A richly deserved honour

I’m sure all readers of this blog will join me in extending hearty congratulations to Professor Mohan Dutta (above) of our own Massey University, who has been announced as the 2023 winner of the Gerald M Phillips Award for Distinguished Applied Communication Scholarship.

The award is sponsored by the Washington DC-based National Communication Association and named after a former professor of speech communications at Penn State University. It honours scholars responsible for authoring “bodies of published research and creative scholarship in applied communication”.

There could surely be no more richly deserving recipient than Prof Dutta, whose official title is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University.

Followers of this blog, being familiar with Prof Dutta’s winningly pellucid and succinct rhetoric, will agree that he boldly cuts through the dense, obfuscatory jargon that characterises most scholarly discourse and has a set a standard for all other academics to aspire to.

Doubtless the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised, whose cause Prof Dutta tirelessly champions, will rejoice at this tribute and will be there in spirit with him at Saturday’s award ceremony in the exclusive waterfront resort of National Harbor, Maryland. The freedom fighters of Hamas will presumably be delighted too, having recently been applauded by Dutta for their "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance".

The latest award is only the latest of many showered on him. We should all take vicarious pride in the fact that this humble scholar from a New Zealand university with lowly agrarian origins is feted on the global mortarboard circuit – a fact attested to by a recent lecture he delivered at Colorado State University, entitled “Decolonisation as organising radical democracies: Centering health, resisting climate colonialism, securing food systems, and resisting hate”.

It’s not surprising that Massey acknowledges Prof Dutta’s international standing by publicising his many achievements on its website. It is surely entitled to bathe in his reflected glory.

In my misguided past I have written on this website that “award-winning” are the two most meaningless words in the English language. In the light of this latest announcement I now realise that was mean-spirited and churlish, and accordingly apologise for my misjudgement.

My experience of censorship and what it tells us about the new culture of journalism

The Free Speech Union held its annual general meeting last weekend in Christchurch. I was part of a panel that discussed free speech and the media. The following were my introductory remarks, which refer to incidents previously covered on this blog. 

Two years ago I was invited to write a regular opinion column for the National Business Review, a paper for which I had once worked in the distant past. A contract was signed and I duly submitted my first column.

It was also my last. The co-editors of NBR disagreed with a couple of points I had made and wanted to delete two crucial paragraphs. I refused, the column never appeared, and the contract was torn up.

My column, ironically enough, was essentially about the culture wars and their chilling impact on public debate. In it I said, among other things, that a truly honest debate about race relations in New Zealand would acknowledge that while Maori had suffered damaging long-term consequences from colonisation, they had also benefited from the abolition of slavery, tribal warfare and cannibalism.

I also said that an honest debate would acknowledge that race relations in New Zealand had mostly been harmonious and respectful. 

One of the two co-editors proposed to delete those two paragraphs. I was told by email: “We want to avoid a hostile response for no real gain”. Now there’s editorial courage for you.

In fact it turned out that the real problem was that he disagreed with what I had said. It was his opinion that cannibalism, slavery and tribal warfare would have ended anyway regardless of colonisation, and he disputed my opinion that race relations had been mostly harmonious – this from a Scottish expatriate who had lived in New Zealand only a relatively short time, so had limited experience on which to base his opinion.

I invite you to consider the irony of my being contracted to write an opinion column, presumably because it was felt I had something worthwhile to say, and then being censored because my opinion was one the editor didn’t share.

In a past life as an editorial executive with a metropolitan daily newspaper, I spent more than 10 years dealing almost daily with columnists of every conceivable political stripe. In all that time, no column was censored because the paper disapproved of what was said. All that concerned us was that the columns shouldn’t be defamatory or factually incorrect.

It seems that on NBR, two other factors must be considered: the column must be one the editors agree with, and it mustn’t risk offending anyone.

