Why the judicial conduct panel's secret inquiry can't possibly be about Judge Callinicos

There was an intriguing report in yesterday’s Dominion Post about a secret inquiry by a judicial conduct panel.

It was a classic case of a story raising more questions than it answered. Quoting a press statement issued by the panel, the story revealed that the unnamed judge at the centre of the inquiry had questioned its legitimacy.

More specifically, the panel said the judge had challenged its jurisdiction to conduct the inquiry “in the particular circumstances of the case”. That would be the first question the panel had to decide.

The panel made interim non-publication orders covering the judge’s identity and the background of the case. Even the judge’s gender wasn’t disclosed. The question of what could be published about the inquiry would not be considered again until that issue was decided, “at the earliest” (which suggests that even then, the panel may reserve its right to keep the proceedings secret).

All this furtiveness was bound to arouse feverish speculation – and sure enough, conspiracy-minded people were soon mischievously putting it about that the unnamed judge under investigation was Hawke’s Bay Family Court judge Peter Callinicos.

This wild gossip was based on no firmer foundation than that Callinicos was reported earlier this year as being the subject of complaints about his conduct in the racially sensitive “Moana” child custody case, in which he subjected Oranga Tamariki social workers to some robust questioning.

While the Moana case was still in progress, a complaint about Callinicos from the then head of Oranga Tamariki, Sir Wira Gardiner, resulted in the judge being contacted by two of his superiors – an apparent breach of judicial independence. It later emerged that Callinicos had been investigated behind his back by even more senior members of the judiciary.

Attorney-General David Parker subsequently accepted Judicial Conduct Commissioner Alan Ritchie’s recommendation that an unnamed judge be investigated by the panel, to which Parker appointed Chief High Court Judge Susan Thomas, District Court judge Lawrence Hinton and former diplomat Jacqueline Caine (Ngai Tahu, Kati Mamoe, Waitaha). The Dominion Post disclosed that in his latest annual report, Ritchie said that “[O]n my assessment, the [judge's] conduct, if established, would fall well short of accepted judicial standards”. (As far as is known, no inquiry has been announced into concerns about an unnamed judge’s judicial independence being compromised.)

Putting two and two together and adding a generous dollop of irrational conjecture, some people have assumed that the unnamed judge at the centre of the current proceedings must be Callinicos. On the face of it, this supposition appears to be supported by the fact that judicial conduct panel hearings are rare and there are unlikely to be two running simultaneously.

But I can put their minds at rest. These proceedings cannot possibly be about Callinicos. By a highly unusual coincidence, they must relate to another case.

My reasoning is simple.

■ There is a well-established presumption of open justice. Justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done etc etc.

■ The judicial conduct panel would be aware that the Callinicos case has been well-publicised and has therefore become a matter of keen and legitimate public interest.

■ It will be aware too that the case has raised concerns about the clubby nature of the judicial establishment and the opaque nature of almost everything related to judicial affairs, from the appointment of judges to the way disciplinary matters are dealt with.

■ In the circumstances, the panel would presumably be anxious to dispel any suspicions, far-fetched though they may be, about important issues being dealt with behind closed doors and out of public view. The last thing it would want is wild allegations about secretive Star Chamber-type inquisitions.

It follows, then, that the inquiry reported by the Dominion Post must relate to something entirely different.

 

What this photo tells us about the state of political journalism

 

Many readers will have seen this picture. It shows three political journalists sprinting across the forecourt at Parliament.

My first thought on seeing the photo was that something or someone very frightening must have been chasing them. But no, the three women were themselves the chasers. They were in pursuit of Christopher Luxon's hired car as he arrived at Parliament for the first time as National leader.

Apparently the reporters were taken by surprise when Luxon was driven to Parliament from his apartment across the street rather than walking, thus presumably thwarting their plans to waylay him. They then had to take to their [high] heels to keep up, something for which they were clearly ill-prepared. 

My second thought was: do they realise how ridiculous they look? Admittedly it probably didn’t occur to them that the moment would be caught on camera, but the photo reminded me why I've made it a lifelong rule never to run unless my physical safety is in imminent danger. I've missed a few trains and buses as a result, but I'd like to think I've avoided the indignity of being seen doing something for which I'm clearly not suited. This photo reinforced the soundness of that rule, though I must say the reporter on the left (whom I couldn't identify) ran quite elegantly despite wearing inappropriate footwear, which suggests she may have done this sort of thing before. 

