To use a cliche, it's a work in progress

(A speech given to the annual conference of Agcarm, Wellington, July 23.)

I want to talk to you today in very broad terms about how journalism and the news media are changing. Because they are changing at an unprecedented rate and we don’t yet know where that change is going to lead.

Some of the changes are positive, some less so. I’ll work through those changes as I go.

What’s important to grasp is that these changes don’t concern only the people employed in the media. They affect everyone in this room, because democracy depends to a very large extent on how well journalists and the media do their job.

Democracy can’t function without an informed public, which is why the work of journalists – whether we like it or not – is vital to us all.

Let me start by taking you back to 1968, the year I entered journalism as a cadet reporter for the Evening Post.

Back then, all four major cities still had an evening newspaper. The impact of television was just starting to bite. People were still in the habit of coming home at night and reading the paper.

Newspapers were conservative, complacent and prosperous. Classified advertising generated rivers of gold – remember those Saturday papers full of To Let ads and Cars for Sale?

Newspapers were passive gatherers of news. Reporters attended press conferences, covered courts and council meetings, turned news releases into stories and made daily calls on the police, the fire brigade and the ambulance service.

As a cadet reporter on the Evening Post, I was one of a team that covered every case that came before the Wellington Magistrate’s Court. On busy mornings we would occupy the entire press bench – as many as seven or eight of us, under the supervision of an older reporter named Fran Kitching, better known to some of you as Fran Wilde. (Fran of course later became a cabinet minister and mayor of Wellington, and now chairs the Greater Wellington Regional Council.)

If some of those court stories took days or even weeks to get into the paper, it didn’t matter. There was no great sense of urgency.

You couldn’t operate like that now. There are so many people coming before the courts that newspapers have to pick and choose which cases they cover.

On a typical day I’d guess the Dominion Post has two, maybe three, reporters to keep an eye on all the courts in Wellington, from the District Court right up to the Supreme Court, which means a lot of court news goes unreported.

In Britain, the journalist Nick Davies wrote last year that you’re just as likely to see a zebra in court as you are to see a reporter. It’s not quite that bad here. But it does raise quite serious questions if you believe, as I do, that press coverage of the courts is vital in an open society and can serve as a check on the abuse of judicial power. Police have told me it can also be an effective anti-crime tool, as there’s still an element of public shame in being named in a court story, especially in a smaller community where everyone knows you.

Looking back, things were pretty cruisy for journalists in the sixties, though we mightn’t have thought so at the time. Reporters didn’t do a lot of digging and they didn’t see it as their job to make life uncomfortable for politicians.

What we now call investigative journalism was still several years away. The phrase wouldn’t enter the popular vocabulary until after Watergate in 1972.

The newspaper business then was highly risk-averse. It was rare for a newspaper, other than the weekly scandal-monger Truth, to consult lawyers over potentially unsafe stories (and Truth had the advantage that it was owned by the country’s leading defamation lawyer, one Jimmy Dunn).

As a general rule, stories that were likely to cause trouble just didn’t get written. The mainstream press enjoyed healthy sales figures and saw no need to win readers by taking risks.

The only time the stops were pulled out was when a major news story broke unexpectedly, such as the Tangiwai disaster in 1953 or the sinking of the Wahine in 1968.

By way of a digression, I still remember the optimistic front-page headline on the first edition of the Evening Post that came out on the day the Wahine sank. It said: Wahine founders in harbour; one dead?

The Evening Post in those days was unique in that it devoted only half of the front page to news; the bottom half was classified advertising. The owners, Blundell Brothers, dithered for years over whether to join the popular trend and put news on the front page instead of classifieds, and eventually they decided on an extraordinary compromise: news on the top half, ads on the bottom.

I seem to recall that even when the Wahine sank, the ads stayed on page one for at least the first couple of editions before it was decided the news that day was so important it deserved to occupy the whole page.

Tragedies aside, the most testing event for a newspaper back then was likely to be a royal tour, which required all available resources to be mobilised.

I remember that when the Queen toured New Zealand in 1970, virtually every reporter and photographer on the Dominion – where I had moved by then – was assigned to cover her every move. That gives you some idea of how news values, to say nothing of cultural attitudes, have changed in the ensuing four decades.

That was the era when every city had its own journalists’ pub. The Journalists Union newspaper even listed the pubs you could go to in every city if you wanted to meet other journos.

In Wellington it was the Britannia in Willis St, which was conveniently close to both the Dominion and the Evening Post. Drinking was an essential part of the journalism culture, partly because there was so much spare time in which to do it.

By two o’clock on a typical afternoon the public bar of the Brit was filling up with Evening Post journalists who were finished for the day. Many of them were still there at six, by which time journalists from the Dom were drifting in – though I have to say there wasn’t a great deal of fraternal goodwill between the two papers and they tended to drink in separate groups.

Newspapers back then didn’t have to be aggressive in pursuit of news because there was little competitive pressure to beat anyone else. There was no city where two newspapers went head to head, by which I mean two morning or two evening papers directly competing with each other. It was all very cosy.

As a general rule, newspapers didn’t like to rock the boat. They were respectful and even subservient toward politicians, and they were conservative in their editorial stances.

There were just one or two editors back then who were prepared to break ranks and take risks. The late Frank Haden, then editor of the Sunday Times, upset his proprietors by opposing the Vietnam War and publishing pictures of a topless Carmen.

At the Sunday News, Alan Hitchens caused a sensation before the 1972 general election by urging his readers to vote Labour. It was rare for a New Zealand paper to suggest that its readers vote a particular way at all, let alone that they vote Labour. And to make things worse Alan put it on the front-page under the banner headline, Big Norman, You’re Our Man!.

