Suddenly, the media are unimportant - and it hurts

I sometimes wonder whether political reporters ever pause to think how precious and entitled their behaviour looks to outsiders.

I doubt it. They are too self-absorbed.

Right now, members of the parliamentary press gallery are feeling peevish. After feasting for years on a rich banquet of political news and sensation, they suddenly find themselves on starvation rations. And they’re not taking it well.

Post-election, everything has come to a dead halt. We are in the customary hiatus period when the leaders of the successful parties disappear from public view to conduct their horse-trading.

As an aside, this is one of the downsides of MMP that no one talks about. Ironically, an electoral system that was supposed to encourage transparency had the reverse effect.

When coalition talks begin, all bets are off. The politicians disappear behind closed doors and all the pledges and promises solemnly made on the campaign trail are up for negotiation. Voters can’t see what’s going on and have no influence over the outcome.

Inscrutability comes with the territory. It’s what we voted for in the early 1990s when we decided to punish politicians - you may permit yourself a rueful grin here - for breaking promises and not being honest about their intentions. But it frustrates the hell out of the media.

Thus we get moments of exquisite preciousness from people such as NewstalkZB’s Jason Walls, whose pride was wounded when Christopher Luxon said he wouldn’t indulge in “parlour games” with the media over the substance of coalition talks.

This, Walls pronounced with no trace of self-awareness, was “terrifically offensive … it’s actually called reporting the news to the New Zealand public.”

Er, no it’s not. You can’t report news when there is none. When the details of a formal coalition arrangement have been hammered out, we’ll be told. Until then the players are bound to play their cards close to their chests. It’s not an ideal set of circumstances, but that’s the way it is.

It's not, however, what the media are accustomed to. They’re conditioned to expect that politicians will bend over backwards to humour them (Winston Peters being a standout exception), and for once, just for a few weeks, the shoe is on the other foot.

Walls’ indignation indicates his apparent failure to accept that after being indulged by politicians for the past three years – and never more intensively than during the election campaign, when the need for favourable public exposure is greatest – the media are suddenly unimportant. The politicians don’t need them right now; in fact the media just get in the way.

It’s a tough adjustment for political journalists to make, but do I feel sorry for them? No, and I doubt there’ll be much public sympathy either. (Incidentally, where did Wells get that weird accent? It’s unlike any I’ve ever heard.)

TVNZ’s Jessica Mutch-McKay was another who pompously played the journalists-as-noble-guardians-of-the-public-interest card. Shayne Currie reports today that Mutch-McKay lectured Luxon at a media stand-up, telling him: “You talk about your negotiations and you’ve done a lot before [sic].

“This is very different because you are an elected prime minister. We are the Fourth Estate that represents the public and it feels like you’re treating us like we’re the ones that are hyped up.

“We’re not, we’re the ones asking on behalf of the public, who have [an] interest in what’s going on. Can you see where we’re coming from?”

This appeal to Luxon’s sense of public obligation might have some moral weight if (a) he had anything substantive to announce and (b) if all members of the press gallery were consistent and conscientious about fulfilling their own obligation to inform the public fully and fairly on matters of public interest. But the media have squandered whatever moral authority they might once have enjoyed through a pattern of partisan, highly selective and often embarrassingly petty political reportage.

That the election has disrupted the normal relationship between politicians and the media was evident in other ways too – almost comically in the case of veteran West Coast Labour MP and cabinet minister Damien O’Connor when he was ambushed by a media pack eager to know whether the party leadership was likely to change.

Accosted on his way to the toilet during a Labour caucus meeting, O’Connor told a reporter to fuck off. I wonder how often MPs from both sides of the House have desperately wanted to say that, or a variant thereof, when bailed up and asked asinine questions.

On this occasion the normally amiable O’Connor, doubtless feeling out of sorts after losing his seat, didn’t hold back. On RNZ’s Midweek Mediawatch, Hayden Donnell noted the irony that for once, a politician gave a heartfelt response to a question rather than rehearsing formulaic, pre-prepared lines, and copped a media backlash as a result.

If only more politicians could be so viscerally honest occasionally. I don’t think the public would think less of them. If anything, quite the reverse.

