Important update on Judge Callinicos

David Farrar of Kiwiblog has read Judge Callinicos's judgment in the Moana case and covers it fully here. I recommend readers of this blog check it out. The more we learn about this affair, the more shocking it becomes. Even Martyn Bradbury has weighed in. Meanwhile the mainstream media largely ignore the scandal and the silence from the government and the Law Society is deafening.

More on the gang-up against Judge Peter Callinicos

What began as a controversy over a judge’s decision to leave a young Maori girl in the care of her Pakeha foster-parents has touched off an extraordinary judicial scandal that threatens to shake public confidence in the integrity of the courts.

Allegations made by lawyer Tony Ellis implicate New Zealand’s two most senior judges in an affair that reflects badly on the judiciary and its handling of concerns about Hawke’s Bay Family Court judge Peter Callinicos. What Ellis has disclosed will almost certainly serve to reinforce perceptions that Callinicos has been the target of a furtive - in fact you might say conspiratorial - gang-up.

According to Ellis, the case threatens judicial independence and has a caused a major rift among judges. Senior lawyers are scratching their heads trying to recall whether any judicial squabble has ever before been aired so publicly. Figuratively speaking, the fire is in the fern and threatening to singe some illustrious names.

In an incendiary letter to the Judicial Conduct Commissioner, Alan Ritchie, Ellis has alleged that:

■ Callinicos was “unlawfully lobbied” by Chief District Court Judge Heemi Taumaunu and Principal Family Court Judge Jackie Moran, together known as the Heads of Bench, over his handling of a case that was then still in progress.

■ Ritchie, whose role is to assess complaints about the conduct of judges, “irrevocably compromised” his independence through the way he dealt with concerns about Callinicos.

■ Callinicos was investigated without his knowledge and with no opportunity to defend himself.  

■ Callinicos himself claims he received “misleading and bullying” correspondence from the two senior judges, known as the Heads of Bench, and was the subject of “scathing” letters sent to Ritchie by the Heads of Bench and by the second-ranked judge of the Supreme Court, Justice William ("Willie") Young.

■ Ritchie predetermined Callinicos’s guilt without his knowledge and without giving him a chance to respond to criticism.

■ Ellis quotes Callinicos as saying: “ … the dumping of this unilateral crap into [the] public domain compounds the injustice as I have no recourse in the investigation, or in the public eye.”

■ Chief Justice Dame Helen Winkelmann and Young are implicated in the affair by allegedly failing to disclose that Young was involved in behind-the-scenes discussions about the case.

■ Young reached conclusions about the case without giving Callinicos an opportunity to put his side.  

■ According to Callinicos, 60 of New Zealand’s 180-odd judges have contacted have contacted him expressing their support. Callinicos is quoted as saying the actions of his judicial superiors have sent “shivers of fear” through the District Court, of which the Family Court is part.

Ellis accused Ritchie of kowtowing to senior judges and added: "A well-informed independent observer would ask the question: "Who are the bullies here, Judge Callinicos, or Justice William Young and the Chief Justice?"

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the background. In the Family Court, Callinicos thwarted Oranga Tamariki’s underhand attempts to remove a girl – whom Stuff named Moana – from a loving, stable home and place her with unfamiliar Maori caregivers on the pretext that her Pakeha foster parents weren’t meeting her “cultural needs”.

In a 145-page judgment, Callinicos tore into Oranga Tamariki social workers over their conduct in the case.

His ruling rapidly escalated into a dispute over judicial independence when it emerged that Taumaunu and Moran had intervened in the case, apparently at the urging of the then acting Oranga Tamariki CEO Wira Gardiner.

Callinicos protested that this action compromised his judicial independence – a point subsequently taken up by Ellis and other unnamed lawyers in complaints to Ritchie.

In a preliminary report issued last week, Ritchie inflamed the issue further when he found that the two senior judges had not acted inappropriately. Extraordinarily, he appears to have reached this conclusion without bothering to speak to Callinicos.

That provoked Ellis into lodging the further complaint implicating Winkelmann and Young.

In this latest complaint, a copy of which has been sent to Attorney-General David Parker, Ellis alleges that when Winkelmann and Young met lawyers acting for Callinicos, they failed to disclose that Young “had been involved in making a finding  that Judge Callinicos bullied witnesses [in the Moana case], and that the Chief Justice concurred”.

