On free speech and where not to find it

The Free Speech Union has been touring the country with its documentary ‘Last Words’, which records last year’s visit to NZ by Danish free speech campaigner Jacob Mchangama. Local speakers have talked at these screenings and I was invited to address the ones in Masterton and Pahiatua. The Masterton event (pictured above) was well attended and the Pahiatua turnout was pretty good too, considering the size of the town. The following are my speech notes.

I would like to start with a few words about so-called hate speech:

Hate is a very powerful word. If you hate someone you want to do them harm and possibly even kill them. I don’t think New Zealand is a hateful society. The perpetrator of the Christchurch atrocities, which have been cited as justification for hate speech laws, was an Australian. Speaking for myself, I can truthfully say I don’t hate anyone. Well, maybe Vladimir Putin when he murders defenceless civilians, but I can’t think of anyone else.

What is characterised as hate speech is more often simply speech that upsets or offends someone. But there’s no human right not to be upset, or to be protected from having your values and beliefs questioned and criticised. So I think it would be helpful to get rid of that loaded term “hate speech” because it’s a misnomer.

Moreover I think the pressure for so-called hate speech laws was based on a false premise. The supposition is that tougher hate speech laws would have prevented the Christchurch atrocities, but there’s no evidence to show that. You heard the sociologist Mike Grimshaw say in the documentary that in fact it would have gratified the perpetrator of those atrocities if hate speech laws were enacted, because it would legitimise his warped, paranoid world view. It would have confirmed his view of himself as someone the establishment wanted to silence – a martyr.

My second point is that free speech is not a standard left-versus-right issue. You heard Jacob Mchangama make that point in the documentary.

You would also have heard Kim Hill implying, when she interviewed Jacob on RNZ, that the free speech movement was a right-wing thing, simply because he had addressed the Ayn Rand Institute. But Jacob is happy to talk to groups from any point on the political spectrum, as he said in the documentary.

Kim Hill also said, quite untruthfully, that the opponents of hate speech laws in New Zealand were all from the right. Wrong: some of the most vocal proponents of free speech are old-school lefties such as Chris Trotter, Martyn Bradbury, Don Franks and Matt McCarten. The political scientist Bryce Edwards is also a free speech champion, and I don’t think anyone would mistake Bryce for a right winger.

The traditional Left believe in free speech because they know it has been a vital tool in fighting for the causes they believe in, such as civil rights in the United States. Jacob makes that point in his book.

Free speech is important to the traditional Left because they know better than anyone what it means to suffer under authoritarian regimes that put you in jail for saying what you think.

You’ll note that I refer to the “traditional” Left. That’s because the opposition to free speech mainly comes from what you might call the new woke Left. I know a lot of people hate that term “woke”, but until someone comes up with a better word, it will have to do.

As a general rule the woke Left are younger and have come through the university system. They have a very limited understanding of history and apparently think they have a human right not to be exposed to opinions they dislike or which challenge their world view. Unfortunately they seem to be encouraged in this belief by their university lecturers.

Universities used to be regarded as bulwarks of free thought and freedom of expression. That’s no longer the case. Universities throughout the western world – even august institutions such as Oxford and Harvard – frequently bring down the shutters on speakers who are deemed provocative or even merely controversial.

There’s no sadder example than the Berkeley campus of the University of California, which was the birthplace of the radical free speech movement in the 1960s but in recent years has earned a reputation as the home of cancel culture, where speakers who challenge ideological orthodoxy are branded as unsafe and de-platformed.

I experienced a very mild form of this phenomenon myself when I spoke at a Free Speech Union event at Victoria University last year. Posters advertising the meeting around the campus were repeatedly torn down and replaced with ones saying “Stop Hate Speech” and labelling the Free Speech Union as racist, homophobic, transphobic hypocrites.

Whoever took down those posters had no idea what I was going to say. They just decided that whatever it was, it was bound to be “unsafe” (and there’s another loaded word that should have no place in rational discourse).

