An essential counterpoint to 'Fire and Fury'

On a Tuesday afternoon in February 2022 I happened to be in Wellington. My route home took me via the bottom end of town, through the precinct occupied by Parliament and the Old Government Buildings. To my surprise, I found my way blocked by protest vehicles.

There had been chatter on the radio that morning about an anti-vaccination mandate protest convoy arriving in town, but I expected it would be over by afternoon and the streets would be clear again. I was wrong.

I found a way through the congestion and carried on, assuming the protesters were just letting off steam and would soon go back whence they had come, wherever that was.

Wrong again. They had other ideas. Three weeks later they were still there, having taken up residence in what they called Camp Freedom.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only New Zealander to be taken aback by the scale and resolve of the protest or the depth of the protesters’ grievances. I think the entire country, police and government included, was caught off-guard.

Yet it’s clear from independent film maker Gaylene Barnes’ documentary River of Freedom that the anti-vax protest had been gathering unstoppable momentum long before it rolled into Wellington. For me the most striking scenes in the film were not the ones showing the violent, fiery climax to the occupation at Parliament. Dramatic though those were, we had seen them before. No, I was most struck by scenes we hadn’t seen; namely, the ones that showed enthusiastic crowds lining the protest routes all the way from Cape Reinga and Bluff to the capital.

Even out in the countryside, boisterous supporters – too numerous by far to be dismissed as a mere rent-a-mob display – turned out in force to wave placards and cheer as the convoy rolled past. Motorway overbridges were shown jammed with well-wishers, even in foul weather.

Clearly, something unprecedented was happening out in heartland New Zealand, but where were the mainstream media? Precious little of this was reported in the press or shown on the TV news. To all intents and purposes, the rolling protest was rendered invisible. It was as if the media had conspired to ignore it (yes, I’m using that c-word), or at the very least to play it down as the work of an inconsequential fringe element and not to be taken seriously.

Small wonder, then, that when protest vehicles choked the streets around Parliament, the public wondered where the hell they had sprung from. And smaller wonder still that the protesters concluded very early in the piece that the media were out to marginalise them. There has rarely been a more graphic demonstration of the gulf between the provincial heartland, where the protest had its roots, and the effete metropolitan elites as represented by the mainstream media.

Two things were happening here – or in terms of media attention, not happening.

The so-called Freedom Convoy appeared to be cleverly orchestrated and co-ordinated, although River of Freedom doesn’t explain who initiated and drove it. (The conspiracy fantasists at the Disinformation Project and their equally excitable cheerleaders at Stuff and RNZ would say it was all the work of malevolvent far-Right agitators, which becomes even more preposterous after a viewing of the film. That being said, a bit more transparency might have helped offset the more lurid accusations.)

Social media platforms were used to spread the word, but very little of the rumbling discontent over vaccination mandates seeped into the wider public consciousness via mainstream channels, and that which did was characterised as loony, dangerous, or both.

The regrettable result has been a hardening and a deepening of the divide between “establishment” New Zealand – the New Zealand of the main political parties, the bureaucracy, big business, academia and (crucially) the information gatekeepers of the MSM – and another, very different New Zealand inhabited by people whose multiple grievances and frustrations found an outlet in opposition to the authoritarian mandate.

I wrote at the time: “A fascinating political and sociological fault line has opened up – one that defies the normal understanding of New Zealand’s political dynamics. People at the bottom of the heap, as political scientist Bryce Edwards describes them – many of them working-class and provincial, with no formal organisational structure – have risen up in defiance of the all-powerful political class, the urban elites who are accustomed to calling the shots and controlling political discourse.” I think that analysis still holds true.

Bleakly depressing though the prospect may be, Winston Peters (or "Sir" Winston, as he's referred to in the film’s credits) is now poised to harness some of the rage and discontent that was left to fester unresolved after police broke up the Camp Freedom protest. Several political parties sprang up in the aftermath of the protests, among them Matt King’s Democracy NZ and Liz Gunn’s NZ Loyal, but only Peters and New Zealand First have the organisational infrastructure, the boots on the ground, the experience and the opportunistic cunning to exploit the opening.

Peters thus stands to collect an electoral dividend from being the only mainstream politician willing to meet the Camp Freedom protesters and hear their stories. As River of Freedom reminds us, National and ACT MPs opposed aspects of Labour’s lockdown regime in parliamentary debate but couldn’t or wouldn’t risk tainting themselves by going out and talking to the campers. They may have been New Zealand citizens with the same rights and entitlements as any others, but politically speaking the protesters were regarded as untouchables. In the film, their resentment at being treated by the politicians as pariahs is matched only by their animosity toward the journalists who shunned them.

My first attempt at seeing River of Freedom several weeks ago was unsuccessful; for the first time in my life, I was turned away because a movie was sold out. After spending the past two weeks out of the country I thought I’d missed out altogether, but I finally caught up with it yesterday at the Screening Room in Masterton. I see from Graeme Tuckett’s review for Stuff that the film attracted full houses in Wellington too.

