor Emeritus Jane Kelsey, Professor Emeritus Jonathan Boston (they do love their titles in academia), climate change bore Jim Salinger, old-school socialist Geoff Bertram, former CTU economist Bill Rosenberg and geeky law academic and activist Max Harris. The usual suspects, in other words - a select roll-call of the Left-leaning brahmin academic caste. 

The parallels with Citizens for Rowling are unmistakable and their efforts are likely to be just as ineffectual, because New Zealand society, for all that it has changed, still has a deep egalitarian streak that is stubbornly resistant to guidance from self-appointed elites.

To put it simply, many New Zealanders resent being told what to think. That was the lesson of 1975 and I don’t think much has changed.

There is more than just a faint whiff of patronising intellectual superiority in the posturing of Palmer and his fellow signatories. In their lofty eyries, they appear to labour under the naïve delusion that their open letter may help turn the tide against David Seymour’s Bill.

I don’t think it will – not because their objections don’t have any substance, necessarily, but because the people most likely to be influenced by the letter are those who belong to that steadily shrinking portion of the population that still habitually reads the Listener and listens to RNZ, both of which can be relied on to reinforce their world view. Such people are programmed to suspect the worst of Seymour anyway and will earnestly nod their heads in agreement with Palmer’s open letter.

Of course the signatories are simply exercising rights available to everyone in a liberal democracy. But they are doing so in the obvious belief that their names, and hence their opinions, carry a lot more weight than those of the average citizen. In other words they are pontificating from a position of entrenched privilege, though I’m sure they don’t see it that way. (It’s worth noting here that this type of elitist posturing invariably emanates from the Left – a curious fact, given that the Left has always presumed to speak for the disadvantaged.)

To return to Citizens for Rowling: I disliked Muldoon intensely, but the campaign against him got my back up nonetheless. Citizens for Rowling gave the clear impression they didn’t trust their fellow New Zealanders to figure things out for themselves; that we needed guidance from mountaineering heroes, lawyers and high-ranking clerics.

I voted for Labour in the subsequent election, but I greatly resented this elite group’s attempt to use their public status to influence the outcome, and the election result suggested that lots of other New Zealanders probably did too. I predict this latest ill-conceived initiative will misfire for much the same reason.

A milestone for the Press Council - perhaps its last

The Press Council celebrated its 40^th birthday in Wellington last night by staging a public forum with the theme: Looking Forward, Looking Back and the Constant Immutable Truths. Council chairman Barry Paterson QC, a former High Court judge, explained that the council had decided to make the most of its 40^th birthday because there was no guarantee that it would make 50 – a reference to the fact that its days may be numbered, since the Law Commission has proposed a new single media regulator to replace the council and the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

Paterson briefly canvassed the council’s origins, recalling that it was set up by newspaper publishers to forestall calls from the Labour Party for statutory control of the press. Its founders took the view (these are my words, not Paterson’s) that the best way of defending the press against political interference was by maintaining high standards through self-regulation – hence the council’s main function of hearing and ruling on complaints against newspapers.

Paterson pointed out that former Justice Minister Simon Power had asked the Law Commission to review the regulatory regime covering New Zealand media not because of the ethical scandals engulfing the British press, but because of the emergence of the unregulated, “new”, digital media. Paterson emphasised that whatever changes were made as a result of the review, it was vital that the press remained free of government regulation.

Judge Arthur Tompkins of the District Court presented an idiosyncratic but scholarly history of free speech that encompassed religious reformer Martin Luther, Picasso’s famous painting depicting the bombing of Guernica and the signing by Churchill and Roosevelt of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which spoke of a world free of want and fear. The linking theme was that ideas matter (Luther), words matter (the Atlantic Charter) and images matter (Picasso). Tompkins told the disappointingly small gathering that the new regulatory framework covering the media must not sweep away the good along with that which had outlived its usefulness.

APN (aka The New Zealand Herald) Digital editor-in-chief Jeremy Rees and former Stuff social media editor Greer McDonald (who confided that she had grown to hate the term “social media”) talked frankly and insightfully about the impact of online media. The overall message was that it was an exciting and satisfying field to be working in, but it was evolving at breakneck speed and sometimes in unexpected directions.

Rees said everything he had been told about digital media five years ago turned out to be completely untrue (“we thought citizen journalism would take over – it didn’t”) and he couldn’t hazard a guess as to where things would go from here, although he thought there would be much greater differentiation between the type of content provided on different online platforms.

He reinforced one of my concerns about a possible adverse consequence of the shift away from traditional print media. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially he said that online providers would increasingly tailor content according to the preferences – including political preferences – of the user. In other words, a consumer with a history of seeking right-wing content (or left-wing, or whatever) will be fed information that complies with that preference.

