Are Brits the people to run our public sector?

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 28.)

TWO RECENT events – education secretary Lesley Longstone’s abrupt departure and the appointment of Kevin Lavery as chief executive of Wellington City Council – have touched off an overdue debate about the wisdom of appointing Brits to top public sector jobs.

Ms Longstone, who was recruited from England, joined a New Zealand public service already top-heavy with appointees from the UK.

Other British department heads include Gabriel Makhlouf at the Treasury and David Smol at the new super-ministry, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (although to be fair, Mr Smol has been here for some time).

Both men seem well regarded. Yet when Brits are appointed to lead three of our most crucial departments of state, not to mention several lesser government agencies – including, ironically, Te Papa, which supposedly embodies what it means to be a New Zealander – it’s time to start asking why there were apparently no suitable local candidates.

Did they not come forward, or were they judged to be inferior to those from the British Isles? If it’s the latter, perhaps we have yet to overcome the cultural cringe which holds that overseas people must be more capable than we are.

In Ms Longstone’s case, things didn’t work out. Perhaps British appointees are better suited to advising on esoteric policy matters than trying to run  departments such as education, which are close to the ground and have a profound impact on ordinary New Zealanders in their everyday lives.

Now Mr Lavery, from Cornwall, has been appointed Wellington’s top bureaucrat. He can expect his performance to be scrutinised very closely, especially as he was chosen at the expense of a New Zealand incumbent whom most agree has done a good job.

The issue is not whether the British appointees have the right credentials on paper. Even her critics conceded that Ms Longstone came with an impressive CV. But our culture, attitudes and ethos are different. Decades have passed since we took our cue from what we then respectfully called the Mother Country.

British recruits inevitably bring with them their own cultural baggage, which may not be compatible with our way of doing things. As a Massey University academic (another Pom, as it happens) remarked of Ms Longstone, she was possibly not well-equipped to read the New Zealand mood.

She is hardly the first such appointee to come unstuck here. If the State Services Commission goes back through its files, it will find no shortage of high-level overseas appointees who terminated their contracts prematurely, apparently after finding things weren’t quite as they expected.

Invariably the hapless taxpayer ends up picking up the tab. Perhaps it’s time to consider a different approach.

* * *

STILL, you can’t entirely blame the British for wanting to escape. They must sometimes feel like strangers in their own country.

The latest census showed that white Britons are now a minority in London. More than 7 million, or one in eight, of the people in England and Wales were born abroad – one in eight.

There’s a lot to be said for cultural diversity, but it’s surely impossible to sustain immigration on such a scale without fundamentally altering a society. Were the British given any say in this? Most would probably say they were not.

This is not a racist argument. The same would apply if Tonga was suddenly swamped with immigrants from China.  It’s not a matter of race, but the right of people to preserve their society as they know it.

Perhaps the cruellest irony is that some immigrant groups in Britain are so hostile to their host country that they commit acts of terrorism against it. France, the Netherlands and other European countries have experienced similar smouldering resentment from migrant communities.

There are lessons here for New Zealand, which is undergoing profound demographic change of its own. Most of us welcome the more vibrant and colourful society that a liberalised immigration policy has created – but it has to be carefully monitored and managed.

* * *

THREE expressions I hope not to see or hear in 2013:

“Added bonus”. By definition, a bonus is something additional. That means an added bonus must be a bonus on top of a bonus. It’s a nonsense.

“Signed off on”. Some of us recall a distant time when things were approved. Now they are “signed off”, a term that makes no sense whatsoever, or even more bizarrely, “signed off on” (as in, “the cabinet has signed off on more Treaty settlements”).  Hanging is too good for perpetrators of this atrocity.

“Fur children”. I heard a marketing executive from a chain of pet stores say on the radio that this is now the preferred term for your cat or dog. The radio interviewer was too polite to say it, so I’ll do it for him: anyone neurotic enough to call their pets fur children should be barred by law from owning any.

 

Tragic radio stunt: who's not to blame?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 19.)

We become almost impervious to bad news. We have to be, otherwise we would go through life in a permanent state of crippling despondency.

Yet even as blasé as we are, every now and again something happens that has the capacity to shock.  Two such items on early morning radio news bulletins have penetrated my semi-conscious state in the past two weekends.

The more recent, and by any measurement the more appalling by far, was the news of the Connecticut school shooting. But this column concerns the earlier item, in which the newsreader announced that a nurse who had put through a hoax call at the London hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge was being treated for morning sickness had been found dead. It was clear she had taken her own life, presumably out of shame.

