Rules won't eliminate the most troubling bias

I have some sympathy for the public service union’s objection to TVNZ’s ban on political journalists belonging to parties. The ban strikes me as an over-reaction to an embarrassing failure that was partly of TVNZ’s own making. (I say “partly” because Shane Taurima’s underhand behaviour was obviously the primary contributing factor, despite his ludicrous claim to have been vindicated by the report of an independent panel.)

Gavin Ellis, former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, argued on today’s Morning Report that journalists have to make a choice between reporting on politics and belonging to a political party. Some political journalists (I think Colin James is one) go even further to ensure purity. They don’t vote.

But with all due respect to such principled views, I struggle to accept that being a political journalist necessarily requires you to neuter yourself as a citizen.

The crucial issue, surely, is how you do the job. Journalists should be judged on the fairness and impartiality of their reporting and commentary. It’s possible to be a party member and still be even-handed as a journalist.

I can think of relatively high-profile journalists who hold strong left-wing views in private but still manage to do their work with integrity, as the journalists’ code of ethics requires. There are also journalists and commentators (Paul Henry and John Campbell, for example) who quite openly lean one way or the other – but since their politics are no secret, viewers can decide for themselves how much weight to place on whatever they might say.

These are not the people who worry me. The ones we should really be concerned about are the journalists who hold pronounced political views that are not declared, but which permeate their reportage. There are a lot of them about, probably more than ever before, and they will never be controlled by arbitrary rules – such as TVNZ is now imposing – about declarations of political interest.

If such people have no qualms about exercising bias in their work, they are not going to feel compelled to fess up to the boss. They are answerable only to their own conscience, which isn’t much help if they don’t possess one.

 

A cosy chat with Aunty Marilyn

I believe our television current affairs interviewers do a pretty good job. Both The Nation and Q+A have been generally well served by interviewers who have been fair and even-handed, asked intelligent questions and been tough without indulging in gratuitous blood-letting. But I thought Q+A’s Susan Wood let herself down at the weekend.

Even before interviewing Professor Marilyn Waring, Wood gave us a taste of what to expect by describing Waring as “one of our most influential thinkers”. Really?

To be fair, Waring deserves everlasting credit for having the guts to stand up to Robert Muldoon, unlike the pusillanimous male lickspittles with whom he surrounded himself (and Q+A obligingly reminded us who some of them were by showing the famous footage of a clearly under-the-weather Muldoon, surrounded by his inner circle, announcing the 1984 snap election that Waring precipitated by announcing she would cross the floor).

But one of our most influential thinkers? Influential to whom, exactly?

Wood then proceeded to conduct possibly the softest interview I’ve seen on Q+A, nodding sympathetically throughout as Waring recited a drearily familiar left-wing litany of grievances. Essentially her message is that the much-touted rock star economy is an illusion and that New Zealanders are being hoodwinked by spinmeisters. (Subtext: we’re all too dumb to understand economics and need people like Waring, who objects to people putting an “ideological” spin on the subject – I particularly liked that bit and thought she did well to keep a straight face, given her own leanings– to explain what’s really going on.)

These are perfectly legitimate views, and I could even agree with Waring on one point: namely, that damage to our waterways means the public is at least partly bearing the cost of the dairying boom. But what I object to is that she sailed through the interview without once being challenged. Wood smiled benignly throughout, as if she were in the presence of a much-loved and slightly eccentric maiden aunt. That’s not a privilege extended to other guests on Q+A.

I could only conclude that Waring is one of Wood’s heroes. And that would be fair enough too, provided she didn’t make it so painfully obvious.

Let's see what the opinion polls say

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

It is possible to be intelligent and a buffoon. Maurice Williamson is such a man.

He can’t be a complete thicko, because despite what people think about politicians, it’s hard to remain an MP for 27 years – and hold down several ministerial posts – without a modicum of intellect.

Besides, Williamson has a degree in computer science and applied mathematics. 

But there is intelligence and there is intelligence. There is the type of intelligence that enables people to get degrees in subjects that, to lesser beings like me, sound impossibly pointy-headed.

Then there is the type of intelligence that enables people to make sound judgments. It’s the type of intelligence that stops you from making a dick of yourself. It’s the little voice in your head that says, “Whoa! Don’t go there”.

There doesn’t seem to be any such voice in Williamson’s head. That makes him accident-prone – the type of politician who makes party leaders and whips feel nervous.

