Mallard in Fantasyland?

I attended two sessions at the Featherston Booktown Festival on Saturday. One, on the state of the news media, was almost totally useless. I walked out before it had finished. The other, however, was not only entertaining but produced one of those “Did he just say what I thought he said?” moments from former Speaker and Labour Party minister Sir Trevor Mallard.

In the panel discussion on the media, Duncan Greive from The Spinoff was the only speaker who brought any insight to bear. The contributions of the other participants – Mike McRoberts from NBR, TVNZ’s Te Aniwa Hurihanganui and moderator Michelle Duff – were shallow, predictable and carefully modulated to elicit murmurs of sympathy and agreement from the full hall.

It would have been a whole lot livelier if Sean Plunket, Michael Laws, Heather du Plessis-Allan, Peter Williams or even Barry Soper had been invited to speak, but that was never going to happen. Book festivals are not noted for their openness to ideas and opinions that challenge prevailing orthodoxies. There are audience sensibilities to be considered.

The preceding session on politics was a lot more rewarding. The subject was the turbulent politics of 2017-2023: the Ardern years. And while there was the same non-threatening quality about the speakers, two of them – Chris Finlayson and Trevor Mallard – at least spoke with the advantage of first-hand, close-up experience. Two journalists, Stuff’s Henry Cooke and the aforementioned Hurihanganui, seemed to be there to make up the numbers and didn’t have a great deal to contribute.

It was a crowd-pleasing session, deftly chaired by Toby Manhire from the Spinoff. Finlayson, nominally the right-wing voice on the panel, was never likely to upset anyone and was presumably invited for exactly that reason. He’s the Left’s favourite conservative: an old-school National Party liberal who quickly earned the crowd’s favour by making it clear he doesn’t have much, if anything, in common with the “Muppet” government (his term) that’s now in power. He remarked that because of the coalition government’s “blowback” on Maori issues, he now feels more like the opposition.

The fact that Finlayson has long been out of politics not only renders him acceptable to left-leaning book festival audiences - since he's no longer in a position of power - but frees him to be frank, all of which makes him ideal for the festival circuit. He’s an engaging raconteur and can be tartly humorous, as when he talked about the many “WTF moments” when National was chaotically in opposition, drolly referring to one former party leader as “Muller the Brief” and to another, Simon Bridges, as a shit.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard Finlayson say that if he had won the then Labour-held Rongotai electorate, which he contested for National with no expectation of winning and plainly no desire to do so, he would have demanded a recount. It’s a good self-deprecating joke that bears repeating.

For his part, Mallard, having been Speaker during the anti-vax occupation of Parliament's grounds, was plainly concerned with putting a favourable spin on his involvement in that unprecedented brouhaha. He told the audience that a lot of “marginal people” were involved in the protest camp – people who had “gone down rabbit holes”, including mentally ill individuals he knew from his Hutt South electorate; in other words, nut cases and no-hopers.

I wonder if anyone else in the hall felt, as I did, that this was a less than empathetic way for a Labour MP – one who makes much of the fact that he represented the battlers from working-class Wainuiomata – to brush aside the concerns of people who are social casualties. Henry Cooke pointed out that many of the protesters had lost their jobs because of the vaccination mandate (although I don’t recall Stuff taking the trouble to make that clear at the time) and Te Aniwa Hurihanganui acknowledged that they were a “real mix of people”. Mallard justifiably copped a lot of flak for his arrogance and indifference to the protesters’ grievances during the occupation of Parliament’s grounds and I wondered on Saturday whether he had learned anything from the experience. Perhaps not.

He also criticised the police for taking too long to deal with the protest encampment (oh, so it was their fault, to paraphrase Basil Fawlty) and he defended the use of water sprinklers – which were seen, along with the notorious Mallard-instigated Barry Manilow broadcasts, as an attempt to dislodge the occupants – as being necessary to wash away human waste. That was a new one on me and I wondered whether it was a convenient justification post-event.

But the big surprise – one that even had the stranger next to me turning to me with a look of disbelief – was Mallard’s claim that the protest camp was funded by Russia. Yep, that’s right: Mallard reckoned someone paid for millions of dollars – yes, millions – worth of camping equipment that mysteriously turned up in Parliament’s grounds. Protesters suddenly had money to spend and he had no doubt that money came from offshore – Russia, he said.

Whoa! That came completely out of left field. My astonishment was shared by my fellow  journalist David McLoughlin, who was also at the session and like me, thought Mallard’s claim was bizarre. No explanation was offered as to why Vladimir Putin should spend millions paying for anti-vax protesters to camp in comfort in the most distant capital in the world. Payback for New Zealand supporting sanctions against Russia following the Ukraine invasion, perhaps? Not totally implausible, but it's the sort of far-fetched scenario that only an over-active imagination might come up with. Neither was it clear why the allegation had never emerged before.

