I wrote this 11 years ago, and it's pretty much all still true

In a very distant past life I played bass guitar in the house band at Wellington’s fabled Majestic Cabaret. One of the two resident singers there was the gorgeous Marise McDonald. (The other was Alan Galbraith, later to become a record producer of note and now a maker of hand-crafted “cigar box” guitars.) Marise’s younger brother Nick was a journalist in Masterton to whom I devoted the following tribute in 2006, when I was providing occasional commentaries on Radio NZ’s Mediawatch. I dug it out a few days ago after Marise mentioned to me that she hadn’t heard it. Reading it again after all this time, it occurred to me that apart from the references to Palestinian elections and Don Brash’s speech to the Orewa Rotary Club, it’s all still true and relevant today. In fact if there’s going to be a revival of the newspaper industry, it could well start at the local level.

I recently attended the funeral of a journalist whose name would be unfamiliar to most of this programme’s listeners. He was Nick McDonald, managing editor of a community paper called the Wairarapa News, who died suddenly aged only 51.

His funeral took place in the Masterton Town Hall, and it was full. Journalists may rate poorly in public opinion surveys, but here was one who obviously enjoyed the respect and affection of his fellow citizens.

I had never met Nick but I attended his funeral because I admired a whimsical column he wrote called Take It Easy – a column that I thought deserved a bigger audience. On occasions I emailed him to say how much I had enjoyed his latest piece, and I always received a courteous reply.

But there were lots of things I didn’t know about Nick until I heard the tributes at his funeral service. I learned from these that he came to journalism relatively late in life after a few false starts in other careers. I learned that he started out by acquiring an old printing press and producing a news sheet for local rugby fans. That got him a part-time job writing feature stories for the Wairarapa Times-Age and eventually he became a full-time reporter, rising to become deputy chief reporter of that paper before taking over as editor of the Wairarapa News, a weekly paper that goes into virtually every home in the region.

I also learned that he had become a bit of an identity through his calls to a local talkback station, where he assumed the persona of a hard-case bucolic character named Larry and soon acquired a cult following.

He was obviously a man who made a deep impact on his local community, both as a personality and as a journalist.

Why am I telling you this? Because Nick McDonald represented a breed of journalists who deserve more recognition than they get. I refer to those who toil in the unglamorous field of community and suburban newspapers – those papers that turn up free in your letterbox every week.

For many young reporters, a stint on a community paper is a stepping stone to bigger things – a rite of passage that has to be endured before they have enough experience to step up to a bigger paper. But Nick appeared to have found his niche in community papers and seemed content doing what he was doing – reporting the generally unexciting community news of a provincial town, while providing himself with an outlet for his writing skills through his column. He was clearly capable of bigger things, but as far as I can tell he had no aspirations to wider fame. 

There is a temptation to regard journalists like Nick as being well down the food chain in the journalistic eco-system. They’re not national names and they don’t break sensational stories that destabilise governments. But no journalists are closer to their communities or their readers. And as much as we focus on the big national and international stories of the day, local news is often the news that impacts most directly on the reader. The local cinema that’s being restored; the street that’s being closed to traffic for a day to accommodate a bike race; the couple around the corner who’ve just celebrated their golden wedding; the heroic effort of the local rugby team against a vastly superior visiting side – no stories are closer to the daily lives of people in a small community.

It’s in the community paper that people read about people they know and institutions that they are intimately familiar with.

It’s these stories, in fact, that help create a sense of community. The early European settlers recognised this, which is why newspapers were often among the first businesses to be set up in newly established towns.

If anything, the role of the community journalist has taken on new importance as mainstream news outlets have withdrawn from the field of local news. Television has almost abandoned the local story, and under-resourced radio stations make only a token stab at local bulletins. Even daily newspapers no longer have the space or resources to cover the minutiae of community life that once filled their pages.

That leaves the field to the community paper – and here’s an interesting thing. While many daily newspapers struggle to maintain readers in the face of consumer indifference and aggressive competition from other news outlets, circulation figures show that most community papers have posted healthy gains in recent years.

What does this tell us? I think it confirms that for many people, news about an increase in local swimming pool fees, or an outbreak of vandalism in the local park, is at least as relevant to their daily lives as Orewa 3 or the Palestinian elections. I know of many people who don’t bother to pick up a daily paper or watch the TV news, but who will always skim through the community paper.