I wondered, in my half-awake state, whether I’d heard correctly. Could a silly radio stunt really have had such tragic consequences?

Well, yes – it could, and it did.

My first reaction, like that of many people, was anger that a pair of infantile radio hosts, eager to make names for themselves, should have perpetrated a hoax that led a mother and wife to kill herself.

Mine was a natural response, but not entirely rational. The young radio hosts had no malicious intent. Their motive was another M word: mischief. But it was mischief of an essentially innocent kind. They could have had no premonition that their amateurish, juvenile prank would result in such misery.

Now they too are going through their own private hell. Even if their radio careers survive, they will have to carry this misconceived act on their consciences for the rest of their lives.

And human nature being what it is, they have become victims themselves. They are now experiencing the cowardly rage that always surfaces when someone is the butt of wholesale condemnation and is therefore deemed an easy target. 

The people reportedly making anonymous death threats against the radio hosts belong to the same wretched sub-group of lowlifes who turn out to shout obscene threats and curses whenever a much-vilified criminal – usually a sex offender – appears in court. These people get very few opportunities in life to feel morally superior to anyone else and they always make the most of them, even if in doing so they expose their own pathetic inadequacies.

The best that can come out of this ghastly business is that ratings-obsessed radio stations and so-called shock jocks (another contemptible life form) will think very carefully in future before perpetrating their puerile stunts.

These pranks may be ostensibly harmless in their intent, but I’m inclined to agree with my fellow columnist Rosemary McLeod that practical joking is often a form of bullying. How else can you explain a form of humour that usually relies on humiliation and embarrassment for its impact?

In any case, the two radio hosts are not the only people who should be ashamed of what happened at King Edward VII Hospital.

They would never have made the phone call if such pranks weren’t condoned, and possibly encouraged, by their bosses. We now know that the radio station management approved of the stunt. It was run past the station’s lawyers before being put to air. They too could have had no idea of the consequences, but they must share culpability.

The station’s claim that it tried to alert the hospital before broadcasting the hoax call is not convincing. For one thing, the hospital insists there was no attempt to warn it; but more to the point, it would be highly unusual for a media outlet to provide advance notice that such a stunt was to be broadcast.

So the station has been badly bruised too. If, as a result, radio station owners are motivated in future to curb the excesses of their attention-seeking personalities, that will be no bad thing.

But the net of blame can be spread more widely still. What about the hospital management, for example?

They had a royal patient who was the subject of intense worldwide media interest. Previous experience (the hospital is no stranger to royalty) should have alerted them to the probability of media incursions.

Fleet Street photographers were camped outside. You can be sure that elaborate precautions were taken to ensure Princess Kate’s safety and privacy. The place would have been swarming with police and security officers intent on protecting the patient not just from prying photographers and reporters, but from terrorist attack.

In the circumstances, how could the hospital management be so naïve and careless as to leave it to an unprepared nurse, the hapless Jacintha Saldanha, to intercept outside phone calls?

The hospital owners have done a great deal of indignant harrumphing over the radio station’s behaviour, but their own handling of the situation appears to have been at best sloppy and complacent, at worst incompetent.

There are other possible factors that we can only speculate on.

Most nurses in Mrs Saldanha’s position would have felt embarrassed and ashamed, but not to the point of taking their own life. The nurse who gave the radio station details of Princess Kate’s condition – arguably a far worse misjudgement – obviously didn’t feel so guilty as to hang herself. Was there something in Mrs Saldanha’s cultural background that gave her a heightened sense of shame and disgrace – a feeling that she had brought dishonour on her family? That might help explain why she thought her action could be redeemed only by killing herself and leaving two children without a mother.

Another possible explanation is emotional or mental fragility, but I have seen nothing to suggest Mrs Saldanha suffered from any such condition.

Was she harassed by the notorious London tabloids? Again, there has been no such suggestion. That would very likely have been her fate had she lived, but the tabloids scarcely had time to identify her before they were reporting her death.

One aspect of this sad affair not widely commented on is the shadow it has cast over what should be a happy event: the birth of the royal couple’s first baby in a few months’ time. That will now forever be tarnished by association with tragedy. But establishing who is to blame is far from straightforward.

