Hood aerodrome: unanswered questions

The following article, which the Wairarapa Times-Age published this morning under my byline, began as a letter to the editor and just sort of grew. It's unlikely to be of much interest to readers outside the Wairarapa.

From the outset, there have been unanswered questions surrounding the proposal to spend $17 million upgrading Hood aerodrome. It wasn’t clear who was driving the initiative and we weren’t told, at least initially, how much money Masterton ratepayers were expected to contribute.

As time has passed, some answers have been provided. It took several days before Masterton District Council chief executive Kath Ross told the Times-Age the council would contribute $7 million on top of the $10 million coming from the government. Information subsequently provided to me by Ms Ross’s office suggests the council’s actual commitment will be $4.2 million, with an additional $2.75 million to be sought in the form of “grants, fees, charges and co-investment” – whatever that may mean. 

Not only does it all seem a bit woolly, but ratepayers are entitled to wonder why these figures weren’t disclosed at the start. After all, the people of Masterton will effectively be paying twice for the upgrade, both as taxpayers and ratepayers. And the key question which remains unanswered is: why?

Unfortunately the council remains evasive. Concerned that no convincing case had yet been made publicly for the Hood upgrade, I made an Official Information request to the council for documentation relating to the project.

My request sought all relevant information, including any business case prepared in support of the upgrade.

What I initially got was a letter providing some additional superficial detail about what the council proposes to do, but conspicuously omitting any cost-benefit analysis or substantiation of the project’s promised economic benefits.

Not satisfied with this response, I sought further information. I asked specifically for minutes of council discussions relating to the upgrade and for budget forecasts covering projected returns and/or deficits. Under the disclosure provisions of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act, this information should have automatically been provided in response to my first request, but wasn’t.

I fared slightly better, but only slightly, on my second attempt. This produced the disclosure that there were no minutes relating to the decision to seek Provincial Growth Fund money for the upgrade, for the strange reason that councillors never formally adopted the proposal.

I was told the draft application to the PGF was “shared” with councillors in workshop sessions (how thoughtful of council officials to keep elected members in the loop). But not being regarded as official meetings, workshops happen out of the public view. So we have no idea what (if any) debate took place around the council table, or how rigorously (if at all) the proposal was assessed.

This seems an odd way to conduct council business, given that Masterton ratepayers will be required to contribute at least $4.2 million. That’s a lot of footpaths.

There was further discussion during a “Zoom briefing” of councillors under the Level 4 lockdown in April, but again no record was provided of what was said. It’s almost as if the lockdown was used as an excuse for the lack of transparency and due process.

The material provided to me by the MDC further revealed that councillors considered an item relating to the Hood development in a public-excluded session last year. All detail of that discussion was withheld on the ground that it might prejudice the council’s commercial operations.

Similarly, in its previous release of material to me, the council provided a briefing document supplied to local MPs and councillors, but blacked out all relevant figures relating to council investment in the project on the basis of “commercial sensitivity”. That document “conservatively” estimated economic benefits of $248-307 million from the Hood upgrade but didn’t explain how those figures were arrived at. For all we know, they could have been plucked out of the air.

As part of the second release of information I was also provided with a poorly written “executive summary”, of anonymous authorship, outlining the supposed costs and benefits of the upgrade. As with previously disclosed information about the project, this document was heavy on optimistic assumptions and positive-sounding buzzwords, but light on substantive data.

The executive summary concedes that the benefits of the upgrade are “uncertain” and positive outcomes are “not guaranteed”, in which case one might ask why the council is committing millions of ratepayer dollars to the project. Commercial risk is the realm of the private sector, where people gamble with their own money.

Most conspicuously, the documents fail to reveal who will use the improved aerodrome/airport and where the projected financial returns, assuming there are any, will come from. The projections rely heavily on the hope that scheduled air services will resume – but there’s no indication that any airline is eagerly waiting for Hood to be improved, and nothing to suggest that upgrading the aerodrome will magically make it profitable. Not one of the cheerleaders for the project has identified a single new user.

All we’re left with, after going through the documents released by the council,  are several mysterious references in the executive summary to “facilitated projects” at Hood, all detail of which was blacked out – again, on the grounds of commercial confidentiality.