Tuckett’s review, incidentally, was commendably fair, considering his own employers had produced the ludicrously overwrought and shamefully unbalanced Fire and Fury. River of Freedom (the title was inspired by disgraced former cabinet minister Michael Wood’s reference to the protest as a “river of filth”) is unbalanced too, as you’d expect of a film made from a standpoint that’s openly sympathetic to the protesters, but it doesn’t indulge in hysterical conspiracy theories and it largely leaves viewers to form their own conclusions. Perhaps its greatest fault (and one that Tuckett pointed out) is that it avoids any mention of the aggressive and hostile conduct that gave the protest a bad name.

To me, one of the film’s most compelling voices is that of Alistair Boyce, owner of the Backbencher Pub opposite Parliament. Camp Freedom was right outside his doors, placing Boyce involuntarily in the thick of the action. His business inevitably suffered and he saw some of the protesters at their worst, yet Boyce – who described himself as pro-vaccination but anti-mandate – was sympathetic to their cause. If only the politicians had taken the trouble to listen to them, he reckoned, the occupation could have been over in five days.

I recommend River of Freedom to anyone who can find a movie theatre where it’s still screening. It’s too long, at two hours 34 minutes, but it’s well made (the cameras luxuriate in some exquisite landscape shots as they follow the convoy through the country) and there are even flashes of humour, as in the scene where a worker arrives at the protest camp to empty the portaloos and pleads with the cameraman: “Don’t take a picture of me – my mother thinks I’m a professor”. But most importantly, people should see River of Freedom simply because it’s an essential counterpoint to the distortions of Fire and Fury.

An idiotic experiment

The latest episode of the BBC radio programme Science in Action includes an account of what could well be the most spectacularly pointless and inept experiment in the history of science.

A team led by Canadian zoologist Professor Liana Zanette used loudspeakers and video cameras to test the reactions of African wildlife to a variety of sounds that included lions growling and a human voice speaking. 

When the sounds were played to animals congregating at a waterhole in a South African game reserve, the researchers noted that the animals were twice as likely to flee from the sound of a human voice than from that of a lion.

Zanette, from the University of Western Ontario, concluded from this that the animals were more afraid of people than of lions, which apparently confirmed her perception of humans as “super lethal” and a “super predator”.

But the experiment tells us nothing of the sort. It's totally unsurprising that wild animals responded more fearfully to the amplified sound of a human voice than to that of growling lions, for the obvious reason that it’s something they wouldn’t be accustomed to hearing.

Growling lions are part of the soundtrack of the savannah; a human voice isn’t. If I were a gazelle or a gnu, I too would run in panic if my evening drink was abruptly interrupted by a metallic-sounding voice emanating from a loudspeaker concealed in the undergrowth. I imagine the noise of a V12 Ferrari or Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin would have had much the same galvanising effect.

To use a different analogy, humans would almost certainly take to their heels if they saw a North American black bear ambling down Lambton Quay – not because the black bear is aggressive toward people (it isn’t), but simply from a natural fear of the unknown.

But Zanette wants us to think that animals perceive people as a “top enemy” that they must avoid. This plays into an ideologically fashionable view of humans as intrinsically malevolent – violent destroyers of everything they touch, and more so if they happen to be white. Among the educated classes of the Western hemisphere, self-loathing is not just popular but mandatory. (It may or may not be significant that the voice played over the loudspeaker is that of an Anglo-Saxon male speaking English, the language of vile colonisers, rather than one of the native languages used by the poachers who represent by far the greatest threat to South African wildlife.)

Intriguingly, the professor’s comments are laced with a type of anthropomorphism – the attribution of human characteristics to animals – more commonly associated with Walt Disney children's movies. She talks as if animals somehow mystically communicate to each other the knowledge that humans are the ultimate predators. “Fear of humans pervades the entire animal community,” Zanette declares at one point. I wonder how this squares with the observations of explorers landing in previously untouched places who noted that the wildlife (seals, famously - and to their great cost) showed no fear of humans. Perhaps they didn't get the memo.

Zanette's fatuous theorising is barely one step removed from Bambi. It beggars belief that a scientist could be so childishly simplistic. It’s the sort of breathtaking idiocy that gives scientists a bad name - or should I say a worse one, since the scientific establishment frequently gives the impression of having abandoned credibility in favour of catastrophising.

You can hear the BBC interview here, starting at about the 22-minute mark.  It's worth noting that the show’s host, Roland Pease, appears to share Zanette's astonishment at animals behaving exactly as you'd expect them to. Media credulity is part of the problem.

Addendum, October 10: A brief Google search reveals that many of the world's most illustrious journalistic institutions - the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times of India, Forbes, Newsweek, Popular Science (the name says it all) - uncritically reported Zanette's conclusions under headlines such as "Wild animals fear humans more than lions, study finds". This is the most highly educated generation of journalists in history, but they lack that most essential quality: scepticism. Shame on them all.

Peter Hubscher's warts-and-all perspective on the New Zealand wine industry

At Wardini Books in Napier last night my wife and I attended the launch of “A Vintner’s Tale”, a memoir by Peter Hubscher, former managing director of Montana Wines. The son of Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia, Peter (pictured) spent his life in the wine industry and has a unique perspective on New Zealand’s emergence as a small but significant player on the global wine scene. The following is the foreword I wrote for his book.