Television news was still finding its feet then. In fact broadcasting generally – radio as well as TV – was still struggling to liberate itself from political control.

Right through until the end of the Muldoon era, state-employed broadcasting journalists were subject to a high degree of political interference and intimidation. Even print journalists were subjected to harassment in the Muldoon era, as Tom Scott would be happy to tell you.

I mention all this just to demonstrate how radically the whole media scene has changed in the ensuing decades.

The first casualty of the changing environment was the metropolitan evening newspaper. New Zealanders who once came home from work and read the paper now came home and watched TV.

Dunedin lost its evening paper in the 1970s. Christchurch went the same way in the following decade and it was Auckland’s turn in the early 90s. Even the ground-breaking investigative journalism of Pat Booth and his team, who uncovered the Mr Asia saga, wasn’t enough to save the Auckland Star.

The last survivor was the Evening Post, which valiantly held on until its merger with the Dominion in 2002.

But enough about dead newspapers. I’d like to talk now about the ones that have survived, and how they’ve changed.

Survival of the fittest applies in journalism just as it does anywhere else. Newspapers today are far more aggressive, far more competitive, far more prepared to push the envelope and take risks.

The Dominion – or the Dominion Post as it is now – provides a good case study. In the early 1980s the Dom was a sick puppy, under-resourced and demoralised. The owners, INL, realised the paper needed urgent remedial attention.

To do this they hired a new editor from Britain, Geoff Baylis. Now Geoff came from a newspaper environment where journalists weren’t accustomed to being intimidated by politicians, and he made it clear quite early in the piece that he was prepared to stand up to Robert Muldoon. In fact Muldoon once told an interviewer that one of his greatest regrets was allowing Geoff into the country. The irony was that the government had given INL a special dispensation to do it, on the basis that there was no New Zealand journalist available with Geoff’s credentials.

Alan Burnet, who was managing director of INL at the time, told me a couple of years ago that Muldoon once rang him and demanded that he fire Baylis. Burnet politely but firmly told him where to go. Muldoon, who was nothing if not vindictive, later vetoed Alan Burnet’s name when it was put forward for a knighthood. Join the dots.

Now I invite you to fast-forward and look at some of the stories the Dominion Post has published in more recent years under the editorship of Tim Pankhurst.

Donna Awatere Huata, Clint Rickards and Tony Veitch wouldn’t need any reminding about the impact the Dominion Post has had on their lives. These were sensational stories that carried a high level of risk, but all were based on verifiable facts and in every case there was a compelling public interest in knowing about them. The fact that not one of those people sued the paper speaks for itself. Truth is a complete defence under defamation law.

A newspaper like The Dominion Post has lawyers on call around the clock. On big investigative stories, a lawyer will virtually take up residence in the office and work through all the material with the reporter. The paper must have run up eye-watering legal bills on the stories I’ve just mentioned, and there were others too.

The Dom Post was ahead of the pack in exposing secret donations to New Zealand First and it took a massive risk publishing confidential police transcripts about the so-called Terror Raids in the Urewera. Tim Pankhurst ended up before the High Court on a contempt charge, which he successfully defended.

My point is that stories like these were virtually unheard of 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Newspapers just didn’t have the balls to tackle them.

There were some honourable and courageous exceptions. I think you have to give credit to Pat Booth and his coverage of the Arthur Allan Thomas case for the Auckland Star in the 1970s for demonstrating that newspapers had a role in exposing wrongdoing and injustice when official checks and balances failed.

Another measure of how things have changed is that 40 years ago, most reporters would have had only a vague idea of what their paper’s daily sales were.

These days if you walk into the newsroom at the Dominion Post you see yesterday’s billboard prominently displayed along with a figure showing how many copies of that day’s paper were sold. Journalists who once thought it was beneath their dignity to worry about sales now realise their livelihoods depend on people continuing to buy the paper.

Ironically free-to-air TV, which killed off so many evening papers, is now fighting to retain its own news audience, because the past decade has seen the biggest information revolution since the invention of the printing press.

Information has never been more abundant, immediate or accessible. Thanks to the Net and satellite TV we can pick and choose our information sources as never before. There’s so much out there, and so freely available, that it’s been compared with trying to drink from a firehose.

The implications of this are huge and I’d like to discuss just a few.

In broad terms, the information revolution represents a profound shift of power from the so-called gatekeepers to the consumer. I think that’s a plus, though with caveats that I’ll come to shortly.

Who are – or were – these gatekeepers? First and foremost they were politicians, who have now been forced to accept that they can’t control information the way they used to.

Prime ministers were once able to keep the media under control, effectively telling them only what they wanted them to know. But as the late David Lange perceptively remarked as long ago as 1994, the global reach of information now is such that voters often know as much as the politicians. That makes it far less likely that the politicians are going to pull the wool over our eyes. In western democracies we have had never had a better-informed, more savvy public. That’s a plus.

The other main set of gatekeepers was the so-called mainstream media, or “old” media. By that I mean traditional news outlets such as newspapers, TV channels and radio stations. They controlled the news supply and could pick and choose what to publish. But the worldwide web has enabled the news consumer to cut out the middleman and select his or her own sources of information.

Is this also a plus? In most respects, I think the answer is yes. You can hardly have too much information. The digital information revolution has empowered people to seek out their own information and opinions, which is a good thing. And of course the blogosphere has introduced millions – in fact tens of millions – of new voices to the democratic ferment.

The old-style shapers of public opinion, and I include newspaper columnists like me, no longer have the field to themselves. That’s a good thing too, even if much of the debate on the blogosphere is of pretty poor quality.