Ellis continued: “Justice William Young, in reaching a conclusion that Judge Callinicos had made comments that were disproportionate and inappropriate, [had] made gratuitous criticisms, and engaged in what appears to be bullying, following an investigation which did not seek input from Judge Callinicos, and taking no action to seek such input himself, this undermined judicial independence.  The Chief Justice’s concurrence compounded this error.”

Ellis challenged Ritchie to recuse himself from further consideration of the case, writing: “Your approach has created not just actual bias, or its appearance, but worse created a scandal not seen since Edwards [a landmark case from 1892], and has now implicated not only … the Chief District Court Judge and the Principal Family Court Judge, but now also the Chief Justice, and Justice William Young, NZ’s second highest ranked Supreme Court Judge as well.”

What is now clear is that judicial concerns about Callinicos date back to his handling of a controversial unrelated case in April involving a woman named as Mrs P, whose cause was taken up by feminist academics and sympathetic journalists who claimed she was mistreated in Callinicos’s court.

According to leaked documents published by Stuff last week, Young had been providing "advice" to the Heads of Bench about Callinicos, apparently without his knowledge, since then.  

Young was reported as saying in a letter to Ritchie that there seemed to be a pattern of conduct by Callinicos and those on the receiving end “considered, understandably, that they had been bullied”. He had read transcripts from the Mrs P and Moana cases and saw the intervention of Callinicos as “excessive, partisan and demeaning".

Even from a non-legal standpoint, this seems an extraordinary way of going about things. Callinicos appears to have been investigated behind his back by the country’s second most senior judge and been given no chance to respond to accusations against him. According to Ellis, that's a denial of natural justice.

Meanwhile, questions arise about apparent bias in the media coverage of the Mrs P case, which unquestioningly took her side and almost certainly contributed to the anti-Callinicos mood. People familiar with the case say the coverage didn’t fairly reflect a long and complicated history dating back to 2012 and involving multiple judges.

In fact media coverage of the Callinicos affair by Stuff – the only media organisation to report the Moana case and its repercussions – forms an intriguing sub-plot to the main narrative. While coverage of the Moana case by Stuff's veteran Hawke's Bay reporter Marty Sharpe has seemed fair, neutral and balanced, the same can’t be said for the loaded reporting of the Mrs P case.

Kirsty Johnston, the Stuff journalist who reported the protest in support of Mrs P by women academics and “domestic violence experts” in April, wrote a story published last Friday which highlighted Young’s claim that Callinicos had bullied Mrs P and subjected her to demeaning treatment.

To bolster the story, Johnston went back to the same “anti-violence advocacy group” she had quoted in April. Not surprisingly they obliged by calling for Callinicos to be “made accountable” for the Mrs P case and others he had presided over. No one reading the story would have been left in any doubt that Callinicos had behaved reprehensibly. After all, even the country's second most senior judge apparently thought so.

Coincidentally or otherwise, Stuff gave that story far greater prominence than one published a day earlier by Sharpe, which took a notably more neutral (and therefore less condemnatory) tone in reporting Ritchie’s preliminary finding in the Callinicos case.

Johnston followed her Friday hit-job on Callinicos with another the following day targeting retired Hawke’s Bay judge Tony Adeane, who was in the frame for several cases in which his decisions were overturned on appeal because of faults in the way he had directed juries.

Two stories on successive days, both reflecting badly on ageing male judges? It looked suspiciously like a pattern – an impression reinforced by Johnston’s description of herself on the Stuff website as “an investigative journalist with an interest in inequality, gender and social justice”. An activist, in other words, who by her self-description inevitably creates doubts about the neutrality of her work.

But at least Stuff published the stories, which is more than can be said for its treatment of the latest disturbing claims by Ellis, which apparently warranted not a word of coverage, although a copy of his letter had been sent to Sharpe.

Put all this together and you get a very worrying picture. Courts are supposed to prevent abuses of power and the media are supposed to expose them. The worrying conclusion to be drawn from the Callinicos affair is that we may no longer be able to depend on these two vital institutions to guard our rights and freedoms.

 

Another story for the media to ignore?

The feminist group Speak Up For Women has analysed public submissions to Parliament on the Bill that would allow transgender people to self-identify as female without having to obtain Family Court approval.

SUFW strenuously opposes the legislation, which would enable people who were born male to alter the sex recorded on their birth certificate by simply making a declaration – a radical move that SUFW argues would have serious implications for what were previously women-only spaces such as changing rooms, hostels and women's prisons.

The select committee that originally considered the Bill introduced the contentious self-identification provision after submissions had been heard, though it was far outside the original scope of the legislation.