There was a subsequent report of my speech in the Victoria University student newspaper Salient. This report was prefaced with what’s known as a trigger warning, which read: “This article examines some of the racist, transphobic, sexist and otherwise harmful content discussed at the event in question. Please exercise caution when reading.”

As far as I know, my speech is still available on the Free Speech Union website. Anyone who’s interested can decide for themselves whether it was harmful. I’m not aware of anyone who needed medical treatment after hearing it.

I noted in a post on my blog that Salient in its heyday was a lively student paper that thrived on controversy and debate. Many of the people associated with it went on to occupy important positions in public life, including one who became a Labour prime minister. They must shake their heads in despair at the modern version of the paper.

But that’s what universities have become: institutions where groupthink, ideological conformity and intolerance of dissent rule. That was never more evident than when seven eminent professors wrote a letter to the Listener in 2021 in defence of the traditional definition of science and were subjected to a vicious gang-up, led by the Royal Society and supported by the University of Auckland and the Tertiary Education Union.

One Victoria University professor posted a sneering tweet calling the seven respected academics “shuffling zombies” and wondered if someone had put something in their water. There’s a mature, open mind for you.

The furore attracted the attention of leading international scientists and was rightly characterised by the likes of Richard Dawkins as an attack on the professors’ academic freedom. In the end the Royal Society and the university were forced to pull their heads in. I think they were embarrassed by the international outcry. But in the meantime, of course, the Listener Seven had been publicly pilloried and portrayed as pariahs.

It used to be the case that three institutions could be relied on to uphold free speech: universities, the courts and the media. I’ve already mentioned the first of those, so what of the other two?

The courts have a mixed record. My impression is that historically they have taken a liberal approach, but a High Court judge decided it was okay for Auckland Council to bar two Canadians, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, from speaking at a council-owned venue. This was after protesters threatened to picket the event.

The unfortunate consequence of the judge’s decision was that it conveyed the message that all anyone had to do to get a speaker cancelled was to threaten disruption.

The Free Speech Union took up the case, managed to win a partial reversal in the Court of Appeal and took it to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the FSU’s case on what I believe were dry, technical legal points rather than approaching it from a broader human rights perspective.

But there have been legal victories too. A city council that tried to ban anti-transgender feminists from holding a public meeting in the local library was forced to back down, and other councils duly took note. So that’s something.

That brings me to the media, and I’m afraid that there the picture is not encouraging.

Print, broadcast and online media tend to take a uniform, homogenous ideological and political line and publish just enough dissenting opinion to enable them to claim they’re open to opposing views.

Letters to the editor, fortunately, remain an important platform for alternative points of view. But I’ve spent a long time in journalism and I can say with certainty that the media are not as committed to diversity of opinion as they used to be.

I’ll give you just one small example: in all the media furore that raged for days over Roe versus Wade last year, it was virtually impossible to hear an anti-abortion voice. It was as if that side of the debate simply didn’t exist.

It was also depressing to hear Jonathan [Jonathan Ayling, of the FSU] say in the documentary that he invited journalists and researchers to meet Jacob Mchangama, but got no uptake. Journalists – and for that matter, broadcasters such as Kim Hill – should be in the front line of the battle for free speech because they depend on it every day. They couldn’t function without it.

I’ll also note that when the Free Speech Union held its inaugural annual conference last year, not one journalist from the mainstream media covered it.

I’d like to go slightly off-topic here and comment briefly on the Public Interest Journalism Fund, or the Pravda Project as I call it, which has made $55 million of taxpayers’ money available to media outlets provided they fulfil certain conditions relating to the Treaty.

I won’t go so far as to say the media have been bought, although some people put it that way. However I certainly think the media have compromised their independence and created a damaging public perception that they’re beholden to the government. They should hardly be surprised if people question their openness to a wide range of opinions.

I can offer a small personal insight into some individual journalists’ commitment to free speech.