If I have one misgiving about this revolution, it’s that there is a risk people will gravitate toward websites and blogs that reinforce their own world views.

One great advantage of the mainstream newspaper is that it presents its readers with a wide range of information and opinion. If you’re a hard-core conservative, it does you no harm to pick up your morning paper and read a left-wing opinion piece. And of course the same applies in reverse.

It might make you choke on your toast but it might also make you recognise that there’s more than one way of looking at things. So in that respect I think an objective mainstream press such as we have in New Zealand is good for democracy.

The danger is that people going to the worldwide web will go to sites and blogs that mirror their own views, and therefore won’t be exposed to a wide range of information and opinion that might challenge their preconceptions. A lot of the blogs I access, both of the left and right, are wildly one-eyed and extremely intolerant of opposing views. Is that good for democracy? I’m not so sure.

I should mention here that the mainstream media has many critics, mostly from the left, who can’t wait to dance on its grave. They are gripped by a paranoid fantasy in which the media is controlled by ruthless press barons who have engaged in a global conspiracy to keep people in the dark. In fact I think the “old” media, by and large, have been very conscientious about exercising their responsibilities fairly, accurately and impartially. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the mainstream media are now facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Most of you will be aware that in America, long-established papers are closing. Others have lost circulation and shed staff. There are similar trends in Britain, though not as severe, and newspapers are experiencing lean times here too.

To some extent this can be attributed to the usual cyclical swings of capitalism, exacerbated in some cases by corporate folly and greed. But there’s no doubt the effects have been magnified by the drift to the Internet, both of readers and of advertising.

Where this is going to lead is anyone’s guess, but in the meantime newspapers are scrambling to find a solution to the crisis. In some cases I suspect they may be digging themselves into a bigger hole.

Some editors have decided the solution is to reach out to a broader audience – by which I mean a younger, predominantly female demographic – by carrying more news about celebrities, entertainment and lifestyles. Soft journalism, latte journalism; lightweight personality stories and endless articles about fashion and food.

My fear is that in doing so, they run the risk of alienating their most loyal core of readers – who tend to be older people – without necessarily picking up enough new ones to make the exercise worthwhile. Of course I could be wrong.

Most papers have also been panicked into putting all their content onto the Net where it can be accessed free. The corollary of this, which is so obvious it hardly needs to be pointed out, is that if people can access content free on the Net, then why should they buy the paper? How long newspaper proprietors will tolerate this suicidal tactic remains to be seen. I note that Rupert Murdoch, who’s usually one or two steps ahead of the pack, is now saying it’s time the news aggregators on the Web stopped getting a free ride.

Some newspapers are holding up reasonably well. Provincial papers seem to be doing a better job of hanging on to their readers than papers in the bigger centres.

I think the reason for that is clear: no one is seriously competing with these papers in terms of local news, which is their lifeblood. The same is true of free community newspapers, which have been a growth sector in the industry. What people in smaller cities and towns most want to know is what’s happening in their own communities. These are the sectors of the media that are least threatened by the Net, because local news, parish-pump news, isn’t seen as sexy.

Now let me talk about some of the other ways in which the media industry is different from when I started.

Journalists have changed. They are younger, better educated and more earnest. They don’t drink as much and I suspect they don’t have as much fun, though they might dispute that.

Today’s typical journalist has a university degree, which was extremely rare when I started out.

Most have also acquired a specialist journalism qualification, which is more or less mandatory now, though whether that makes them better journalists is a moot point. Some of us older hands lament the fact that journalism no longer seems to have room for the mongrel – the roughie who often sneaked into journalism through the back door, but had a natural talent for writing and could sniff out a good story 10 kilometres away.

Warren Berryman, founder of the Independent, was one of those – he was a former crayfish poacher. Another was Kevin Sinclair OBE, who as a teenager was steered into a messenger’s job at the Evening Post by a kindly probation officer in the Wellington Magistrate’s Court, where Kevin was appearing on a vandalism charge. Kevin went on to become a legend in one of the more colourful outposts of English-language journalism, Hong Kong.

When I look around a newsroom these days, it seems there’s no one over 40. All the old journalists have crawled off to die somewhere.

This is not entirely a bad thing because in the old days, many newsrooms operated on a hierarchical basis largely dictated by age rather than ability. The Evening Post seemed full of grey heads when I started there.

But there’s a downside too, and that’s the loss of institutional memory. There’s a place for the crusty old sub-editor who knows what year the first Labour government was elected, and how many tests the All Blacks lost in South Africa in 1949, and who can save smart-arse younger journalists from embarrassing mistakes.

Journalists today are required to have a much broader range of skills. In my day all you needed was a notebook, a pen and a basic grasp of shorthand – a very basic grasp in my case. Those are still necessary tools but now reporters must be multiskilled.

They are trained to shoot video so they can upload it on to their newspaper’s website, and to tape interviews so that anyone reading their story in the paper and wanting to know more can access the audio. My worry is that with all this emphasis on technical skills, the ability to tell a story well – which is still at the very heart of journalism – might be downgraded.

It might be just an old curmudgeon talking, but I seem to see fewer cleverly written stories than I used to.

I’m running out of time now so I just want to skim over several remaining points.

One of the worrying trends in journalism is the increasing tendency for fact and comment to become blurred.

In political journalism in particular, fact and comment is becoming so tangled that it’s often hard to tell where one stops and the other starts. TV3 political editor Duncan Garner, in particular, insists on giving us his own spin on everything.

I contrast this with Brent Edwards, Radio New Zealand’s political editor, who has strong political views of his own but manages to keep them out of his work.