Pat Booth, arguably New Zealand’s most distinguished journalist, chose to spend the last few years of his career on suburban papers. He points out that in our bigger cities, some of these papers now engage in quite sharp, aggressive reporting on important local issues – and the politician who ignores them does so at his or her peril, given that they reach hundreds of thousands of readers.

Yet as Pat points out, it’s still the local paper that people will go to if they’ve lost their dog, or want to save a notable tree that the council has decreed must come down.

There’s no glamour in reporting these stories, but someone has to do it. And the job demands a particular type of journalist.

It has to be someone who doesn’t feel it’s demeaning to report what some would consider to be parish-pump news. To some extent it requires a suspension of ego, since the journalist must accept that he or she is never to be going to be famous and still less rich. And it helps if the journalist actually belongs to the community he or she is reporting and understands its concerns and interests.

Nick McDonald seems to have been that sort of person. By all accounts he was an everyman who loved his family, who enjoyed a beer and a punt on the horses, but who retained a sharp and perceptive eye for everything that was going on around him.

And here’s something else that I think is significant about Nick. He had no formal training in journalism, but learned by doing it. That was once the norm in the news media, before we became obsessed with tertiary courses and qualifications.

I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that such courses be dismantled and the qualifications abolished. But the question should be asked: was Nick poorer as a journalist for having no formal qualifications? Unquestionably I think the answer must be no. He reminded us that there is, in fact, no great mystique in journalism that can be learned only in lecture rooms. That’s a relatively recent misconception.

An inquiring mind, a degree of tenacity, a facility with words and a commitment to report honestly and impartially – these are some of the key attributes of a good journalist. Some journalists never acquire them, no matter what courses they complete, and some possess them naturally. Nick McDonald was clearly in the latter category, and I believe it’s essential that the news media always keeps the door open for roughies like him.

And I don’t use that word “roughies” in a pejorative sense, but in the horse racing sense – to indicate someone who’s a bit of an outsider. I’d like to think that Nick, as a keen student of the turf, would take that as a compliment.

"Most trusted" - except, perhaps, by many of their own people

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

I recently wrote a column in this space about the St John Ambulance organisation. It was prompted by a Consumer survey of emergency survival kits which rated the one marketed by St John as the worst of those tested. Ironically, it didn’t include a first aid kit.

I wondered how an organisation with St John’s proud history and reputation could have exposed itself to such public embarrassment, and I attempted to answer my own question by speculating that it had been corporatised – and in the process, become disconnected from its roots.

I pointed out that it wouldn’t be the only worthy organisation to have succumbed to the ruinous cult of managerialism, with all the attendant trappings of bloated hierarchical structures, marketing and PR flannel, expense accounts and flatulent corporate jargon.

The column prompted a mixed reaction – one predictable, the other unexpected.  I’ll deal with the predictable one first.

Andrew Boyd, St John’s central region general manager, wrote a defensive letter to the paper pointing out, among other things, that a St John first aid kit was available as an extra to the $200 “Emergency Grab Kit”.

This seemed to confirm the suggestion by a disgruntled St John veteran – one of many who contacted me – that the omission of a first aid kit, thus requiring that it be purchased separately, was a calculated commercial decision.

“Profit first!” as one commenter on the Stuff website put it. “St John are more interested in growing the wealth of the organisation.”

As someone else pointed out, the fact that St John sold first aid kits separately was no excuse for not including one in its emergency kit. This person also said you’d assume the kit would include emergency rations and water – but the bright sparks in the St John marketing department apparently didn’t think of that.

Boyd’s letter went on to say that “All St John products are regularly clinically assessed”. Not very rigorously, obviously, or the emergency kit wouldn’t have got such a shellacking from Consumer.

In fact Boyd went on to reveal the kit had been removed from sale while it was “re-evaluated”. What’s that, if not an admission that it was a crock?

But there’s a much bigger issue here, which brings me to the unexpected reaction.

My column uncorked a bottle of disenchantment, cynicism and distrust among the frontline rank and file who represent, for most New Zealanders, the public face of St John. One insider said I had described the organisation “to a T”.

Both in online comments and emails to me directly, St John volunteers expressed dismay at the way the organisation has changed: at the proliferation of middle managers and the layers of sclerotic bureaucracy that get in the way of good people trying to do something they love for the good of the community. These are all hallmarks of corporatisation.

Even more striking was a very real fear that internal critics of the organisation would face repercussions if they were identified. “St John is very touchy about bad publicity,” said one.