Of course this is happening already as a result of users exercising their own choice, but if Rees is correct the trend will accelerate. This has implications for civil society, because one of the great virtues of “broad church” mainstream print media such as we have in New Zealand is that it exposes readers to a wide range of material. In the process they may come to consider ideas and opinions that are contrary to their own, and possibly even concede that they have some validity – surely no bad thing. This isn’t going to happen if online readers see only content that reinforces their existing prejudices.

Greer McDonald, who has just taken up a new appointment as digital editor of the Manawatu Standard (a fine newspaper – they print my column), talked about the impact of social media during the Christchurch earthquakes but noted that people still turned to the traditional media for reliable information. At one point a rumour spread via Twitter that the Riccarton Mall had collapsed – a furphy* that Fairfax journalists were able to extinguish by using the traditional methods, in other words picking up the phone and asking the people who knew.

The sceptical Luddite in me silently cheered at a couple of points McDonald made. She noted that there were only about 70,000 Twitter users and said journalists shouldn’t get excited or distracted by what was being said among such a small minority. And she rightly scorned the “race mentality” – the obsession with being the first to report even trivial information online, which she described as a sideshow. Bravo. (I touched on the same phenomenon here a few months ago.)

The council’s executive director, Mary Major, presented a slide show covering the council’s history and touching on celebrated skirmishes from the past involving such notables as Robert Muldoon and morals crusader Patricia Bartlett. (The former case, which followed Muldoon’s decision to cut off the flow of information to The Dominion, was a rare case of a complaint being brought by journalists against a politician, rather than vice-versa).

The evening wound up with a spirited speech by Sir Geoffrey Palmer in which he ranged across Milton’s Areopagitica, John Stuart Mill, the pernicious sedition laws (getting rid of them was the law reform of which he was most proud, although he had to wait until he was president of the Law Commission to achieve it), climate change (Justice Venning’s analysis in his recent finding against climate change sceptics was “devastating”) and the failings of television news (“a disaster”).

Palmer - the son of a newspaper editor - said he was not impressed by arguments that there was a crisis in journalism. The crisis, if it existed, was in the way journalism was delivered, but he was confident the problems would be overcome with creativity, determination and innovation.

I hope he’s right.

* Furphy: a false report or rumour. Wagons made by an Australian company called Furphy carted water behind the front lines on the Western Front during World War One. They became synonymous with misleading gossip about what was happening on the battlefield. It's a term widely used by Australian journalists ("I checked it out, but it was a furphy").

Captured by the New Wowsers

I don’t believe Sir Geoffrey Palmer is a wowser. I imagine he would bristle at the suggestion. Neither do I believe he’s a compulsive controller who knows what’s best for everyone. However I do believe that the Law Commission, in preparing its report Alcohol In Our Lives: Curbing the Harm, has allowed itself to be well and truly captured by neo-wowsers who don’t think New Zealanders can be trusted to make the right decisions about alcohol consumption. The wowsers’ fingerprints are all over the document.

Reading the report summary and an accompanying breakdown of the 2900-plus submissions, it’s clear that the commission’s report is an almost unqualified victory for those who want to see the liberalisation of the past few decades wound back. They have convinced Palmer and the commission that only a drastic retreat from past reforms can save us from our inability to control our alcohol intake.

The tone of the report is alarmist. Large chunks of it are written in the language of the anti-alcohol propagandists who have been blitzing the media in the weeks leading up to the report’s release. Their objective was to create a moral panic over alcohol abuse, and so far they have succeeded.

The commission has listened to the social scientists, health providers and medical researchers who urged a lifting of the minimum age of purchase, an increase in excise tax and a crackdown on liquor advertising and promotion, among other measures. Liquor industry interests didn’t get a look in. In fact the commission explicitly rejects the industry position that the majority of New Zealanders drink responsibly and shouldn’t be penalised because of the minority who don’t.

On this crucial point, the commission has adopted the alarmist contention that “excess drinking is not confined to an aberrant minority”. Exactly what constitutes “excess drinking” is not satisfactorily explained. Rather, the commission seems to accept without question the anti-alcohol lobby’s claims that 20 percent of us drink in a “potentially hazardous manner” and that 25 percent of us consume too much alcohol every time we drink – statements that hinge on the anti-alcohol propagandists’ arbitrary perception of what is “hazardous” or amounts to “too much”. Where there is a choice between an alarmist conclusion and a more cautious, conservative one, the commission seems unerringly to opt for the former. (I should note here that judged by the criteria of Professor Doug Sellman, one of the more shrill anti-alcohol propagandists, I am one of New Zealand’s 700,000 “heavy drinkers”. Perhaps you are too.)