What’s happening is that the model of the journalist as passive observer is under threat. Many journalists, particularly in the political sphere, now see themselves as active players in the political process.

They see it as part of their function to make things happen. That’s not my idea of how democracy is to supposed to work. Journalists are unelected and unaccountable to anyone but their bosses; it’s a perversion of the democratic model for them to be actively influencing the political process.

We’re also seeing a gradual drift toward advocacy journalism, in which journalists push issues, take sides and get directly involved in the controversies they’re covering.

I believe it was a big mistake for John Campbell and his crew to attend the after-trial party for David Bain. It just looked too chummy for comfort.

But you can see why things like this happen: Campbell Live is in a ratings war with Close Up and they’ll doing almost anything to get a competitive advantage, even to the point of appearing to compromise their editorial integrity.

And just in case you think I’m picking on TV3, I notice when I watch Q+A on Sunday mornings that Paul Holmes isn’t content merely to ask questions. He seems to think we’re interested in knowing what he thinks about whatever issue is under examination.

Speaking of political interviews brings me back to the relationship between journalists and politicians, which has changed radically in the course of my working life.

We’re no longer deferential to people in elected office. We’re not content to accept the occasional bone thrown in our direction in the form of a press statement or formal press conference. Journalists consider it their right to accost politicians at all times and in all places and thrust a microphone in their faces.

Remarkably, politicians seem to accept this as the price of democracy. There is now an almost masochistic quality to the relationship between politicians and the media. They virtually queue up for the pleasure of being disembowelled on national television, because media coverage is the oxygen of politics.

Is this a good thing? Well, yes and no. Politicians have to be made accountable to the public, and I would never suggest that journalists should kowtow to politicians the way they used to. But we seem to have swung from one extreme to another.

Now, this thing called citizen journalism. This is what some people fancifully think will replace the current journalism model in the brave new world.

The idea of citizen journalism is that anyone with a camera, a tape recorder and access to the Net can be a journalist; you actually don’t need trained professionals at all.

It’s true that in some situations, citizen journalism can be invaluable. Much of the TV footage from the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 was taken by amateurs, and the same was true of the recent riots in Tehran. But it’s a huge leap to suggest that citizen journalism can take the place of mainstream journalism.

Citizen journalism is anything-goes journalism, because its practitioners operate outside the ethical framework that professional journalists work within. There’s no obligation on citizen journalists to be even-handed or to get things right; there’s not even a company you can sue if a citizen journalist defames you.

We’ve recently seen problems created by amateurs making wild statements in the blogosphere about the Clayton Weatherston trial. Unlike properly trained journalists they don’t know the laws of contempt and probably didn’t care that they might prejudice the outcome of the trial. At best, citizen journalism is only ever going to be an adjunct – though potentially a significant adjunct – to mainstream journalism.

Now, television news: TV news once had some concern for editorial integrity but I’m afraid that in the race to win the ratings, that’s largely gone by the board. TV news is dictated by visuals; if you can’t create pictures out of it, it doesn’t make the cut. The problem is that this often hampers rather than enhances good journalism. Because everything hangs on the visuals, the cogent facts of the story often get obscured. The story is tailored to fit the images rather than vice versa.

It’s not helped by the fact that TV editors believe viewers have the concentration span of a goldfish and you risk losing them if any item runs longer than two minutes, unless it happens to be about Michael Jackson or the new GI Joe movie.

And it’s helped even less by the fact that most TV reporters these days are attractive young women who seem to have been chosen more for their looks than their ability. I thought it said everything about the prevailing values at TVNZ that when it laid off several journalists earlier this year, one of the casualties was Owen Poland – to my mind one of their most capable reporters. Sorry, Owen – too old, wrong sex.

The other thing about TV news and current affairs is that it’s often less about reporting the news than about evoking an emotional response from the viewer. Stories that ooze sentiment always get a good run and reporters are clearly briefed to tug on the viewers’ heartstrings at every opportunity. Getting people to break down in tears on screen is a surefire winner – I used to be convinced that the producer of the Holmes show got a generous bonus every time someone started weeping.

So if I could sum up what I’ve just said.

There are some very good things happening: journalism is more aggressive and fearless. We’ve got access to more information than at any previous time in human history. We can pick and choose to an extent that was unimaginable only 10 years ago. And I should also stress that here in New Zealand, we have one of the freest news media environments in the world – freer even than the United States, Britain or Australia, according to most surveys.

And the not so good things? More froth and less substance. Too much journalism focuses on conflict and personalities or goes for the cheap emotional angle. We’re doing a worse job than we used to in covering boring but important nuts-and-bolts stuff like parliamentary debates, select committee hearings and council meetings.

Journalistic objectivity is under attack by left wing academics. Newspapers are struggling and I’m not confident that the blogosphere will provide an adequate replacement. At the moment it’s a hubbub of partisan, conflicting voices.

So it’s a mixed picture: some good things, some bad. The news media are going through a period of unprecedented upheaval. It’s a work in progress, to use a cliché, and it’s too early to know how it will play out. Thank you for your attention.

Dirty words in the teachers' lexicon

(Published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, July 22.)

Who controls the education system?

It’s a question that arises again in the light of the fuss over the proposed introduction of numeracy and literacy standards in primary schools.

The primary school principals’ organisation, alarmed that the introduction of mandatory standards might lead to the publication of “league tables” which would enable parents to make comparisons between schools, got up on its hind legs and threatened a boycott.

In the education sector, “league tables” are dirty words. Teachers’ organisations have fought tooth and nail to prevent reforms that might better equip parents to make judgments about which school is best for their children. We are expected to simply trust the teachers.