Peter Hubscher was a dominant figure – arguably the dominant figure – through the crucial formative years of the modern New Zealand wine industry. His long career at Montana Wines, then New Zealand’s biggest wine brand, spanned an era during which the industry made a remarkable transition from ugly duckling to swan.  He had the distinction of leading Montana when it was still wholly New Zealand-owned, and as a genuinely patriotic Kiwi would later lament the corporate manoeuvrings that resulted in it being acquired by overseas interests with no emotional commitment to the brand.

A visionary and an innovator, Hubscher was a key player in many of the developments that helped New Zealand wine achieve international respect and credibility. Marlborough sauvignon blanc? Tick. (Montana was the first large-scale producer of the wine that made New Zealand famous among wine lovers around the globe.) Chardonnay? Tick. (Montana’s Gisborne winery was the source of New Zealand’s first commercially successful wine made from the classic white grape of Burgundy.) Sparkling wine? Tick. (Montana’s Lindauer proved that New Zealand could make quality sparkling wine using the same technique as France’s champagne houses, and sell it at a price that made it accessible to New Zealand consumers.)

All this happened on Hubscher’s watch. He joined Montana as a winemaker in 1973, initially working under the mercurial Frank Yukich, and led the company from 1991 till 2004.  Under his leadership, Montana – a label whose subsequent downgrading he believes was unnecessary and retrograde – achieved unquestioned pre-eminence in the industry, with 57 percent of the domestic market and a 49 percent share of the country’s wine exports.

In this characteristically frank memoir, Hubscher presents an insider’s view of an industry more often written about by observers on the sidelines. He lays bare the fraudulent winemaking practices of the past and is blunt about the industry’s mistakes: the historic reliance on poor-quality hybrid grapes whose deficiencies were disguised by the addition of water and copious quantities of sugar; the brazen misuse of European names on bottles whose contents bore no resemblance to the wines they purported to emulate; the greed and ignorance of independent grape growers who were paid by the tonne and therefore interested only in quantity; the vast sums of money expended on hit-and-miss experiments with the wrong grape varieties and in the wrong places. That the industry overcame these self-inflicted handicaps is a minor miracle and a tribute to the resilience of influential figures such as Hubscher who were determined to learn, adapt and move on.

He reveals that Montana made catastrophic mistakes – perhaps never more so than in the early days of the expansion into Marlborough, which were a fiasco. It came as a surprise to this reader to learn that Hubscher considers it was not so much Marlborough sauvignon blanc as the humble müller-thurgau grape, now almost forgotten, that propelled the New Zealand wine industry into the modern era. Remember those big-selling cask wines such as Montana Blenheimer and Bernkaisler? Made predominantly from müller-thurgau grapes, they provided the vital evolutionary bridge between the old New Zealand wine industry and the new one.  And while Marlborough is generally lauded as the place where the industry was reborn, for Hubscher it was Gisborne – a region overlooked by the wine commentariat, but one for which he retains a particular affection.

Hubscher never conformed to corporate stereotypes. The corporate sector frequently gives the impression of valuing conformity above all else, but Hubscher was a somewhat idiosyncratic industry leader; a man who, although quietly spoken, never lacked conviction and was always prepared to say what people might not wish to hear. (He’s not entirely complimentary, for instance, about wine writers.) In retirement, he has been critical of some industry decisions and sceptical about wine companies’ susceptibility to the whims of fashion – opinions not always appreciated by PR-conscious industry spokesmen eager to present a rosy picture. In this respect, Hubscher lives up to a wine industry tradition of strong-willed individuals – renegades, almost – who don’t always conveniently fall into line with mainstream thinking.

He’s also notable for taking a sensibly holistic view of wine and its place in society, seeing it as something to be enjoyed as a natural adjunct to other sensual pleasures such as food and music. His pragmatic approach is an antidote to the swooning of wine snobs who see wine as an end in itself, and who describe it in esoteric, almost mystical, terms more likely to amuse rather than impress the uninitiated.  

In retirement, Hubscher has revealed another side to his character. He and his wife Pam, a former teacher, have devoted themselves to the funding and nurturing of the Tironui Music Trust, which they created in 2006. Using tutors and instruments paid for by the Hubschers, hundreds of primary and intermediate school pupils from low-income areas of South Auckland have been introduced to the joy and satisfaction of playing music. It’s a project that reflects not only Hubscher’s evangelistic enthusiasm for music (his violinist father was a music teacher), but also his commitment to social wellbeing and the responsibilities of citizenship – to say nothing of his determination to do something with his life post-Montana.    

As the owner of a small library of wine books and the author of one myself, I thought there wasn’t much I didn’t already know about the history of New Zealand wine, but A Vintner’s Tale fills spaces in the canvas that I didn’t realise were blank. It’s a unique, revealing and highly personal insight into the internal dynamics of the industry at a time when it was undergoing profound and far-reaching change. 