That shameful abuse of process was belatedly remedied when the proposal was put forward in the form of a supplementary order paper and the public finally got an opportunity to comment. SUFW has sifted through the resulting submissions and the results are revealing.

More than 6500 submissions were analysed and 73 percent were against the change. Only 25 per cent were in favour.

SUFW has had to fight tooth and nail to have its voice heard on gender self-identification. Councils barred the group from using public venues for meetings, online activists bullied Wellington City Council and Go Media into removing a prominent downtown advertising billboard (the offending text, “Woman: adult human female”, was taken straight from the Oxford Dictionary) and the powerful media group NZME, publisher of the New Zealand Herald, refused to accept the group’s advertising.

Whether NZME was intimidated by the aggressive transgender lobby or refused to sell advertising space to SUFW because it supported the Bill isn’t clear, but either way it was a flagrant abuse of free speech that before the onset of the culture wars would have been unthinkable. 

The question now is whether the media will do their job and report that public submitters overwhelmingly oppose gender self-identification. Or will SUFW’s summary of the submissions be ignored, just like Curia’s opinion poll showing conclusively that New Zealanders oppose their country being named Aotearoa?

It seems to be open season on Judge Callinicos

There have been significant developments in the case of Moana (not her real name), the Maori girl whom Oranga Tamariki wanted removed from her Pakeha foster parents. I commented on the case here, here and here.

The Dominion Post’s long-serving Hawke’s Bay reporter Marty Sharpe, who broke the story, reported yesterday that the Judicial Conduct Commissioner, Alan Ritchie, found that two senior judges did not act inappropriately when they contacted Family Court judge Peter Callinicos to express concerns over his handling of the Moana case.

Chief District Court judge Heemi Taumaunu and Principal Family Court judge Jackie Moran intervened while the case was still in progress, prompting a complaint from Callinicos that their action compromised his judicial independence.

The two senior judges, known as the Heads of Bench, acted after Sir Wira Gardiner – then head of Oranga Tamariki, the department whose social workers Callinicos grilled over their behaviour in the Moana case – had contacted them.

According to Ritchie’s preliminary report, Taumaunu denied any attempt to direct Callinicos and said he and Moran wanted to engage with him over his in-court conduct, not his decision-making.

Taumaunu said he and Moran had become involved after concerns were expressed about Callinicos’s handling of an earlier case relating to a Mrs P. He said Callinicos “appeared to me to have been engaging in a pattern of bullying behaviour”.

Moran said there had been numerous complaints about Callinicos and they needed to be addressed promptly.

Extraordinarily, Ritchie sought comment from Taumaunu and Moran but according to Callinicos, not from him. Sharpe quoted Callinicos as saying: “If the Judicial Conduct Commissioner was investigating a complaint in which I was a participant, but not the subject of, then in the absence of some extraordinary reason, I would have thought that I would have been invited to make input.”

I would have thought so too. Even junior reporters are expected to seek both sides of the story (although, sadly, less so now than back in the day). I would have thought it went without saying that the same fundamental principle of fairness would be scrupulously applied in a matter as serious as a complaint about judicial conduct.

David Farrar of Kiwiblog has a good critical analysis of Ritchie’s preliminary finding here. But in the meantime, the Moana case has widened to include a judicial heavyweight in the person of Supreme Court judge Willie Young, who has joined the apparent pile-on against Callinicos. And Stuff reports that an “anti-violence advocacy group” – none of whom are identified – is asking how the Family Court judge will be made accountable for actions relating to the case in which the woman named as Mrs P was later found to have been wrongly convicted of perjury.  

Citing leaked documents, Stuff quotes from a letter to Ritchie in which Justice Young reportedly said he had been providing advice to the Heads of Bench about Callinicos since April.

Young said there seemed to be a pattern of conduct by Callinicos and those on the receiving end “considered, understandably, that they had been bullied”. He had read transcripts from the Mrs P and Moana cases and saw the intervention of Judge Callinicos as excessive, partisan and demeaning.

The leaked documents also reveal, according to Stuff, that Callinicos refused to meet the heads of bench, insisting instead that his lawyers talk to the Chief Justice, Dame Helen Winkelmann.

Ritchie has now kicked the problem upstairs by referring it to Winkelmann and says he’s confident the circumstances will be subjected to “appropriate scrutiny”. In the meantime, the Callinicos affair raises important issues.