Other dirty words in the teachers’ lexicon include “bulk funding”, “performance pay” and “education vouchers”, mention of any one of which is guaranteed to make teachers’ union leaders look as if they have just sucked a lemon.

All of the above concepts offend the entrenched notion that teachers should be exempted from the performance measurements and competitive pressures that other industry and professional groups are subject to. Any time one of these ideas is mentioned, teachers’ organisations put up a smokescreen of largely spurious arguments against them.

Bulk funding of schools is opposed because … well, because it would give schools a degree of autonomy and flexibility, particularly in crucial areas such as individual teachers’ pay, which the teachers’ unions find threatening. And why do they find it threatening? Because it would undermine the highly centralised education model that enables teacher unions such as the PPTA to wield such power.

Once the centralised system starts to unravel, so does union control. That explains why the PPTA fought a determined campaign of sabotage and intimidation against bulk funding during the term of the Bolger National Government.

A compliant Labour-led government obligingly shelved bulk funding after winning power in 1999. With a caucus packed with former teachers, Labour couldn’t help but be sympathetic to the education unions, which is why they have been relatively docile in recent years. But the primary school principals’ rebellion over National’s intention to introduce standards may be a sign that the truce is over.

So what’s the objection to standards, then? Well, they are said to be too narrow. “Summative assessment of data from two just two learning areas from young children has limitations,” according to one teacher’s letter to a paper, couched in the fuzzy jargon familiar to generations of despairing parents.

In fact most parents are probably smart enough to realise that literacy and numeracy standards are not the only means by which to judge a school’s performance. But there’s no getting around the fact that they are the two most vital aspects of a child’s education and therefore the ones parents most want to know about.

“League tables”, which would enable parents to assess schools’ performance against national standards, are opposed because they would supposedly disadvantage already under-privileged schools. Teachers complain that publication of league tables would encourage parents to withdraw children from poorly performing schools and thus accelerate the schools’ decline.

Better, then, to keep parents in the dark about schools’ performance and deny them the right to make an informed choice about which school will best serve their children’s needs – or so the primary principals seem to argue.

And don’t dare suggest that the publication of league tables might actually have a beneficial effect by forcing under-performing schools to make a choice between lifting their game or losing more of their pupils. That’s far too radical for the teachers’ organisations to comprehend.

Government-issued education vouchers, which would enable parents to “buy” education from the school of their choice, are vehemently opposed for similar reasons – they would shift power from teachers and education bureaucrats to parents. Rather than being forced to put up with inferior schools, parents could withdraw their children and take them elsewhere. We can’t have that, can we?

That simple word “choice”, which we take for granted in so many other facets of our lives, is denied parents when it comes to their children’s education. (That is, unless they have the money to buy a house within the zone of an elite state school such as Auckland Boys’ Grammar – but don’t get me started on the illogic of zoning, which has produced consequences that are the very opposite of those envisaged by its architects).

I also mentioned performance pay. This offends the sacred notion of collegiality, which seems to hold that one teacher should never be paid more than another of equivalent qualifications and experience, regardless of how good they are.

I can’t think of any other profession or industry in which this rule applies, but teachers insist they are different. Why? Well, they just are.

What collegiality means in practice is that indifferent, lazy or bad teachers are protected while good, conscientious teachers are denied proper recognition and reward. This may help explain why there are so few talented male teachers; the career prospects just aren’t there.

The big question hanging over all these thwarted ideas for education reform is the one posed at the start of this column: who controls the education system?

This is much more than an industrial question; it is about respect for the democratic process. Voters give governments a mandate to effect change, and organisations which set out to forestall that change – as the teachers’ organisations have done in the past, and are now showing signs of doing again – are effectively giving voters the fingers.

Whether we will see a re-emergence of the bolshie, arrogant PPTA that we remember from the 1990s remains to be seen. The current union president, Kate Gainsford, is a personable and intelligent woman who bears little resemblance to strident PPTA leaders of the past such as Martin Cooney, so perhaps there will be a rational policy debate rather than the bullying intransigence of old.

As the people who have to make the system work, teachers are entitled to a say in how education is run. Governments owe it to them not just to listen to their concerns, but where they are valid – as teachers’ concerns sometimes are – to try and allay them. But ultimately, teachers need to pull their heads in and accept they are the paid servants of the system, not its masters.

We'll know who to blame when the wowser backlash hits

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, July 21.)

THERE could be few more unlovely cultural confluences than the one where boy racers meet binge drinking.

On its own, either phenomenon is ugly. Together they make a vile and lethal combination, as we saw in Invercargill a couple of weeks ago when a hotted-up Honda Civic slammed into a wall and three teenage lives were extinguished. According to the police, that made six boy-racer deaths so far this year in Southland alone.

Was alcohol a factor in the Invercargill crash? Well, the TV cameras showed what looked like a crushed Speight's carton in the boot of the wrecked car, and we know that alcohol occupies a place of honour in boy-racer culture.

This was confirmed by the young men’s tribute pages – replete with moronic phrases like “party on” and “go hard” – and by the inevitable roadside shrine at the scene of the crash, where friends placed bottles of alcopop and Tui in a perverse homage to the dead.

But these people are mere kids. Immaturity provides them with an excuse for indulging in maudlin sentimentality that romanticises sudden, violent death. Not so excusable is the role of adults in this continuing tragedy.

By that I mean people like the family spokesman at one of the Invercargill funeral services who wore a Tui hat and told the mourners to “keep cruising” and “party hard” before leading the congregation in a drinking song. What a clot.