“A Vintner’s Tale” is available here. All proceeds go to the Tironui Music Trust.

 

 

Spiro Zavos: Sun Tzu and the art of winning the Rugby World Cup

Spiro (pictured) is a New Zealander who for decades wrote a popular rugby column in the Sydney Morning Herald. He has kindly agreed to have his thoughts on the RWC published on this site.

A coach of the fabled Notre Dame gridiron team was once asked about the secret of his team's success. "Prayers work best when players are big," he replied. 

After observing the exciting opening round of the 2023 Rugby World Cup tournament, I would add a clarification to this comment: "Big players need to play big while small players can play big by leading their team with ultra smart rugby."  

We saw a splendid example of a big player (finally) playing big with Will Skelton, a 120 kg, 203cm giant, turning in a massive performance for the Wallabies in their commanding 35-15 victory over Georgia. 

The fearsome Georgia pack, with their pirate beards, swelling bellies and tree trunk legs, lost their usual swagger and were reduced to a bewildered gang arguing with each other by Skelton's frequent power plays.

The captain of the Wallabies was helped in this demolition job on the Georgia pack by powerful and athletic play from Taniela Tupou, the 140kg prop, and coach Eddie Jones' golden discovery, Tom Hooper, a 122kg, 199cm flanker who plays like Owen Finegan of blessed RWC 1999 memory.

The Australian's Jamie Pandaram headed his article on Skelton's sensational performance: "Giant leap for Wallabies skipper who's proving his weight in gold".

The article pointed out that when Skelton was playing at 145kg as a younger player he could not make the starting lineup of the Waratahs. It is not enough, in other words, to be big. A big rugby player has to actually play big.

This playing-big attitude started for Skelton when he was released to Saracens, the English rugby club closest to the Crusaders in their preparation of their players. Skelton reduced his weight under extensive training to 130kg, still presenting as a massive presence. He was taught how to manipulate his size by mastering the technical aspects of tight forward play. 

Against Georgia, Skelton was a force of nature. He smashed Georgia's rolling maul. He made powerful runs that dented Georgia's defensive line. He won turnover ball. And in one of the last lineouts of the match, he jumped easily to win a lineout, a skill that many pundits believed he did not have in his arsenal.

Pandaram also made the interesting point that World Cups have been defined by forwards who rise to a level that seems unbelievable,' 

He cited Pieter-Steph du Toit in 2019, Kieran Read in 2015, Jerome Kaino and Thierry Dusautoir in 2011 and Victor Matfield in 2011 as RWC dominators. "Skelton can sit among these kings," Pandaram wrote.

The small man playing big syndrome was illustrated by George Ford who drove England to an unlikely and very comfortable 27-10 victory over the Pumas. The victory and its margin was unlikely because for 70 minutes or so England played with a 14-man side. 

RWC tournaments have seen many brilliant performances by number 10s, the likes of Grant Fox, Michael Lynagh, Joel Stransky, Stephen Larkham, Jonny Wilkinson and Dan Carter. 

But Ford's performance was, in my opinion, the biggest big game any number 10 has played in a RWC tournament. 

England were a team that had won only four out of their previous 13 Tests and among the losses was a defeat handed out to them by the Pumas at Twickenham only a few weeks ago. But Ford, in a remarkable sequence of skill, intuition and execution, played the Pumas out of the game and possibly out of the RWC tournament. 

He booted over three dropped goals and six penalties to boost a pack of Dad's Army veterans to master a tough Pumas pack into errors and then submission.  

It was Ford's big-man thinking that he was determined to win the game as the playmaker and points-scorer, rather than try not to lose it, that thrilled me. As he told reporters after the match: "We were a man down early and we had take points when we gained field position."

The clarity of the drop-kicking option lay in the fact it didn't matter that England were a man down. He needed the ball somewhere within kicking distance and enough forwards to form a sort of block on charging Pumas. His technique was deadly under pressure and distance from the goal posts for all his kicks.

England's coaching staff have a real dilemma on their hands now. The England backline with Ford and Manu Tuilagi at number 10 and inside centre worked so well on attack and defence that the position of the suspended England captain Owen Farrell becomes an issue for England when he can return from suspension after the next match.

There is no way that Ford could have performed his rescue act for England with Farrell at inside centre and sharing the playmaker role.

If there needs to be further proof that the two-playmaker system does not work, we need to look no further than the All Blacks and their loss to France in the opening match of the 2023 RWC tournament. 

The media have pointed out that this is the first time the All Blacks have lost a match in the pool stages of the tournament. As the Springboks proved in winning the RWC 2019 tournament, teams - or one team at least since the tournament started in 1987 - can win after losing in the pool round. 

But what has not really been acknowledged is that 27-13 scoreline was the worst ever inflicted on the All Blacks in the history of the RWC.

It is obvious now, or should be, that the All Blacks selector-coaches have made a massive mistake in not entrusting the team four years ago to the playmaking leadership of Richie Mo'unga, the way previous RWC-winning All Black sides were entrusted to one playmaker, mainly Grant Fox in 1987 and Dan Carter in 2011 and 2015.