I earlier mentioned the political scientist Bryce Edwards. Bryce compiles a daily summary of political news and comment that he makes available online to anyone who’s interested. He provides links to the source material, which ranges across a very broad spectrum of political comment encompassing left as well as right, although more of the former because that’s the nature of most commentary in the mainstream media. Occasionally Bryce includes links to my own blog posts.

I learned recently that a senior journalist in the parliamentary press gallery had emailed Bryce asking, in a wheedling tone, whether he had given any thought to excluding my blog posts. In other words this journalist wanted me, a fellow journalist of 55 years’ standing, cancelled.

He apparently took this step because he was offended by critical comments I had made about some of his colleagues in the press gallery. Bryce, to his credit, ignored the suggestion.

Perhaps more to the point, this journalist, who has never met me, described me as a racist, a sexist and a misogynist. Not only are these lazy, simplistic stereotypes that shouldn’t belong in any mature journalist’s vocabulary, but they are defamatory and I believe untrue. I would happily challenge my accuser to substantiate them.

In an unrelated event, I was recently invited to participate in an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio discussion analysing Jacinda Ardern’s prime ministership, Ms Ardern having just stood down.

A senior and highly influential New Zealand journalist was also approached to take part but on learning I was a panellist, declined. The explanation she gave was that I was a racist, a sexist and a misogynist – those very same words again – and she didn’t want to “legitimise” me by appearing on the same show.

Again, this person has never met me and had no idea what I was likely to say on the show. As it happens, I deplore the vicious personal attacks made on Jacinda Ardern and believe I was fair in my assessment of her performance as PM.

If this person disapproved of my views, then surely the thing to do was challenge them. But rather than engage in a rational, civilised discussion on air, she recoiled as if the mere act of appearing with me would expose her to the risk of biological contamination.

Is that the response of a mature, rational adult, open to debate? I think it was cowardly and childish.

In a Free Speech Union newsletter sent out only this week, Jonathan [Ayling] points out that the leader of the so-called Disinformation Project, Kate Hannah, has repeatedly declined invitations to meet with him, saying it would be – get this – “unsafe”. That word again.

Now Jonathan doesn’t exactly strike me as a threatening individual, but this is a typical reaction. Rather than engaging in a mature, intelligent exchange of views, the opponents of free speech squeeze their eyes shut, block their ears and run shrieking from the room.

Incidentally, I have yet to see any explanation of where the Disinformation Project gets its money. I entered the word “funding” in the search box on its website and nothing came up. Interesting.

But getting back to those two journalists: I suspect neither of my accusers had taken the trouble to actually read a cross-section of my work as a journalist, columnist and blogger. If they had, I don’t believe they could possibly substantiate their attacks on me. I’m happy to be judged on my record.

But here’s the point: if two senior and influential mainstream journalists have such resolutely closed minds, what hope is there of the media facilitating open and balanced debate?

The really worrying thing is that the latter of the two was in a position to exercise editorial control at the highest level. I could no longer have any confidence in the editorial integrity of any publication this individual was involved with.

Before I finish, three bullet points:

■ First: We shouldn’t count on the National Party to champion free speech. That’s obvious from the way Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis pounced on Maureen Pugh a couple of weeks ago for having the courage and honesty to ask questions about the theory of human-induced climate change.

Neither can you rely on the Human Rights Commission to defend free speech. In fact, quite the reverse. The commission has actively campaigned for restrictions on what New Zealanders can say. It’s possibly the most ironically misnamed government agency in our history.

■ Second: There is a moral panic over misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories. My question is, who decides which information is permissible and which is not?

Misinformation and disinformation are terms that are too easily used to delegitimise dissent and confine public debate within “safe” channels.

In any case, in a free society you have the right to be wrong. The way to determine truth – insofar as that’s possible – is by allowing open debate, not by driving dissenting opinion underground.

As John Milton wrote in his poem Areopagitica, which you heard mentioned in the doco: “Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

■ Third, and to finish on a slightly more optimistic note, I wonder whether the tide may be starting to turn.