The question remains: why were they running, exactly? Luxon's limo would be pulling to a halt in a few seconds, giving them a chance to do what political journalists typically do in such situations, which is ask trite and pointless questions that they have no real expectation of being answered in any meaningful way.

Perhaps the three runners share the same instinct as sheep and cattle, whereby if one starts running, even when there's no obvious reason, all the others do too, as if by some mysterious trigger. Or to use another animal comparison, maybe, like dogs, they just can't resist the urge to chase anything that appears to be trying to get away from them. 

Chasing cars, of course, is a common canine sport, though the dog never quite knows what to do if and when the car stops. But let’s not take that analogy any further.

Setting aside these possible explanations, my guess is that the journalists were running because of that well-recognised psychological disorder common among press gallery journalists: FOMO, or fear of missing out.

In the few seconds between Luxon getting out of his car and disappearing inside Parliament Buildings, hounded by a scrum of over-stimulated reporters all asking questions that were unlikely to reveal anything even if they were answered, there might have lurked a sound-bite. Who knows? It might have been as trivial as Luxon commenting on the weather, but hey – with skilled editing, any meaningless remark has the potential to be stitched into a package for the 6pm bulletin that conveys a sense of intense political drama and momentous events unfolding even when nothing much is happening. Newshub does it almost every night.

And what, say, if Luxon had tripped and fallen as he tried to fight his way through the media pack? What would Jessica Mutch McKay (that's her on the right) have said to her bosses if TV3 had captured the moment and TVNZ didn't, and her only excuse was that she and her camera person were five seconds late getting there? There's big-time professional humiliation, right there.

The photo, then, tells us quite a lot about the state of political journalism. It's less concerned with the substance of politics than it is with the excitement of the chase and the ambush, the irrational, adrenalin-charged excitement of the media scrum and the  desire to bail politicians up, catch them out, trip them up and trap them into saying things that will backfire on them; the “Gotcha!” moment.

Not all these elements are present in the picture, of course, but nonetheless it encapsulates the sense that coverage of politics, for broadcasting journalists especially, has become an infantile game in which almost all sight has been lost of journalism's key purpose, which is to inform the public about things that actually matter to them.

Media coverage of politics has become a circus in which the media themselves act as ringmasters. To their shame, politicians are complicit in this, allowing alpha journalists such as Tova O'Brien to bully and goad them. Politicians are thus instrumental in trivialising politics and demeaning themselves. They should remind themselves that they at least have the honour of being elected and publicly accountable (those who represent actual electorates, that is – list MPs not so much), which is more than can be said for journalists. In that sense politicians have the moral high ground over their tormentors. They need to remember this and stand up for themselves.

A friend of mine who has experienced political journalism from both sides recently suggested, not entirely jokingly, that we need a politician like the late Robert Muldoon to put egotistical reporters in their place. Neither my friend nor I were admirers of Muldoon and his take-no-prisoners attitude toward journalists, but the relationship between politicians and reporters today is just as unhealthy as it was then – albeit with the roles reversed. 

What makes things worse is that the media have almost entirely abandoned coverage of parliamentary proceedings – that is to say, debates and select committee hearings where important issues are debated and decided, and where our laws are shaped. This stuff is way too dry and tedious for the media, who prefer to confront MPs outside the debating chamber and pepper them with questions about the latest confected controversy-du-jour.

Parliamentary proceedings appear to interest the media only when there’s blood on the floor or when (as happened yesterday) there’s the tantalising prospect of a showdown or shootout. As a result, we sometimes learn about new laws months after they have been passed, by which time they have taken effect and are starting to bite – often to the complete surprise of those affected by them. I often wonder whether there's anyone even sitting in the press gallery, that section of Parliament that Edmund Burke honoured by labelling it the Fourth Estate – one he described as "more important [by] far" than everyone else sitting there. 