Certainly there was feverish talk in 2022, some of it from the excitable, conspiracy-obsessed Sanjana Hattotuwa of the Disinformation Project (remember them?), about alleged Russian-sourced disinformation. Canada too was identified as a source of malevolent anti-vax propaganda, Jacinda Ardern noting the supposedly incriminating evidence that Canadian flags were being flown in the protest camp. But Russia spending millions on tents and sleeping bags? That was a new one.

Surprisingly, despite two political journalists being on stage with Mallard when he made the allegation, nothing has been reported, at least to my knowledge. Here was a former senior government politician – the Speaker of the House of Representatives and subsequently ambassador to Ireland – alleging malign foreign interference in our domestic affairs. I would have thought there was a story in it (“Russia funded Wellington protest camp, says Mallard”), but apparently not. Perhaps Cooke and Hurihanganui decided it was just Mallard running off at the mouth and not worth taking any further. But previous generations of political reporters, their news antennae twitching furiously, would have been pursuing him for elaboration.

What, if anything, should we make of it? For me it had echoes of former Waitakere mayor and Labour grandee Bob Harvey’s startling allegation in 2000 – similarly unsubstantiated – that the CIA was involved in the death of Norman Kirk, which had even his friend Helen Clark looking sideways at him. Mallard’s claim has the same slightly loony, off-the-wall quality. If he has evidence, he should front up with it. Otherwise people will be justified in concluding it was a case of Mallard in Fantasyland.

Mallard must go

The Free Speech Union has launched an online petition calling on Parliament to remove Trevor Mallard as Speaker of the House. I've signed it and I urge others to consider doing likewise. You can find it at www.mallardmustgo.nz

The fascinating new fault line in New Zealand politics

Some further thoughts on Camp Molesworth:

■ A fascinating political and sociological fault line has opened up – one that defies the normal understanding of New Zealand’s political dynamics. People at the bottom of the heap, as political scientist Bryce Edwards describes them – many of them working-class and provincial, with no formal organisational structure – have risen up in defiance of the all-powerful political class, the urban elites who are accustomed to calling the shots and controlling political discourse. I would guess most of the protesters outside Parliament have not previously been politically active and may not feel allegiance to any particular party. They appear to be angry about a number of things.  Covid-19 and the vaccination mandate galvanised them into action, but it’s possible there are deeper, less easily articulated grievances – such as perceptions of powerlessness and exclusion – simmering beneath the surface.

■ Most commentators in the mainstream media are framing the occupation of the parliamentary lawn as being orchestrated by sinister right-wing extremists, and therefore devoid of any legitimacy. How paper-thin their tolerance of the right to dissent has proved to be. The clear implication (where it’s not explicitly stated) is that the occupation is not a legitimate expression of the right to protest by sincerely motivated New Zealanders who present no threat to anyone, but an alarming phenomenon driven by alt-right agitators with an ulterior agenda. But there’s a very marked discrepancy between reports from people who have actually been on the ground at Molesworth St, who generally describe the event as peaceful and good-natured, and those who make judgments from afar and take refuge in simplistic stereotypes about the type of people who are protesting.  This was starkly encapsulated on Morning Report this morning when Bryce Edwards (who has been at Parliament) and Morgan Godfery (who hasn’t) presented strikingly different perspectives.

■ Do I detect a gradual change in the overall tone of media coverage? As more journalists and commentators take the trouble to familiarise themselves with the protesters’ concerns, so the tone is becoming more sympathetic, although most commentators are still careful to distance themselves from the anti-vaccination message and the tactics of the more extreme protesters. My own ground has shifted somewhat, as readers of this blog may deduce, as we've learned more about the nature of the protest action (and also learned to disregard some of the more hysterical media accounts). It would be no surprise if the attitude of the country gradually shifts too, from one of impatience and condemnation to understanding and tolerance. Trevor Mallard’s spectacularly childish, cack-handed and ineffectual attempts to drive out the protesters will very likely have helped bring about a national mood shift. Needless to say, it would also help if protest leaders (whoever they are, assuming they exist) could rein in the few wild-eyed extremists whose antics enable the pro-government media - apologies for the tautology - to discredit the event. But good luck with that, as they say.  

■ Jacinda Ardern displays a telling lack of empathy, one that’s strikingly at odds with her supposed embrace of inclusiveness, when she tries to discredit the protest by suggesting, apparently on the basis of a few Donald Trump and Canadian flags, that the idea was imported from North America, as if none of the protesters at Parliament are capable of thinking for themselves. A more valid comparison might be with les gilets jaunes, who rocked the French political establishment in 2018 in protests that predated Covid-19 by more than a year.