Many book publishers now employ what are called sensitivity readers, who are paid to read authors’ manuscripts and intercept anything that might be construed as upsetting. That’s how precious we’ve become.

The best-selling British author Anthony Horowitz recently revealed that one of the characters in his latest novel was a Native American doctor who attacked someone with a scalpel. Horowitz had to delete that word “scalpel” for fear that some people might associate it with the Native American tradition of scalping. Although there’s no etymological connection between the two words, Horowitz was told to replace “scalpel” with “surgical instrument”. That’s how absurd things have got.

However (and here’s the optimistic bit), Puffin Books pushed the boat out too far last month when they tried to render Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s books politically correct by removing words such as “fat”, “ugly”, “mad” and “crazy”, and by making the Oompa Loompas gender-neutral.

Waddya know: there was an international backlash, and within days Puffin had announced that the texts would again be made available in the original form. In the battle for free speech, such small victories must be cherished. Thank you.

Footnote: Although I’m a member of the Free Speech Union, I don’t purport to speak for it. The views expressed here are my own.

Please remind me - who's Jacinda?

How quickly things change in politics.

The Ardern era is behind us. Just as water instantly closes over a stone that’s been thrown into a river, leaving no trace of where it fell, so the former prime minister has already assumed the character of a political ghost.

The change in the political tone of the country that followed her departure has been dramatic and immediate. It’s now clear that Ardern had come to be regarded – and very likely regarded herself – as a liability in election year.

Her leadership will forever be associated with the ascendancy of identity politics, which polarised the country in a way not seen since 1981 – if ever.

She was careful to personally remain aloof from the culture wars, in keeping with her image as someone who avoided unpleasantness. She couldn’t be accused of actively inciting them because she didn’t need to. Merely by doing nothing to discourage them, she gave the impression she approved.

With Winston Peters out of the way after the 2020 election, her assumption of complete power sent a signal to the forces of wokeness. It said, “This is your moment”.

They seized the opportunity with gusto, zealously pushing – with the mainstream media serving as state-subsided cheerleaders – an agenda of radical change that principally revolved around divisive issues of racial and sexual identity, with a generous side-order of climate change panic.

Under Ardern, Labour became a genuinely transformational government – one of only a few in New Zealand’s history (Richard Seddon’s Liberals in the 1890s, the first Labour government under Michael Savage, the Lange administration that ushered in Rogernomics) that could be so described.

In 2023, New Zealand feels like a very different country from the one Ardern inherited only three years ago. Problem was, as with Labour under Lange, much of that change was unmandated.

Unlike Rogernomics, it was a cultural transformation as much as a legislative one. The similarity was that it caught people by surprise because they couldn’t remember voting for it.

Now Chris Hipkins has thrown Labour into reverse gear. The most obvious sign is Labour’s abrupt jettisoning of Transport Minister Michael Wood’s Government Policy Statement on land transport, which prioritised emissions reduction. That would have meant more cycleways and bus lanes, higher fuel taxes and fewer new roads.

We first learned about the land transport policy statement yesterday morning. By afternoon it was gone. Now you see it, now you don’t. How quickly things change in politics …

It was a reminder that politics is ultimately about winning and retaining power, regardless of which ideological side you’re on. Policies that are seen as an electoral risk are likely to end up on the bonfire.

In the broader context, Cyclone Gabrielle changed everything. By placing Hipkins and some of his key ministers front and centre in the national consciousness, it has given vital oxygen to Labour. They have been presented as politicians able to roll their sleeves up and act decisively in a crisis.

That in turn has aligned neatly with Hipkins’ obvious desire to reposition Labour as a party of the people – its traditional image – rather than one representing the urban, university-educated elites, which it had become under Ardern.

Cancelling a hostile-to-cars transport policy was the pragmatic thing to do, even if it meant alienating Labour’s Green allies. It won’t have escaped the public’s notice that politically unfashionable diesel SUVs come into their own in a crisis; or that electric cars – the favoured mode of private transport for virtuous urban liberals – are useless when there’s no electricity.