Where, for example, was the press gallery last month when Parliament quietly changed the law to allow “iwi representatives” – for which read nominees of unelected vigilante Hone Harawira, a politician booted out of Parliament by the very people he purports to speak for – to obstruct people going about their lawful business on public roads? Was there no one in the gallery that day? (It was a Saturday, after all – sleep-in day for exhausted hacks.) Or were the journalists obligingly looking the other way?

Nearly two weeks passed before news of the law change filtered out. Inexplicably, National and Act were silent; missing in action. Winston Peters issued a statement, but it was ignored. Despite saturation media coverage of Covid-19, this unprecedented interference with New Zealanders’ common law rights strangely went unreported. It was only when Police Commissioner Andrew Coster was interviewed by Mike Hosking that the public became aware of the law change.

Hosking’s fellow NewstalkZB presenter Heather du Plessis-Allen subsequently ripped into the government for going to ground and refusing to answer questions once the news got out about iwi-manned roadblocks, but she let her media colleagues off the hook. They were complicit too, either though dereliction, laziness, incompetence or connivance.  

The government’s action might have been “shady as all hell”, as du Plessis-Allan says, but governments get away with these things only if the media let them. And as long as cynical politicians can rely on the mainstream media being distracted by sideshows and political soap operas, they will continue to escape tough scrutiny on things that really matter.

 

On the Royal Society and the stifling of free speech

Last week the Free Speech Union, of which I’m a member, asked me to write something about the modern-day heresy trial initiated by the Royal Society of New Zealand following complaints about a letter written to the Listener in which seven respected academics very civilly challenged the idea that matauranga Maori – traditional Maori knowledge – should be given the same status as science. My article was to be distributed to media outlets in the hope that it would help draw attention to the parlous state of free speech in academia.

My article, which was sent out last Tuesday, is published below. It doesn’t deal solely with the Royal Society controversy, since I wanted to contextualise the society’s inquisition (which has attracted attention in the latest issue of the UK Spectator) by setting the current issue against the backdrop of other free speech controversies, just to remind readers that there’s a pattern here.

I deliberately adopted a low-key tone, bearing in mind the article was to be offered to mainstream media and I didn’t want to give them any excuse to reject it. But as of today, I’m told that only one small provincial paper has published it. People may feel entitled to assume from this that the protection of free speech doesn’t rate highly in media priorities, although all media outlets depend on it for their existence. (Of course it's also possible that it was rejected because it's a crappy article. You be the judge.)

Freedom of speech is a fundamental right in a liberal democracy – as important, even, as the right to vote, since people’s ability to cast an informed vote depends on them first being able to participate in free and open debate about political issues and ideas.

This is one of the crucial factors that distinguishes a true liberal democracy such as New Zealand from authoritarian “pretend” democracies such as Russia, where people are allowed to vote but are denied access to information and opinion that doesn’t conform to the agenda of those in control.

Accordingly, the Bill of Rights Act, passed by a Labour government in 1990, states that every New Zealander has the right to freedom of expression, “including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form”. The wording is similar to that of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, except that the UN declaration goes a step further by asserting the right to “hold opinions without interference”.

Even before the Bill of Rights Act made it explicit, free speech was a right that New Zealanders took for granted. They exercised it (and still do) every day in letters to the editor and on radio talkback shows.

Yet a perception has grown in recent years that New Zealanders’ right to speak freely and to hear or read all shades of political opinion, short of those that incite violence and hatred, is under sustained attack. Concern at the fragility of free speech rights led to the formation this year of the Free Speech Union, which has drawn support from across the political and ideological spectrum.

One celebrated case involved the Canadian “alt-right” (so-called) speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who were barred from speaking at a council-owned Auckland venue in 2018. The excuse used for denying them a platform was that the event might be disrupted by protesters.

Activists quickly realised they could force the cancellation of speeches by people they didn’t like simply by threatening protest action – a tactic sometimes referred as the heckler’s or thug's veto.

A similar pretext, fear of disruption, was used by Massey University to cancel a speech by former National Party leader and Reserve Bank governor Don Brash, although it’s hard to imagine anyone less likely to incite trouble than the unfailingly civil Brash. Emails released under the Official Information Act subsequently revealed that the real reason Massey’s vice-chancellor banned Brash was that she didn’t want the university to be seen as “endorsing racist behaviours”. In other words, she didn’t agree with Brash’s opinion on the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Southern-Molyneux controversy is still being played out in the courts, the crowd-funded Free Speech Union having gone all the way to the Supreme Court in a test case aimed at preventing public authorities from using the supposed threat of disruption as an excuse to “de-platform” speakers.