From time to time throughout his career, his propensity for saying things that were probably better left unsaid has got him into bother.

In 2003 he broke ranks by criticising the performance of the then National Party leader, Bill English. He may have been saying what other National MPs were thinking, but others held their tongues while Williamson sounded off. Predictably, he found himself isolated and was suspended from the party caucus.

In 2010 he made a lame, if harmless, after-dinner joke that offended Muslims. A more prudent politician, knowing how touchy religious minorities can be, would have resisted the temptation to play for a cheap laugh – especially when he represents a multicultural electorate such as Pakuranga, whose population is nearly 30 per cent Asian.

But that’s the sort of man Williamson is. He’s the class clown. He gives the impression that he just can’t help himself.

And sometimes, it must be said, this works to his advantage – never more so than when he gave his famous speech in Parliament ridiculing opponents of same-sex marriage.

That made him an unlikely international hero overnight, but to me it just confirmed that he can’t suppress the urge to show off. 

There was a less endearing side to that speech. Many of Williamson’s own constituents and party supporters would have opposed the same-sex marriage bill, for sincere and deeply felt reasons. But to Williamson, they were fair game for derision and mockery.

To me, that speech exposed him not only as someone who loves to be the centre of attention, but as a bigot in reverse – a man contemptuous of anyone who didn’t share his progressive views, and happy to have fun at their expense.

Given this background, it was no great surprise that Williamson had to resign his ministerial portfolios last week after he caused deep embarrassment to his party.

This was more than just another case of him shooting his mouth off. This time there was a serious moral dimension to his lack of judgment.

It’s hard to believe he could see nothing wrong in phoning a senior police officer about domestic violence charges faced by the wealthy businessman Donghua Liu, on whose behalf he had previously lobbied for citizenship.  

A drover’s dog could see that it screamed impropriety. Either Williamson’s political blind spot is even bigger than we imagined – so big, in fact, as to block out his vision entirely – or there was something more disturbing going on.

In an interview with TV3’s John Campbell, Williamson tried to distance himself from Liu but failed wretchedly. It turned out that Liu, on Williamson’s suggestion, had bought the house next door to his own holiday home at Pauanui, on the Coromandel Peninsula – and that Williamson had done work on the house for him and even used it himself.

Added to the revelation that Liu’s citizenship ceremony took place in Williamson’s electorate office, this made nonsense of his protestations that they weren’t really friends.

And the most damning aspect of all, of course, is that a company associated with Liu made a $22,000 donation to the National Party. 

Now, think about this. In the latest annual global corruption survey conducted by Transparency International, New Zealand and Denmark were rated the world’s most corruption-free countries.

That’s a status we should be proud of, and determined to protect. It sharply distinguishes us from Australia, where corruption is rampant. But I wonder how much longer we will be able to make that claim.

No one has alleged Williamson is corrupt, but appearances matter. It smells – there’s no other word for it – when a cabinet minister lobbies on behalf of a wealthy immigrant businessman and a generous donation subsequently turns up in party coffers.

The odour intensifies when the minister phones the police about their investigations into criminal charges against the businessman, pointing out to them that he’s an important investor in New Zealand.

This comes on top of the John Banks/Kim Dotcom scandal and the suspicions swirling around Justice Minister Judith Collins and her association with the Chinese company Oravida. Those controversies, too, involve wealthy business interests and generous donations.

I don’t accept that Collins has crossed the line in the way Williamson did, although there’s persuasive evidence of a conflict of interest. But the truly worrying thing is that there’s a pattern here.

In other countries, it has long been accepted that money is paid for political favours. In China, especially, corruption is part of the business and political landscape.

Now it’s starting to look as if that’s the way we do business here, too; that the government’s door is open to whoever produces a fat chequebook. But that’s not the New Zealand way, and nor do we want it to be.

This year’s election is National’s to lose. It’s said that elections are lost by governments rather than won by oppositions, and this government is looking increasingly tainted by its murky associations with wealthy business interests.

Prime minister John Key promptly cut Williamson loose, but I wonder if public distaste has passed the point where it can be neatly managed with the usual damage control strategies. The next opinion polls may tell us.

The truly scary thing about Barraco Barner

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 2.)

 

HEARD OF Barraco Barner? Possibly not. But according to a 20-year-old English beautician, he’s the president of Britain and he really shouldn’t be getting involved in Ukraine’s problems.