Cyclone Gabrielle also had the effect of snatching the political initiative back from National. It couldn’t have come at a better time for Labour, because it provided a platform for Hipkins when he needed it most. The combination of Labour’s leadership change, followed almost immediately by Gabrielle, arrested the government’s decline and relegated National to the sidelines.

Suddenly all bets were off. A general election that had looked like National’s for the taking now looked like a real contest. There was even speculation that Hipkins might seize the moment and call an early election.

But whoa! Back up the truck! Now the pundits are saying National has got the jump on Labour – and raided its territory – by announcing a family-friendly childcare subsidy. Election calculations are being revised … again. How quickly things change in politics.

What was perhaps just as significant about National’s policy announcement was that Christopher Luxon, for perhaps the first time, seemed to take a genuinely red-blooded position rather than reciting safe, PR-crafted sound-bites.

His promised crackdown on government handouts to wealthy corporate consultants cleverly plays to the public perception that far too much power and influence is wielded by shadowy, overpaid, unaccountable consultants and political hangers-on. Political parasites isn’t too strong a term.

What’s more, Luxon for once didn’t allow the media to bait him or trap him into equivocating. Asked whether he was concerned for the jobs lost by consultants, he replied: “I feel very good about that.” Does this mean he finally has the confidence to say what he really thinks?

Oh, and by the way, please remind me – who’s Jacinda?

Everything you need to know about Te Anamata a-Kai o To Tatou Taone

A press release from the Wellington City Council advises that the council has formalised Te Anamata a-Kai o To Tatou Taone. This is described as “an action plan for a sustainable, equitable, healthy and resilient food system in Poneke”.

By Poneke, which is an old transliteration of Port Nicholson ("Port Nicky"), the council PR flunkies obviously mean Wellington. Where this leaves Te Whanganui-a-Tara, which is the more commonly used Maori name for Wellington these days, isn’t clear. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up.

Anyway, the press statement went on to explain that the Action Plan is part of “Te Atakura First to Zero framework” and is aligned with something called the Tupiki Ora strategy. “It is an integrated, co-ordinated approach across Council to support food systems’ shifts in business-as-usual workstreams”.

What this means in everyday language is anyone’s guess. The statement was heavy on buzzwords – “resilient”, “sustainable”, “equitable”, “culturally appropriate” – with the mandatory references to climate change and social justice. Wellington City Council isn’t quite the madhouse that it was in the last term but there are still some flaky operators in the council chamber and deputy mayor Laurie Foon, who issued the press statement, is apparently one of them.

There’s a strange, Year Zero quality to pronouncements like these. They are so freighted with ideological jargon that it can be almost impossible to work out what they actually mean in practical terms. But what they do reveal, vividly, is that council bureaucracies have become highly politicised and detached from the pressing everyday concerns of ratepayers.  

As an aside, I used to work with Richard MacLean, who for many years has been the Wellington City Council media manager. He was a good newspaper reporter and a very funny man with a highly developed sense of the ridiculous. As a journalist, he would have laughed heartily at this sort of bullshit.

The encouraging thing is that people have grown wise to woke PR flannel. The comments under the press release on the Scoop website oozed cynicism. TrevorH, for example, wrote: “What is ‘soil sovereignty in relation to the cultural landscapes’? [Yes, that’s a line from the press statement.] Does any of this psychobabble have any relationship to reality whatsoever?”

There was a lot more in a similar vein. Ian Apperley commented: “I often wonder if the WCC can produce even more gibberish, and then they prove to me that they can.” Someone called Barb added: “New logo for WCC should be 110 per cent B.S.”.

Interestingly, no one commented on the use of te reo in the press statement (and also on the council website, where it takes precedence over English). Presumably that's because it's now taken as a given. 

For the record, Maori make up 8.6 percent of Wellington's population.