Astonishingly, O’Connor was stopped again on his way back from the dunny. This illustrates a striking characteristic of the press gallery media pack: a sort of dull, brutish insensitivity and sense of entitlement that’s manifested in oafish rudeness and a failure to recognise that continuing to ask the same questions, when a response is clearly not forthcoming, is stupid as well as pointless. The pack mentality - the excitement of the chase - takes over and common sense takes flight.

We saw the same phenomenon when reporters pursued Peters through Wellington Airport, peppering him with fatuous questions that he obviously wasn’t going to dignify with an answer.

Of course it’s often the case in such instances that reporters are far less interested in obtaining a genuinely useful morsel of information than in simply provoking a reaction. TV viewers watching the news realise this, which does nothing to lift journalists off the bottom rungs of the public respect scale. I don't think political journalists realise just how cynically they are regarded by the public. They are immune in their bubble.

Another testy exchange took place between Newshub’s Amelia Wade and Helen White, the new Labour MP (for the time being, at least) for Mt Albert. Wade was gratuitously provocative, asking White whether she was embarrassed by the result in her electorate (where Jacinda Ardern’s 22,000 majority in 2020 was cut to a mere 106 on election night) and more bluntly, “How did you do so badly?”

This appeared to be a classic case of a question being asked in the hope that it will goad the respondent into an injudicious (and therefore bulletin-leading) response. I suspect Newshub’s political journalists are under standing instructions to take this approach.

The confrontation between White and Wade illustrated another immutable verity of political journalism. When you’re a predator, all wounded politicians, regardless of their party affiliations, make irresistibly tempting prey. In that respect, if in no other, political reporters tend to be impeccably even-handed.

This in turn points to an even bigger truth: the media always win. They just shift their targets as circumstances dictate.

Unlike politicians who must submit themselves for re-election, journalists are not held accountable and almost invariably escape punishment when they get things wrong. They have no skin in the game and nothing personally at stake. They create their scandals-du-jour and move on, rarely pausing to look back.

Power without responsibility, the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin famously called it (although credit for the phrase is given to his cousin, Rudyard Kipling). Or to paraphrase a cynical British writer: journalists hide in the hills while the fighting rages, then come down and bayonet the wounded.

That being said, it’s important to state that not all political journalists are egotistical, feckless sensation-hunters. The harm is done by those who hunt as a pack, and more especially by those who play the alpha predator at media stand-ups and thus tend to be most in the public eye. To those more traditional political reporters who are conscientious and committed to the values and principles of good journalism, I apologise now for slurring them by association.

 

 

 

 

 

Guest post: Spiro Zavos on that torrid RWC quarter-final and the Irish curse

Ireland were not literally or even metaphorically hung or drawn by the New Zealand at Stade de France. But they were quartered, as in being booted out of the tournament by a brilliant All Blacks team 28 -24.

An enduring sequence of quarter-final failures at RWC tournaments has now become The Curse for Ireland.

Tim Horan in his comments on the match made the point that quarter-finals are the most important round of the RWC tournament because success ensures the winning teams of access to the last two weeks of play, with semi-finals and a third-place playoff possibilities, and the final for the last two teams standing.

The Stade de France result, in a RWC tournament that Ireland expected to win - a prediction supported by heavyweight rugby pundits - is now the eighth lost RWC quarter-final the men in green have experienced in all eight of their RWC quarter-final appearances: 1987, 1991, 1995, 2003, 2011, 2015, 2019 and now 2023.

To add to this misery, the last time Ireland even led its opponents in a RWC quarter-final was back in 1995.

Ireland is the only one of the so-called Home Unions (the others being Wales, Scotland and England) that has never progressed to a RWC semi-final.

Compare this record with England's. In this RWC 2023, a lacklustre England side with a newish coach, Steve Borthwick, who replaced Eddie Jones, defeated Fiji at Marseilles 30 -24, in its quarter-final match. It now faces South Africa in the semi-finals.

This is the sixth RWC quarter-final match England has won out of the nine they have played.

England, also, are the only Northern Hemisphere team that has won the Webb Ellis trophy, with their famous triumph in RWC 2003.

