At least Bradford has principles, even if no one else does

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 30.)

WHATEVER else you might think of Sue Bradford, she sticks to her principles. You have to respect her for walking away in disgust from the Internet-Mana pantomime.

Who, other than the most gullible, is going to believe these two parties have genuine shared concerns? They are united only by rank opportunism.

Hone Harawira needs access to Kim Dotcom’s bank account, while Herr Dotcom seems driven by a personal grudge against John Key and a need for political friends who might help him avoid extradition. These are hardly a sound basis for a credible political party.

In his desperation to make the merger look honourable, Harawira argues that Internet access is a pressing issue for young Maori. This is a convenient but very recent conversion. When I last looked, digital access wasn’t even mentioned on the Mana website.

The $200,000 that Dotcom reportedly put into the Internet Party [note: since this column was written, we've learned the sum is $3 million] is a far more likely explanation for Harawira’s enthusiasm. But at least he had the decency to grin cheekily when he admitted coveting his new ally’s resources. Like Winston Peters, he often gives the game away by grinning when he knows no one is fooled. 

Unfortunately a mischievous grin can’t disguise the truth that this alliance is a cynical exploitation of a deeply flawed electoral system. Theoretically at least, there is a possibility that Internet-Mana will end up in a classic tail-wags-dog position of power that bears no relationship to its voter support.

What’s more, the two parties have undertaken to review their relationship six weeks after the election. So if they get into Parliament, all bets will be off. Take that, suckers. 

The best we can hope for is some entertainment as the inherent tensions boil to the surface and Internet-Mana blows up like Krakatoa. How long, for example, before Mana office-holder John Minto – a conviction politician in the Bradford mould – spits the dummy? He can only fool himself for so long that the merger is in the best interests of the proletariat.

Even on their own, far- Left parties such as Mana have a glorious history of disembowelling themselves. Who knows what bloody mayhem could result when the hard-core Left hitches itself to a wholly incompatible ally like the Dotcom party?

 

* * *

MY FELLOW columnist Joe Bennett has written in these pages about his irritation at the tone of phony familiarity adopted by marketers in their sales pitches. I think I know what he means.

A few weeks ago I received a card from Telecom announcing its proposed name change. It began with the words “Hey there”, which is the type of fatuous greeting you might expect from a cashier at Starbucks.

Genesis periodically sends me emails with the subject line “Let’s chat”, apparently unaware that a chat is a two-way dialogue that requires consent from both parties.  Other companies begin their promotional messages with the words “Hi guys”, at which point I stop reading.

A common marketing misjudgment, one guaranteed to raise older people’s hackles, is the presumption that customers are happy to be addressed by their first names.

Members of the generation that was brought up to address each other as “Mr” or “Mrs”, at least until invited to do otherwise, are affronted when employees in the bank or insurance company, who are usually young enough to be their grandchildren, assume the right to call them “Joe” or “Mary”.

Most are too polite to say anything, but quietly grit their teeth in resentment.

The problem, of course, is that corporate marketing departments are run by Generation X-ers who assume that older customers will be flattered to be addressed as if they are teenage airheads.

I’m waiting for a bright young marketing graduate to send me an email with the introductory words, “Hey, dude”. It can only be a matter of time.

* * *

BIG GOVERNMENT is now so all-pervasive that many people find it hard to imagine life without it.

That was evident from a recent minor party leaders’ debate on TV3’s The Nation, in which ACT leader Jamie Whyte was treated as some sort of freak - or possibly even a traitor - for daring to suggest that New Zealanders don’t need constant intervention from the state in every aspect of their lives. This is clearly a dangerous heresy.

Only days later, Dr Whyte got a similar going-over from Guyon Espiner on Morning Report. It seems we’ve all become so accustomed to the smothering influence of Big Government – even to the extent of deciding whether we should have children – that we can’t comprehend any alternative.