That’s another defining characteristic of corporatisation: an obsession with public image and a desperate desire to prevent negative messages getting out. Journalists dealing with corporate communications flunkies see this every day.

Boyd pointed out in his letter that St John was recently voted New Zealand’s Most Trusted Charity in a Reader’s Digest survey, but this didn’t impress one St John stalwart. “He appears to be basking in the ‘most trusted’ reputation when this is actually provided by those of us who work at the coalface – the people who work in the community who the public see and relate to,” this long-serving volunteer wrote in an email.

I received many other comments in a similar vein. One commenter on Stuff said St John had become top-heavy and added: “The petty attitude towards the coalface staff is what gets me. Management think they ARE St John.”

Either the St John hierarchy doesn’t know about this underbelly of discontent, or chooses to ignore it. Either way, something’s wrong.

Is it unfair to single St John out for criticism? Perhaps. Several people named other not-for-profit organisations that have been transformed by corporatisation, and not in a good way. One commenter suggested the problem lies partly with the demands imposed by charities legislation.

Perhaps St John just had the misfortune to come to public attention because of a spectacularly incompetent marketing exercise. But clearly its bosses have some repair work to do. 

The crisis in the print media - and what's at stake

My apologies to anyone who followed a link here expecting to see my Listener article on the crisis in the print media. After posting it, I realised I might be depriving the Listener of revenue from anyone wanting to read it behind their paywall. And since they paid for me to write the story, that wouldn't be fair, so I've taken it down.  You can see from this that I'm still getting to grips with the digital environment ...

The totalitarianism that taints public debate

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, May 31.)

Free speech is a cornerstone of democracy, but we can never take it for granted. On polarising issues, its limits are constantly tested.

Dr Lance O’Sullivan got up on stage at a Kaitaia screening of the controversial anti-vaccination documentary Vaxxed last week and told the audience that their attendance would cause babies to die.

O’Sullivan is a much admired doctor in Northland – he was New Zealander of the Year in 2014 – and an impassioned champion of vaccination programmes.

The makers of Vaxxed claim the vaccine that immunises children against measles, mumps and rubella can cause autism – a theory discredited by medical authorities. O’Sullivan wanted the audience to know that he has held dying children who would have survived had they been immunised.

He subsequently explained to John Campbell of Radio New Zealand that he was worried that immunisation rates in Northland were declining because of erroneous anti-vaccine propaganda – hence his decision to speak at the screening of Vaxxed.

When I first heard a radio report about the Kaitaia incident, I wondered whether O’Sullivan had stepped out of line. The report seemed to suggest that he wanted to prevent people seeing the film.

That would have been an unacceptable intrusion on freedom of expression. Section 14 of the Bill of Rights Act rightly protects the right to free speech, “including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form”.

The moment we start suppressing opinions, no matter how overwhelming the arguments against them may seem, we are on a slippery slope. The true test of free speech is our willingness to uphold the right of people to say things that we don’t like.

As the American political activist Noam Chomsky put it:“If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favour of free speech.” It's possibly the only thing Chomsky ever said that I agree with.

But when I watched a video of O’Sullivan speaking from the stage at Kaitaia, he didn’t appear to be making any attempt to stop people watching the film. He just wanted the audience to know that he believed Vaxxed was based on fraudulent misinformation. In other words he was asserting his own right to free speech.

He reportedly performed a haka, which seemed gratuitously confrontational, but otherwise he seemed calm and respectful. His statement to the audience that their presence would cause babies to die may have been a theatrical exaggeration, but you could see where he was coming from.

Unfortunately, O’Sullivan later spoiled it all by saying, in an interview with the Stuff website, that health professionals who reportedly attended the screening should be sacked.

This time he did step over the line. It’s not for O’Sullivan to decide what opinions other health professionals should hold, or be exposed to.

At this point, his legitimate espousal of the pro-immunisation viewpoint transmuted into an authoritarian insistence that anyone who didn’t fall into line with the officially “correct” view should be punished.

This is bullying. It produces the type of cowed, conformist groupthink that we see at its most extreme in places like North Korea.

In any case, who knows what motives other health professionals might have had for attending the screening? It could be argued that it’s their duty to acquaint themselves with false propaganda so that they are then in a better position to counter it when advising patients. “Know your enemy,” the saying goes. 