There are various reasons, presumably, why Ireland has been defeated in all its RWC quarter-final matches. We cannot canvas them all here. But I think I can pinpoint the reason why The Curse struck this time. Just follow me with this because it is slightly complicated.

The draw for RWC 2023 was correctly described by rugby pundits as "bizarre".

The top four teams in the world, Ireland, South Africa, France and New Zealand, were loaded into the same half of the draw, in Pool A and Pool B.

In the pool rounds Ireland played South Africa and France played New Zealand. The losers of these Big Four pool round matches played the winner in their respective quarter-finals.

The way this draw worked out meant that in the quarter-finals, Ireland, a winner of their pool round match against South Africa, played New Zealand, a loser in their quarter-final against France, with France playing South Africa in their quarter final.

This, in turn, meant that two of the four teams that had a good chance of winning the RWC 2023 tournament would be eliminated in the quarter-finals.

In effect, the quarter-finals for this 2023 RWC tournament became the semi-finals.

Now, here is the interesting part. Both of the teams defeated in the pool round, New Zealand and South Africa, went on to beat their previously undefeated pool round opponents, Ireland and France.

My take from all of this is that behind Ireland's loss to the All Blacks was the energy-sapping physical and mental effort the men in green invested in their hard-fought pool-round victory over the Springboks.

In that match Ireland played all its cards - its retaining-the-ball tactics, its energy, its will-to-win, its muscular defence and its emotional capital - to defeat the Springboks 13-8.

In terms of the way RWC tournaments work, a team can lose a pool round and still win the tournament. The Springboks did this in RWC 2019 - and with their victory over France, are in the hunt to repeat their triumph of four years ago.

By playing all its cards in its pool-round match against the Springboks, Ireland, in my opinion, won the poker-hand pool round. But this win set the team up for losing the big payout of a quarter-final triumph. It was, as the ancients would put it, a pyrrhic victory for the ages.

The Ireland that played the All Blacks at Stade de France in the knock-out quarter-final did not have the same flair and hardness, both mental and physical, as the All Blacks. They were a team that seemed to play by numbers more than passion. They were rote rather than inventive in adapting to the circumstances that unfolded during the game.

Ireland never played the ball wide in the match even though the All Blacks were operating a tight defensive line. Johnny Sexton did not try even one of his trademark and deadly effective loop plays. The team was off the pace both on attack and defence. Where were the killer plays they have routinely pulled off in Tests over the last four years?

Stephen Jones, never one to praise the All Blacks, explained Ireland's problems in trying to win the match this way: "Ireland probably had the majority of possession, and they let nobody down, but on the day they seemed to be up against a team who were tactically and probably technically superior, and Johnny Sexton at fly-half simply could not conjure up a winning score as the game went on and on."

I believe that while the All Blacks did not throw their match against France, they did not, as Ireland did against the Springboks, reveal their full arsenal of attacking and defensive plays and expend all their physical and mental energy against up pumped-up France in the opening match.

In other words, they weren't greatly worried if they lost this opening match of the 2023 RWC tournament.

They anticipated that Ireland would defeat the Springboks. This meant the All Blacks would have to play Ireland in the quarter-final, rather than the Springboks. My hunch is that the All Blacks coaching staff were more comfortable playing Ireland than they were about countering the Springboks early in the finals.

In the back of the mind of the All Blacks coaching staff (and please remember I am surmising this) was the thought that Ireland's two successive wins against New Zealand in 2022 were helped significantly by yellow cards that were dished out against the All Blacks.

In fact, in a media conference after the All Blacks' victory over Ireland at Stade de France, coach Ian Foster talked about the two yellow cards dished out to his players by referee Wayne Barnes (who also controlled the third New Zealand-Ireland Test in 2022) and how Ireland seemed to magically conjure yellow cards against their opponents from willing referees.

And on the All Blacks coaching staff was Joe Schmidt, the former Ireland coach who started that team on its road from a middle-tier rugby nation to a world power.

It was under Schmidt that Johnny Sexton became a world class number 10. Schmidt, presumably, gave the All Blacks inside knowledge of the attacking plays Sexton likes to use. And, more importantly, how to counter these plays.