Deaf to everything but their own righteousness

I woke up yesterday morning to hear an RNZ newsreader refer to something that had happened in Kirikiriroa. That’s a name that’s almost as hard to type as it is to pronounce, but that’s not the point.

To my knowledge, no one has asked the residents of Hamilton whether they approve of their city’s name being changed. My guess is that they don’t – but hey, only 10 percent of the population want the country renamed Aotearoa, and that hasn’t stopped newsreaders, weather forecasters, reporters, politicians and academics using it as a substitute for New Zealand.

I’ve yet to hear anyone use Kirikiriroa in everyday conversation. Until relatively recently, few people had even heard of the name. But the political/academic/media cabal that controls the national conversation has decreed that henceforth, that's how Hamilton is to be known.

This is an act of colossal arrogance and conceit by a self-ordained priesthood that regards itself as being above democracy and accountable to no one. 

What’s more, it’s not even honest. It's true there was once a village called Kirikiriroa where Hamilton now stands, but the city is a wholly European creation.

There’s a very good case for restoring Maori names to places and natural features – for example, mountains, lakes and rivers – where those names were usurped by colonists. That process is already well advanced, with public buy-in; who refers to Mt Egmont these days? But to apply Maori names to cities that were built by European colonisers is historically misleading and an ostentatious form of virtue-signalling.

Theoretically at least, there may also be a case for changing Hamilton’s name, given that it commemorates a British naval officer with no historical link to the city. But the same could be said of other cities and towns with colonial names that arguably have no modern relevance; for example Nelson, Napier, Hastings, Havelock North and even Wellington, all of which celebrate British imperial conquests in one way or another. 

Good luck with that, as they say. In any case, the bottom line is that any change must be endorsed by popular mandate, not imposed by the ruling political caste with no regard for public opinion.

And as for Kirikiriroa, so for Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland), Otautahi (Christchurch) and Otepoti (Dunedin). 

The lack of public uptake for these names by the citizens of those cities speaks volumes. Does the political class notice or care that the public don’t go along? No. They’re deaf to everything but their own moral righteousness.

 

How hard can it be to check a map?

RNZ News this morning described the Esk Valley as being west of Hastings and said it had been inundated by the Ngaruroro River.

Wrong - in fact doubly wrong. The Esk Valley is northwest of Napier and was inundated by the Esk River. You’d think the name of the valley was a clue. It’s nowhere near the Ngaruroro.

Credibility matters in the media. When people in Hawke’s Bay – or in fact anyone with basic geographical knowledge – hear something like this, they are entitled to wonder what else RNZ gets wrong.

In a blog post on February 15 which I subsequently withdrew because I thought it was too negative, I criticised the media for frequently getting geographical references wrong in their coverage of Cyclone Gabrielle.

I said this: Location matters, and never more so than in a story about floods. Do journalists ever consult a map? It’s not hard.

My criticism stands.

Are we allowed to suggest that Hunga Tonga is the cause of the weather mayhem?

The most powerful volcanic eruption of the 21st century happened on January 22 last year in Tonga.

Scientists measure the force of eruptions using something called the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI. (I learned about this from my teenage grandson, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of volcanoes.)

The eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai had a VEI of 5 or 6, depending on which source you believe. According to NIWA, it was the biggest atmospheric explosion recorded in more than a century. As a point of comparison, the cataclysmic Oruanui (Lake Taupo) eruption about 26,500 years ago had a VEI of 8. Krakatoa (1883) scored a 6.

The Hunga Tonga (HT) eruption sent atmospheric shockwaves around the globe and was heard as far away as Alaska. The eruption plume rose 58 km, reaching above the stratosphere.

The subsequent tsunamis devastated parts of Tonga, claiming four lives there and even killing two people in Peru. The eruption also wiped out 55 km of undersea cable, but otherwise it aroused relatively little public attention. After all, it was a long way from anywhere in a very sparsely populated part of the globe.

Scientists, however, got very excited about it. An online search turns up numerous academic papers marvelling at the scale of the eruption and assessing its implications.