But the key point is this: liberal democracies are based on a contest of ideas, and we can have that contest only if competing ideas are publically weighed and debated. People can usually be trusted, when presented with the evidence, to figure out which argument is the correct one.

Stifling free speech by suggesting people should be sacked for deviating from the approved view is a denial of democracy and intellectual freedom. Unfortunately, however, it’s typical of the ideological totalitarianism that increasingly taints public debate – the more so since social media platforms made it easy to gang up on dissenters and intimidate them into silence.

We see this manifested in all sorts of ways. Climate change doubters are constantly shouted down on the spurious basis that “the science is settled” (it’s not). In Australia, family-owned brewery Coopers was recently subjected to an angry boycott simply because it sponsors the Bible Society, which opposes gay marriage.

Intolerance of dissent takes a variety of forms, but the ultimate aim is always the same: to silence the dissenters. I saw another example last week when Wellington’s Dominion Post published an article by former MP Gordon Copeland, a devout Christian and pro-lifer, urging that the principle of informed consent should be applied when a woman is considering an abortion - hardly a radical proposition when, as Copeland pointed out, informed consent has been entrenched in medical practice since the Cartwright inquiry of the 1980s.

It was a thoughtful, sympathetic and carefully argued piece that acknowledged the complexity of the abortion issue. But a letter in response, from an abortion rights activist, attacked Copeland’s article as a “paternalistic and sexist rant”. He had committed the ideological offence, as a male, of writing about abortion, which some feminists consider none of men’s business.

Whatever anyone thought about Copeland’s argument, there was no way his article could be described as a rant, which my dictionary defines as an angry tirade.

But the enforcers of ideological orthodoxy have little respect for semantic precision. If you want to disparage an opinion you don’t like, you label it a rant. We can add this to the repertoire of tactics used to deter anyone foolish enough to exercise their right of free expression. 

FOOTNOTE: This column was written before a hysterical row broke out in Australia over tennis legend Margaret Court's public opposition to same-sex marriage. Court's personal opinion, which she was perfectly entitled to express in a free society, was seen as so threatening to the prevailing ideology that people wanted her name removed from Melbourne's Margaret Court Arena. What next, I wonder - public book burnings?  

Accountability: frequently talked about, rarely practised

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 19.)

I’VE BEEN scratching my head trying to recall the number of times when someone in a position of responsibility in New Zealand fell on their sword in atonement for things that went badly wrong.

Conservation Minister Denis Marshall did it after the Cave Creek viewing platform collapse in 1995 and Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson stepped down in 2012 over Pike River – in both cases, after commissions of inquiry released highly critical reports.

Those two aside, I struggle to remember any minister, department head or company boss taking the rap for tragedies or adverse events that involved human failure.

Accountability, the long-established principle that someone should be seen to take responsibility for serious mistakes, is frequently talked about but rarely practised. 

When an inquiry panel released its report last week into the Havelock North water contamination scandal that caused 5000 people to get sick and was implicated in three deaths, Hastings mayor Lawrence Yule was quick to absolve himself of any fault. “I didn’t personally cause this contamination,” he said, and of course that’s true. But it’s not the point.

Yule doesn’t seem to grasp that someone in charge has to carry the can, if only symbolically. People expect it. It’s the price that has to be paid for keeping the system honest.

If no one ends up accepting personal responsibility and incurring a penalty, there’s little incentive to make sure it doesn’t happen again. That’s why, in the Westminster parliamentary system, ministers bear ultimate responsibility for their departments and are expected to resign if their subordinates fail seriously in their duty.

This applies even though the minister may have had no idea that things were going pear-shaped. The rationale behind the principle is that it puts pressure on ministers to ensure everyone’s doing their job properly.

That creates a culture of rigour and discipline that filters down through the system and keeps everyone on their toes.

At least that’s the theory, and the same principle applies in local government – which is why a lot of people in Havelock North, including the man interviewed on television who spent weeks in hospital and lost 11 kg as a result of bacterial infection, expected heads to roll following the e-coli outbreak. Faint hope, I’m afraid.

For Yule, the timing was unfortunate. My impression is that he has been a very good mayor, which is why voters have repeatedly returned him to office since he was first elected in 2001. But his attempt to distance himself from responsibility for the water contamination is unlikely to win him votes when he stands for National in the Tukituki electorate later this year.

To be fair, he’s not the only high-profile figure anxious to absolve himself of blame for things that have gone wrong on his watch. Former Ministry of Transport head Martin Matthews must have been squirming as the media revealed acutely embarrassing details of the audacious $725,000 fraud perpetrated by his ex-employee Joanne Harrison.