From the outside, it looks as if the judicial establishment is out to make an example of Callinicos, who’s acknowledged as tough and direct in court. The aim might not be to discourage other judges from rocking the boat, but that's likely to be the outcome.

There’s also a discomforting impression that the case has been tainted by ideological considerations. Callinicos first made himself unpopular with his involvement in the Mrs P case, which has a long and complicated history, and now he’s a target. He has made the dangerous mistake of (1) antagonising activist women’s groups and (2) siding with a Pakeha couple against Oranga Tamariki and the local iwi.

On a broader level, the controversy raises crucial questions – not for the first time – about judicial independence from political influence and about the opacity of the process by which judges are appointed and held to account. We are entitled to assume that members of the judiciary – including those at the very top – are chosen for the right reasons, and that they are immune to ideological and political currents. But are they? Cases like this may cause people to wonder.

Mental health gets the standard Labour treatment

Labour governments typically have two standard responses to a political problem, or even the mere perception of one. They either throw vast amounts of money at it, or they create an unwieldy, centralised bureaucracy to give the impression something is being done. Sometimes it’s both, since these solutions often overlap.

We’ve already seen several examples of both approaches under this government and it’s not even one-third of the way through its term. In health and education, Labour is re-inventing the wheel by setting up potentially cumbersome bureaucracies that will strip away all pretence of local representation – and in the former case, create a co-governance structure that will give Maori power vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Reform of local government is still to come, and we can expect it to follow a similar path.

Even more egregious is Labour’s proposed Three Waters upheaval – a project so flawed and obnoxious that even the mayors of Auckland and Christchurch, both former Labour cabinet ministers, have declared their opposition.  

Another former Labour minister, Richard Prebble, succinctly describes Three Waters as the biggest robbery in our history. “The government is taking over $35.7 billion of ratepayers’ water assets and leaving the ratepayers with the debt,” Prebble writes in the New Zealand Herald.

Once again a centralised, opaque governance structure will be created that will give grossly disproportionate power to unelected Maori, sweep away local representation and discard generations of local knowledge, investment and experience.

Arguably the most offensive aspect of Three Waters is its audacious dishonesty. Rather than solving a problem, the government has invented one. The entire exercise has been sold to the public on the basis of a one-off incident – Havelock North’s 2016 water crisis, when four people died and thousands fell ill as a result of contaminated groundwater.

Using that isolated event as its primary justification, Labour has insulted our intelligence by spending millions on an infantile advertising campaign aimed at scaring us into believing the entire country’s water infrastructure is in such a parlous state that only the imposition of a new layer of remote, unaccountable bureaucracy can save us. In fact most councils manage their water safely and effectively without help from the Big State, still less any need for a dodgy Scottish governance model.

Another striking example of textbook Labour kneejerk-ism is Health Minister Andrew Little’s action plan (I use that term sardonically) for mental health.

It bears all the familiar hallmarks of Labour box-ticking: a Maori name, Kia Manawanui (apparently it means “have patience”, which seems apposite given how long the mentally ill may have to wait for anything to happen); a blizzard of empty buzzwords (two examples: “joined-up investment” and “a digital eco-system of support”); a 10-year plan (Stalin and Mao were fond of visionary plans too); and the creation of yet another new bureaucracy, in this instance an "external oversight group” headed by a dependable Labour favourite in the person of Professor Judy McGregor.

All this is intended to create the illusion of decisive, meaningful action, but it’s merely the announcement of a plan that has yet to be formulated. It contains nothing substantive or concrete – not even any goals or targets (they’ll come later, presumably).  It will provide work for lots of highly paid consultants and hangers-on but do nothing in the short term to help people suffering from mental illness. In short, it’s a disgrace and a travesty.

It’s not as if the government hasn’t had plenty of time already to assess the problem. It commissioned a mental health inquiry (another thing Labour’s good at) that produced a doorstop of a report in 2018, and it has budgeted for $1.9 billion to sort things out – money that it doesn’t seem to know how to spend. Responsible governments decide what needs to be done then work out what it’s likely to cost. But this one appears to work backwards, plucking a sum out of the air then wondering what to do with it.

In the meantime, Little continues to huff and puff over National’s supposed neglect of mental health (which may have been a fair criticism in 2018, but voters allow governments only one term to blame the previous lot; after that the excuse just doesn’t cut it) and wrings his hands in frustration at his inability to get anything done. Pardon me, but isn’t he supposed to be in charge?

And now, after all that, it seems we’re being told that what’s needed is more talk, more planning and ... oh yes, a layer of "oversight". If words and reports were all it took to solve the problem, New Zealand would be the most mentally robust nation on the planet.