Why am I writing about this? Simply because I can’t help wondering whether Hunga Tonga might have something to do with the freakish weather the North Island has been enduring.

I can’t recall a wetter, more miserable summer. January rainfall in parts of the North Island was four times higher than normal; Auckland was the wettest ever. Campers, and especially those with kids, will remember 2023 as their annus horribilis.

The February figures will be far worse. We’ve just been through several weeks of catastrophic weather events and they may not yet be over.

In so far as there’s any explanation for these events, they are commonly (if vaguely) attributed to climate change, the implication being that it's human-induced. La Nina and “atmospheric rivers” have been cited, but in such a way as to imply that they are all part of the same pattern. Anyone who dares suggest otherwise, as Maureen Pugh did, risks being put in the stocks. But is there more to it than that?

Before anyone rushes to denounce me, I’m not a climate change denier. I’ m not in a position to deny anything, since I don’t possess the scientific knowledge to make definitive assertions. My own amateur observations tell me the climate is changing; the winters are warmer (we seem to get far fewer frosts in Masterton than 20 years ago) and the frequency of slips on the Remutaka Hill road is a very basic pointer to heavier and more frequent rain. Weather bombs that were once exceptional are now the norm.

Nonetheless, the science on climate change is contradictory and often freighted with ideology – so yes, I’m sceptical. I think journalists and scientists have a duty to be sceptical.

Oh, and another disclaimer: I’m generally clueless when it comes to science. When I began my fifth form year (today’s Year 11) at Central Hawke’s Bay College, I was thrilled to discover that science had quietly been dropped from my curriculum. I was such a no-hoper that my teachers decided, without any consultation, that there was no point wasting my time or theirs. The same thing had happened with maths the previous year.

But while acknowledging I’m an ignoramus, I think I have a legitimate question to ask. Even accepting that the climate is changing, what has happened this summer seems qualitatively different. It has not only been brutal and extreme but abrupt, persistent and viciously repetitive – too much so, surely, to have been simply a continuation of a familiar long-term trend. It just seems too easy – too glib, almost – to put it all down to human-induced climate change.

Which brings me back to Hunga Tonga. Notwithstanding my lack of scholarship, it seems obvious to me from the various academic papers published about the HT eruption that it had meteorological consequences. One study, published by the French National Center for Scientific Research, called it the most remarkable climate event of the past three decades. There’s a clue, right there.

Another paper, published by the American Geophysical Union, had this to say: “The violent Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption on 15 January 2022 not only injected ash into the stratosphere but also large amounts of water vapor, breaking all records for direct injection of water vapor, by a volcano or otherwise, in the satellite era.

“The massive blast injected water vapor up to altitudes as high as 53 km. Using measurements from the Microwave Limb Sounder [no, I don’t know what that means either] on NASA's Aura satellite, we estimate that the excess water vapor is equivalent to around 10% of the amount of water vapor typically residing in the stratosphere. Unlike previous strong eruptions, this event may not cool the surface, but rather it could potentially warm the surface due to the excess water vapor.”

The study also notes that “the H2O injection was unprecedented in both magnitude and altitude” and says it may take several years for the water plume to dissipate.

I admit that much of the paper is incomprehensible to me, but am I wrong to assume that a phenomenon of that scale is going to affect weather patterns?

Yet another study, published in Nature Climate Change, similarly noted that the HT eruption had expelled an unprecedented amount of water into the atmosphere and could cause an increase in global surface temperatures lasting several years. So there seems to be some sort of consensus.

I learned that volcanic eruptions can have a profound impact on the weather when, in a past life as a wine writer, I heard New Zealand winemakers bemoaning the Pinatubo years.

The 1991 eruption of Mt Pinatubo, in the Philippines, had a VEI of 6. It produced what’s called a volcanic winter, reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface by 10 percent – hence the challenge of getting grapes to ripen even in distant New Zealand. Pinatubo’s eruption is also thought to have triggered the so-called Storm of the Century in 1993.