Here, starkly laid bare, is the one of the downsides of social media and the digital information revolution. Instant opinion, zero knowledge.

Gemma Worrall from Blackpool wrote on Twitter that it was “scary” that “our president Barraco Barner” was tangling with Russia. But the truly scary thing is that someone who thought that Britain had a president, and that his name was Barraco Barner, could so innocently display their rank ignorance for the world to see.

Ms Worrall’s tweet shines a light on the existence of people whose view of the world is formed not from the printed word, but from whatever they happen to overhear.

If she had seen Barack Obama’s name in print, it’s unlikely she would have been so gravely misled as to how it’s spelled. But clearly, she’d only ever heard it – perhaps from customers chatting in the beauty parlour where she works, or from a TV set playing in the background.

Add to that Ms Worrall’s obvious belief that the world needed to hear her considered views on Barraco Barner and Russia, and you have a lethal confection of foolishness and conceit.

On the other hand, these things are self-correcting. As her gaffe was re-tweeted worldwide, thousands gleefully pounced, sneering at her error.

You might say this is a good thing. A mistake was promptly exposed and corrected. But in the process, another unlovely aspect of social media was laid bare: namely, the propensity for abuse and bullying by anonymous cowards.

Never in human history has it been easier for someone like Ms Worrall to express their thoughts so instantly or freely, without the moderating intervention of someone who might save them from embarrassment. And never has it been easier for others to join in mob nastiness.

You could argue that this is all very democratic. But is it progress?

* * *

 

I HAVE DOUBTS, too, about the explosion in online opinion, even when it’s written by people who know very well who Barack Obama is and how his name is spelled.

University of Otago political scientist Bryce Edwards collates online political comment every day and emails a summary to people who are interested in politics and curious to know what others are thinking.

What’s notable is that the volume increases with every week, to the point where it has become almost indigestible.

On Monday I counted 67 commentaries on the subject of Shane Jones’ departure from the Labour Party. These ranged from generally dispassionate comment in mainstream media to partisan rants by bloggers from both sides of the political fence. The previous Thursday, Edwards disseminated 51 commentaries on the same subject.

As political comment proliferates and the tone becomes more trenchant, so the temptation to tune out – or at least to exercise greater discretion about how much of it one bothers to read – increases. The law of diminishing returns kicks in.

In the early days of the Internet, someone cleverly said that trying to keep up with the flow of information it unleashed was like drinking from a fire hose. I don’t know what you’d compare it with now.

Having one’s say has never been easier, but the clamour and static sometimes threatens to overwhelm reasoned debate.

* * *

IN THIS paper a couple of weeks ago, Ross Bell of the Drug Foundation claimed New Zealanders are “comparatively high” users of both marijuana and alcohol.

In fact OECD figures for 2011 show per capita consumption of liquor in New Zealand was 9.5 litres. That’s exactly the OECD average – hardly something to get in a panic about, especially when you consider that some countries on the table, such as Turkey and Israel, have low levels of consumption because of religious factors.

New Zealand was placed 10^th of the 19 OECD countries for which statistics were available. More complete figures for 2009 show we drank less, per head, than comparable countries such as Britain and Australia.

What’s more, Ministry of Health figures show that drinking across all New Zealand age groups is in steady decline, and “binge drinking” by young people – contrary to what panic merchants like Mr Bell will tell you – has fallen off sharply over the past 10 years.

These facts appear not to matter to the neo-wowser lobby, which continues to promote the myth that we need to be protected from the machinations of wicked “booze barons”.

And there’s another thing. Just who are these booze barons? The term might have meant something in the 1930s, when men like Sir Ernest Davis controlled the brewing and hotel industries, but these days it’s just a crudely emotive propaganda tool.

 

What else did Kirk's biographer get wrong?

Browsing through a copy of the recently published biography The Mighty Totara: The Life and Times of Norman Kirk, by David Grant, I came across a reference to the late W P Reeves.

Wellington newspaper readers of a certain age will remember that name. Bill Reeves was editor of The Dominion from 1964 to 1968 and for more than two decades thereafter, wrote an eloquent weekly column called Stand-Off: A Radical View.

To my astonishment, Grant - a Wellington historian - describes Reeves in the book as "an unashamed right-winger". He couldn't be more wrong.

As I wrote in this blog at the time of Bill's death in 2009, he was a gentlemanly, left-leaning liberal of the old school. If Grant had taken the trouble to read his columns, he would have realised this.