We can conclude from this that the council is probably involved in negotiations with an undisclosed party or parties regarding some form of commercial activity at Hood, not necessarily related to passenger services, and has been persuaded that it’s the best if the public is kept in the dark.

Those with suspicious minds might wonder whether the council has been sweet-talked into bankrolling an ambitious, aviation-related project in which ratepayers could end up carrying the commercial risk – in which case we’re entitled to know what our officials are signing us up for.

Otherwise the rationale for the upgrade remains unclear. A cynical explanation is that taxpayers and Masterton ratepayers are bankrolling a Labour Party strategy to win the Wairarapa seat back from National.

Mayor Lyn Patterson’s column in the Times-Age last week did nothing to clarify things. Presented with another opportunity to mount a convincing case for the Hood upgrade, Ms Patterson resorted to more airy, feel-good platitudes about putting Masterton on the map.  

We’ve still seen nothing to indicate the upgraded aerodrome will generate an economic return and thus justify the investment of ratepayers’ money that might be better spent on other services or facilities. And perhaps even more disturbing is the impression that councillors have been passive spectators in whatever is proposed.

Best-case scenario: the council is secretly talking to a prospective Hood user who promises an economic bonanza but wants the ratepayers to pick up the tab. Worst-case scenario: both the council and the government are taking a massive punt with our money and we can only cross our fingers and hope for the best. Either way, the facts should be put before us. 

Is the public bankrolling Labour's bid to reclaim Wairarapa? It certainly looks that way

Jacinda Ardern spent Friday campaigning in the Wairarapa. Labour is targeting the National-held seat and is confident it can win.

The party’s candidate, list MP Kieran McAnulty, is an ambitious, energetic local with a high profile. In 2017 he got within 3000 votes of the sitting MP, the lacklustre Alastair Scott, and this time he faces a first-time National candidate, farmer Mike Butterick, who is not well known.

Although it’s essentially a rural electorate, Wairarapa has been held by Labour before – most recently by Georgina Beyer from 1999 till 2005 – and an influx of new residents, many of them from the Labour stronghold of Wellington, could help tilt the scales in Labour’s favour.

Ardern’s charm offensive on Friday gives context to the otherwise puzzling announcement in July that the government will invest $10 million in an upgrading of Masterton’s Hood aerodrome, a facility currently used mainly by topdressing planes and recreational flyers. That sum will be augmented with a multi-million-dollar contribution from Masterton District Council. (I say multi-million because the actual sum isn't clear. Council chief executive Kath Ross told the Wairarapa Times-Age in July that the council would contribute $7 million, but information subsequently released to me by her office indicates the actual commitment will be $4.2 million, with an additional $2.75 million to be sought in the form of "grants, fees, charges and co-investment". Make of that what you will.)

The announcement of the Hood upgrade came out of the blue and makes sense only when seen as an enticement to vote Labour. In other words, it’s a prime example of the old-fashioned pork-barrel politics most of us thought had been consigned to history decades ago.

The entire process behind the government’s decision to fund the upgrade, and the buy-in by the district council, has been strikingly opaque. It’s not clear where the initiative came from and no substantive business case or cost-benefit analysis has been made public. The probable reason is that none exists.  

Masterton ratepayers have seen nothing to indicate the upgraded aerodrome will generate an economic return and thus justify the investment of ratepayers’ money that might be better spent on other services or facilities. As I pointed out on this blog in July, not one of the various cheerleaders for the project – neither McAnulty, Grant Robertson (who announced it), Ron Mark nor Masterton mayor Lyn Patterson – has identified a single new user of the upgraded aerodrome.

Scheduled air services in and out of Masterton have been tried twice in the past 20 years. In both cases they were abandoned because they made no money.

In an attempt to establish the economic rationale (assuming there is one) behind the Hood project, I twice sought information from Masterton District Council under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act. The responses added little to what was already known, reinforcing my suspicion that both the government and council have committed public money to the upgrade based on airy assumptions that are not backed by any substantive business case.

Among other things, the council provided me (but only after I approached them a second time, after a totally inadequate response to my first request) with a poorly written “executive summary”, of anonymous authorship, that was heavy on positive-sounding buzzwords but had all the substance of candy floss.