Dr Whyte, of course, believes the state should get out of our lives, save for a few essential functions. It’s an idea worth exploring, but you get the impression that for a lot of people, it’s just too scary.

 

TV3: too clever for its own good

You sometimes have to  wonder about TV3's news judgment.

There's  a place for aggressive reporting that pushes the boundaries, and Patrick Gower has become the pacesetter in the parliamentary press gallery - at least in the electronic media. But some of the channel's decisions lately have been downright silly.

It greatly overplayed its exclusive on Kim Dotcom's ownership of a signed copy of Mein Kampf. (Memo to TV3: "exclusive" doesn't necessarily mean it should lead the bulletin.) More recently, it excitedly led with a non-story about Justice Minister Judith Collins firing a pistol in circumstances which, under what could only be called a nitpicking interpretation of the gun laws, might have been technically illegal (but even if it was, didn't amount to a hill of beans). TV3 should note that for all the hype, neither of these stories led anywhere. They were largely ignored by other media, and rightly so.

Now the channel has suffered the unusual humiliation of being rebuked from the bench of the High Court and banned from further camera coverage of the John Banks trial - this, for showing footage last week of Banks absent-mindedly doing something nauseating with ear-wax while listening to the evidence against him.

What was the purpose of this shot? It was utterly gratuitous. It shed no light on the case, it was unnecessarily humiliating to Banks and it was repulsive to look at. Small wonder that Justice Edwin Wylie gave TV3 a whack around the ears.

There's not necessarily any disgrace in a media organisation upsetting the judiciary. In some circumstances it can be a badge of honour. But in this instance, the judge's indignation was entirely justified.

It was a case of TV3 once again getting a bit too clever for its own good. To the channel's credit, TV3 lawyer Clare Bradley, who was evidently party to the decision to screen the shot, now admits it was a bad judgment call.

Amen to that. Perhaps the channel will now dial back its propensity for shock and overkill.

When juvenile hero worship turns downright bizarre

I accept that some grown men (and, much more rarely, women) indulge in a form of hero worship. The object of their adoration may be a sports star, a musician, an actor or even a politician. This mystifies me, because I would have thought that hero worship is something you grow out of as you mature; but I accept that it exists, and that it’s essentially harmless.

What I struggle to accept is fawning admiration of flawed people, as if self-inflicted flaws are worthy of our approval. This is a particularly common phenomenon in writing about rock music, where musicians are frequently revered not so much for the quality of their music as for the quantity of alcohol and drugs they have ingested or for their dysfunctional personalities. Lou Reed, who was virtually deified by the rock press when he died last year, was a case in point.

There is another example in yesterday’s edition of Fairfax Media’s Your Weekend section, in which Philip Matthews reviews the book Gutter Black, by the late Dave McArtney, of the 1970s Auckland rock band Hello Sailor.

Matthews is clearly enthralled by McArtney’s drug habit. He devotes a big chunk of his review to it, writing with awe about the role drugs played in the band. The title of Hello Sailor’s song Blue Lady, Matthews tells us, was a coded junkie tribute to a favourite syringe. The band lived in a house they called Mandrax Mansion, after a sedative that was fashionable at the time.

When they went to Los Angeles hoping to crack the American market (a fanciful hope, I would have thought – the band was world-famous in Ponsonby but was hardly noticed outside New Zealand), McArtney survived an overdose. His bandmate Graham Brazier (who was convicted last year on charges of assault against his former and current partners, though we hear very little about that) took heroin at Disneyland. The band spent much of its time in LA partying at their rented house in the Hollywood Hills, which may help explain why their mission was a failure (although, on the other hand, the reason may simply have been that they weren’t as good as they thought they were).

Matthews excitedly relates all this in the apparent belief that readers will be as impressed as he was by the band’s dissolute lifestyle. The great irony is that he reports McArtney’s fondness for the needle ultimately led to his death at 62 from liver cancer. You almost get the impression this is something Matthews thinks we should all aspire to.  