Someone who has monitored the deepening crisis in mental crisis over many years is Andy Espersen of Nelson, a regular commenter on this blog who spent his entire working life in psychiatric hospitals. Following the announcement of Labour’s mental health “plan” he wrote the following letter to Little, part of which I reproduce here with his permission:

Dear Andrew Little.

Your government uncritically followed He Ara Oranga [the 2018 inquiry into mental health and addiction] by almost immediately accepting 38 of its 40 recommendations –  practically rubber-stamping them. You simply did not leave enough time to properly investigate, understand and weigh up the recommendations.

This inquiry was set up exclusively to solve the following New Zealand mental health problems:

 1. The increased number of suicides among clients of our mental health services.

2. The obvious shortage of fully serviced, psychiatric in-patient beds.

3. The number of atrocious murders of innocent people by known mental health patients.

4. The chaotic and dangerous state of affairs in our acute mental health units where both staff and patients are regularly assaulted by insane patients.

5. The never-ending complaints from carers (usually parents) of schizophrenic sufferers re lack of realistic support for them.

6. The problem with our many single, homeless people now slumped in our streets – of whom at least 70% are suffering from schizophrenia. 

7. The fact that whereas before 1992 we did not have one single schizophrenic sufferer in prison (it was actually illegal to imprison a schizophrenic person) – we now have ca. 2000 mentally ill prisoners (20% of our total prison population!). Tony Bouchier, then President of the NZ Criminal Bar Association, in an RNZ interview on Feb. 18th 2016, stated, “One of the main reasons the prison muster is so high is that our prisons are our proxy for our mental health institutions which we no longer have. And everybody in criminal law will tell you this, from judges through to defence counsel, if there was another way to deal with these people through proper mental health legislation our muster would be a lot smaller”.

Those were the reasons for setting up the Paterson Inquiry. Jonathan Coleman (former  Minister of Health) resisted an inquiry into mental health, dryly observing :”We know the problems – why set up an inquiry?”. Those were the problems Dr Coleman and all other people working with the mentally ill then knew as facts.

Nevertheless, in came your Labour party –  up came Ron Paterson [the inquiry chair] – and out came He Ara Oranga.

My proofs for your being ill advised by your public service employees consist of the following facts :

 1. Nowhere in the 219 pages report will you find any reference to any of the above mentioned 7 stark, accepted mental health problems, except suicide.

2. Nowhere in its 219 pages will you find any mention of the treatment of mental illnesses -  schizophrenia, human insanity, dementia, endogenous depressions  or any of the neuroses. You won't even find the words for those conditions mentioned (except schizophrenia once, in passing,  in chapter 1, page 33).

3. Nowhere in the 219 pages will you find any reference to the most drastic changes happening to New Zealand's philosophy of treating mental illness in 150 years, namely the enactment of the 1992 Mental Health Act -  which you are now blithely revoking and replacing. As none of the 7 problems mentioned above existed prior to 1992, one can hardly avoid suspecting that those changes might be a factor behind those problems!

4. All you get from the report is an incredibly vague treatise on something the commission calls   “mental well-being” -  which has nothing whatsoever  to do with mental illness. We are advised that we shall all attain that state of  eternal bliss when we have enough mental health personnel  to reach 20% of our population rather than the miserable 3.7% as at present!

5. The report lacks any practical suggestions how to initiate working towards this eventual utopia. It is all just fine words and sentiments  – all politically correct. There is nothing to hang your hat on – as is  amply proved by the fact that nobody has yet  figured out how to even begin to spend the $1.9 billion so generously promised by Labour!!   And by the way,  we who are passionately concerned about mental health were jubilant when Labour came out with that fantastic budget.

It beggars belief that your Mental Health Directorate advised you to follow the recommendations from He Ara Oranga  - ignoring  the facts shown above.

So far I have only criticised  -  which is easy.    I wish to finish on a positive note: How then should we proceed to repeal and replace the 1992 Act?  In 1991 British social historian Waltroud Ernst wrote a paper on 19^th century psychiatry in New Zealand.  Our first mental health legislation was The Lunatics Ordinance 1846.   Ernst wrote that it aimed to “provide safe custody and the prevention of offences by persons dangerously insane and for the care and maintenance of persons of unsound minds”. This brief synopsis  shows the foundation for the building of all our designated,  psychiatric hospitals  for 150 years - together with our whole philosophy of our treatment of all our mental illnesses. 1. It authorised society to contain acutely psychotic persons and charitably protect them from their own actions over which they have no control. 2. It gave all mentally ill persons the right to remain as a wards of the state under protection for the rest of their lives, if they so desired.