The documents fail to reveal who will use the improved aerodrome/airport or where the projected financial returns, assuming there are any, will come from. The projections rely heavily on the hope that scheduled air services will resume – but there’s no indication that any airline is eagerly waiting for Hood to be improved, and nothing to suggest that upgrading the aerodrome will magically make it profitable.

Perhaps most disturbingly, there’s nothing to indicate that Masterton district councillors subjected the project to any rigorous analysis or even detailed discussion. No minutes, no formal resolutions: zilch.

I can only repeat what I wrote on this blog on July 20: in the absence of any compelling case for the upgrade, we’re left with no other conclusion than that it’s a brazen vote-buying exercise - one that Masterton ratepayers have been suckered into subsidising by a council that displays little regard for responsible financial stewardship and even less for transparency.

I despair for Wellington

 I have a lot of affection for Wellington. I spent most of my working life there. Two of my children were born there. Many of my oldest and closest friends live there still.

It’s a place full of pleasant memories for me. I enjoyed my first non-European meal at the Shanghai restaurant in Manners St. I had my first under-age beer in the infamous Bistro Bar at the Royal Oak Hotel. I met the woman who became my wife in The Beachcomber at Oriental Bay. I knew most of Wellington’s pubs and I played in bands in its bars, cabarets and dance halls. In later years I spent many pleasurable hours exploring the city’s nooks and crannies on my mountain bike or on foot with our dog.

The climate was lousy but it was a city full of character and charm. It was true that you couldn’t beat Wellington on a good day. But when I go to Wellington these days, as I often do, it’s hard to avoid a feeling of despondency at what’s happening to the place.

Wellington feels dead in the water. Public buildings that formed a crucial part of the city’s identity are out of bounds and likely to remain so indefinitely. Engineers and city bureaucrats who are either incompetent or paralysingly risk-averse (or both) appear to be doing their best to suck the life out of a once-vibrant town that rejoiced in the slogan Absolutely Positively Wellington.  

The city is run by a fractious council dominated by leftist ideologues, presided over by a well-meaning but ineffectual mayor whose only claim to the job was his dogged longevity (he’s been on the council since 1992). The forward momentum created in the 1980s and 90s under a succession of energetic, visionary mayors – Fran Wilde, Mark Blumsky, Kerry Prendergast – is a distant memory. Under Celia Wade-Brown, Justin Lester and now the colourless Andy Foster, it has been supplanted by a sense of civic sclerosis. 

The city’s stasis is exemplified by the dismal stalemate over the development of Shelly Bay, potentially a jewel in Wellington’s crown but mired in endless disagreement and acrimony. And let’s not forget the optimistically named Let’s Get Wellington Moving, which has come to sound like a cruel, ironic joke.  

Wellington even looks tired and unkempt. The grungy look that was once confined to Cuba St, long celebrated for its Bohemian charm, has spread in all directions. But rather than being shabby chic, which might be tolerable, it’s just plain shabby. It’s a hotch-potch, gimcrack city that sends out conflicting signals: endlessly disrupted by unsightly street works and construction projects, yet not making any discernible progress.

But hey, don’t worry that the city’s water and sewage infrastructure is buggered, or that a bloated and inept regional council did its best to sabotage the once nationally admired public transport system, or that drunken brawls are turning the increasingly squalid Courtenay Place entertainment precinct into a no-go zone, or that the central library is operating out of a tent on a weed-infested vacant construction site (okay, that’s a slight exaggeration), or that private-sector employers are having trouble attracting workers to what was previously dubbed the world’s coolest capital, or that the bells in the carillon in the National War Memorial can’t be rung for fear that the supposedly strengthened tower will collapse, or that the city council is floundering financially, or that shops are empty and the city’s acclaimed hospitality sector is struggling to survive.

No, we can all relax, because Wellington’s woke councillors are on the case. Two of them, Jill Day and Tamatha Paul, have boldly tackled the city’s problems head-on by recommending that iwi representatives be given seats on council committees – paid representatives, that is, with full voting rights. Day says they would bring “knowledge and insight” on how the council should tackle issues such as (you guessed it) climate change.  They wouldn’t be elected by popular vote, of course, and they wouldn’t be accountable to the people who pay them, but that’s okay because democratic principles are presumably a legacy of colonialism and a tool of white privilege.

I despair for Wellington. It deserves better than this.