Schmidt's game plan for Ireland, too, when he coached them, remained essentially Farrell's game plan, There was a slight difference in that Farrell, a former rugby league hardman, has given a toughness and abrasive quality to Ireland's defence.

To put all of this theorising into some match-play context, it is curious that against France the All Blacks invariably kicked long and played Beauden Barrett often as the first playmaker.

In my comments after this match, I argued that the All Blacks could not win the RWC tournament or indeed even get out of the quarter-finals if this pattern of using Barrett was continued.

Against Ireland, interestingly, there was an entirely different strategy. Aaron Smith and Richie Mo'unga kicked short-high balls for their forwards to regather, and Beauden Barrett and Mo'unga kicked lobs over the top of the Irish defenders for themselves to grab and carry on the attack.

Beauden Barrett was kept out of the first receiver role and Mo'unga was given the major responsibility for calling the plays. Mo'unga had the role of playmaker and Barrett the role of an attacking third winger-fullback.

Before the tournament started the South African rugby greats, Jean de Villiers and Victor Matfield, predicted that France would play the Springboks and the All Blacks would play Ireland in the quarter-finals. Did they reveal a master plan from the Springboks camp? Anyway, as President Joe Biden famously said about a different situation, "Son of a gun, what do you think happened?"

For the record, the All Blacks' loss to France was their first ever RWC pool round loss. It was noticeable that the All Blacks coaching staff seemed to accept the loss with calmness rather than any sense of panic.

As for RWC quarter-finals, the All Blacks record is now nine matches and eight wins. The one loss was in RWC 2007 when France pulled off an upset victory at Cardiff 20-18. And here we come to another part of the puzzle of the All Blacks' remarkable revival of form against Ireland.

The referee for that Cardiff match was a callow newcomer: Wayne Barnes.

A report of the match by Pro Sport noted that the All Blacks were "hammered in the penalty count by a young English referee, Wayne Barnes".

I wrote in The Roar about this upset loss by the All Blacks that "remarkably, Wayne Barnes did not give the All Blacks a single penalty in the final 60 minutes of play", even though they were camped inside the French 22 for most of that time hammering away at the try line.

I pointed out, too, that "Barnes and his assistant referee, Jonathan Kaplan, who was metres away from the incident, missed an obvious forward pass in the build-up to France's second try, the match-winner".

That loss remains deeply entrenched in the New Zealand psyche. Many New Zealanders have never forgiven Barnes for his refereeing on that day.

But, and this is the important point, the All Blacks have moved on from RWC 2007. They acknowledge - rightly - that Barnes is now one of the best referees in world rugby. He knows the names of the rugby players, he speaks French to the French players, he is accurate with his decisions and is not afraid to make tough calls.

The All Blacks showed this respect early in the quarter-final when the Man of the Match, Ardie Savea, was penalised by Barnes for a mistake in the ruck.

Savea looked up at Barnes as he clambered to his feet, got an explanation, nodded his head in agreement and got back into position for the next play. Savea then went on to make several crucial turnovers that passed the Barnes scrutiny.

At scrum-time, too, Barnes correctly ruled against the Ireland front row's boring in and wheeling the scrum tactics, decisions that gave the All Blacks some early and welcome penalties.

He was just as accurate and tough, though, on the All Blacks, giving them two yellow cards: one for collapsing a maul on their try-line and another to Aaron Smith for sticking out an arm that prevented an Ireland pass going to hand during an attacking movement. This second yellow card seemed a bit harsh but was seemingly imposed on Barnes by the TMO.

Minutes into full time, after Ireland had launched the most determined attack in RWC history with 37 or 39 phases (counts vary) to enforce a winning try, Barnes, with great integrity given the feverish Irish supporters cheering on their side's onslaught, awarded a turnover penalty to Sam Whitelock.

The decision meant that the All Blacks only had to kick the ball into touch legally, that is with an initial tap, and the match was over.

Barnes' refereeing performance, in fact, prompted the former England player Nic Easter to praise him this way: "Wayne Barnes doesn't miss a thing. He has been able to spot things that other referees might overlook, His performance played a crucial role in an incredible game."

The reaction to decisions made by Barnes from some of Ireland's supporters at the Stade de France and on social media, in the context of the superb display of the refereeing craft he gave, was disgraceful.