My second example of censorship occurred last year. Some of you will be familiar with NZ Politics Daily, which is a collection of political news stories and opinion columns compiled by the respected political scientist Bryce Edwards and distributed every day by email. It’s an influential guide to what’s happening in politics.

A senior political journalist, a member of the parliamentary press gallery, objected to the fact that NZ Politics Daily sometimes included pieces that I had written and surreptitiously emailed Bryce Edwards urging him not to publish them.

This journalist described me as a racist and a misogynist. He concluded with the line: “I think your readers would do well not to be served up this trash.”

This was another first for me. It’s hardly unusual for journalists to disagree with each other or engage in bitchy personal rivalry, but to call for someone to be cancelled because you don’t approve of what they write crosses a very perilous threshold.

This journalist’s sneaky, would-be hatchet job – which Edwards rightly rebuffed – reinforced my suspicion that some journalists are more than merely ignorant of the importance of free speech in a liberal democracy. They are actively hostile to it.

To return to the NBR episode, I should say here that I absolutely defend the right of newspaper owners to decide what they will or will not publish. They must be free to say what they want, within the law, and even to suppress material they don’t like. That is part of the package of rights known as freedom of the press. But they must accept that it comes with a proviso.

Media owners need to understand their vital role in a liberal democracy as enablers of robust public debate. They also need to accept that if they abandon that role by taking it upon themselves to dictate and restrict the opinions the public is allowed to read and hear, they risk relinquishing whatever credibility and public respect they enjoy.

I’ve written two published works about press freedom in New Zealand, one in 1994 and another in 2005. When I wrote those, any threat to press freedom was seen principally as likely to come from the state.

But here we are in 2023, and press freedom is being steadily undermined from within, by people who seem not to value the traditions of openness and free speech that give the media their legitimacy and moral authority. They have repudiated a tradition of balance and fairness that has existed for the best part of one hundred years, and in the process they have fatally compromised their own standing. I don’t think anyone saw this coming.

The key problem here, as I see it, is that the media have abandoned their traditional role of trying to reflect society as it is. Instead they have positioned themselves as advocates for the sort of society they think we should be. This almost inevitably requires the exclusion of opinions that stand in the way of that vision.

Public opinion has become largely irrelevant. The media have set themselves above and apart from the communities they purport to serve, and in the process they have severed the vital connection that gives them their legitimacy. They have so compromised themselves that I think their future must be in doubt. Thank you.

The centrepiece of the Free Speech Union meeting was the keynote address by the distinguished British jurist and historian Lord Jonathan Sumption, which can be read here. It was a masterful and compelling summary of the attacks being made on freedom of speech and the reasons why they must be opposed.

Remembering Fred Tulett

Fred Tulett, a former Southland Times editor who died on Monday, has been described as “old school”. It was an apt description and one that should be regarded as a compliment.

Fred, who died in his Central Otago home aged 77, edited the Invercargill daily for 15 years until his retirement in 2013. He led the paper with great verve and ensured it was a force in the region at a time when the provincial press was generally in decline. 

Before that he was chief reporter of The Dominion, which was when I worked with him.

He was a tough, savvy, quick-thinking newsman with the voice, appearance and manner of a regimental sergeant-major. I probably wouldn’t agree with Stuff CEO Sinead Boucher on many things, but her description of Fred as a warhorse of the newspaper industry was spot on.

She also said he was a representative of a past era in New Zealand journalism. That could have been interpreted in two ways, one of them not complimentary, but it too was true. We didn’t realise it then, but it was a golden era.

As chief reporter of the Dom, Fred could be brusque but had a reputation for backing his staff. Two former Dom reporters who contacted me yesterday commented on his staunch defence of them when they were under attack. Fred didn’t lose many battles.

He was noted for his collaboration with the late David Hellaby on a series of investigative stories that exposed a white-collar crime ring – the so-called Gang of 20 – that was centred on a dodgy company called Registered Securities Ltd. Several of the principals ended up in jail.