In the meantime, other developments have reinforced the perception that freedom of expression in New Zealand is imperilled. The feminist group Speak Up For Women (SUFW), which advances the unremarkable view that only people born female can call themselves women, has been barred from holding meetings in public premises and had a prominent advertising billboard taken down in central Wellington. Some newspapers refused to accept their ads.

SUFW’s struggle to get its message across in the face of determined opposition from trans-gender activists illustrates that the defence of free speech cuts across the usual ideological and political lines.

People who identify with the radical left have found themselves on the same side as conservatives and libertarians in pushing for the right to say what they think. The Free Speech Union’s supporters, for example, include veteran leftists Matt McCarten and Chris Trotter.

In the latest outbreak of the speech wars, the action has shifted to a new and worrying arena. Seven respected university academics found themselves blacklisted in July after they wrote a letter to The Listener challenging the notion that matauranga Maori – which can be defined as the traditional body of Maori knowledge – should be accorded the same status as science, as proposed by an NCEA working group preparing a new school curriculum.  

In an unprecedented pile-on, more than 2000 fellow academics, urged on by professors Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles, signed a letter denouncing the Listener Seven and implying they condoned “scientific racism”.

The response went well beyond legitimate disagreement. The sheer weight and vehemence of the denunciation sent an unmistakeable message to the academic community: express dissent at your peril.

More alarmingly still, two of the Listener Seven are now being investigated by the Royal Society – an organisation dedicated, ironically, to the advancement of science – and may be expelled.  

What started as an academic debate has thus taken on the character of a heresy trial. Even more ironically, one of the professors under investigation, Garth Cooper, is a Maori who has earned international acclaim for his achievements in Maori health.  

Once again, the Free Speech Union has stepped up by creating an academic freedom fund to help defend the two accused. If the complaint against them is upheld, union spokesman Dr David Cumin says, academics will inevitably feel less safe expressing honestly held views on contentious issues.

The union accuses universities and research institutions of trying to muzzle the very people whose job is to ask questions. “Academic freedom is under attack.”

The bottom line here is that science and academia need people who challenge accepted wisdom, otherwise we would be stuck forever in the status quo. But in New Zealand in 2021, the price for deviating from approved orthodoxy is punishment and ostracism.

[Anyone interested in defending free speech is welcome to republish or distribute this article. The Free Speech Union website is here.]

Competent management won't be enough to save New Zealand

I wrote the following article for the Insight section (paywalled) of the BFD. It was published on Friday.

The question everyone’s asking about Christopher Luxon – or to be more precise, the question everyone who’s interested in politics and New Zealand’s future is asking about Christopher Luxon – is this: what sort of leader (and potentially prime minister) will he be?

Judging by what we’ve seen and heard over the past few days, the answer is that he’ll probably be like most previous National leaders.

That is to say, he’s likely to be driven primarily by pragmatism – by whatever works politically, rather than by deeper philosophical motivations. In this respect he may be not much different from John Key, the party’s most successful (for which, read popular) leader in the modern era, and a man who has been described as Luxon’s mentor.

During an interview with Lisa Owen on RNZ’s Checkpoint on the day he became leader, Luxon referred in passing to National’s “core values”. He didn’t explain what they were, perhaps assuming we already know. But we don’t, because they haven’t been apparent for a very long time.

Certainly, I never had a clue what Key’s core values were, if they existed. I’m not sure he ever spelled them out – and to be honest, it wouldn’t matter to most New Zealanders that he didn’t. It was enough that Key kind of felt right to a majority of voters – the feel-good factor shouldn’t be under-rated – and mostly avoided doing reckless or unpopular things. (I say “mostly” because there was the poorly handled flag debate, which was a gift to his opponents, and the sneaky signing of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which revealed that whatever else Key believed in, transparency didn’t rank highly in his priorities.) 

In fact National’s ultimate core value, for as long as most people can remember, is winning and holding onto power. Fundamentally, that’s what drives the party.