Hunga Tonga, being an underwater eruption that produced a plume of water rather than clouds of dust that absorbed sunlight, had a different effect, leading to the predictions of rising global temperatures.

Either way, it seems safe to assume the eruption will have had an effect on the weather. And being a lot closer to New Zealand than Mt Pinatubo, doesn’t it stand to reason that its impact is likely to be more pronounced?

Bearing all this in mind, it doesn’t seem fanciful to suggest that Hunga Tonga might have played a hand in the apocalyptic weather events of the past two weeks. But I wonder if that likelihood is being played down because it conflicts with the human-induced climate change narrative so feverishly promoted by the Greens and now apparently accepted by the National Party – and enforced by sections of the media.

To put it another way, are we in a Fawlty Towers-type scenario where no one's supposed to mention Hunga Tonga? (To quote Basil Fawlty, I just did, but I think I can get away with it.)

There are people who read this blog who are far better informed than I am on matters of science. I would welcome their input, even if it results in my theory being – for want of a better expression – blown out of the water.

A few more thoughts on Luxon, Pugh and the media - oh, and press secretaries too

The irony of the Maureen Pugh furore is that it has caused far more damage to Christopher Luxon than to Pugh.

Luxon has come out of it looking like a control freak, intolerant of any deviation from the party line.

This should surprise no one. He comes from a corporate background, and the corporate world values conformity above almost everything else. Original thinkers are seen as problematical and even threatening. Conventional men who play golf and wear suits are naturally most comfortable in the company of other conventional men who play golf and wear suits.

John Key came from a corporate background too, but of a different type: one that placed a high value on individual risk-taking. One difference between Key and Luxon is that Key, for all his faults, seemed to have more trust in his own judgment.

But that’s not the only reason Luxon has come out of this affair looking bad. Many New Zealanders are likely to have taken a dim view of the way he threw Pugh under the bus.

Loyalty is a two-way street; party leaders are entitled to it, but so are their MPs – even lowly backbenchers. To publicly demean Pugh by ordering her to read some books on climate change – in other words, to go and stand in the naughty corner – was a bad look. It seemed petty and vindictive.

The result: Pugh finished the week having won public respect for having the honesty to say what she thought, even though she was then bullied into a humiliating recantation. People would have realised her backdown was insincere, but would have excused her because it was forced on her by her leader.

There was a simple way to avoid all this. When confronted by scalp-hunting political journalists about Pugh’s supposed climate-change heresy, Luxon could have casually waved it away. “Well, that’s Maureen,” he might have said. “She has her own way of looking at things. National has room for non-conformists.”

But he didn’t. He responded exactly as the media hoped and gave them the “Gotcha!” moment they wanted.

I think the underlying problem here is that Luxon is scared of the media and allows himself to be intimidated. Political journalists play him like a fiddle and end up effectively dictating the political agenda. This is no basis for a healthy democracy.

Luxon seems to lack the guts or confidence to stand up for principled conservative positions, fearing that the left-leaning media will punish him. The same is happening in Australia, where the once-formidable Liberal Party has been cowed into a state of paralysis by media that are even more aggressively leftist.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 1970s, the boot was on the other foot: New Zealand political journalists were scared of politicians – or to be more precise, one politician in particular, Robert Muldoon. That wasn’t good for democracy either. There's an honourable middle ground between these extremes.

Control-freak press secretaries appear to be part of the problem too. They wield far too much power. It emerged on RNZ this morning that when word of Pugh’s verbal indiscretion got around, Opposition press secretaries went into panic mode, scurrying around to ensure that all the other National MPs were “on message”.  

Pardon me, but who’s in charge here? We don’t elect press secretaries to run the country. They are the modern equivalent of the palace courtier, wielding undue influence and orchestrating events out of the public eye. Political communications, aka the spin doctor industry, is a racket that’s out of control; a gravy train that needs to be derailed.