Of course the fact that McArtney died as a result of his drug habit only serves to enhance his mystique in the eyes of people like Matthews. The prospect of canonisation into the sainthood of rock music is enormously enhanced by premature death.

This blog post will almost certainly result in me being accused of making a callous attack on a dead man. It is nothing of the sort. McArtney was a stalwart of the Auckland music scene and was obviously much loved. I was saddened to read of his death. But the fact that his illness was attributed to his past drug use makes it all the more bizarre that Matthews should romanticise his lifestyle. He should grow up.

 

Mr Peters comes to Masterton

Winston Peters cops it with both barrels in today’s Dominion Post. In his weekly column, former TV3 political editor Duncan Garner launches a withering attack on the New Zealand First leader and concludes that the public is tired of his games. On the same page, Dom Post political editor Tracy Watkins says New Zealand First is a clock that has been slowly winding down since the 1996 election. (Remember? That was the pantomime when Peters kept the country in political limbo for six weeks while he went fishing.)

Both commentators are especially critical of Peters’ vicious and cowardly counter-attack against his former protégé Brendan Horan, whom he likened – under parliamentary privilege – to the serial child abuser Jimmy Savile.

It all tends to reinforce a perception that Peters is losing his mojo. Certainly there has been a marked change in the tone of media coverage of him in recent weeks, starting with his failure to deliver on the promise of a killer blow to Judith Collins.  The press gallery was almost unanimous in its scorn for him over that, which leads me to wonder whether they’ve finally had enough of his bluster and bullshit.

But before those of us who abhor Peters’ political style get too excited, hang on a minute. Yesterday he held a public meeting in Masterton, and out of curiosity I went along. The room was packed long before the guest of honour arrived. I counted more than 100 heads, nearly all of them grey. The meeting was chaired by octogenarian New Zealand First stalwart George Groombridge, who deferentially referred to Peters as "the Boss".

For Peters, the 2014 election campaign is already underway. He spoke, mostly without notes, for nearly an hour. It was vintage Peters, delivered in that characteristic hoarse staccato bark, and it pushed all the usual buttons.

We have a government that grovels to wealthy foreign interests. Immigrants are placing huge demands on housing and infrastructure, which the rest of us (meaning real New Zealanders) have to pay for. Australian banks are robbing us blind. The Budget was a big con; the only good thing in it was the extension of free doctors’ visits for children, and we all know where Bill English got that idea. Honest, hard-working Kiwis in places like the Wairarapa are being forced to subsidise the Auckland super-city, which even Aucklanders didn’t want. We wouldn’t sleep at night if we knew how few police cars were on the job (and this after New Zealand First heroically pushed Helen Clark’s government into increasing police numbers by 1000). Wealthy Chinese donors to the National Party who can’t even speak English are demanding that we change our immigration policy (“Just try that in Beijing!”). Twenty-one of Barfoot and Thompson’s 25 top real estate agents are Asian. We’re an economic colony of China and Australia. John Key was the only person in New Zealand who didn’t know in advance of the raid on the Dotcom mansion, and he’s the minister in charge of the SIS and GSCB. The free market is a total nonsense. Cameron Slater is a dysfunctional twit who knows nothing about politics. (Journalists were repeatedly scorned, but only Slater was paid the compliment of being mentioned by name.) The most profitable investment in New Zealand is a donation to the National Party. Chardonnay-drinking clowns have nothing but contempt for the concerns of ordinary people – “but we’ve got news for them, and it’s all bad”. And so on, and so on. You get the picture.

Peters repeatedly invoked memories of a kinder, fairer and more prosperous New Zealand, where everyone pulled their weight and was duly rewarded for their hard work. There were nostalgic references to Keith Holyoake, Robert Muldoon (his own political mentor, whose imprint remains all too visible) and even to the Seddon government of the 1890s.