Other adults may like to think they are safely distanced from the mayhem, but they cannot be entirely absolved of responsibility. Breweries and their advertising agencies continue to promote the booze culture while sheltering behind sanctimonious corporate statements promoting responsible drinking.

If I were on the board of Dominion Breweries, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable about Tui’s celebrated status among boy racers and binge drinkers.

Then there was the liquor entrepreneur Michael Erceg. When the tributes flowed following his death in a helicopter crash in 2005, people politely overlooked the fact that Erceg was behind the explosive growth in the sale of alcopops – “ready to drink” mixes that marketed alcohol in a form irresistible to teenage drinkers, and none more so than the insensible young women whom the police regularly scoop up from the footpaths in Courtenay Place.

Also culpable are well-meaning parents who look on while their children mark their passage to adulthood at 21st birthday parties by downing a yard glass, a tradition invariably accompanied by violent vomiting (and in one tragic case a couple of years ago, sudden death).

I could go on. There are idiot publicans who still think it’s a good idea to offer 50 crates of beer as a prize in a pub competition, and rugby players who promise to shout their teammates a keg if they win a big game.

Clearly, some people in the liquor business are not good at reading the signs. Largely because of public alarm over binge-drinking and alcohol-fuelled crime, the wowser lobby – which never really went away – is now collectively rubbing its hands at the prospect of the liquor laws being tightened up again after five decades of gradual liberalisation.

Those who favoured sensible relaxation of the liquor laws, in the belief it would ultimately lead to more civilised drinking, can only their shake their heads.

No one should be in any doubt about where the blame should lie if the current review of the liquor laws gives effect to a public backlash against excessive consumption. The promoters of the drink-to-get-pissed culture were too thick or too greedy, or both, to see it coming.

* * *

THIS Friday, July 24, is Montana Poetry Day, which seems an appropriate time to ask: what is poetry?

Much of what passes for contemporary poetry isn’t poetry at all. It’s prose, chopped up and arranged so as to suggest some sort of poetic structure. Punctuational gimmickry – which often means no punctuation at all – completes the artifice.

If it reads just like prose once you remove the contrived line breaks, then it isn’t poetry. Amy Brooke, a Nelson writer who frequently locks horns with the self-ordained priesthood that rules New Zealand’s incestuous literary scene, calls it “post-poetry”.

It’s an ironic twist that Sam Hunt’s mongrel verse, which once drove literary purists into a frenzy of denunciation, now looks positively Shakespearean alongside that of some more recent arrivals on the scene.

In the 1960s, “poets” hijacked rock and roll and almost succeeded in giving it a bad name. (“Hi, I’m Bob Dylan, and I’m taking this plane to a place where only people with PhDs in modern literature will pretend to know what my songs are about.”) Now they’re trying to do the same with poetry itself.

* * *

AMONG ALL the initiatives suggested for combating obesity, has anyone considered good old-fashioned shame?

Here’s an idea: install compulsory weighbridges at the entrances to all McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC outlets. The moment an overweight person sets foot on the threshold, klaxon alarms could sound and the words “Obese! Obese!” could start flashing in bright red lights.

No one’s freedom would be curtailed, since the customer would still be allowed to proceed to the counter to place his or her order. But what’s the bet they would slink away in shame, perhaps to enrol at the nearest gym.

The last Stand-Off

I’m a few days late with this, but I think it’s worth recording nonetheless.

Monday’s Dominion Post reproduced parts of The Dominion of July 22, 1969 – a special issue marking the first moon landing.

That 1969 edition contained several erudite, reflective pieces, including one contributed by the late Kim Keane, who for many years had been the Dom’s greatly respected chief reporter, and another by the then editor, Jack Kelleher. Jack died only a few months ago.

But the one I particularly want to comment on was the typically eloquent column written by W P (Bill) Reeves, whose Stand-Off column (subtitled “A radical view”) was an institution in the Dom for more than two decades.

Bill died in Rotorua on July 14, only days before that commemorative publication appeared.

Himself a former editor of the Dom from 1964 till 1968, Bill was dumped in favour of Jack Kelleher because Rupert Murdoch, who had a controlling interest in the paper, thought Jack was more attuned to tabloid-style journalism. At that stage the Dom was about to go tabloid. Murdoch thought because tabloid papers worked in Australia, they would work here. He was wrong, and the Dom reverted to broadsheet format in 1972.

It was characteristic of Bill Reeves that he bore Murdoch no ill will. In fact when he graciously agreed to provide a memoir for the centennial history of the Dom that I put together in 2007, he wrote kindly of Murdoch. A gentlemanly left-winger (a diminishing species these days), Bill admired Murdoch’s drive and newspaperman’s instincts and wrote that the Australian never interfered in his attempts to give the traditionally conservative Dom a more liberal image. In fact he recalled that Murdoch himself was something of a left-winger then.

After moving from the editor’s office to a back room, Bill devoted himself to crafting stylish and insightful editorials and Stand-Off columns, continuing the latter until well after his retirement in the 1980s.

It was a further measure of his equanimity that he appeared to bear me no ill will for curtailing his column when I was editor. Looking back it strikes me as having been a breathtakingly impudent action on my part, given Bill’s distinguished history with the paper.

A tall and imposing man, but quiet and modest, Bill had a formidable range of friends and contacts from every point of the political compass. It was typical of him that he didn’t want an obituary written, but his good friend Phil Campbell, editor of the Rotorua Review, quite rightly disregarded his instructions. I understand Phil’s tribute to Bill will appear in the Dom Post in due course.

That's news to me, Judy

I never cared much for Judy Bailey’s cloying style as a newsreader, but I think I care for her even less as a children’s rights activist.