■ I get the distinct impression that politicians from all the parties in Parliament, even ACT, feel threatened by this sudden gesture of assertiveness by the great unwashed and don’t know how to handle it. MPs have done themselves no favours by refusing to engage with the protesters. For one thing, it looks cowardly; for another, it reinforces the perception that the politicians prefer to remain isolated in their bubble rather than sully themselves by talking to a bunch of scruffs who dared to challenge the political consensus. Unusually, this protest is a rebuke to the entire political establishment, which the politicians probably find unsettling because it's outside their realm of experience.  But they need to get off their high horse; the people standing in the mud outside Parliament are New Zealanders, after all.

■ The protest has brought to the surface a level of intellectual and class snobbery that is normally kept carefully concealed. I’ve already referred to Lloyd Jones’ savage putdown in which he basically characterised the protesters as ignorant bumpkins who don’t know their place. Yesterday, Stuff’s Andrea Vance exhibited the same admirable broadmindedness when she, like Jones, sniffily dismissed the protesters as a rabble. But the commentator who most carelessly dropped his guard, unblushingly revealing himself as a closet totalitarian, is the veteran leftist and supposed champion of free speech Chris Trotter, who condemned the police for not getting tough enough with the demonstrators – and who, by so doing, confirmed that at heart he remains a believer in the brute power of the state. When he was subsequently called out by blogger Steven Cowan, a frothing Trotter went even further, denouncing the protesters as a “dangerous collection of angry and deluded lumpenproletarians”. Well, I guess we should be grateful to this friend of the working class for letting us know where he really stands.

 

You can argue with Mallard's method, but not his motive

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, February 7.)

The census figures say it all, really.

Since 1991, the number of New Zealanders describing themselves as Christian has tracked consistently and quite sharply downwards, from nearly 70 percent to 48 percent.

There has been a corresponding upward trend in the number claiming no religious belief – up to 42 percent in 2013, the most recent census year.

If this pattern continues, it would be no surprise if the 2018 census showed non-believers outnumbering Christians in New Zealand, confirming our status as one of the world’s most secular countries.

As a point of comparison, 83 per cent of Americans described themselves as Christian in a poll last year and only 13 percent said they had no religion. In Australia the figures are 52 percent (Christian) and 30 percent (non-believers).

Meanwhile, there has been a steady rise in the number of New Zealand residents adhering to other religious beliefs besides Christianity – notably Hindus (whose numbers doubled between 2001 and 2013), Buddhists, Muslims and Sikhs.

This is the consequence of a radical change in immigration policy dating from 1987, when the Lange government shifted from a system that gave preference to applicants from Britain, Europe and North America to one that was essentially skills-based. This opened the door to migrants of diverse ethnicities and religions from Asia and other parts of the Third World.

In the light of all this, it was unsurprising that Trevor Mallard, who became parliamentary Speaker following the change of government, decided that the explicitly Christian prayer which opens proceedings when Parliament is sitting was overdue for a rewrite.

When Parliament resumed after the 2017 election, reference to Jesus Christ and the Queen had been deleted. Mallard apparently made this decision unilaterally, short-circuiting what was expected to be a consultation process.

It seemed high-handed but it was consistent with his style. And he was within his rights, since the Speaker is the boss in Parliament in much the same way as judges decide how their courts are run. It may seem paradoxical, but Parliament is not an institution run on strictly democratic lines.

After the summer recess, however, Mallard back-pedalled. When Parliament resumed last week it was with a compromise version of the prayer. The Queen had been reinstated – as she should be, given that she’s our head of state. But of Jesus Christ, there was no mention. And just to rub salt into the wounds of traditionalists, Mallard recited the prayer in Maori.

Setting aside the question of whether he should have consulted before barging ahead in the first place, the muted public reaction to the change suggests that most New Zealanders are pretty relaxed about it.

That’s not surprising, given that fewer than half the population now profess to be Christian. I suspect that if the census drilled down a bit further and asked respondents whether they solemnly believed that Jesus Christ was truly the son of God, which is what defines a Christian, they might be even fewer in number.

Many people who think of themselves as Christian use the term in a much looser sense, denoting someone who tries to live according to Christian values. Such people are unlikely to take great offence at Christ no longer being mentioned in the parliamentary prayer, the wording of which was clumsy and archaic and thus due for revision regardless of religious feelings.

Those who believe in the existence of a supreme being will be consoled that the prayer still acknowledges “almighty God”, although in such a way that adherents of other religious beliefs besides Christians can feel it refers to their God too.