And speaking pragmatically, it’s hard to argue with. After all, a political party achieves nothing by languishing in opposition, other than by perhaps coming up with the occasional good idea that someone else then steals and takes the credit for.

But some people – and I admit I’m one – look for something more in politicians than simply the desire to win. Accordingly, we talk about “conviction politicians”: people who enter politics because of a compelling belief in a particular set of values and a commitment to pursue them regardless of political exigencies. ACT was founded by conviction politicians, though it later lost its way. So were the Values and Green parties.

Granted, New Zealand voters tend not to be wildly keen about conviction politicians. The public is suspicious of ideologues and feels safer with pragmatists who don’t stray too far from the centre ground.

And it has to be said that voters sometimes have good reason to be wary. Leaders of some conservative Christian parties, for example, presented themselves as conviction politicians but didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory. One was a conviction politician in the very worst sense, entering politics on the basis of his religious convictions and ending up with convictions of the criminal kind for sexual offences against young girls.

Notwithstanding all the above, conviction politics has worked for Labour. One of the defining differences between National and Labour is that the latter is perceived as having more clearly identifiable values than the former.  Labour evolved from the union movement and was seen as the party of battlers and underdogs. Remarkably, the blue-collar image persists despite the party being controlled by mostly middle-class, theory-driven political careerists and ideologues.

Ask most people what National stands for, on the other hand, and the answer – after a bit of hesitation – is likely to be more nebulous; something about belief in capitalism, individual rights and prosperity, perhaps. But these values are rarely, if ever, clearly and emphatically articulated, and voters can hardly be blamed for feeling a bit confused about the party’s identity.

Arguably, the last National prime minister who clearly and unequivocally espoused strong personal convictions was Robert Muldoon. Problem was, they were essentially socialist ones. Muldoon was the greatest socialist prime minister Labour never had.

What, then, of Jim Bolger? During his long political career, Bolger evolved from a staunch Muldoon loyalist to an enthusiastic proponent of the free market economy. Since retirement, he seems to have doubled back to a point where he often sounds more Labour than National – a turnaround that can possibly be explained by the social conscience imbued in him by Catholicism. Small wonder, then, if people are not sure what National stands for.

But back to Luxon. In his formal speech and other statements following his elevation, he talked a lot about revitalising National and winning back the 400,000 voters who deserted the party last year. He zeroed in on government failings in managing inflation, education, housing, mental health, crime and Covid-19. He stressed the need to get things done rather than just talking about it. He talked about rewarding hard work and initiative – virtues National has traditionally espoused.

The intended message was clear: National will be more competent managers than the present lot. As with Key, Luxon’s business credentials will be used to burnish his credibility. Provided the party can maintain discipline and not be distracted by the traps that will be strewn in its path by the media, we may see a sharper and more concerted focus than was evident under Judith Collins and her immediate predecessors.

(As an aside, Luxon has already had a taste of what he can expect from journalists. The first question at his press confidence, from Jessica Mutch McKay, concerned his Christian faith, which many journalists clearly regard as one step removed from total nutbar territory. Tova O’Brien then tried to unsettle him with a question about having to watch his back, to which Luxon replied with a deft putdown and the best line of the day: “You think politics is like House of Cards”.  Later, on Checkpoint, Owens wasn’t content with Luxon saying he was pro-life and demanded to know whether he regarded abortion as murder, improbably justifying the question by claiming it was one that all her female listeners wanted him to answer. Really?)

Luxon’s performance in the interviews I’ve heard was mostly articulate and assured. But is he a conviction politician? In his first speech as leader, he avoided some of the polarising, hot-button issues simmering in the public arena: Maori co-governance proposals (as in Three Waters), the appropriation without any mandate of English place names, Labour’s audacious and undemocratic re-apportionment of power and control, the increasing suppression of free speech, the centralisation of power and erosion of local democracy, the radicalisation of the education system, ideological coercion in academic institutions, confected furores over diversity and inclusion – in other words, the culture wars.  Most journalists and interviewers avoid these subjects, probably preferring to think they are the pre-occupations of an extreme right-wing fringe and therefore not worth raising.