Yesterday’s Dominion Post announced that Bailey is the spokeswoman for a well-funded coalition (Plunket, Barnardos, Save the Children etc) campaigning for a “Yes” vote in the anti-smacking referendum. She was reported as saying: “This whole debate was never about light smacking or good parental correction, it was all about the parents who choose to beat their children with jug cords or bits of four-by-two.”

Pardon me? Among supporters of the referendum I know, the referendum against the repeal of Section 59 was never about the right of parents to beat their children with jug cords or bits of four-by-two. Responsible parents who support the referendum find that type of “discipline” just as abhorrent as Bailey does.

The referendum’s backers may have shot themselves in both feet by stupidly appearing to back the right of a bullying father to shove his young son to the ground repeatedly because he didn’t want to play rugby, but that doesn’t alter the core issue: that is, the right of conscientious, caring parents to give children a sharp, corrective smack when they are behaving badly or dangerously, as generations of good parents have done without traumatising or physically harming anyone.

To say the referendum is about the right of parents to use unreasonable force is at best naïve or obtuse, at worst a gross misrepresentation.

The irony is that violent parents who think it’s okay to whack their kids with jug cords or bits of four-by-two will go on doing exactly that, because they don’t care what the law says. We know that, because brutal and sometimes fatal assaults on children have continued unabated, just as opponents of the Bradford Bill said they would.

Jeez, is this the best we can do?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, July 8.)

We New Zealanders must be a dull, unimaginative lot.

I came to this gloomy conclusion after reading yet another newspaper story (they must be counted in their thousands now) recalling how the former All Black prop Keith Murdoch was sent home in disgrace after biffing a hotel security guard while on tour in Wales in 1972.

It’s now part of New Zealand folklore that Murdoch got off the plane in Australia and disappeared into the Outback, where he has since been sighted only rarely. I guess you could say he was banished, then vanished.

On the strength of this piffling episode, which in any other country wouldn’t even merit a footnote, Murdoch has become a full-blown New Zealand legend. What does this say about us?

America has Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid and John Dillinger. Australia has the rebellious Irishmen Peter Lalor, who led a famous goldminers’ uprising at the Eureka Stockade, and Ned Kelly. England has Robin Hood and Ronnie Biggs. But the best New Zealand can do – a collective sigh here please – is Keith Murdoch, a rugby player whose name means nothing to anyone outside the country (with the possible exception, that is, of the unfortunate Welshman who walked into Murdoch’s beefy fist 37 years ago).

The media’s fascination with Murdoch is as enduring as it is mystifying. Hardly a year goes by without his story being dusted off again.

If an altercation in a Cardiff hotel kitchen had terminated the stellar rugby career of a Kel Tremain, a Don Clarke or a George Nepia, the media’s obsession would have been slightly easier to understand, but Murdoch never achieved their exalted status. He only played three test matches, for heaven’s sake.

His main – indeed, only – claim to fame is that he threw a punch in a moment of anger and the team managers, under pressure from their snooty British hosts, decided they had to make an example of him. Then, for entirely understandable reasons, Murdoch decided he didn’t want to face the music at home.

Let’s have a reality check here. Murdoch didn’t kill the hotel security man or even leave him permanently maimed. His transgression looks almost laughably inoffensive compared with the predatory sexual exploits, drunken assaults and drug abuse that are now almost commonplace in some sporting codes. In terms of infamy, his behaviour pales into insignificance even alongside some of the on-field behaviour of more recent All Blacks.

Yet his story has assumed near-mythic proportions. Murdoch is portrayed as the enigmatic central figure in a real-life Shakespearean tragedy, when in reality he was probably just a shy sort of bloke – perhaps a bit ashamed and embarrassed too – who couldn’t cop the thought of facing a rugby-obsessed media back at home.

Maybe he thought he’d just lie low till the fuss died down and then re-enter the country unnoticed. Perhaps he then got a job in an Outback mining town where the money was a lot better than it was in Dunedin. Maybe he met someone. Who knows? But whatever happened, he hardly justifies the endless media attention.

The latest pretext for recycling the Murdoch story was that the Rugby Union was handing out commemorative caps to all living former All Blacks, and Murdoch was one of those eligible. I could envisage sports editors around the country crying as one: “Hey, let’s do another story about Murdoch.” Never mind that the story, which should never have been more than a nine-day wonder in the first place, is now so familiar it’s imprinted in our DNA.

Perhaps it’s a blokeish infatuation perpetuated by men of a certain age. Mercifully they’ll be nearing retirement now, so maybe we’ll get some relief from the Murdoch saga.

Periodically a New Zealand reporter makes a foray into the Australian desert to track Murdoch down. These quests have taken on something of the epic quality of Sir Henry Stanley’s search for the explorer David Livingstone in deepest, darkest Africa in the 19th century.

Some of these intrepid hacks have reported a brief sighting of the mystery man, much as one might recount an encounter with a yeti. Some even described a terse exchange of words. It all helps keep the legend alive.

It wouldn’t surprise me if we were told he was three metres tall, breathed flames and devoured live crocs for breakfast.

One high-profile rugby writer, seizing on the Rugby Union’s issue of the commemorative caps as an opportunity to recount a moment of glory, wrote a column in which he recalled having eyeballed Murdoch on the occasion of the former All Black’s appearance before a coroner’s inquiry into the death of a young Aborigine man at Tennant Creek in 2001. For a sports journalist, this was akin to touching the Holy Grail.