What bothers me is not so much that the liquor industry position – which essentially favours the status quo – has been disregarded in favour of the restrictive regime favoured by the anti-alcohol lobby. The industry is big enough and ugly enough to look after itself (and you can bet it will be doing exactly that behind the scenes). No, what concerns me is that this whole elaborate process is dominated by organised and well-resourced pressure groups: the industry on one side, the control lobby (largely taxpayer funded, incidentally) on the other. Ironically, the people on whose behalf this review exercise is supposedly being undertaken – ordinary New Zealanders – are largely excluded. There is, as far as I know, no lobby group representing moderate drinkers. By its very nature, the commission’s review gives weight to the views of interest groups but largely fails to capture the views of the ordinary citizens who will have to bear whatever consequences flow from it, but who don’t have the time, the resources, the know-how or the motivation to prepare and make submissions. (This isn’t the fault of the commission, of course; it’s just the nature of the system.)

I haven’t tackled the full report – all 500 pages of it – but the 32-page summary condenses the commission’s recommendations and gives an idea of the report’s tone. One key point, already mentioned, is the commission’s dodgy assertion – based on the anti-alcohol lobbyists’ loaded statistics – that liquor abuse is not confined to a problematical minority.

Another is that alcohol should not be treated as a “normal” commodity – again, a central tenet of the New Wowser Manifesto. “The trend towards regarding alcohol as a normal food or beverage product needs to be reversed,” the commission pontificates. “In truth, alcohol is no ordinary commodity. Alcohol is a psychoactive drug that easily becomes addictive and that can produce dangerous behaviours in those who drink too much. New Zealanders are reluctant as a nation to face up to the facts.” (See what I mean about the language used? It’s straight from the New Wowsers’ Handbook.)

A counter-argument to this is that by treating alcohol as a dangerous drug that must be carefully controlled, as New Zealand governments did for decades, you produce bizarre and contradictory outcomes like the six o’clock swill (wherein, I suspect, lie the origins of our binge drinking culture). I believe we’re still suffering the legacy of that prohibitionist tradition, which treated New Zealanders as helpless drunks unable to control their intake without the help of the state. The danger in turning the clock back on the liberal reforms of the last two decades, as the commission wants to do, is that alcohol will again attain the lure of forbidden fruit, attracting people (especially young people) because of its aura as something slightly risky and dangerous, rather than being treated as something to be enjoyed, like food, as part of everyday life. It strikes me as highly significant that countries where alcohol is treated as “normal”, and where children are introduced to it as an integral and unremarkable part of their culture, don’t generally share our binge-drinking problem.

It was inevitable that New Zealand would take time to adapt to the more liberal alcohol regime ushered in (albeit in a piecemeal and illogical manner) from the late 1960s onwards, but we were getting there. What the commission and the wowser lobby constantly overlook, because it doesn’t fit their agenda, is the many ways in which our drinking behaviour has improved. Not only is our per capita consumption down slightly on the late 1970s (it dipped very sharply in the 1990s, then crept back up), but we’re drinking differently. We’re doing it in more civilised surroundings, we’re doing it in mixed company rather than in the men-only domain of the old-style public bar, and we’re doing it more often over a meal rather than standing at the bar. We’re also more discerning about what we drink, choosing wine and “craft” beers over the mass-produced draught beer once dispensed through plastic hoses.

The commission notes with disapproval that the number of on-licences has more than trebled since the Sale of Liquor Act 1989, but doesn’t acknowledge that the size of the average bar has decreased enormously. The horrendous suburban booze barn of the 1960s and 70s, surrounded by acres of car parks, is extinct. The bars that have replaced them are much smaller, more intimate and more congenial. But apart from one brief token acknowledgment in the summary, the commission seems steadfastly to ignore these gains. It would rather dwell on binge drinking – a very real and ugly phenomenon, to be sure, but hardly “pervasive”, as the commission asserts, which suggests it has permeated every level of society when in fact it’s confined to a relatively small demographic group.

Not all the commission’s recommendations are extreme. There’s a good case to be made for reducing the proliferation of off-licence outlets and I personally wouldn’t argue too vigorously against the proposed reduction of opening hours. But the proposal to put the age of purchase back to 20, with no exceptions, is barmy and regressive. How humiliating for a 19-year-old to go to a bar or licensed restaurant with his or her parents and not be allowed to have a drink. How can we expect people to behave like adults when we treat them as children? This is precisely how our dysfunctional attitude toward alcohol developed in the first place.

So now it’s in the hands of the politicians. Given the fraught history of legislation relating to alcohol, we shouldn’t expect Parliament to make logical or consistent decisions – least of all if it’s down to a conscience vote (and I have some sympathy with Sir Geoffrey Palmer on that point). But at least the politicians, unlike the Law Commission, have constituents’ views to consider, which might lead to a more balanced position being struck than that taken by the commission. We should certainly hope so.