Talking to Mike Hosking, Luxon was more forthcoming. No doubt feeling he was on safe ground with a host and audience who were likely to be broadly sympathetic, he opened up about iwi roadblocks (“nuts”), gun violence and gangs (“we’ve got a big problem with that”) and Three Waters, which he vowed to repeal.

On the other hand, he appears to have back-pedalled on his earlier opposition to so-called “safe zones” outside abortion clinics, which isn’t promising. And interviewed by Ryan Bridge on The AM Show, he was notably less unequivocal about iwi road blocks, saying only that they need to be monitored. He can’t afford to change his message to suit whatever audience he happens to be talking to.

The best advice for Luxon is that he should hold his ground and not allow himself to be browbeaten or unnerved by media needling. I believe there’s a large cohort of voters in the political centre who are alarmed by wokeism and want to hear unequivocal statements from the leader of the opposition, yet there remains a feeling that National is too timid about nailing its colours to the mast on issues of principle. Luxon needs to dispel the impression that National has no stomach for a fight over these big issues, which go to the very heart of New Zealand’s identity and the type of society we aspire to be. If he really wants to win back some of those voters who transferred their allegiance to Act, there’s the answer.

Underlying all this is a bigger question. What is the role of centre-right parties in 21^st century democracies? Some say it’s simply to manage the economy, maintain stability, take whatever action might be necessary if there’s a genuine crisis and otherwise do as little as possible – the classic laissez-fair approach. By this yardstick, Key was a great conservative prime minister because he left virtually no enduring imprint.

William Hague, a former leader of Britain’s Tories, wrote last year that conservative politicians generally shun abstract principles and universal ideologies. In this respect they are at a marked disadvantage compared with their political enemies, who are energised and inspired by commitment to ideological goals.

According to this analysis, conservative parties are defined mainly by their opposition to “progressive” politics rather than by any core philosophy. This means in essence that they are in a state of continuous managed retreat, constantly giving ground to the left and adapting as best they can.

I no longer believe that’s good enough. In New Zealand, we are faced with parties on the left that want to deconstruct one of the world’s most exemplary democracies and rebuild it in a form we won’t even recognise. Mere competent management, as promised by the new National leader, won’t be enough to stop that.

Introducing the new Tova O'Brien, the voice of sweet accord

Rebranded radio station Today FM (formerly Magic Talk) has announced that someone named Mark Dye, who’s described as a former NewstalkZB presenter, will be co-hosting the new station’s breakfast show with Tova O’Brien.  

In one of those standard pieces of meaningless PR fluff that invariably accompany such announcements, Dye is quoted as saying: “The time is right for a station like Today. We all need a little less divisiveness and a bit more optimism.”

Less divisiveness? With Tova O’Brien?? Ha. Good luck with that, as they say – that is, unless we’re going to see a rebranded O’Brien too.

 

The hit jobs on Luxon came even sooner than I expected

I’m not in the habit of saying I told you so, but … I told you so.

In an article I wrote for the BFD last week and republished on this blog, I predicted the media would be out to destabilise Chris Luxon from day one, which turned out to be literally true. But even I’ve been taken aback by the intensity of the character assassination he’s been subjected to.

The media appear obsessed with the fact that Luxon is a Christian. At the press conference that followed his elevation to the National leadership, the first question he faced (from TVNZ’s Jessica Mutch McKay) related to his religious beliefs.

In the eyes of many political journalists, being a Christian automatically categorises him as a weirdo and possibly a fundamentalist right-winger. But in the 2018 census, 37 per cent of New Zealanders identified as Christian, and my guess is (in fact, logic dictates) that they span the political spectrum, supporting Labour and even the Greens as well as conservative parties. “Christian” is not a synonym for loony, wild-eyed extremist or tragic Gloriavale cultist.

It got far worse on Newshub News last night, when Luxon was subjected to an undisguised hatchet job that focused on his wealth. In the eyes of many in the media, being rich is almost as bad as being Christian (unless, that is, you're a rock star). It goes without saying that being both rich and Christian makes Luxon an irresistible target for journalists like Newshub’s smiling assassin Jenna Lynch, who snidely claimed he was so wealthy he didn’t even know how much capital gain he had made on his property investments (but don’t worry, Newshub had calculated it for him).