Judging by what’s been reported, there were multiple signs that Harrison was ripping off the ministry. Short of wearing a flashing neon sign saying “I am a crook”, she could hardly have been more brazen.

Yet far from having his career prospects damaged by the scandal, Matthews was rewarded with a promotion to the position of Auditor-General – a job in which he’s required to make sure no one misuses taxpayers’ money.

The irony is exquisite. Please, no one tell John Oliver, the irritatingly smug US-based TV host who loves nothing more than poking fun at quaint little New Zealand.

It’s not only in the public sector that bosses manage to evade responsibility for shocking failures. No one took the blame or paid a penalty for the tragic collapse of the CTV building in the 2011 Canterbury earthquake, despite damning evidence of professional dereliction.

Ditto the 2010 disaster at Pike River, where the families of the 29 dead miners still cry out for justice. Again there was clear evidence of multiple failures at multiple levels, but only token penalties were imposed.

Why does it seem so hard to establish culpability for catastrophic mistakes? One possible explanation is that as bureaucracies grow bigger and more amorphous, lines of accountability become blurred and blame becomes harder to sheet home.

Management structures sometimes seem designed to protect and insulate people. Responsibility gets diffused and the smoking gun, if there is one, is buried so deep that official inquiries never seem able to find it.

And in the meantime, public confidence in “the system” continues to be steadily eroded. 

  

Was the wrong person on trial?

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, May 17.)

I can’t help wondering whether the wrong person was on trial in the Whanganui District Court last week.

The name on the charge sheet was that of Kerry James “Chester” Borrows, who was tried on a charge of careless driving causing injury. But it seems to me there were other charges that could equally have been brought as a result of an incident that occurred during an anti-TPP protest in March last year – only not against Borrows.

For example, there’s a charge of disorderly behaviour and another of obstructing a public way.

I’m not a lawyer, but it’s surely not too much of a stretch to argue that a person deliberately stopping someone else going about their lawful business is acting contrary to public order, which is how my dictionary defines disorderly behaviour.

As for an alternative charge of obstructing a public way, anyone watching the TV news last week, and seeing exactly what happened in Whanganui on March 22 2016, could form their own conclusions.

Borrows, the National MP for Whanganui, was driving out the entrance of a motor inn with cabinet minister Paula Bennett in the front passenger seat. Several protesters were standing by the gate holding placards.

The TV camera showed two women stepping out into the path of the approaching car with the apparent intention of forcing it to stop. At least two police officers were standing by, but did nothing to intervene.

The car was moving very slowly. There was some dispute in court as to whether it actually stopped at one point, but it was certainly moving when it came into contact with the two women.

A police witness estimated the car’s speed as 1kmh – far slower than walking speed. Borrows testified that he feathered his brakes, as he was trained to do in similar situations during his 24 years as a police officer.

In any event, the protesters had ample time to get out of the way. They chose not to.

Let me repeat: they chose not to. They seemed to think their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership gave them the moral right to prevent two elected public officials going about their lawful business.

Predictably enough, the vehicle nosed into them. One of the women rather theatrically testified that she thought: “Oh my god, you’re going under, girl.” At this point the police on the scene were roused from their torpor and belatedly moved the women out of the way

It looked to me as if the protesters were playing a game of chicken. Even if they weren’t exactly willing the car to hit them, they seemed to be at least daring it to happen.

That impression was reinforced when one of them, having been pulled clear, shrieked in the direction of the TV crew: “Did anyone get that on camera?”

You could be excused for wondering whether she had set the situation up for exactly that purpose. The idea of public protests, after all, is to get noticed – and what better way to attract public attention than by being hit by a car driven by a government MP and carrying a high-profile minister?

You can imagine the posts on social media that would have followed: “Frail elderly woman mowed down in callous act of Tory brutality.”

Borrows testified that the reason he didn’t come to a complete halt was that a male protester at the scene had earlier made threats against Bennett on Facebook. To be precise, the protester had written: “See you shortly, bitch”, which surely tells you something about the calibre of some anti-TPP protesters.

He had also a posted a picture of a dildo with Bennett’s name on it. Borrows testified that he thought it was a wooden dildo which, if thrown at Bennett – as had happened to her fellow minister Steven Joyce at Waitangi only weeks before – could have done damage.