In the match against France, Barrett seemed to play in the line more than Mo'unga, who was camped at fullback for long periods of play. The effect of this meant that there was no consistent method in the way the All Blacks tried to counter the France's arrow-like rush defence

Mo'unga's skill is running the game, in the line, with the occasional searing break of his own. All the time.  He needs to have his hands on the ball in most of the plays, calling them from virtually every set piece, ruck and maul. 

This is elementary 101 playmaking theory. All Blacks coach Ian Foster, a former number 10 himself, should know this. 

He should also know that Beauden Barrett, one of the great players of his era, is a shadow of his former self as a player. In my opinion, the terrible concussion he suffered in the 2022 Test against Ireland at Aviva Stadium has had a dulling effect on his former brilliant running game.

This infatuation with the two-playmakers game and poor selection has also impacted on the positions key players have been placed in. 

Barrett at this time in his career could be used as a reserve who could play cameos at fullback or number 10. Will Jordan should be the starting fullback for the All Blacks.

Jordan as a fullback, as he does for the Crusaders, would be mainly running, where he is a match-winner, and occasionally putting in kicks. He would not be subjected to the ordeal, as he was against France, of having to chase Barrett's high kicks, most of them too long and not high enough, with the risk of getting his timing wrong. 

As it was, he failed to snatch any of the high balls the French backs were challenged with. But he was yellow-carded once and could easily have been charged again, which would have been red-card territory and dangerous ground for him as far as staying in the tournament. 

The official excuse for the high-ball tactic by the All Blacks apparently was that it would conserve the energy of the players in the torrid heat. 

But chasing 30m or so time and again in the heat cannot be described as a conservation policy. It was madness. It failed to achieve anything other than tiring a brilliant runner and exposing him to injury or a card or two. 

When I watched Jordan, a natural and gifted try-scorer, being required to chase high balls, I thought it was a disgrace - rather like requiring Phar Lap to compete in a steeplechase.

The original sin with this All Black side, though, was the selection of Sam Cane as captain before the 2020 season had actually started. 

In the past, All Black captains were selected from certain starters in the run-on side. This is the way the Australian cricket captain, a similar sort of position, is chosen. History shows that for both teams, selecting someone assured of his position in the side as captain works well.

The problem that Foster created for himself and any team he selected with this first decision as the All Blacks' new coach was that there was a much better player available for the number 7 jersey, Ardie Savea. 

His solution of playing Savea at number 8 merely enhances the coach-created problem. Savea at 103 kg and 190 cm is big for a number 7, but far too small for a number 8.

Savea is the best loose forward in the All Blacks pack, but he is not the best number 8 available. Even though he invariably plays well, as he did against France, the loose forward trio is unbalanced with him at number 8. 

This is a position where size is important. Kieran Read, on the small side as number 8, was 111 kg and 193 cm. The current Springbok number 8, Duane Vermeullen, plays at 120 kg and 193 cm.

There is a rugby adage that goes to the crux of the problem the All Blacks could not solve against France: the team that controls the advantage line wins the game. 

The All Blacks could not control the advantage line against France because they lacked the power and muscle to dominate the French pack. 

The All Blacks pack - unlike the Wallabies, say, in their match against Georgia - played small, not big. They were pressurised by a big French pack, playing big, into conceding 13 penalties to the five penalties conceded by France. 

Six of the All Blacks' penalties were conceded on attack and seven were conceded on defence. This suggests that the All Blacks were under pressure both when they had the ball and when France had the ball.

The French also were able to off-load 15 times to the seven achieved by the All Blacks.

The all-important battle of the collisions, as these statistics and the scoreline indicate, was won around the field by France.

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher on war, postulated that "the battle is won before it is fought".

Rugby is not warfare. But it is a war game. If the All Blacks keep the same tactics, the same backline and forward strategies and selections they played against France, I fear that their battle to win the 2023 RWC tournament has already been lost.

 

Matthew Hooton on Christopher Luxon

Matthew Hooton has written a devastating critique of Christopher Luxon, and the frightening thing is that his assessment is spot-on.

Regardless of what else you might think of Hooton, he’s astute and politically well informed. Here’s what he wrote on Sunday after watching Luxon’s “train wreck” interview on Q+A, in which the National leader was unable to answer Jack Tame’s questions on tax cuts:

“Today's interview shows that [Luxon] is clearly as stupid and empty as Ardern (without, to be fair to him, the irritating frowny-concerned face, or, to be fair to her, the charisma she was sometimes capable of)," Hooton wrote.

“But there is no evidence of Luxon even having her mental agility to get himself out of talking about things he obviously doesn't understand in the slightest, beyond further regurgitating slogans; or the humility to have prepared properly for the interview to make up for his low IQ, as Ardern would try to do, sometimes successfully.

“As I mused here a little while ago, I think Luxon's record as a hardworking model student at an elite high school who only got a B Bursary is instructive.

“He seems to be someone just clever enough to read and regurgitate a text-book or one of the self-help books he reads and recommends, but not to reflect on it, evaluate it, challenge it, or see how it might link or conflict with other ideas.