Underneath all the bluster was a plaintive, and politically potent, question: how could we allow that legacy to be snatched away from us? It was a message that resonated sharply with his audience. And while it would be easy to dismiss the speech as classic populism, it was hard not to feel a grudging admiration for Peters’ ability to zero in on the National-led government’s weak points. He certainly has no shortage to choose from.

What was conspicuously missing (not that anyone brought it up at question time) was any coherent prescription for tackling the issues Peters sees bedevilling New Zealand. But then, Peters was always, by instinct, an opposition politician, triumphantly finding fault with everyone else while shirking the hard work required to come up with workable policy solutions.

Not that this mattered to his adoring audience yesterday. They hung on his every word, nodding and murmuring in agreement and laughing on cue even when he said things that weren’t funny.

Now here’s the thing. Most of the people who turned out to hear Peters in Masterton probably wouldn’t have bothered to read the comments of Duncan Garner and Tracy Watkins in the paper this morning; and if they had, they would have dismissed it as the posturing of a Wellington elite that’s out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. Winston has told them so, many times.

And while it’s easy to deride New Zealand First supporters as frightened and bewildered (I’ve done so myself), they all have a vote. And nothing I saw or heard yesterday gave me any reason to believe they won’t all be giving it to Peters – which is why it would be premature to say he’s lost it, no matter how much we might cherish the thought.

Footnote: Immigration was a dominant theme of Peters’ speech, but I couldn’t help noting that the first four people to get to their feet at question time had British accents. Obviously immigration from the UK is fine; it’s that other lot we don’t want.

Why I almost feel sorry for Sterling and Clarkson

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, May 21.)

You will have heard of Donald Sterling. He’s the owner – though probably not for much longer – of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team.

Sterling sounds a thoroughly unpleasant man. Last month, sports website TMZ released a leaked recording of a private conversation in which the multimillionaire team owner rebuked a close female friend (I’m being delicate in my terminology here) for associating with black sports stars.

The “friend”, V Stiviano, had posted a picture of herself with basketball legend Magic Johnson on the social media site Instagram. Sterling told her it bothered him that she wanted to broadcast the fact that she was associating with black people.

“You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want,” Sterling said. “The little I ask you is ... not to bring them to my games.”

The subsequent uproar reached as far as the White House. Within three days, Adam Silver, the commissar who runs the National Basketball Association (his official title is commissioner, but I think commissar is more appropriate in this context), announced he had banned Sterling from the sport for life, fined him $2.5 million and ordered him to sell the team.

Silver seems to be a man with unlimited powers. I’m surprised Sterling escaped the death penalty, given that it still applies in California.

Okay, you might say; the man is a grotesque old racist. No argument about that. Then why do I feel he’s been wronged?

The reason is that we have crossed an alarming new threshold.

Freedom of speech is already under sustained attack throughout the Western world. In many countries, governments and judges are on a mission to outlaw something called hate speech, which can broadly be defined as the expression of opinions that somebody – usually a member of a supposedly oppressed minority – finds objectionable and wants prohibited.

But to the best of my knowledge, the proponents of hate speech laws have limited their attention – so far, anyway – to statements made or opinions expressed in public. What’s different about the Sterling case is that it concerns something said in private, and to someone he presumably trusted not to repeat it.

This takes things to a new level. There is probably not a person on earth who would want to be held publicly accountable for statements that have been made in private, in the reasonable expectation that their privacy will be respected. But this is what happened to Sterling.

Where will this lead? Does it mean, I wonder, that any high-profile figure is now fair game? Is there no escape from the speech and thought police? Will all prominent people now fret that their private reflections will be surreptitiously recorded on a smartphone and released to the media? Whatever happened to notions of privacy?

As it happens, Sterling’s private beliefs are of little consequence. If he were a politician or public servant with influence over public policy, they might be a matter of legitimate concern. But they are simply the private mutterings of a bigoted old man. To put it bluntly, they are none of the public’s business. 