Naturally, not everyone is happy with this compromise. The TV news showed a rally at Parliament protesting at the change. The ecstatic singing, the blissful facial expressions and the waving of arms toward the heavens suggested this was an evangelistic fringe of New Zealand Christianity rather than the mainstream.

If I understood him correctly, the protesters’ leader argued that our system of government largely derives from Judeo-Christian principles and that Parliament should therefore acknowledge and honour Christ as embodying and inspiring those principles.

It’s a legitimate argument but it only goes so far, because modern democracy requires that we acknowledge and respect other religious beliefs.

Some devout Christians struggle with this idea, because their faith in Christ is absolute and allows for no alternatives. Most of us, though, accept that modern New Zealand is a pluralist society that accommodates a range of belief systems, just as long as they don’t intrude on anyone else’s rights.

We should thank God, if you’ll pardon the expression, that we live in a tolerant, liberal society rather than an oppressive theocracy, such as Iran, or one of those countries where religious passions can lead to murder and mayhem, such as India or Myanmar.  

Mind you, it does our MPs no harm to start their day with an acknowledgement that they are answerable to a higher power. If only they could make a more sincere attempt to live up to the sentiments expressed in the prayer, particularly the bit about humility.

Shaky ground for Shearer

I see David Shearer is accusing the Government of using the Christchurch earthquakes as a smokescreen for a "wider agenda" of closing and consolidating schools.

He should be very careful here, because this is shaky ground (pardon the pun) for a Labour Party leader. Shearer was elected to Parliament only three years ago, so his political memory is short. But if he'd been around in 2003, he would know there was a national uproar then over a brutal school closure programme which traumatised many communities. It was masterminded by his own colleague Trevor Mallard, then minister of education, who exhibited a Pol Pot-style indifference to the damaging consequences. There seemed to be little understanding of the central place of schools in the lives of many communities, especially in rural areas (not that they mattered much, since they vote National).

The effects of that clumsily executed programme are still evident in places like Masterton, where I live. Besides causing enormous stress and disruption, it left the town with several unsightly, abandoned schools that inevitably became magnets for vandals, taggers and arsonists. A local secondary school teacher wrote a PhD thesis on the closures in 2010 and concluded there was still no evidence that the benefits outweighed the costs.

At least National has the excuse that the Canterbury earthquakes forced a reappraisal of Christchurch's education infrastructure. Part of the reason for the pain felt over the 2003 school closures was that little attempt was made to explain why it was necessary.

BLUE COLLAR, OR BLUE RINSE?

A couple of weeks ago, the Dominion Post’s Saturday magazine, Your Weekend, published an article of mine about Lower Hutt. You can read it here:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/6742575/Something-odd-about-the-Hutt

Towards the end of the article I quoted Hutt South Labour MP Trevor Mallard and mentioned that he was raised in Wainuiomata. During my interview with him I had asked whether he grew up in Lower Hutt and he had replied: “I grew up in Wainuiomata”.

Someone I know subsequently contacted me to say that this was untrue: Mallard had grown up in Khandallah. She understood his father had been a stockbroker. This informant put me in touch with another person, also known to me, who confirmed that he’d been at primary school with Mallard in Khandallah and played sport with him there. He said Mallard had later attended nearby Onslow College – a decile 10 school, and a long bus ride from Wainui. I was able to confirm this by checking the MP’s entry in the New Zealand Who’s Who. What’s more, a Google search revealed that Mallard had frequently been described in the past as a Wainuiomata boy; no mention of Khandallah. Similarly, his website during the 2011 election had him saying he’d lived in Wainui “for the majority [sic] of my life”.

The significance of this, for those unfamiliar with the sociology of Greater Wellington, is that Wainuiomata is about as working-class as you can get in New Zealand, whereas Khandallah is at the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum: a leafy suburb of lawyers, doctors, company directors and suchlike. The obvious implication was that Mallard was being less than honest about his background in order to bolster his blue-collar cred with Labour supporters.

Well, I contacted Mallard today and put this discrepancy to him. He seemed unfazed, explaining that he’d attended Wainuiomata Primary School, been a foundation pupil at Wainui’s Wood Hatton School (a school, ironically, that  he closed down when he was Minister of Education) and had shifted to Khandallah during his Form I year. He came back to Wainuiomata later, he said. “And you also went to Onslow College?” I asked. “Yes I did.” He added that he had relatives in Wainuiomata and a long family history there.

So where does this leave us? Since his school attendance is a matter of public record (and I can’t imagine he would risk telling fibs about something so easily checked), we can only conclude that he has been rather selective in highlighting his Wainuiomata background while playing down his more privileged antecedents. While you could take the moral high ground and argue that this isn’t 100 percent honest, from a pragmatic point of view I suppose it’s simply smart politics.