“He comes across as just one of those very-average, very-hard-working, and very boring nerds with the discipline to move up through the ranks of big multinationals, without ever getting close to the top, by following the brand manual.”

Hooton’s assessment of Luxon exactly echoes my own, except that he puts it more mercilessly.

Luxon strikes me as a man who has quite possibly never had a single original thought. He clearly thrived in the corporate environment, which prizes conformity, groupthink and buzzwords. Unfortunately that makes Luxon arguably the perfect leader for a party that is bereft of vision or imagination and seems pathologically risk-averse.

Hooton suggests Luxon is incapable of doing more than parroting slogans (the “squeezed middle” is his latest) and bluntly accuses him of being too dumb to understand National’s own tax policy and its implications. Ouch.

If that’s not scary enough, Hooton claimed – and repeats today – that National is actively plotting to exclude ACT from a National-led government and would rather govern with New Zealand First or even the Greens. His explanation, and it’s entirely plausible, is that ACT would make things too uncomfortable for National by demanding radical action to reverse Labour’s six years of disastrous mismanagement. 

National's aversion to a coalition with ACT would be the ultimate betrayal of conservative principles, but entirely consistent with an approach to politics in which there seems to be no bottom line.

Hooton concluded his Sunday column by advising that anyone able to move to Australia or beyond should do so as soon as possible. My thoughts exactly – but what do you do if you have family here? You can’t abandon them.

One other thought for the day:

Chris Hipkins seems fated to reprise the role of his 1970s predecessor Bill Rowling. Like Hipkins, Rowling in 1974 inherited the prime ministership from a charismatic leader – in his case, Norman Kirk – and led Labour to a crushing defeat at the next election. An obvious difference is that, unlike Hipkins, Rowling was up against a National leader, Robert Muldoon, who was a master politician and street fighter. But in other respects, the parallels with Hipkins are striking.

Like Rowling, Hipkins was thrown into the role unexpectedly; and like Rowling, he doesn’t look comfortable. Although admired as a capable and decent man, Rowling never looked prime ministerial. Neither does the boyish Hipkins, whom Garrick Tremain wickedly depicts as wearing short pants, looking overwhelmed and anxiously clutching a teddy bear.

Gravitas counts in a prime minister, and Hipkins hasn’t got it. As I’ve written in an article for the Spectator Australia, he seems doomed to become a footnote in New Zealand history, and a minor one at that.

I defended the media then; I wouldn't now

In his media column in the New Zealand Herald today, Shayne Currie reports that media organisations are having to think about security arrangements for journalists covering the election campaign. TVNZ went to the extent of hiring security staff for its news team at the National and Labour campaign launches, both of which were disrupted by protesters. Currie quotes TVNZ executive editor Phil O’Sullivan as saying: “Globally we’ve seen an increase in anti-media sentiment. We’re now seeing this in New Zealand too, with an increase in abuse directed towards our reporters while out in the field, and threatening behaviour in online spaces disproportionately impacting our female reporters.”

We have been here before. A post on this blog in November 2021 noted expressions of concern from journalists about hostility toward the media at anti-vax events. That post was headlined No one should be surprised by a backlash against the media and it still holds true.

I deplore attacks or threats against anyone lawfully doing their job, but people in the media need to ask themselves why animosity toward journalists – which has existed, to a greater or less extent, all the time I’ve been in the business – has been cranked up to an unprecedented level.

Part of the explanation can be found in an article that Currie quotes from. It was written in February last year by Mark Stevens, then head of news at Stuff. Stevens, who takes up a new job on Monday in an equivalent role at RNZ, noted that aggression toward journalists had increased and cited incidents of Stuff journalists being punched and having gear smashed.

Stevens (who I worked with when he was a very capable young reporter at the Evening Post in the 1990s) went on to say: “From time to time, news stories are published that rub a certain person, group or community up the wrong way. We often say in journalism that we can’t please everyone all the time. Nor should we. Holding the powerful to account, shining light on untruths and giving voices to the wronged isn’t always welcome or popular.”

This is the familiar narrative of the noble journalist on a heroic mission to uncover the truth, without fear or favour, and to make life uncomfortable for those in power. It’s an admirable ideal and one that appeals to journalists’ sense of self-worth, but I’m not sure the wider community has ever found it wholly convincing, and probably less so now than ever.

Then Stevens said this: “We publish a range of views, while avoiding and dismantling falsehoods, and we listen. But when you disagree, wipe the froth from your mouth first; we take criticism but cannot tolerate attacks, threats or violence.”

Let’s unpack that statement. “We publish a range of views”? That may certainly have once been true of the mainstream media, but it no longer applies. Just see how far you get with a letter to the editor in which, for argument’s sake, you challenge climate change orthodoxy, or suggest that the English language is being damaged by the increasing use of te reo (as someone I know did, and was told by the editor of the Dominion Post, when he asked why his letter was rejected, that he was a racist). Or try to get an ad published in which you assert that the word “woman” means “adult human female”, as both Family First and Speak Up for Women did, to no avail. In the case of Family First, every major paper in the country turned the ad down in a co-ordinated act – a conspiracy, effectively – of censorship. The “range of views” Stevens refers to is an increasingly narrow one, prescribed by media gatekeepers not on legal grounds, as might once have been the case, but on purely ideological ones.