Lynch linked Luxon’s ownership of seven properties to the housing crisis, as if he were personally responsible for the continuing surge in house prices and had cynically exploited them for his own gain. “If you’re going to attack me for being successful, I can’t defend that,” Luxon protested. But appealing to Lynch’s sense of fairness is about as futile as asking a pitbull to desist from lunging at your throat.

Stuff followed up with a similar hit job headlined “Christopher Luxon’s property gains soar as National promises to tackle housing crisis”. Stuff calculated that he was earning $90,000 a week in capital gains and commented: “While the Opposition has hounded the government for allowing the housing crisis to worsen, National’s new leader is benefiting more than most from soaring house prices”. In other words, we’re encouraged to assume that Luxon is a hypocrite as well as a callous profiteer, getting richer by the day at the expense of the homeless and destitute.

But Luxon is  no more responsible for the housing crisis than the hundreds of thousands of other New Zealanders who have similarly benefited from economic circumstances which they have no control over or responsibility for. What, I wonder, does Stuff think he should do? Bury his money in the garden? Give it all away?

In response to Luxon’s statement that his property ownership hadn’t caused the housing crisis, the Stuff reporters commented: “But it’s hard to separate the property portfolios of Luxon and [Nicola] Willis from their position on housing”. Really? That implies a degree of culpability, but what’s the connection? Stuff didn’t explain. It’s easier to make facile judgments.

Now here’s a very intriguing thing. In three separate interviews, I heard Luxon being asked exactly the same question. Lisa Owen on RNZ’s Checkpoint, Ryan Bridge on Newshub’s AM Show and the smiling assassin on Newshub News all demanded to know whether he regarded abortion as murder.

It seems beyond coincidental that all three asked the same question, the more so because it came out of the blue. Abortion happens to be an important issue to me, but it isn’t something you hear people talking about in the pub and the supermarket. In a country beset by Covid-19, runaway house prices, rampant crime, inflation and inequality, it was nonsense to suggest (as Owen did on her programme, in an attempt to justify the question) that abortion was a pressing issue for her listeners.

The truth is that abortion is an ideological shibboleth – a test of Luxon’s acceptability to the left-wing media elite. The question was clearly linked to their apparent obsession with his  Christianity. If you were of a conspiratorial mindset, you couldn’t help but wonder whether this was a co-ordinated set-up. It certainly looked that way.  

And what was the point of the question, given that abortion isn’t currently on the political agenda? Could it be that tens of thousands of New Zealand women have had abortions, and that trapping Luxon into suggesting they’re all murderers would ensure National would never get their votes?

Trapping politicians, baiting them, trying to catch them out and make them look silly, hypocritical or indecisive … that’s what now passes for political journalism. And of course the journalists always come out on top, because they can set themselves up as judge and jury, are responsible to no one, pay no penalty when they get things wrong  (as they frequently do) and always have the last word.

What’s more, they’re highly selective about whose feet they hold to the fire. Luxon wields no real power at this stage of his political career, yet he’s subjected to far tougher treatment than the sainted prime minister, who clearly enjoys immunity from difficult questions. But most New Zealanders still believe in giving people (even conservative politicians) a fair go, and the media are probably doing far more damage to themselves than to Luxon.

The worst of all possible worlds

The following column was first published on The BFD. It has since had a small amount of new material added.

We’re all familiar with the phrase “the worst of all possible worlds”. Well, I think we now know what that world looks like.

We have an all-powerful, increasingly authoritarian government that combines ideological zealotry with ineptitude, profligacy, laziness and contempt for democratic process – surely the most lethal confluence of malignant political forces in living memory.

We have an opposition that should be presenting itself as an alternative to Labour but instead has been busy disembowelling itself. Both Judith Collins and Simon Bridges placed their egos and ambitions ahead of the interests of the country. The primary blame lies with Collins for her clumsy and desperate last-resort survival ploy but Bridges cannot entirely escape culpability, having done little to hose down media speculation about a change of leadership – indeed, appearing at times to revel in it. The voters are likely to punish them, but tragically New Zealand will also pay for their hubris. As long as the National caucus remains fractured by leadership squabbles, Labour has a good chance of squeaking back into power in 2023 and completing its transformational, neo-Marxist agenda.