I wonder whether he made the mistake of assuming that because The Dominion was founded by conservative business and professional men, and taken over in 1964 by a young Rupert Murdoch, anyone who wrote for it must have been, ipso facto, a reactionary. But Reeves certainly wasn't, and it's an insult to his memory to suggest he was.

In fact the Dom, paradoxically, was staffed in those days by journalists who generally tilted to the left. Even Murdoch himself was something of a liberal then.

It's worrying that an error like this will become part of the historical record. I can't help wondering what else Grant might have got wrong.

The quest for a better life

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, April 23.)

In his recently published autobiography, Don Brash reflects on the contribution made to many Western countries by minority groups that had been forced to leave their homelands because of discrimination.

He theorises that people under pressure are driven to succeed. Brash specifically mentions Huguenots, Quakers and Jews.

This resonated with me. My forebears on my father’s side were Huguenots – Protestants who fled France in the late 17^th century to escape persecution by the Catholic majority. They settled in tolerant Denmark, from where my grandfather emigrated to New Zealand in 1890.

Huguenots spread themselves around the world. They were among the earliest settlers in New York and also migrated in large numbers to the Cape of Good Hope – hence the frequency with which French surnames, such as du Plessis, de Villiers, Joubert and du Toit, occur in South Africa.

The Jewish diaspora, of course, is well known. Ashkenazi Jews, many of them driven out of central and eastern Europe by campaigns of harassment known as pogroms, have been hugely influential in business, science and the arts in the United States, in particular.

They have also punched well above their weight in New Zealand. One of our most energetic early premiers, Julius Vogel, was Jewish and Abraham Hort was a prominent figure in early Wellington. Woolf Fisher was a founder of Fisher and Paykel and Bendix Hallenstein established the retail chain that bears his name. In the brewing and retail industries, the Myers and Nathan families have been key players for generations.

Many New Zealand Jews were not only highly successful in business but were, and are, generous benefactors to the community. Whether this arises from a sense of gratitude to a country that offered them freedom from persecution, I couldn’t say.

But back to my own forebears. On my paternal grandmother’s side, I’m descended from Danes who left their homeland after the province of Schleswig, where they lived, was invaded by Prussia in 1864. The decisive battle of the Danish-Prussian war was fought around their farmhouse.

Rather than live under the rule of Germans who were bent on suppressing Danish language and culture, they emigrated in 1875 and settled in the Manawatu, where they prospered as farmers, timber millers and merchants.

My mother, meanwhile, came from an Irish Catholic background. Her forebears left Ireland in the 19th century for the same reason as millions of others: poverty, religious discrimination and subjection to British rule.

My wife’s family, too, came to New Zealand looking for a new life, free of the bitter experiences of the Old World.

Her Polish parents had been forcibly transported to Germany in 1944 and put to work in Nazi labour camps. They had witnessed indescribably shocking things and both lost their entire families.

When the war ended, Poland had effectively been taken over by Stalin’s Soviet Union and there was no point in returning. Some of their friends made the mistake of going back and were never heard from again.

Rendered stateless, my in-laws spent nearly 20 years looking for a country that would take them in. In the end it was New Zealand that welcomed them – this after friends had emigrated here and written to them saying what a wonderful place it was.

These family stories are probably not exceptional. We are a society of immigrants. The circumstances they left behind may have differed, but virtually everyone who came here – including, for all we know, the first Maori arrivals – was motivated by a desire for a better life.

It’s true of the Dalmatians who came here to dig kauri gum in the late 19^th century, it’s true of the Pacific Islanders who came here to work in car assembly plants in the 1960s, and it’s true of everyone who arrived in between. Why else would people uproot themselves and risk an uncertain future in a strange land?

Perhaps not all of them had experienced the acute pressure that Don Brash refers to in his book – the type that threatens people’s very identity and existence; but I believe they all came here determined to construct a better society than the ones they had left behind. And they probably included a disproportionate share of determined and aspirational people – risk-takers who were not prepared to go on living in unsatisfactory circumstances.

I think that helps explain the sort of society we have become. By world standards we are a liberal, tolerant and even idealistic society. That was confirmed in the recent international Social Progress Index which ranked New Zealand No 1 in the world – and most significantly, scored us highest on freedom, tolerance and inclusiveness.

We have not only left behind poverty, repression and lack of opportunity. Crucially, we seem also to have left behind old feuds and rivalries.