It was matched, unfortunately, by Johhny Sexton's verballing of Barnes throughout the match. The contrast between this behaviour by Sexton and Savea's spoke a lot about the mental strength of the two players.

Even when Barnes explained correctly, on one occasion, that Bundee Aki's head had not been hit or even touched by an All Black player, Sexton continued to badger him to give a penalty to Ireland. It was as if Sexton was blaming the referee for the way the match was turning against Ireland.

I always think that when players start blaming the referee for their own poor play they are well on the road to a defeat.

It seemed to me, too, as if Ireland's feverish fervour for a quarter-final victory was so intense for some of the team's players and supporters that the normal good grace of the Ireland team and its supporters was put on hold for the game.

It was disappointing, for instance, for anyone who has a regard for the traditions of rugby that the crowd, Ireland supporters in their tens of thousands, deliberately drowned out the chanting of the All Blacks haka, a rugby ritual that goes back to the Wales-New Zealand first Test at Cardiff Arms Park in 1905.

Irish crowds are famous for their respect for opposition sides, even to the extent of imposing a cone of silence around the ground when there are kicks at goal. So it was out of character that their enthusiasm for their side at the Stade de France saw them show such disrespect for Ireland's opponents on the day.

Where Ireland go next in the world rankings and as a major rugby power is an intriguing question. Coach Andy Farrell concedes that the great team he brought to this RWC tournament no longer exists.

Can he construct another great Ireland side in the next four years?

Will the small number of fully professional rugby players available for selection, about 160 of them, create a large enough pool of talent capable of continuing to win major tournaments?

We are told that Ireland's system of a handful of elite clubs, clear pathways for young players to learn how to play effective rugby through academies and a strong school competition should ensure strong numbers coming into the professional game.

There is also a great tradition of playing rugby in Dublin in the great Public Schools that goes back at least to pre-1914 days when James Joyce, of all people, wrote about the game in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, admittedly expressing his character's reluctance to get out of bed on chilly mornings to go to rugby practice.

And then there is a theory that can be called Rugby Darwinism.

Let me introduce Ben Darwin, a former Wallaby prop forward, now the founder of Gain Line Analytics, a sports analytics firm, and his "teamwork index" theory.

This account of Darwin's "teamwork index" is based on an article in the Australian Financial Review (17/09/23) by Jonathan Shapiro, where he explained the TWI this way:
"It is based on three measures - long-term cohesion, which is the time team members have spent playing together more than two years ago: medium term cohesion - which is time spent within two years, and finally in-season cohesion, which has the highest weighting.

'It led to the conclusion that money buys skill, but not success, that talent flourishes best in familiar environments and greatness is built carefully and methodically."

Ireland's current success at club and international rugby, according to Darwinism, is due in large part to the "cohesiveness" the national team has achieved through players having played together for years at school, club and then international level.

Paul Cully, in the Sydney Morning Herald, has pointed out that 10 of Ireland's starting XV against Scotland, for instance, play for Leinster.

Ben Darwin has touted Ireland's recent defeats of the All Blacks as proof of his TWI theory. Moreover, he has predicted that Northern Hemisphere teams will start defeating Southern Hemisphere teams on a more regular basis than in the past as they reduce the number of club sides they have in their premier competitions.

Well, perhaps or perhaps not. 

My view is that Rugby Darwinism may work from time to time with nations with a small pool of players.

But the future, it seems to me, still remains with the traditional rugby powers of South Africa and New Zealand with their deep rugby culture, their history of success, the extensive pool of players, their coaching excellence and their long pathways for players of ability to come through to their national teams.

The diversity of New Zealand rugby, with Maori and, increasingly, Pacific Island players being involved in national teams and in leadership positions, has always been its greatest strength.

South African rugby is flourishing, too, in terms of competitions won since the game and leadership positions were opened up to all races in the Republic.

This future of South African and New Zealand hegemony, of course, will always be challenged by other nations, like France, Australia, Argentina, England, Wales and Ireland (if that team can ever beat The Curse of the RWC quarter-final).

But the Rugby Darwinism theory needs to embrace the hard fact that all these teams, with the exception of the Wallabies, between them have won only one Webb Ellis trophy since Rugby World Cup tournaments started in 1987.