Incompetence is one thing, misinformation another

First, let’s look on the bright side. No one in New Zealand has died of Covid-19 since the end of May. If I were a government minister under pressure from the media, I would take every opportunity to point this out to my tormentors.

The static death toll puts into perspective the outcry over testing failures at the border. By international standards, New Zealand is still doing very well in combating the virus, despite what Donald Trump says. We need only look across the ditch to Victoria to see how much worse things might be.

As of last night, there were 90 active cases and six people in hospital, none of them critical. Most governments would be overjoyed to boast figures like that.

In fact death rates from all causes in New Zealand are lower than usual, a statistical quirk that experts attribute to the likelihood that the lockdown at the start of winter arrested the circulation of germs and viruses that might otherwise have taken the lives of susceptible people.

So things could be far worse. But after that, the positives quickly run out, and you have to wonder whether we’re in this fortunate position through sheer luck rather than good management.

The self-congratulatory buzz that accompanied the announcement that we’d gone for 100 days with no Covid-19 cases turned out to be short-lived. In the 10 days since then, we’ve been bombarded daily – in fact often several times daily – with a litany of oversights and failings. 

The big picture is one of a fiasco. Consider the following.

By common consent, the Covid-19 tracing app is a clunker. It seemed to work fine on my phone until several days ago, when it suddenly went into meltdown. After repeated attempts to re-activate it, I gave up.

The police checkpoints around Auckland are a joke, massively disrupting daily lives and economic activity for no apparent purpose. In one 24-hour period more than 50,000 vehicles were stopped but only 676 were turned back. That means people spent hours trapped in stationary cars and trucks for an almost negligible success rate against supposed rule-breakers.

Even worse, people with valid reasons for travelling – for example, trying to get to work or deliver essential goods – have reportedly been turned back or made to wait days for the required paperwork. Others, meanwhile, have been waved through. It all seems totally haphazard and arbitrary, with decisions made on the spot by officers who don’t seem to be working to any clear and consistent criteria.

Police credibility took a big hit during the previous lockdown as a result of hopelessly confused messages about what was and wasn’t permissible. Not only were some of the rules irrational and imposed in a rush of control-freakery, but they seemed to change by the day. This was compounded by the perception that police were picking the low-hanging fruit – for example, turning back solo cyclists going for a harmless ride in the country, yet ignoring Black Lives Matter protests that flagrantly defied social distancing rules and turning a blind eye to (and worse, even endorsing) illegal vigilante checkpoints manned by iwi activists.

The image of the police is unlikely to have been enhanced by the latest shambles. Didn't it occur to them to have a contingency plan in case they needed to control movement in and out of Auckland? You’d have thought it would. But if such a plan existed, it surely wouldn’t have taken several days before they had the bright idea of setting aside a dedicated lane for essential freight traffic. By any yardstick, the police performance should be marked as a fail.

Then there was the panicked decision - or at least it looked that way - to test 12,000 port workers and truck drivers within a time frame that was laughably unachievable (and perhaps just as well, since it would have caused more business chaos).  

And once again, there were mixed messages about eligibility for testing – a problem that first became apparent when the country went into lockdown in March. The official message then was “test, test, test” – yet people seeking tests, including those showing Covid-19 symptoms, were repeatedly turned away. And it's still happening.

Glaring discrepancies between what was being said at Beehive press conferences and what was actually happening “on the ground” have been a recurring feature throughout the coronavirus crisis. Many were highlighted by Newshub’s investigative reporter Michael Morrah. He revealed, for example, that nurses and health workers were said to have ample protective equipment when clearly they didn’t.  Similarly, Morrah exposed a yawning credibility gap between what the government was saying about the availability of influenza vaccine and what was being reported by frustrated doctors and nurses.

Somewhere the truth was falling down a hole, but the public trusted in the assurances given by the prime minister and Ashley Bloomfield. Many will now be thinking that trust was misplaced.

The most abject cockup of all was the failure (again exposed by Morrah, though strangely not picked up by the wider media for several days) to test workers at the border. Former Health Minister David Clark told the public weeks ago that border workers, including susceptible people such as bus drivers ferrying inbound airline passengers to isolation hotels, would be routinely tested. This seemed an obvious and fundamental precaution, but we now know it didn’t happen. Nearly two thirds of border workers – the people most likely to contract and spread the coronavirus in the community – were never tested. Some epidemiologists believe the Covid-19 virus was bubbling away undetected for weeks before the current resurgence.