To backtrack momentarily, my wife’s family, although Catholic (like most Poles), was sponsored on arrival in New Zealand by a Methodist community in Palmerston North, which found them a house and helped them settle in. Even in the 1960s, when religious differences were far more pronounced than they are now, this seemed to signal that New Zealand was able to rise above petty sectarianism.

Mercifully, anti-semitism has never taken root here. It’s as if there’s an unstated understanding that the divisions of the Old World – whether it’s Jew versus Christian, Irish Catholic versus Irish Protestant, Croat versus Serb or whatever – have no place in the new one.

And long may it remain so. I reckon there should be an imaginary quarantine bin at airports where arriving immigrants discard old prejudices in the same way as they dispose of prohibited foodstuffs.

Of course we’re not perfect, as a contemptible Wellington footballer demonstrated recently when he made monkey noises at a rival player from Africa. But we should be proud that we’re an inclusive society, as has been shown by the way we’ve painlessly adapted to greatly increased inflows of Asian immigrants. We are now one of the world’s most cosmopolitan societies – a remarkable transformation that has been achieved with minimal fuss.

In an election year, when rival politicians will be doing their best to paint the blackest possible picture of their opponents, it does no harm to remind ourselves that this is actually the Most Civilised Little Country in the World.

 

The curious incident of the bird in the nighttime

I was watching the TV news last night when there was a loud bang from the adjoining dining room. It sounded like someone had thrown something hard against our French doors.

I went to investigate and there, just visible in the rapidly fading light, was a handsome morepork, flat on its back on our deck. It was a truly pathetic sight. Its legs were moving feebly but it appeared to be out cold and I wondered whether it had done its dash.

What do you do in these situations? I figured that the stress of being picked up and handled by a human being might only have hastened its demise. I convinced myself that the best course was to leave it in peace in the hope that it would recover of its own accord. Fortunately it wasn’t cold or wet outside.

While my wife kept an eye on it, I got on the phone to seek advice. My call to the Bird Rescue organisation in Auckland was diverted to the SPCA, where the call taker – obviously not an SPCA person, but someone merely manning the phones – said I’d have to contact my local branch. This I did, and got an after-hours cellphone number where there was no reply. I left a message.

Meanwhile things were happening on the deck. Somehow the poor bird had struggled to its feet. In the light of a torch (it was now completely dark) we could see it standing motionless, its head drooping forward. It looked desperately forlorn.

I went back to the computer and looked for advice on handling stunned birds. I quickly found what appeared to be an authoritative article from North America which said, essentially, that the first thing to do was ensure it was safe from predators such as cats. (This was my wife’s first thought anyway, which is why she stood vigil at the French doors.)

Beyond that, it suggested allowing time for the bird to recover on its own and if necessary, carefully picking it up, placing it in a box and leaving it in a safe place where its system could “reboot” (nice analogy).

By this time, probably half an hour had passed. Then a shout from the dining room announced that the bird had flown. Phew.

The incident left me pondering a couple of questions. The first was, why do moreporks seem so accident prone? I always assumed they were skilled night-time flyers, but I’ve already written here about the dead one we found tangled in the branches of our plum tree a couple of years ago. A man from DOC told me they sometimes get disoriented in stormy weather, but last night was calm. So why had one crashed headlong into the side of the house? It’s the sort of clumsiness you expect of kereru, not ruru.

The other thing I was left wondering was why we should be so moved by the fate of a mere bird. Nature kills creatures every day in all sorts of cruel ways. Having established what the noise was from the dining room, I could have rationalised that this was simply Darwinism in action and gone back to watching TV. But something caused my wife and I to fret about the morepork’s survival, and we were both hugely relieved when it appeared to recover.

Was it because a morepork, with its soft, mottled plumage, is a beautiful bird when you see one up close (a privilege we don't normally get)?  Was it because it’s a native bird, and therefore considered more precious than an introduced species? Was it because there’s something uniquely appealing about the call of the morepork in the nighttime, when everything else is silent?

Was it, in other words, mere dribbling sentiment? Intrinsically, a morepork’s life is no more special than that of a blackbird or a sparrow. Yet if a blackbird or a sparrow had knocked itself out on our deck, though I would have felt momentarily sorry, I would have been inclined to shrug my shoulders and leave it to its fate. What a capricious, emotional lot we human beings are.

Footnote: I’m pleased to say that someone from the Masterton SPCA returned our call soon after, and was as delighted as we were that the bird had flown.