 

How to stay onside with teachers

As was to be expected, there was an almost deafening chorus on Morning Report this morning calling for Hekia Parata's head. But the comment that most interested me came from Massey University education academic Professor John O'Neill, who said Parata's biggest mistake from the outset was that she got offside with workers in the education sector - in other words, teachers.

Problem is, the only way to stay onside with the teachers' unions is to allow them to dictate policy - the easy option, but obviously untenable in a democracy. The price of their support is to avoid doing anything that might upset them. No other body of public sector workers behaves like this.

This is not to say that teacher unions don't sometimes have good and legitimate reasons to oppose government policies or lobby for public support. But ultimately we elect governments, not teacher unions, to determine policy. That may be why John Key feels it necessary to stand up for his beleaguered education minister, even when her record so far has been less than stellar.

More mangled pronunciation

One News reporter Helen Castles was careful to get her Maori pronunciation correct last night, but struggled with English. In an item on shellfish poisoning she twice pronounced "paralytic" as "paraletic". Doesn't anyone check these items before they go to air?

Our resident morepork has been silenced

Sadly, we’ll no longer enjoy the call of the morepork (ruru) that we often heard at night in the reserve behind our house. We had some friends around for a barbecue last night and one of our guests, while inspecting the garden, happened to look up into a big plum tree by our back fence and saw a large dead bird suspended in the branches. Closer investigation showed it to be a morepork – presumably the one that has been resident all these years.

I took the body to the local DOC ranger today, thinking it might be of interest. He explained that although moreporks are incredibly skilful fliers, their navigation system can sometimes be affected by storms and gale-force winds (which we’ve had lately). Apparently they have very precise mind maps, and if the branch of a tree (for example) suddenly pops up where they don’t expect it, they can come to grief. We can only assume that’s happened to our bird, which was hooked up in a tangle of branches and was dangling upside down.

Very sad, because it was a beautiful bird. I left it with DOC because they thought someone might be able to use the feathers. I might put up a “vacancy” sign by the entrance to the reserve and see if we can attract another one.

An unsung hero of print

Today's Dominion Post contains a fine tribute by my friend and former colleague Peter Kitchin, New Zealand's most celebrated obituarist, to another old colleague: Nick Wrench, former deputy editor of The Dominion Post, who died last Sunday at the age of 55 from brain cancer.

Nick was one of the unsung backroom heroes of the newspaper business: smart, creative, energetic, committed and endlessly enthusiastic. As chief sub-editor and later news editor at the old Evening Post, he loved nothing more than to hurl himself into a really big, fast-breaking story, marshalling all the paper's resources - words, pictures, headlines, graphics, design - to produce a complete and compelling package. An outstanding example was the Post's coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which conveniently fell in the paper's time. (We were able to make an early start because, being something of an insomniac, I heard of the attacks as they happened in the early hours of the morning and was able to rouse key editorial staff from slumber and get them on deck. Nick and his old mate Mike Aston, the Post's design maestro, were the first people I phoned, knowing they would be the kingpins.)

Nick's finest moment, undoubtedly, was when he organised publication of the Christchurch Press - the Dom Post's sister paper - on the night following the disastrous quake of February 22, 2011. The Press's production systems were put out of action by the quake, though its printing press in the suburbs was still working and reporters and photographers were all on the job. Nick stepped into the breach, masterminding production of the Press's earthquake edition by remote control from Wellington. Christchurch marvelled not only that the paper was able to come out, but that it was able to provide such comprehensive coverage. Readers rarely get to hear of people such as Nick, but good newspapers couldn't happen without them.

He was an admirable figure in more ways than one, facing his terminal illness with inspirational optimism, courage and spirit. The big crowd at his funeral at Old St Paul's on Thursday was testimony to the respect his former colleagues (Nick parted company with the Dom Post last year) felt for him. A Waikato farm boy to the end, he was buried at Ohaupo.

Rata speaks out - but is anyone listening?

Dr Elizabeth Rata of Auckland University is one of very few Maori with the courage to speak out against the pernicious consequences of what she calls Treaty-based biculturalism. (Another brave and lonely voice is that of Tata Parata, whose letters often appear in The Dominion Post.) In this piece in today's New Zealand Herald,  Dr Rata persuasively explains why so many New Zealanders, including Maori, are alarmed at the "profoundly undemocratic nature of political arrangements proposed by Treaty activists within all levels of government". It's an article everyone should read, but I suspect that the politicians who most need to heed its powerful message have their hands clapped firmly over their eyes.