On one level this can be dismissed as simple incompetence, but it goes far beyond that. People might be willing to excuse incompetence up to a point, but they are not so ready – and neither should they be – to forgive spin, deception and dissembling. Misinformation can’t be blithely excused as a clumsy misstep, still less as “dissonance” (to use Bloomfield’s creative English). On the contrary, if misinformation is deliberate then it raises critical issues of trust and transparency.

At a time of crisis, people are entitled to expect their leaders and officials to be truthful with them, especially when the public, in turn, is expected to play its part by making substantial social and economic sacrifices. If the government doesn’t uphold its side of this compact, it forfeits the right to demand that the public co-operate.  That’s the situation in which we now appear to find ourselves. The bond of trust that united the government and the public in the fight against Covid-19 has been frayed to a point where it’s at risk of breaking.

A watershed moment point came for me when I heard political commentator Richard Harman state the unthinkable on Jim Mora’s The Weekend Panel when he called on Bloomfield to resign for misleading his minister.

You could sense the shocked hush in thousands of Labour-voting households, followed by a collective cry of “Noooo!” and a blitzkrieg of anguished emails to RNZ. The pandemic has made Bloomfield a national hero. You can buy tea towels and shopping bags bearing his image. To call for his resignation was the secular equivalent of heresy.

Harman’s statement could have been dismissed as sensationalism or politicking if he were politically aligned or had a history of making provocative claims, but he’s a commentator with a reputation for being neutral and moderate.

To make matters worse, at least from the perspective of Bloomfield’s legion of admirers, Harman’s sentiments were largely echoed by Jane Clifton, another veteran political observer with no axe to grind. While eschewing witch hunts, Clifton said Bloomfield’s ministry had established a pattern of, "if not outright lying, then failing to supply correct information”. These were damning words.

All of this threw a new light on the political controversy that flared in June when Clark was pilloried in the media for supposedly “throwing Bloomfield under the bus”. Questioned about people being released early from quarantine on compassionate grounds without being tested (another extraordinary blunder), Clark said Bloomfield had accepted responsibility for the failure. Media sympathy overwhelmingly lay with Bloomfield; photos showed him standing behind his minister wearing the pained expression of someone who has been wronged but must suffer in dignified silence.

Soon after, Clark resigned in response to the general perception that he had been incompetent in his handling of the crisis. But in hindsight, people might well wonder whether it was he who was thrown under the bus; in effect, made the fall guy for failings by others, including a Ministry of Health head who was possibly considered too popular to be sacrificed.

All of which raises intriguing questions about the exercise of ministerial accountability. Harman said that if Bloomfield had misled current minister Chris Hipkins about border testing, it wasn’t Hipkins who should resign but Bloomfield. But the doctrine of ministerial accountability is usually taken as meaning that ministers must carry the can for actions taken by the departments and officials under their control – as the then Minister of Conservation, Denis Marshall, did after the Cave Creek tragedy of 1995. Marshall was in no way responsible for the erection of the unsafe viewing platform that collapsed, killing 14 people, but he did the honourable thing and resigned anyway. 

The rationale behind the principle of ministerial accountability, as I understand it, is that a minister who fears losing his seat in Cabinet is more likely to ensure his officials do their jobs properly. It’s a way of ensuring discipline and accountability down through the chain of command.

The question then arises: if the much-maligned Clark accepted responsibility for failings in dealing with the pandemic, why shouldn’t Hipkins? Could the explanation be that Hipkins is generally well liked and acknowledged as a competent minister, but Clark wasn’t? That’s the impression we’re left with. But that’s not how the doctrine of ministerial accountability is supposed to work. Denis Marshall didn’t get away with blaming those under him and neither should Hipkins, or even Jacinda Ardern.

The wider backdrop to this scandal, as pointed out earlier, is that from the very start of the Covid-19 crisis there has been a pattern of contradictory messages, but the daily tag-team act of Ardern and Bloomfield, and latterly Hipkins and Bloomfield, was remarkably effective in assuring the public that things were under control. Morrah’s reports quoting disaffected front-line health workers were met with bland denials by Bloomfield. We believed him because we wanted to, and because he seemed up-front, personable and plausible.