Now, “avoiding and dismantling falsehoods”. Really? Who decides what’s false, and on what grounds? To use that same obvious example, who decided that “woman” no longer means an adult human female – a proposition still regarded, other than by an infinitesimally tiny and deranged woke minority, as an incontrovertible and objectively provable fact? The conceit that editors and journalists are able to determine what’s true and what’s false is a recent phenomenon, and one that has further eroded the already frayed relationship between the media and the public.

Then there’s this: “But when you disagree, wipe the froth from your mouth first.” The striking thing about this statement is its blatantly antagonistic posture. Stevens was characterising dissent as something that only mad and probably dangerous people would indulge in. He was overtly setting Stuff up in opposition to many of its paying customers. It’s a novel business model and it’s unlikely to end well.

Here we get close to the core of the problem. The media have effectively set themselves above the communities they purport to serve. They are interested only in people who agree with them; the rest can be dismissed as deplorables, to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous term.

The widening them-and-us relationship between the media and the wider community became starkly apparent during the Covid pandemic. Few journalists seemed interested in what motivated the hundreds of protesters camped outside Parliament. They preferred to look down on them, literally and figuratively, from the balcony.

Later came the shameful hounding of anti-vaxxers, when Stuff and other media outlets embarked on an orchestrated witch hunt aimed at demonising local government candidates who were deemed to hold the “wrong” opinions, or who were merely suspected of having links to so-called conspiracy theories. Not illegal opinions, mind you; just “wrong” ones. The frenzy reached a peak with Stuff’s overwrought – no, make that hysterical – Fire and Fury documentary. (Note: I was fully vaccinated myself so can’t be dismissed as anti-vax.)

To all this can be added the baneful consequences of the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, aka the Pravda Project, the beneficiaries of which never seemed to consider the likely public perception that the media were being bought by the government. Even if their motives were impeccably pure, there was always going to be a suspicion that the money came with strings attached.

Meanwhile, levels of trust in the mainstream media continue to decline, newspaper circulations continue to shrink and New Zealanders continue to abandon traditional free-to-air TV – that means the 6 o’clock news, along with everything else – in favour of streaming services. It’s slow-motion suicide.

And having alienated a large part of their audience and driven them to alternative online platforms, mainstream media then clutch their pearls in horror at the thought that audiences might fall prey to “unsafe” content and “disinformation” from fringe sources. It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.

How did this happen? My own theory, and it’s unlikely to be popular among today’s journalists, is that it had a lot to do with the transferral of journalism training from the newsroom to the lecture room.

Earlier generations of journalists learned on the job from other journalists. Many of my contemporaries came from working-class backgrounds. They didn’t go to university and were proud to regard journalism as a trade rather than profession. The importance of neutrality, fairness and balance was drummed into them. They had no delusions of grandeur about being on a mission.

But from the 1970s on, journalism was subjected to academic capture. Budding journalists were inculcated with a highly politicised vision of journalism’s purpose. They were encouraged to acquire degrees that were often based on esoteric theories far removed from the simple, practical concerns of good journalism. Over time, that has had the fatal effect of creating a widening gap between journalists and the communities they claim to serve. Even more dangerously, it has led journalists to think they are wiser and smarter than the people who buy newspapers and watch the TV news, and even morally superior to them. As the Marxist American journalist Batyar Ungar-Sargon puts it, they climbed up the status ladder and became part of the elite.

So if anyone wants to understand why so many people are now reacting against the media and even viewing them as the enemy, there you are. It’s not pretty and it’s not desirable, but no one should delude themselves about how we got to this point.

I’m writing this blog post on a Friday. For many years, Friday was the day I would meet a good friend, the late John Schnellenberg, for lunch in Masterton. We would talk about politics and inevitably the performance of the media would come up. I suspect John took a mischievous pleasure in goading me with disdainful remarks about journalists and I would always rise to the bait. It was my instinct in those days vigorously to defend the media. I’m sorry to say that wouldn’t be the case now.

The soldier whose heroism the NZ Defence Force strangely refuses to recognise

I wrote this post for my blog last week, then decided it was an issue of public importance that deserved a wider audience. I shared it with the NZ Herald, which published its own story by David Fisher today.

A New Zealand Army hero has been denied proper posthumous recognition for reasons that are bafflingly unclear. The most plausible explanation is that the NZ Defence Force wanted to be spared further embarrassment over a shameful episode from its past.

Private David Edward Whawhai Stewart, 23, was killed in a ferocious blizzard on Mt Ruapehu in 1990 while trying to save his comrades on an ill-planned winter training exercise. He was one of six who died from hypothermia in the army’s greatest loss of life in a single incident since the Second World War.