In acquitting Borrows, the judge cited the dildo threat as an extenuating factor. She accepted that he had valid reason to be concerned about Bennett’s comfort, if not safety.

So Borrows got off.  But why was he prosecuted in the first place? I’ve seen it suggested that the police proceeded with the charge against him for fear that they might otherwise be seen as going soft on a former cop – hardly a compelling reason.

And why did the police take no action against the protesters, whose injuries (they were both treated for soft tissue damage) were the direct result of their own provocative and arguably unlawful behaviour? If a case could be made against Borrows for careless driving, they should surely have also been charged for their own contributory role.

Come to that, why did the officers on the scene not step in earlier to prevent the pantomime? Have they been disciplined or reprimanded?

In the end, the outcome was the right one. But it should never have come to that point, and Borrows can hardly be blamed for sounding bitter about his former colleagues in uniform.   

St John and the cult of managerialism

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 5.)

I thought it significant that in Consumer’s recent comparison of emergency survival kits on the market, the one that scored worst by far was marketed by the St John Ambulance organisation.

Its “Emergency Grab Kit” got a scathing “fail” from Consumer, with a score of 38% – far below any of the six other kits tested. How humiliating for an organisation that traces its history back to the 12th century, when the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem looked after sick and injured pilgrims to the Holy Land.  

What was almost comically ironic was that the St John emergency kit didn’t even include a first-aid kit – this from an organisation that’s synonymous with emergency medical assistance – or food rations. And to make matters worse, the pack wasn’t cheap ($200 compared with one at $85 and another that costs $139).

In a sense, it’s a betrayal. People buying an emergency kit bearing the name of St John are entitled to expect that it will set the standard for all others. In fact it appears the reverse was true.

You have to ask: how could an organisation with St John’s proud record end up in such a state?

Let me hazard a guess. It’s been corporatised.

What typically happens is this. Organisations like St John start out as voluntary. They are run on the smell of an oily rag by enthusiastic, committed amateurs whose only reward is the satisfaction that comes from doing good for the community.

No doubt that’s still true at the grassroots level. But what happens as such organisations grow is that they reach a point where enthusiastic amateurism no longer cuts it at the top level. They evolve into bureaucracies.

They adopt all the trappings of the private sector. They acquire a flash office in Wellington and they hire professional managers, public relations consultants, fundraisers, marketers, website designers, health and safety trainers and HR advisers.  They also recruit university-educated careerists whose lack of life experience doesn’t stop them from wanting to re-invent the wheel.

In other words they get corporatised. With this come expense accounts, corporate credit cards, business-class travel and company cars. Along the way, the purity of purpose that originally motivated them tends to get diluted.

They also get contaminated by the deathly cult of managerialism, with its key performance indicators, meetings, values statements, general control freakery, risk avoidance, more meetings, arse-covering, preposterous jargon, more meetings and bitchy office politics.

Of course an organisation as large and complex as St John requires an appropriate management structure. The danger is that as these organisations grow bigger and more unwieldy, they became so pre-occupied with the minutiae of management that they lose sight of their core functions. Management becomes an end in itself.

If they are partly funded by the state, as many are, things get more complicated, because government bureaucrats create hoops for them to jump through. So they hire more people to ensure compliance with the government’s requirements – which might include, for instance, paying someone to come up with Maori names for everything they do, even though no one ever uses them.

Under the headline Vision and Values on the St John website, for example, you see things like: “We Make It Better – Whakawerohia. We find solutions – step up, own it, do it.”

There it is, right there: management psycho-babble that means whatever you want it to mean.

All this, needless to say, gobbles up money that might otherwise be used for whatever purpose the organisation nominally exists for.

In the meantime, the faithful and tireless people at the grassroots go on doing what they have always done. But the corporate head office grows gradually more distant and disconnected from its original ethos, and the people at the grassroots feel powerless to influence decisions and policy.

I’m not saying this has happened at St John, but it has certainly happened to other organisations in the not-for-profit sector – for example the IHC, a $280 million-a-year behemoth whose head office sometimes gives the impression of being unaccountable to faithful, long-serving members.

Some would say New Zealand Rugby has gone down a similar path, moving ever further from the game’s muddy amateur roots.

Is the same true of St John? I admit I can’t be sure, but the fact that the organisation couldn’t put together a basic emergency kit – or worse still, perhaps couldn’t be bothered – suggests it may have lost sight of what most of us assumed it existed for.