We’re now forced to confront the possibility that we were sometimes being fibbed to, or alternatively that Bloomfield was being fibbed to by officials further down the food chain. That realisation will give no pleasure to anyone other than the government’s political opponents, for whom it’s pure gold, and those who have resented the authoritarian overtones of the lockdown from the start. But as Harman and Clifton pointed out on Jim Mora’s show, trust in the government is never more crucial than at a time like this. Most people want to believe they are being told the truth and not fed spin. That’s the quid-pro-quo for the public compliance which the government must rely on to keep the pandemic under control.  

As I said at the outset, we shouldn’t lose sight of the positives, nor of the heroic efforts made by the countless health sector workers doing their utmost to keep the virus in check. That's the flip side to the many blunders. But public faith in our leaders has been eroded and many New Zealanders think their trust has been betrayed - all of which has left the government looking a lot more vulnerable than it seemed a couple of weeks ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Institutional overkill? The case of Deborah Hugill

I wonder if anyone else felt uneasy reading the story on Stuff today about a Taranaki nurse, Deborah Hugill, who was deregistered by the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal for making racist comments.

Hugill was held to be guilty of professional misconduct after a social media post – prompted by a news report about the absence of Maori voices from a mental health and addictions inquiry – in which she described Maori nurses as lazy, cunning and underhanded [sic]. She also said they got a lot of unfair handouts and spent too much time eating and going to meetings.

It was a statement that even staunch upholders of the right to free speech would have trouble defending, and Hugill asked for trouble by posting it on a New Zealand Nurses Organisation’s Facebook page.  Yet Stuff’s account of the tribunal hearing left the discomforting impression that the proceedings had the hallmarks of a show trial.   

The tribunal chair, Maria Dew QC, rebuked Hugill for her “failure to show a sustained and genuine understanding or remorse for her highly offensive and racist comments”. That suggests she was punished not just for her offence but for not being sufficiently contrite.

Dew also acknowledged “mana whenua” – by which she apparently meant local Maori, though that’s not the Maori Dictionary’s definition of the term – for their “very special contribution” to the hearing, saying it was important for the tribunal to be part of restoring mana for Maori. “Ms Hugill’s conduct has damaged that mana.”

Really? I would have thought the purpose of the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal was to ensure professional standards are upheld.  Restoring mana for Maori suggests a broader agenda that goes beyond the tribunal’s warrant. This is fashionable ideological rhetoric, not the dispassionate language expected from a quasi-judicial body. Was this a case of the tribunal buying into the culture of grievance and victimhood?

Perhaps it was Hugill’s misfortune to be subjected to disciplinary proceedings at a time when confected fury over supposed white supremacy, fanned by the Black Lives Matter movement, has fuelled an appetite for retribution against anyone bold or foolish enough (and this case involved a bit of both) to expose themselves to charges of racism.

Cherene Neilson-Hornblow, who laid the complaint against Hugill, told the tribunal that Hugill had “trampled on the heads of our people”. Later, when the hearing was over, she said: “I’m just overwhelmed, I’m so pleased. It’s thousands of years of injustices, it’s tears of joy.” Hyperbole, much? Remember, we’re not talking about the righting of grievous historic wrongs here. We’re talking about a lone woman who expressed racially offensive (but, we must presume, sincerely held) opinions and has paid what some would regard as a disproportionate penalty.

As well as having her registration cancelled, Hugill was formally censured and ordered to pay 15 per cent of the costs of the hearing: $8362.95. She was barred from practising for two years and before working as a nurse again must complete what Stuff called a cultural confidence course (I think they mean cultural competence). Used punitively, as appears to be the case here, this is a more benign form of the re-education camps favoured by Pol Pot and the current Chinese communist regime: a means of moral purification by which ideological transgressors are persuaded to see the error of their ways and given a chance to purge themselves of their sins.

Stuff also reported that after the tribunal had come to its decision, proceedings were closed with a karakia. Well, of course.

 

Rediscovering a Wellington guitar hero

In 1968 I was the bass guitarist (not a very good one, I regret to say) in a Wellington band called the Regency Set. I don’t remember much about most gigs we played, but one that stuck in my memory was a Friday night dance in the Khandallah Town Hall where we shared the bill with an outfit called the Supernatural Blues Band.