The smart money is on Christopher Luxon to take over the leadership of the National Party, but it will be a hospital pass. People who know Luxon speak highly of him, but running an international airline is no preparation for the brutal business of top-level politics – and especially not for dealing with destructive and mischievous elements in the media, who will set out to destabilise him from day one.

Speaking of the media, we have a new breed of political journalists whom no one can trust, who regard themselves as players rather than observers, and who treat politics as some sort of entertaining blood sport – one in which all participants risk being maimed with the exception of … the media, who are accountable to no one and are in the uniquely privileged position of ensuring they always come out as winners. I’m reminded of a British journalist’s memorable line about newspaper editorial writers: “They watch from the hills as the fighting rages, then come down and bayonet the wounded.”

That pretty much describes some of today’s Press Gallery journalists, such as Newshub’s political editor Tova O’Brien and her understudy Jenna Lynch, who have no skin in the game and can walk away unscathed from the carnage they helped to orchestrate. Newshub played a key role in National’s leadership crisis, constantly contriving opportunities to undermine the floundering opposition leader while leaving the prime minister – the person actually running the country – untouched within her media-enabled force field. Dirty politics? You have it right there – but don’t expect another book from Nicky Hager. 

We have a rising political star in the person of David Seymour, whom voters clearly see as the most effective alternative to Jacinda Ardern, but who has no experience in government – in fact remains largely an unknown quantity – and who leads a party of absolute greenhorns. Theoretically there’s scope for an electoral arrangement between Act and National, on the assumption that they share at least some political values and might achieve together what they cannot do individually. But my guess is the same petty egos that have torn National apart would sabotage any such proposal. Sharing power and relinquishing control just isn’t in their DNA.

So there it is. Good luck trying to find something optimistic to latch onto in that lot.

Who’s to blame, then, if anyone? Mike Hosking this week fingered John Key as being responsible for the mess we’re in, and I don’t think he was being entirely flippant. If only Key hadn’t stood down, Hosking implied, New Zealand would still be basking in the sunlit uplands.

But I suspect Key regarded the prime ministership as just another box to be ticked off on the career path he had mapped out for himself, and once he tired of the job he could hardly be expected to stick around just for the sake of the country. After all, a bloke like Key likes to quit while he’s ahead.

No, if you want to trace New Zealand’s parlous situation back to its origin, the trail leads inexorably to Winston Raymond Peters. Remember the 2017 election? With just 7 percent of the vote, Peters held the balance of power and exercised it by anointing Ardern as prime minister when, morally, National had earned the right to govern with 44 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 38 per cent.

Had the New Zealand First leader done the honourable thing in 2017, Bill English would have remained prime minister and might have turned out to be a good one. Not only had he done much of the heavy lifting behind the scenes in the Key government, but he had a social conscience that marked him as a politician in the mould of National Party liberals from the Holyoake era – National’s golden age, when it won four consecutive terms.

But Peters gifted Labour with a glittering prize that they didn’t expect and hadn’t earned, and the rest is history. Ardern’s initially assured handling of the Christchurch mosque massacres, the Whakaari-White Island eruption and the Covid-19 crisis won her a cult-like following both at home and abroad – so much so that voters rewarded her with a decisive majority that conferred virtually absolute power, something never envisaged by the architects of the voting system.

Since then, other events have served only to consolidate Ardern’s power. Covid-19 provided a handy distraction from Labour’s agenda, pre-occupying the public and the media while Labour got on with the job of pursuing a programme of radical change that was mostly kept from the voters during the pandemic-dominated 2020 election campaign.

The media have been complicit in this process, for months on end treating the pandemic as if it was the only story of any consequence and ignoring, or at the very least playing down, elements of the government’s agenda that might cause public disquiet. Covid-19 has forced almost everything else off the news pages and the evening bulletins, allowing Labour’s activists to get on with their project virtually unhindered.

Peters, ironically, found himself ousted from Parliament, the voters finally having had enough of his decades of chicanery, so perhaps there’s some justice after all. But with the NZ First leader again hovering balefully around the periphery of politics, no one should forget his ignoble role in all this.