We enjoyed this mental hospital based system for 150 years – and everybody, including the mentally ill, were very satisfied and content.  I here must stress that other groups of people who eventually became patients in our mental hospitals (e.g. the intellectually disabled and the epileptics) were never happy here. This system was destroyed for ideological reasons only by the enactment of the 1992 Act – and its consequential closure of our charitable, residential institutions.

Our ten-year mental health plan should be simply to revert to the charitable philosophy of yesteryear. And would it not be good if  the whole of parliament would agree to that plan?

I have been in touch with Shane Reti  [deputy leader of the Opposition] and happen to know  that he sympathises with my views – he is an old time medical doctor who spent part of his training working in mental hospitals but, of course, like you he is thwarted by the convictions of our present mental health ideologues.  It would be ideal if you and he  could get together to talk about all this.  And why not include Brooke van Velden [ACT deputy leader]?  Please, please – do try to work towards a multi-party solution to the mental health issue.   It is ironic (and saddening)  that Judith Collins and Jacinda Ardern both claim to have mental health as a priority  but don't get together to work something out.

You politicians are supposed to be running the show – not your advisors.  It is the same with all this Covid nonsense. Here you are legislating and issuing decrees  – all terribly destructive  to New Zealanders, with long-lasting,  devastating effects both economically and psychologically.  And meekly excusing it  by saying that  you are following expert advice. But you are not obliged to follow “expert advice”.   Your job is exclusively to do the best, the most humane, the most charitable, the most rational for your fellow New Zealanders who have honoured you and elected you to govern –  and if that runs counter to scientific, epidemiological opinions, so be it. 

Yours sincerely,

Andy Espersen

The media's calculated insult to public opinion

How much longer will the political and media elites persist with their extraordinary arrogance in referring to New Zealand as Aotearoa?

We have now, in the space of two weeks, seen two reputable polls showing conclusively that the majority of New Zealanders prefer the status quo, and by a very substantial margin.

First there was the Curia poll, commissioned by the lobby group Hobson’s Pledge, in which 39 per cent of respondents were “strongly” opposed to a name change and nearly 10 per cent were “somewhat” opposed, making a total of 49 per cent in favour of keeping things as they are.

Against that, 18.4 per cent "strongly" favoured Aotearoa and a further 9.7 per cent were “somewhat” in support, with 22 per cent of respondents neutral. That’s a decisive majority – 49-28 – who want no change.

No doubt there were aggrieved supporters of a name change who pooh-poohed the findings because (a) the poll was commissioned by a group opposed to the change and (b) Curia was formerly the National Party’s pollster and is therefore associated in some people’s minds with the centre-Right.

But hang on a minute. TVNZ last night reported a 1News Colmar Brunton poll that found even stronger public opposition to the adoption of Aotearoa.

Asked “What do you think the country should be called?”, 58 per cent of respondents said New Zealand.

1News put its own slant on the findings by then saying that 41 per cent “opted for Aotearoa to be in the mix”. But in fact only 9 per cent – I repeat, 9 per cent – wanted New Zealand renamed Aotearoa. 

That's only half as many as in the Curia result. Of the rest, 31 per cent took an each-way bet, preferring "Aotearoa New Zealand".

These figures should put the naming issue to bed once and for all, but don’t expect that to happen. The elites will continue using the inauthentic name Aotearoa because they are contemptuous of public opinion. The saddest part of this for me is that the poll results confirm the news media have completely lost touch with the society they purport to serve.

Notwithstanding the above, I remain more or less neutral on the naming issue. There are good arguments both ways. But the bottom line, as long as we continue to maintain that this is a democracy, is that the people should decide.

An exception can be made for privately owned news organisations, which are entitled to use whatever nomenclature they choose. This is a free society, after all. But they should realise that in calling New Zealand Aotearoa they risk alienating the viewers, listeners and readers who keep them afloat.

For publicly owned media such as TVNZ and RNZ, however, a different rule applies. I believe they have a clear moral obligation to respect the views of the people who provide their funding and to whom they remain accountable.

That means referring to this country by its official, recognised name. To do otherwise, in defiance of two credible opinion polls that clearly show what the people want, is a calculated insult to public opinion.