The rugby writer’s story was headlined “Time to leave Murdoch alone in peace”. It apparently didn’t occur to the journalist that the first step toward leaving Murdoch in peace would be to stop publishing his story over and over, ad nauseam.

The irony, of course, is that Murdoch himself could probably call a halt to the whole charade if he sat down and talked to a journalist. The spell might then be broken. Who knows, he might turn out to be a boring man with nothing interesting to say. But the fact that he has remained a determined recluse serves only to make him all the more fascinating. He is, in effect, the creator of his own myth.

You’d think, though, that we could find a more interesting person to elevate to folk-hero status. Even George Wilder, who of all living New Zealanders probably commands the most media curiosity after Murdoch (probably because, like Murdoch, he has resolutely shunned attention) has a stronger claim to a place in Kiwi folklore. At least Wilder’s spirited jailbreaking exploits were in keeping with the traditions of folk heroes who took on authority and defied the odds.

There’s surely an interesting thesis to be written about why a man like Murdoch should have become the centre of such a cult-like obsession. Perhaps it’s because he is seen as embodying the stoic, taciturn, man-alone quality that has been the theme of so much bleak New Zealand literature.

Whatever the explanation, it seems a damning indictment that we can’t find a more colourful and dynamic legend to celebrate.

Now the pasty-faced technology geeks have laser beams too

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, July 7.)

A LARGELY overlooked aspect of the digital technology revolution is that it has placed dangerous power in the hands of pasty-faced young men with bad skin, greasy hair and no friends.

In previous eras they were losers. They were the 90-pound weaklings who had sand kicked in their face at the beach and never got the girl (assuming they were interested in girls in the first place, which is a moot point).

Computers have been their salvation. Now they can sit in darkened rooms, surrounded by discarded fast-food packaging, and perpetrate mayhem just by tapping at their keyboards.

Hacking, spamming and phishing to their hearts’ content, these computer geeks can wreak enormous mischief without ever leaving their bedrooms. It’s a great way for socially inept nerds to get their own back on the world.

It’s safe, too. There’s no risk of getting shot, unlike those less intelligent dysfunctional young men who make the mistake of running amok with guns.

Now the technology geeks have added laser beams to their repertoire. Do they, I wonder, get some sort of sexual thrill from blinding aircraft pilots on their landing approaches, or does orgasm occur only if they actually bring the plane down? It would be interesting to know.

The only socially beneficial use I can think of for laser beams would involve shining them into the eyes of boy racers, but that’s too much to hope for.

* * *

IT WAS a big week for Maoridom. The $500 million Treelords settlement was finalised and the Government confirmed the proposed repeal of the Foreshore and Seabed Act. All of which raises a few questions:

■ Why do I get the feeling that the repeal of the F and S Act is driven not by principle or high-minded determination to resolve a legitimate grievance, but by pure political expediency: namely, the need for National to secure a long-term alliance with the Maori Party that will keep Labour out of office for the foreseeable future? (The taxpayer, of course, will pick up the tab.)

■ What faith can we have in the integrity of the process when it was carefully choreographed to the extent of appointing a “review panel” whose membership ensured the outcome was pretty much a foregone conclusion? Even Winston Peters gets some things right, and he’s right about this.

■ How much of the millions likely to be paid to Maori under the new foreshore and seabed arrangements will trickle down to dispossessed “urban” Maori? Or will the process be tightly controlled by the same tribal elites that have prospered from the big compensation deals of the past, thereby ensuring a large body of Maoridom remains out in the cold, potentially storing up further grievances for future governments to deal with? (This is a rhetorical question.)

■ When will we see Maori leaders shift their focus and energy from the pursuit of financial compensation for supposed historical grievances to the more urgent need for moral leadership of a people ravaged by crime, drugs, alcohol, violence and welfare dependency – or will that remain in the too-hard basket?

That’s a rhetorical question too.

* * *

THE FUSS over proposed national literacy and numeracy standards shows that teachers’ organisations still haven’t got over the quaint notion that the education system is all about them.

By petulantly threatening to withhold information about how schools perform under the proposed standards, the primary school principals’ organisation is placing the self-interest of teachers above the right of parents to exercise an informed choice about which school will best meet their children’s needs, and the right of the public at large to know whether schools are doing the job expected of them.

Teachers insist they are motivated only by concern for the quality of education and the need to ensure low-decile schools don’t suffer. In truth, they seem to have a deep-seated phobia about public scrutiny and accountability.

The very word “standards” is anathema to them because once standards are established, parents and the public have a means of making comparisons. And once comparisons can be made, parents will insist on the right to take their children out of poorly-performing schools and place them in better ones.

The fear-mongering teachers’ organisations insist that the publication of so-called “league tables” will create a winners-and-losers mentality and lead to non-performing schools closing as parents shift their kids elsewhere.

The corollary of this is that teachers think it’s okay for sub-standard schools to be protected by an official conspiracy of silence that prevents parents from finding out their children’s life prospects are being blighted by a lousy education.

* * *

AMID THE wave of righteous indignation that swept the country after French rugby player Mathieu Bastareaud was revealed to have invented his story about being attacked outside his Wellington hotel, it was possible to detect a large measure of relief as well. Because although the attack didn’t happen, everyone knows it very well could have.

New Zealand cities in the early hours of a Sunday morning are dangerous, violent places in which anyone walking alone is at risk. This explains why everyone – Kerry Prendergast and John Key included – was ready to believe Bastareaud’s story.

We got off the hook on this occasion because diligent police work revealed it was all a gigantic fib, but let’s not get up on our hind legs and protest that our international reputation as a safe country – a myth we desperately need to promote ahead of the 2011 Rugby World Cup – has been unfairly impugned.