But the episode I remember when I think of Fred is the sensational exclusive story he wrote for the Dominion Sunday Times – the Dom’s stablemate – about the affair that caused the collapse of David Lange’s marriage.

Fred just happened to be in the office tidying up his desk on a quiet Saturday in 1989 when the phone rang. The call was from an angry and resentful Naomi Lange, who wanted to expose her husband’s relationship with his speechwriter, Margaret Pope. Lange, who had only recently stood down as prime minister, had announced two days earlier that the marriage was over but hadn’t indicated why.

Cool and quick-thinking as ever, Fred’s first reaction – counter-intuitively – was to ask Naomi to hang up so he could call her back. We had the Langes’ home number in our files and he wanted to be sure it wasn’t a hoax call.

In Lange’s own words in his autobiography, Naomi “poured out her anger about me and Margaret” in her interview with Fred. Naturally his story was all over the front page and dominated the national conversation for days. It seriously damaged Lange’s reputation.

I remember thinking it was extraordinarily lucky that Fred was at his desk when the call came in. The only reporter in the office at the time was timid and inexperienced and might well have hung up in fright, but Fred was a born newsman and knew exactly what to do.

 

Accessibility and transparency are two different things

There was a time in living memory when New Zealand politicians rarely spoke to the media. Press conferences were unusual events. Prime ministers and members of Cabinet would occasionally grant interviews to individual reporters but felt no general obligation to communicate information or opinions to the public at large.

Prior to the advent of television and the inquisitorial approach taken by impertinent interviewers such as Brian Edwards and Simon Walker (both of whom were from Britain, where journalists were accustomed to holding politicians accountable), the media’s relationship with those in power was respectful and even deferential.

Consider the striking contrast with the situation today, when not only is the prime ministerial press conference an established ritual, but journalists consider it their right to intercept politicians whenever the opportunity arises – most obviously on “the tiles” at Parliament, named after the strategically located area where the press gallery pack lies in wait.

Politicians have never been more accessible, which in theory should be welcomed as a triumph for accountability. But are the public necessarily any better informed? Politicians give the appearance of being more open than they used to be, but in reality they are often simply a lot more skilled at saying nothing. They are coached by teams of media advisers to stick carefully to agreed lines that typically conceal more than they reveal.

I was reminded of this while listening to Nathan Rarere interview Nicola Willis on RNZ’s First Up. It was an exercise in futility. Rarere wanted to know what was going on in National’s coalition talks with ACT and NZ First, but Willis batted away his questions with well-rehearsed and entirely predictable lines. We heard the familiar “strong and stable government” mantra twice, followed by a recitation of familiar objectives from the National manifesto. The interview added nothing to what we already knew – or perhaps that should be what we didn’t know. In which case, what was the point? I wonder whether politicians ever consider the novel notion that, like Mister Ed, they should only speak when they have something to say.  

This is not to suggest that politicians retreat behind a wall. There’s always the possibility that a clever question will catch them off-guard and provoke a revealing response or an unexpected morsel of information. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves that accessibility equates with transparency. As with so much in politics, the media standup is often mere political theatre, conducted more for drama and entertainment than enlightenment.

As a recent RNZ interview with veteran political journalist Richard Harman reminded us, useful information is far more likely to be ferreted out by the old-fashioned means of cultivating good contacts – digging beneath the surface – than by the showy but often pointless ritual of the press gallery scrum. For the current generation of political reporters, however, cultivating contacts, like covering select committee meetings and debates in the House, may seem too much like hard work. Far easier to point a camera or microphone at someone and ask fatuous questions that elicit meaningless replies.

 

 

The Christchurch mosques inquest: what we know so far

The inquest into the Christchurch mosque massacres has unexpectedly become a source of national shame and embarrassment.

A procession of witnesses has appeared before deputy chief coroner Brigitte Windley with evidence of a confused and chaotic response from police and ambulance services. New Zealand has no reason to feel guilty about the atrocity itself, which was the act of a lone outsider, but the failings of the first responders have come as a shock.