Seen in this light, the furore was grotesquely disproportionate.

The Sterling affair raises other important questions. What about Stiviano’s role, for example? Assuming it was she who leaked the recording, she committed a flagrant breach of trust and privacy.

On the face of it, her moral compass is every bit as defective as Sterling’s. Yet Stiviano has largely escaped public scrutiny. Presumably an octogenarian real estate tycoon presented a much more satisfying target.

Consider this, too. Even the most loathsome criminals – mass murderers, serial rapists, terrorists – are entitled to a defence. But not Sterling. Commissar Silver effectively tried and sentenced him ex parte, to use a legal term – in other words, without Sterling being given a chance to speak for himself.

That Silver was able unilaterally to fine Sterling $2.5 million, ban him from the sport for life and force him to sell his team, all without any hearing or opportunity for Sterling to speak for himself, is a shocking denial of natural justice.

I’m astonished there wasn’t an outcry. If I were an American, this abuse of power would bother me far more than Sterling’s private thoughts about whether it was right for Stiviano to be photographed with black men.

There are parallels here with the confected outrage that erupted over Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson’s alleged use of the forbidden N-word in the old “eeny, meeny, miney, moe” children’s rhyme.

Like Sterling, Clarkson is not an easy man to feel sorry for. He’s a blowhard who uses humour - admittedly with some skill - to mock and denigrate.  But the uproar over his supposed verbal indiscretion was grossly inflated by tabloid media that love nothing more than to bring down a celebrity.

The alleged offending word was so mumbled as to be indistinct. Clarkson himself denied using it. In any case the footage was never broadcast, which should have been the end of the story. Nonetheless, the tape was leaked – by whom, and for what reason, isn’t clear – and in the ensuing firestorm, Clarkson was condemned as a racist.

Even if he did use the word, does that make him racist? Insensitive, perhaps, and possibly mischievous, given Clarkson’s fondness for juvenile naughty-boy antics – but racist? We all used that rhyme innocently as children. It didn’t make racists out of us.

Clarkson may be a loudmouth, but racism is a far darker thing. As with the Sterling affair, all sense of proportion was lost. We are all too busy taking offence.  

And then there’s Teuila Blakely – another victim of instant moral outrage, although one more deserving of our sympathy than either of the aforementioned men.

A video showing the Shortland Street actress engaging in a sex act with rugby league player Konrad Hurrell was leaked, apparently without Blakeley’s knowledge, on social media.

What Blakely and Hurrell did was a private act by consenting adults. No offence was committed and no one was harmed. But that didn’t prevent a wave of vicious abuse directed at Blakeley, including death threats and exhortations to kill herself. You can always rely on social media to bring out the lynch mob.

Even more bizarrely, a $5000 fine was imposed on Hurrell by his rugby league club for supposedly bringing the game into disrepute.

You’ve got to laugh at that last bit. Driving an opposing player into the ground head first and breaking his neck – now that’s what I call bringing rugby league into disrepute. But the player who did that recently got off with a seven-week ban. It’s good to know the rugby league authorities have got their priorities right.

The public couldn't see the smoke, let alone the gun

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 16.)

FOR WEEKS, political news was dominated by allegations swirling around Justice Minister Judith Collins. Night after night, it was the lead item on television news bulletins.

Press Gallery journalists closed in, sensing a kill. As the breathless disclosures accumulated, it was easy to get the impression the government was on the ropes.

Then came the reality check. Two opinion polls indicate the government hasn’t taken the big hit that might have been expected. In fact the results suggest the public was pretty relaxed about the whole affair.

A Colmar Brunton poll for TVNZ asked respondents whether Collins should remain a minister or resign. They were split 42 per cent each way – hardly a resounding condemnation.

A question about whether her behaviour would damage the government drew a slightly stronger response, but hardly a fatal one. Fifty per cent said it was damaging and 42 per cent thought it would make no difference.