And as the quarter-finals of RWC 2023 seem to suggest, a continuing dominance by the top Southern Hemisphere teams is informed on results rather than spreadsheets.

Three of the four winners of last weekend's quarter-finals - New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina - are the dreaded Southern Hemisphere part of the rugby power zone.

At the beginning of the RWC 2023 tournament several British rugby writers fearlessly predicted that the semi-finals could include, for the first time, all Northern Hemisphere teams.

This brings me to my punch line to sum up RWC 2023 results so far  - a joke that is doing the rounds of rugby tragics:

"Rugby is a simple game. Thirty men chase a ball for 80 minutes, and at the end, a Southern Hemisphere team wins the World Cup."

Boom, boom.

Time for a breather

The preliminary results are in, and perhaps the best thing we can all do – me included – is take a deep breath and calm down.

New Zealand is feeling ragged and bruised. It has been a testing few years. We all need some recovery time.

The Covid pandemic had far-reaching consequences – I mean socially, politically and economically, rather than medically – that weren’t necessarily obvious at the time, but which played out in the election results.

On top of that we had catastrophic weather events of biblical proportions. These were not Labour’s fault, and to be fair, the government probably did as much as it could to mitigate the effects. But the damage and disruption caused by Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary Weekend storms had an unsettling effect on the national psyche and may have contributed to a mood for change.

Now the people have spoken, and in the words of the late Mike Moore when Labour lost the election in 1990, the people are always right. It may be over-optimistic to suggest it’s a time for the country to heal, but it’s a time for the smoke to clear and the dust to settle.

Here in the Wairarapa, where I live, ousted MP Kieran McAnulty set an admirable conciliatory example by turning up at the election night celebrations of his victorious National rival, Mike Butterick, and delivering a generous and sincere speech of congratulations.

A quietening of social media would be helpful. Nothing does more to create the feeling that New Zealanders are at war with each other than feverish 24/7 online agitation by mischief-makers from across the political spectrum. But that may be a forlorn hope, judging by journalist and professional attention-seeker David Farrier’s Twitter post reported today in the Herald.

And speaking of journalists, I wonder whether the Parliamentary Press Gallery will take heed of this morning's blog post by Barrie Saunders. That too may be too much to hope for.

 

Australia has never looked more appealing

It came as no surprise to read that the number of New Zealanders leaving the country approached record levels in the year to August 31.

There was a net migration loss of 42,600 New Zealand citizens, not far short of the record loss of 44,400 in 2012. More than half of those leavers were bound for Australia.

Overall, migration figures show an unprecedented population increase. Annual migrant arrivals reached an all-time high of 225,400. Most of the new arrivals came from India, China, the Philippines, Fiji and South Africa.

New Zealand must seem an attractive destination to people from countries suffering from overcrowding, poverty, political repression, pollution, violence and corruption. But the migration figures also tell another, less encouraging story.

New Zealand is looking less and less hospitable to people who have grown up here. They remember what the country of their birth used to be like and they know what it’s capable of being. They have watched with dismay as a prosperous, settled, liberal democracy has been destabilised and transformed into a squabbling, sullen and ill-tempered society that they no longer recognise.

They have not only seen economic prospects – historically a key driver of emigration – diminished by an incompetent, profligate government; they have also watched with mounting disquiet as social cohesion has been undermined by extreme, officially sanctioned ideological agendas that have prevailed unchallenged since 2020.

Even more depressingly, many see little prospect of improvement post-election. Small wonder, then, that so many New Zealanders find Australia appealing. I suspect that many of those who have already left shut the door behind them, albeit regretfully, and have no intention of returning. Those of us who remain are diminished by their loss.

As is often the pattern with external migration, many of those who have gone will have been skilled, highly educated and ambitious for social and economic advancement. As Kiwibank economist Jarrod Kerr observed, “We lose trained, smart individuals. That is something that worries us.”

The leavers will no doubt have been encouraged by an Australian law change last year that eased the pathway to Australian citizenship. This was naively greeted by the media – and celebrated by the New Zealand government – as a breakthrough after years of Australian intransigence.