Stewart (pictured above) could have saved himself by hunkering down in his sleeping bag but instead risked his life exposing himself to the elements, moving around in 180 kmh winds and near-zero visibility in an attempt to help his comrades and keep up morale. Seven in the party of 13 survived, but Stewart died after the wind ripped away the sleeping bag he had volunteered to share with two others. Evidence suggested he was the last of the six to die.

An army court of inquiry led by Colonel Bernard Isherwood found that Stewart exhausted himself helping his companions. “It is the Court’s belief that his efforts to assist others were largely instrumental in causing his own death.” Stewart and Private Sonny Te Rure, the court said, had displayed “leadership and self-sacrifice of the highest order”.

It recommended decorations for both soldiers and for Private Brendon Burchell, who descended the mountain with one of the two instructors in the party to get help. Burchell and Te Rure (now known as Sonny Tavake) both survived.

Extraordinarily, it took nine years for the army to formally acknowledge the men’s heroism. And when recognition finally came, it was in the form of the New Zealand Bravery Medal – the lowest of four civilian awards for bravery. The Bravery Medal is awarded for “acts of bravery”, with no reference to the context in which the act occurred. (Military honours for gallantry, such as the Victoria Cross, are not awarded in peacetime.)

For several years, Isherwood, a former commanding officer of the NZSAS, and retired Warrant Officer Bob Davies have led a patient but determined campaign to get Stewart’s honour upgraded. They submitted that a more appropriate honour would be the New Zealand Cross, which is given for “acts of outstanding bravery in situations of extreme danger” – an apt description of the circumstances in which Stewart put his own life at risk.

At times it seemed they were almost across the line. Former Defence Minister Peeni Henare was supportive. So was Sir Jerry Mateparae, former Governor-General and chief of the NZ Defence Force. But this month Isherwood and Davies learned via a letter from current Defence Minister Andrew Little that the request had gone right to the top, to prime minister Chris Hipkins, who turned it down.

The reason given was that “the prime minister was of the view that it was important to uphold the long-established principle that decisions about awards of this kind were best made while all the relevant information was readily available, recall of the events was clear, and the actions concerned could be considered against the standards and values of the time and other contemporary examples.”

It seems an elaborately contrived excuse. The “relevant information” was all there in the 24-page report of the court of inquiry led by Isherwood only days after the tragedy, when recall of the event could not have been clearer. Statements were taken under oath from men who had personally witnessed Stewart’s valour.

The court of inquiry’s citation for Stewart – not made public at the time – noted that he “would have been fully aware that his actions in continually moving out of shelter and the warmth of his sleeping bag to assist those with hypothermia meant he had an increased chance of also becoming a casualty. He was also aware that he was becoming increasingly exhausted by the continual battling of the elements.”

What further information could have been needed? And in what way have “standards and values” altered since 1990? Has heroism been redefined in the intervening 33 years?

It was a fob-off that left the ex-army men scratching their heads. They believe their efforts were stymied by the hierarchy of the NZDF. But why, when it would appear to be in the interests of the NZDF to honour its own?

One possible explanation is stubborn institutional reluctance to revisit decisions made decades ago. But what seems more likely is that the NZDF doesn’t want to admit, even after all this time, that the army got it badly wrong not once but twice: the first time by sending 10 soldiers and a naval rating up on the mountain with inexperienced instructors, and again by not promptly recognising the acts of heroism that almost certainly prevented further loss of life. 

Isherwood, who now finds himself at odds with the army that he devoted 32 years of his life to, describes it as a can of worms that the military hierarchy doesn’t want to reopen.

The excuse given for the nine-year delay in awarding medals to Stewart, Te Rure and Burchell was that the bravery awards were in transition at the time from a British system to a New Zealand one. But Isherwood says there was resistance “from day one” within the NZDF.

It may be an indication of the army’s discomfort over the Ruapehu tragedy that it took more than 30 years for the report of the court of inquiry to be released. I obtained it last year after requesting it under the Official Information Act. Even Isherwood, who left the army in 1999, had to make an OIA request before he was given a redacted version of his own report so he could write an account for the history of the Royal NZ Infantry Regiment to which Stewart belonged.

Certainly the army had reason to be embarrassed by the inquiry, which found there was inadequate instruction and preparation prior to the training exercise. It concluded, damningly, that the inadequate skill levels of the instructors – both of whom survived – were a major contributory factor in the deaths of the six servicemen.

The inquiry found that the instructor who remained on the mountain absolved himself of leadership responsibility when it was most required. Isherwood thinks the fact that Stewart stepped into the leadership vacuum made his actions even more commendable.

The inquiry also noted that the party had no communications equipment – on the face of it, an extraordinary omission.

The army went some way toward atoning for its treatment of Stewart and his fellow servicemen last year, 32 years after the event, when a plaque was unveiled in Stewart’s memory at Linton army camp. His mother, Kathleen Kotiro Stewart of Whakatane, jointly unveiled the plaque with the head of the army, Major General John Boswell.

Among those pushing for Stewart’s heroism to be properly recognised, it was welcomed as a belated step in the right direction. But it wasn’t enough, and this month’s brush-off from Hipkins is unlikely to be the last word on the affair.