On the crucial question of whether the Collins affair would be a factor in deciding who to vote for, the overwhelming response – from 75 per cent – was a ho-hum “not much”.

Those findings were reinforced by a Stuff.co.nz/Ipsos poll which showed that National’s support has remained steady while Labour, which might have been expected to benefit handsomely from the furore, has slipped.

Should we be surprised? Probably not. The poll results simply confirm that issues which excite journalists and political junkies often barely register with the wider populace.

Press Gallery journalists live and breathe politics. They immerse themselves in detail – who said what, to whom and when, or who was at dinner and why – and go to great lengths to join the dots. But the public hasn’t the time or patience for all the minutiae and often fails to see what the fuss is about.

Maurice Williamson was different. The public got that. A ministerial phone call to a senior police officer about a wealthy Chinese donor to the National Party could look nothing but dodgy.

But the issues in the Collins affair were harder to explain. The public struggled to see the smoke, let alone the gun.

Call it the bubble effect. Britain has the Westminster bubble, America the Washington bubble and New Zealand the Wellington bubble. The things that fascinate people inside the bubble – and that means journalists as well as politicians – often fail to resonate with those on the outside.

* * *

TWITTER is the perfect protest platform for the social media era. It requires zero effort, no sacrifice and no risk, yet still imparts a warm glow of self-righteousness.

Millions worldwide have tweeted their outrage at the terrorist group Boko Haram’s abduction of 300 Nigerian schoolgirls. The fact that weeks had passed before they thought to do this, and the abductors had long melted into the bush, didn’t seem to matter. Until it’s happened on Twitter, it hasn’t happened.

Neither did it matter that the sad-looking African girl whose photo was tweeted in support of the protest campaign wasn’t from Nigeria and had nothing to do with the abduction.

Who cares whether the photo was relevant or authentic, when the only purpose is to stir shallow sentiment? One African girl is as good as the next.

And what will the vacuous outpourings on Twitter actually achieve? As an article in this paper pointed out, a video aimed at bringing the murderous Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony to justice went viral on YouTube two years ago.

Countless millions saw it. For a few days, Kony was world public enemy No 1. Then social media found something else to get excited about, and moved on. As it does.

Needless to say, nothing happened. Kony is still at liberty. People using Twitter and Facebook have the concentration span of a goldfish. They need to be constantly fed with new distractions.

There was a time when the act of protesting required people to put themselves on the line. It meant marching in the streets or manning picket lines, and risking arrest or abuse. But in the Twitter age, when it can be done instantly and in comfort, it’s all about narcissistic self-gratification.

* * *

A MAN BASHES his partner’s 2-year-old son so savagely that half his brain dies, turning into what an expert medical witness calls a watery mush. The basher is sentenced to 3½ years in jail.

On the same day, a former teacher is sentenced on charges of sexual grooming, unlawful sexual connection with girls under 16, offering to supply methamphetamine and trying to flee the country on a false passport. He gets 9½ years.

The two men were sentenced last week. Who was the more monstrous offender? The New Zealand public would have no trouble deciding, even if judges can’t.

This could get interesting

It seems people around Parliament are asking questions about former TVNZ political editor Linda Clark’s supposed conflict of interest in appearing on TV3’s The Nation as a political commentator while also (reportedly) giving media training to Labour leader David Cunliffe.

I welcome this, but only if it widens into a broader inquiry into the murky ethics of political journalists, interviewers and commentators selling their services to politicians on the side. I fail to see why Clark should be singled out for scrutiny.

If what I hear is correct, quite a few high-profile media figures have nice little undisclosed earners providing advice to politicians. In fact it’s an odd quirk of New Zealand politics that many of the commentators provided with media platforms for their supposedly objective views are hopelessly compromised.

If it’s fair to unmask Clark for grazing on both sides of the fence, then let’s complete the job by exposing all the others who are on the take. This could get very interesting.