It was, to put it mildly, an incongruous mix. We wore jackets and ties and played a middle-of-the-road repertoire that erred on the side of mature. (I was the youngest in the band by several years.) We got plenty of bookings but no one would have called our music edgy. Build Me Up, Buttercup was about as raunchy as we got.

The Supernatural Blues Band, on the other hand, wore jeans and sneakers and looked slightly disreputable. They were an antipodean extension of the British blues boom – think John Mayall, Eric Clapton and Peter Green – that was then in full cultish cry.

To use an automotive analogy, if the Regency Set were a bourgeois Hillman Hunter, the Supernatural Blues Band were a Ford twin-spinner with a couple of missing hubcaps and primer paint on the mudguards.

The SBB had a bunch of fans who had come only to hear them and who regarded us, when they acknowledged us at all, with eye-rolling disdain.  Whoever selected the bands for the night either had a mischievous sense of humour or was trying to cover the field. But as my musician brother recently reminded me, bizarre combinations were not uncommon back then: Jimi Hendrix once shared a bill with the Monkees, and the Rolling Stones toured New Zealand in 1965 with Roy Orbison.

Anyway, the point of this reminiscence (trust me, I’m getting there) is that the star of the Supernatural Blues Band – who later simplified their name to the Supernatural – was an uncommonly talented teenage lead guitarist and singer named John O’Connor.

I vaguely recall that O’Connor was then still at school, or perhaps I just made that up, but his playing was masterful. He had a natural feel for the blues and coaxed sounds out of his Jansen Beatmaster guitar (remember, those were the days when the import substitution policy made it difficult to acquire a Fender or Gibson, and most guitarists had to make do with inferior, locally-made lookalikes) that made it sound damned-near respectable.

It didn’t surprise me that he went on to enjoy an illustrious career in music, though he never acquired the reputation he deserved. When I next heard him play, in a steamy and crowded Wellington club called The Cabin during the mid-1970s, he was with the fondly remembered Wellington funk band Redeye, whose members formed the core of an elite group that provided backing on recording sessions – you can hear them on the Mark Williams hits Yesterday Was Just the Beginning of My Life and It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, among others – and the TV shows Grunt Machine and Ready to Roll.  

A Google search indicates that in the ensuing decades, O’Connor evolved into a player of consummate versatility and professionalism, touring and recording not only with rock and blues luminaries (BB King, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry) but also with Kiri Te Kanawa, Ron Goodwin and the NZSO.

But it wasn’t until last Friday night, when the Laura Collins Back Porch Blues Band played to a full Carterton Events Centre, that I again heard him playing live. I’d heard the band before, albeit with a different guitarist, and knew to expect a good show, but O’Connor’s virtuoso playing added an exhilarating new dimension to their sound. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to describe him as world-class.

The soulful feel evident in the Khandallah Town Hall more than a half a century ago is still there, in spades, but it’s combined with dazzling flair and technical skill. (It probably helps that the Jansen Beatmaster has been replaced by a semi-hollowbodied Gibson. For the benefit of guitar nerds, it looked like an ES 336, although I couldn’t be sure from where I was sitting at the back of the room.)

And my point in writing this is? Simply to indulge in a bit of self-vindication. O’Connor mightily impressed me in 1968 and it was a real pleasure to rediscover him in 2020, still playing his heart out.

In singling him out, I certainly don’t mean to downplay the contribution from the rest of the Back Porch Blues Band (who actually play a lot of other stuff besides blues). Keyboard player Wayne Mason’s impressive mastery of the blues idiom, and especially of New Orleans-style rolling boogie-woogie piano, may surprise those who remember him from the Waratahs and (going back into the mists of antiquity) the Fourmyula. George Barris on upright bass is another respected veteran with nothing to prove, although I did wonder whether a bass guitar would have had sharper definition and cut-through. Pete Cogswell is unobtrusive but rock-solid on drums and the exuberant Laura Collins does much more than just sing, although she does that with power and grit.

All in all, a tight band of redoubtable old hands who still get an obvious  charge out of playing together, and who communicate that energy and enthusiasm to their audience. Even without O’Connor, they were a great band; with him, they’re even better.