Perhaps the most damning revelation so far is that paramedics took half an hour to enter the Al Noor mosque, apparently because it was St John’s ambulance policy not to enter unsafe scenes.

Several police witnesses told of calling for ambulances, to no avail. One member of the armed offenders squad ran out onto Deans Avenue several times to see why no ambulances were coming. He could see them parked up the road, presumably waiting for the all-clear.

When bystanders asked why no ambulances had arrived, the police officer told them to put the wounded into private cars and rush them to hospital. Think about that: amateurs had to be asked to save lives when skilled professionals were standing by, only a stone’s throw away.

The inquest heard that a wounded survivor, Zekeriya Tuyan, was on his phone to emergency services for half an hour before medical help arrived. Tuyan himself died weeks later.

Eventually a St John’s paramedic entered the mosque knowing he was acting contrary to instructions. “There were human beings inside that needed help,” Dean Brown told the inquest.

Was this an example of the precautionary principle that appears to have taken hold of the bureaucratic mind? The precautionary principle holds that all risk must be mitigated by appropriate safeguards – even, it seems, in emergencies where insistence on following the officially prescribed procedure can be the difference between life and death.

Thank God there are still situations where human initiative, courage and compassion kick in and the rulebook is set aside. Dean Brown was a shining example and so were the helicopter pilots who defied a bureaucratic edict by risking their lives rescuing survivors from Whakaari-White Island – another tragedy that showed by-the-book New Zealand officialdom in a very poor light.

Almost as shockingly, the dead, the dying and the wounded in Christchurch were abandoned altogether for 10 minutes after the police left Al Noor to respond to reports of the second massacre at the Linwood mosque. An AOS member told the survivors that help was on the way, which he assumed to be true. It’s impossible to imagine how they must have felt: dozens dead, others dying, and they were left alone with not even a reassuring voice to comfort them.  

These were the most startling revelations of the inquest so far, but there have been others.  

They included the disclosure that an inexperienced police call-taker who took a 111 call giving advance information about the shootings, from an email sent to Parliament by the perpetrator Brenton Tarrant, treated it as only priority 2. The inquest was told the call-taker may have been influenced by a suggestion from the caller, a parliamentary staff member, that the email was from a nutter.

That call obviously came too late to prevent the slaughter at Al Noor, but it might have given the police time to get to the Linwood mosque before Tarrant struck a second time. A police dispatcher seemed to think so, and that things might have turned out differently if the call had been categorised as priority 1. It will fall to the coroner to decide whether that was a missed chance.

Astonishingly, the police inspector in charge of national communications centres at the time defended the categorisation of the call as priority 2 because it was “general” in nature. In fact it wasn’t; Tarrant’s email was detailed and precise, even identifying the three mosques that he intended terrorising (the third was in Ashburton).

Of course it’s easy to be wise after the event. There was no precedent in New Zealand for the Christchurch mosque massacres. The Royal Commission of Inquiry in 2020 established that they couldn’t have been anticipated. Events unfolded with bewildering speed and police couldn’t be sure at first whether Tarrant had accomplices who might still be at the scene.

Human error in such circumstances is hardly surprising. Only those present at the carnage and its immediate aftermath could know how traumatic and confused it was.

That said, police and emergency services are supposed to be prepared for unexpected and extreme events. That’s the nature of their job. Evidence given at the inquest points to shortcomings, such as a known communication problem between police and St John’s, that were recognised and could have been obviated. The frustration of some witnesses was obvious.

On the upside, we shouldn’t forget that Tarrant was arrested only 19 minutes after the shooting started by two courageous and quick-thinking country cops who happened to be in Christchurch for a training day. Their actions, which thwarted Tarrant’s intention to attack the Ashburton mosque, served as a reminder that for all the benefits of thorough planning and training, there’s sometimes no substitute for intuitive, decisive, on-the-spot action.