Addendum: The Dominion Post published the following letter from me yesterday:

Thomas Manch devoted a substantial article to the Aotearoa name change debate (“Name debate bubbles away”, Sept 27) but strangely omitted one very significant piece of information.

In a Curia poll released this month, 49 per cent of respondents opposed changing New Zealand’s name – 39 per cent “strongly” and 9 per cent “somewhat”.

Against that, 18 per cent “strongly” and nearly 10 per cent “somewhat” supported Aotearoa. Slightly more than 20 per cent of respondents were neutral.

The poll was conducted early in September and surveyed 1000 people.

It was commissioned by the lobby group Hobson’s Pledge, which strongly opposes a name change. Some would argue that this undermines the poll’s credibility, but Curia is a reputable research company and unlikely to  compromise its reputation by producing a dodgy result.

In any case, the media – including Stuff – frequently report on political polls carried out by UMR, which is the Labour Party’s pollster. This makes it puzzling that the Curia poll – the only one, to my knowledge, that has recently surveyed public opinion on this highly contentious issue – appears to have had no publicity whatsoever.

I left it to Dom Post readers to form their own conclusions about why Thomas Manch, a senior Stuff political reporter, failed to mention the Curia poll, which was painstakingly ignored by all the media.

John Key's less than glorious re-entry into the political arena

If you wanted a measure of how dire things have become in God’s Own Country, the weekend provided it.

John Key wrote a comment piece attacking the government’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic and was rapturously welcomed by the centre-Right as some sort of messiah returned from the wilderness.

You know things are in a seriously bad way when Key is acclaimed as the nation’s saviour. Yes, I know he was a popular prime minister, but I never understood why and still don’t.

I never knew what, if anything, he stood for, and I never heard him say anything remotely insightful, still less inspirational. His one attempt at leaving a permanent impression on New Zealand, in the form of a new flag, was comprehensively defeated – not so much because it was a bad idea, necessarily, but because it was poorly managed and presented a sulking, resentful Left with an opportunity to prick his balloon. It was his only act of real political boldness and it failed.

Otherwise Key left virtually no footprint. You look at the political space that he occupied for eight years and there’s virtually nothing to indicate he ever passed through. He was at best a competent manager who had the good fortune to be supported by some capable cabinet ministers, among them Bill English and Stephen Joyce. But – and it’s a big but – Key was successful politically, which is what the National Party has always valued above all else. He won elections.

He appealed to New Zealanders for reasons that eluded me. Political journalists liked to say he had something called “Everyman appeal”, but in my case it was Everyman minus one.

I wasn’t the only one scratching my head over the Key phenomenon. In his book The Passionless People Revisited, the late Gordon McLauchlan referred to Key as “the Face” and suggested he was the perfect leader for a bland, passionless country. “I could sense the attraction of personal charm,” McLauchlan wrote, “but saw or heard nothing to hint at the gravitas [that] mature citizens should want from a mature leader, and nothing to excite admiration.”

For me, the true measure of Key – the real insight into his personality and character – lay not in anything he achieved politically, but in what he revealed of himself away from politics: for example, his idea that it was fun to tug a young waitress’s ponytail and his jokey admission on a blokey radio show (a milieu in which he felt right at home) that he urinated in the shower. Everyman appeal? Really??

In fact you can make a compelling argument that Winston Peters, who never served as prime minister (other than in an acting capacity), had a far more profound and lasting impact on New Zealand than Key, who served nearly three terms in the top job.

I don’t mean that as a compliment to Peters. He left his mark for all the wrong reasons and in the worst possible way. By anointing Jacinda Ardern as prime minister in 2017 when, morally, National had earned the right to govern with 44 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 38 per cent, Peters effectively set the course on which New Zealand finds itself fixed today.

By taking that step, he facilitated the installation in 2020 of the most radical left-wing government in our history – one that’s pursuing a divisive and destructive agenda for which it has no mandate, and which has the potential to cause long-term and possibly irreversible harm.  

I hope Peters is proud of his legacy. When he occasionally harrumphs in the media about the damage the Ardern government is doing, as he did again this week, people should remind themselves that Peters himself is the man to blame for the country’s predicament.

They should also remind themselves why he backed Labour in 2017. All the evidence suggests he did it not because he sincerely believed a Labour government would be better for New Zealand. He did it out of an urge to exact utu on National, his own former party; in other words, out of spite because of his fury over the embarrassing leaking of his personal superannuation details, an act for which he blamed the National government. He would also have calculated, no doubt correctly, that he would exert greater influence over Labour than would have been possible over a more experienced and battle-hardened National.