We're all immigrants here

I recently read an interview with the Sri Lankan-born Wellington novelist Brannavan Gnanalingam. In it he talks mainly about the challenge of being male in a culture that he sees as clinging to a narrow and not always attractive idea of masculinity. But he also comments on the frequency of “casual racism” and his regret at having lost touch with his heritage, presumably as a result of feeling pressured to fit in to a predominantly white society.

One thing in particular struck me, and I quote directly from the article:

Being asked where you’re from, for example, is a “ridiculously common” experience for a non-white person, he [Gnanalingam] says. If it’s someone at a hostel overseas, or someone wanting to establish whakapapa links, that’s one thing. If it’s someone who’s noticed your skin is a different colour from theirs, that’s another. “I often get slightly sassy and respond, ‘Well, where are you from?’” he says. “It always throws them.”

But hang on a minute. I’m happy to admit that I’ve often asked people with dark skin or unfamiliar accents where they’re from – taxi drivers especially, since I’m sharing the front of the car with them and it’s an obvious way to get a conversation started.

I supposed I could play it safe and make meaningless small talk about the weather, but I ask about their background because I’m genuinely interested. It’s posed as a friendly inquiry, not as a demand that they explain their justification for being in New Zealand. Still less is it intended to imply judgment of them on the basis of their appearance or way of speaking. I see it as a way of establishing a connection with a fellow human being. Can that be so bad?

Sometimes they have an interesting story to tell, like the irrepressibly cheerful cab driver from Bhutan I met in Christchurch a couple of years ago, or the lugubrious Afghan who once picked me up from San Francisco Airport. If I sense that they’re not comfortable (which I don’t recall ever happening), there’s always the weather option to fall back on.

I welcome the fact that New Zealand has become a multicultural society, as do virtually all the people I know. To me it seems the most natural thing in the world to want to learn more about people’s cultural origins and the circumstances that led them to settle here. Quite apart from anything else, it adds to my knowledge as a journalist about the demographic forces shaping this county. It’s not intended to make immigrants feel like outsiders, still less that they’re not welcome. We’re all immigrants, after all; some just more recent than others.

Would it be better if I said nothing and completed the taxi ride in silence? That would seem far more cold and unfriendly.

And really, is it so different from someone asking about the origin of your surname, which happens to me all the time? Or inquiring where your accent comes from, as in the case of my Polish wife (who never minds being asked, although she’s been a New Zealand citizen for more than 50 years)? Or are such questions okay if you’re white, but somehow different if you’re brown or black – in which case, should we be asking whether the people who condemn the question as racist in those instances are themselves perversely promoting a sense of “them and us”, which is the very thing they profess to oppose?

I’m aware of the fashionable view that only the victims of racism can recognise and identify it. Using that yardstick, a taxi driver who thinks my question about where he comes from is racist must be right. But if the question is asked with goodwill and genuine curiosity, doesn’t that count for something?

Here, of course, we come to our old friend unconscious bias; the notion that you can be racist without realising it. If we accept the idea of unconscious bias, we also acknowledge the possibility of casual or unintended racism. But I reject the notion that by simply asking someone about their nationality or ethnic background, you’re somehow demonstrating racial prejudice. That strikes me as a complete non-sequitur.

In fact I’d suggest that treating discussion of ethnicity as a no-go zone is potentially an impediment to good race relations, because it risks amplifying awareness of difference rather than encouraging acceptance of it as normal. How can tip-toeing around questions of ethnicity in a “don’t mention the war” fashion be more inclusive than openly engaging with people about their origins?

I could go further and ask who’s more likely to drive a wedge between the predominant white culture and ethnic minorities: the person making an innocent inquiry about someone else’s race or nationality, or the person assuming it must be underpinned by racism?

So I intend to continue asking people where they come from. And if they turn the question back on me, as Gnanalingam says he sometimes does, it won’t throw me in the slightest. I’d be very happy to tell them that I come from Waipukurau and long before that, from Ireland on my mother’s side and France and Denmark on my father’s. There’s no stigma in that, and I wonder why it should be seen as potentially stigmatising if you tell people you come from Sudan, Taiwan, Iran or wherever. Perhaps more to the point, who exactly is doing the stigmatising by suggesting such matters should be off-limits? After all, as I said, we’re all immigrants here.