But in other respects the response appears to have been almost scandalously shambolic, which may shake New Zealanders’ confidence in the people we rely on to protect human life. Only two weeks into the inquest and with another four to go, it’s already obvious that Windley will have a lot to chew on.

Update (6.15pm): In News First's report of the inquest tonight, the acting paramedic in charge at the scene said police were concerned about the possibility there was an IED (improvised explosive device) at the mosque. He appeared to acknowledge that waiting for the scene to be made safe could have cost lives, but he disputed that the ambulances were "simply stopped" a block from the mosque. He said they were treating victims there. 

For once I'd love to be proved wrong

I wrote this the day before the election, explaining my decision not to cast a party vote:

"I see no good whatsoever coming from this election and don’t want to feel responsible in any way for the outcome – which, however the voting plays out, will almost inevitably perpetuate the paralysing malaise gripping the country and condemn us to further decline."

And this:

"New Zealand feels buggered, not to put too fine a point on it, and I have no confidence that whatever wretched, compromised hybrid government rises from the post-election swamp after tomorrow will have the will, the ability or the moral fibre to fix it."

It gives me no pleasure to say I see no reason so far to revise my gloomy prognosis, though for once I'd love to be proved wrong.

Whakaari-White Island: the bureaucrats are untouchable

WorkSafe NZ hasn’t exactly emerged covered in glory after its four-month court action over the Whakaari-White Island disaster of 2019. In fact quite the reverse.

In the District Court at Auckland yesterday, Judge Evangelos Thomas found Whakaari Management Ltd (WML) guilty on one health and safety charge.

This was after Worksafe’s case against six other defendants had collapsed, leaving its big prosecution push “hanging by a thread”, in the words of 1News.

Six defendants had earlier pleaded guilty to the charges against them, leaving WML – the holding company of the Buttle brothers, who own the island – the sole remaining defendant.

GNS Science, the Inflite tourism group, White Island Tours and three helicopter tour operators pleaded guilty. Judge Thomas dismissed charges against Tauranga Tourism Services, ID Tours and the three Buttle brothers as individuals.

The dismissal of those charges indicates WorkSafe’s case was not well-founded and raises the possibility that some of the other parties might have got off too had they put up a fight. But infinitely more damning than that was the judge’s scathing criticism – largely ignored by the media, other than by Newshub – of the government agency itself.

In what veteran Newshub reporter Adam Hollingworth described as a “huge serve” to WorkSafe, Thomas noted that the agency had given WML a tick of approval in an adventure activity audit.

That audit, the judge said, did not cover White Island Tours’ processes for assessing the risk of an eruption while tourists were on the island. He described this as “an astonishing failure”.

Not surprisingly, WorkSafe didn’t want to be interviewed. Quelle surprise.

The judge’s comment followed an independent review in 2021 which found that WorkSafe “fell short of good practice in its regulation of activities on Whakaari White Island over the 2014-19 period” and called for improvements in WorkSafe's management of adventure activities. It was the gentlest of raps across the knuckles.

All this serves to reinforce the view that WorkSafe should itself have been in the dock for its abject failure to foresee the potentially catastrophic consequences of an eruption on New Zealand’s most active volcano, which tourist parties visited as if it were some sort of theme park. The eruption on December 9 2019 killed 22 people and injured 25 others.

High-profile Christchurch lawyer Nigel Hampton KC said in a 2020 interview that it could be argued WorkSafe bore some responsibility for what happened on Whakaari. He drew a comparison with the former Department of Labour, which brought charges at Pike River despite having failed in its own duty as the regulator responsible for mining safety.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as the French would say.

WorkSafe surely has an obligation to explain why it left itself off the hook. At the very least it should apologise to the victims and their families for its dereliction in failing to act on a very obvious risk to public safety. But no one’s holding their breath. The bureaucrats are untouchable.