Of course Peters couldn’t have foreseen subsequent events: the mosque shootings, the Whakaari eruption and Covid-19, all of which contributed to the elevation of Jacinda Ardern to politically stratospheric levels of popularity, internationally as well as at home. Nor would he have foreseen the collapse of the National Party as it cycled through several embarrassingly ineffectual leaders. But most ironically for Peters personally, he wouldn’t have foreseen that Ardern’s management of those crises would so impress the electorate that voters would reward her with the right to govern alone, thereby consigning his own party to the political scrap heap.

Poetic justice, some would say; Shakespeare would have loved it. But what a price the country is now paying. 

So while New Zealand politics has taken a sharp turn to the left that Peters would have neither wanted nor intended, no one should be in any doubt that he set the country on its present path. It all started with that cynical decision in 2017 to put his own political interests ahead of the clearly expressed preference of the voters. Who knows how different things might have been had Peters opted to go with National?

That’s why I say he had a more profound and long-lasting impact than Key, who always gave me the impression he regarded the prime ministership as a milestone to be ticked off on the career pathway he had mapped out for himself before moving on to something else.

But back to Key’s weekend article, which broke new ground by being published in both the Herald on Sunday and the Sunday Star-Times.  

There’s no doubt that many New Zealanders were waiting for someone to articulate the building sense of resentment against Ardern and her government over their management of Covid-19, and Key stepped up at the right time. He always did have a good sense of timing – an ability to sense and seize the moment, which was possibly what made him such a formidable international currency trader.

He was also able to use his status as one of our two most successful living politicians (the other being Helen Clark) to command a degree of media prominence that few others would have been granted. Even NZME and Stuff, media organisations not noted for their tough and rigorously even-handed scrutiny of the Labour government, could not ignore the opinion of a man who won three terms in government, a record rarely achieved in New Zealand. Besides, Stuff and NZME need to sell papers, and Key’s still a big-enough name to do that for them, especially when he’s expressing the frustrations and misgivings of an electorate that is becoming immune to Ardern’s magic dust and has grown tired of the daily spin.

So Key got a lot of media traction, even though the points he made have all been made previously by other people. His opinion piece made an impact not because what he said was original, but because it was John Key saying it.

What was surprising was that Key unnecessarily blunted the impact of his piece by making a silly mistake – one so fundamental that any half-decent PR adviser should have been able to point out the risk.

It lay in Key’s description of New Zealand under Ardern as a smug hermit kingdom akin to North Korea. As a piece of rhetorical hyperbole it served the purpose of capturing public attention and triggering a media feeding frenzy. But it also undermined the credibility of what Key was saying, simply because the comparison with North Korea was so demonstrably outlandish.

More to the point, it enabled the government and its media defenders to scoff in disbelief. And they were entitled to, since no one seriously believes New Zealand can be compared with the world’s most repressive state – a country where millions starve, dissent is brutally suppressed through imprisonment or worse and a high-ranking politician was executed with an anti-aircraft gun for making the mistake of falling asleep during a speech by the Supreme Leader

Thus the ensuing debate, which should have been about Covid-19 and lockdown, predictably focused not on the good sense in much of what Key said – for example, about the lack of a clear pathway out of lockdown, the massive cost of borrowing to compensate for economic inactivity, the stranding of New Zealand citizens overseas and, perhaps most crucially, the imposition of restrictions on civil liberties that are disproportionate to the risk of catching Covid-19 – but on whether New Zealanders should feel insulted by the North Korea analogy.

When Key went on Morning Report, the reference to North Korea seemed to be the only thing Corin Dann was interested in. On Stuff, Dominion Post editor (and frequent North Korea visitor) Anna Fifield rushed into print – unnecessarily, I would have thought – with an explanation of all the ways in which New Zealand differs from the Kim Jong Un regime. Covid-19 Minister Chris Hipkins was another who eagerly latched on to the North Korea angle, grateful no doubt for the opportunity to deflect attention from Key’s more cogent arguments. Simon Wilson in today’s Herald? Ditto.

So while Key may be baaack (as a headline on the far-Left website The Standard put it, in a nod to the The Terminator), his re-entry into politics has hardly been an unqualified triumph. Yes, he put some runs on the board on behalf of the growing number of New Zealanders disenchanted with the government’s pandemic management. But when he could have knocked the ball out of the park, he lofted a soft catch into the hands of the other side.