In fact the Australians would have been motivated less by a sudden, uncharacteristic rush of goodwill toward their neighbours across the Ditch than by the realisation that opening the doors to talented and well-trained New Zealanders made perfect sense, especially when a recovering post-Covid Australian economy was desperate for skilled, hard-working (and English-speaking) people.

In other words, what was played up by New Zealand politicians as a gain was in fact Australia cleverly taking advantage of mounting social, political and economic unease under a floundering Labour government here. To put it bluntly, we were screwed. And it worked: the Guardian reported in August that New Zealanders were applying for Australian citizenship at the rate of 375 a day.

The latest migration figures particularly resonated with me because my wife and I have just spent two weeks in Queensland. While there, I couldn’t help but be struck by the vibrant, dynamic, prosperous vibe and the general mood of positivity. It stood in striking contrast to the sulky, bitchy mood at home.

We stayed with my brother-in-law and his wife in Brisbane and our son and his family in Noosa. They enjoy a very good life, a high standard of living and didn’t give me the impression of pining for home.

I drove up to Hervey Bay to visit a cousin, I spent an enjoyable day with a former colleague from my Nelson Evening Mail days and we had a long lunch with an old friend of our son who moved to Brisbane many years ago. Our friend's parents and siblings had made the move too.

They are among the estimated 670,000-plus New Zealanders living in Australia. Two nephews and a niece have also settled there, along with several old school friends and an almost uncountable number of ex-workmates. Most are still proud to call themselves Kiwis but they are better off there.

We spent several years in Australia in the early 1970s – our first child was born there – but I had never thought about returning there to live. This time I did. The appeal of Australia historically ebbs and flows, but right now it’s running very high.

It’s not just the lure of the climate and the beaches, enticing though they are. It’s something much more elemental than that. It’s the feeling that New Zealand has become a broken, demoralised society – a perception accentuated when I made the mistake of visiting NZ news websites while in Queensland and read mostly about violent crime and failing infrastructure.

As a former news editor I have to remind myself that a lot of news is, by definition, bad. Still, stories about a massive sinkhole opening up in the centre of Auckland and the unexplained damage to the iconic Ranfurly Shield (not to mention the implication that illegal drugs were involved in the latter incident) seemed somehow symbolic of a country in decline.

This negative perception was magnified on the bus trip into Wellington from the airport on our return. The once proud capital (remember the “Absolutely Positively Wellington” campaign?) looked like Dublin in the 1980s, which is not a flattering comparison. The first people we saw on the streets were a trio of high-as-a-kite derelicts falling about in a Kilbirnie bus shelter. Vape shops and tattoo parlours lined the route and the city generally looked unkempt and unloved. It couldn't have made a more striking contrast with the shining, humming Brisbane we had left behind.

Of course Australia has its issues too. Tomorrow’s referendum on whether Aborigines should have a constitutionally enshrined “voice” in Parliament was the dominant story while we were there, and it’s an issue as divisive as co-governance (with which it has obvious parallels) here.

Australia, like New Zealand and virtually every other English-speaking democracy, is also mired in the culture wars initiated by neo-Marxists in the universities. But from the perspective of a New Zealander, these problems, as long as they occur in Australia, have the great virtue of being someone else’s. I don’t feel I have any emotional stake in them, nor any right to pronounce an opinion. Here is different; this is my country.

All of which brings us to the election. And for the first time, after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to exercise a passive protest by not casting a party vote. I will be among the hundreds of thousands of abstainers who threaten to make this the lowest turnout in New Zealand election history. 

It’s not just that I find the options too thoroughly depressing. Rather, 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. 

In the end, the decision came down to a relatively simple calculus. Do I desperately want to get rid of the Labour government and its Green hangers-on? Yes. But even to the extent of giving my vote to parties that I can't in conscience support? No.

I won’t join the exodus to Australia, because we have deep family attachments here. But 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.

Guest post: Spiro Zavos on the psychic pleasures of the 2023 RWC

(A long read but worth it, even if you're not a rugby enthusiast.)

Hollywood could not have scripted the climatic last 15 minutes of Fiji v Portugal, the final match of the pool rounds of RWC 2023, much better for thrills and spills. So roll the tape.

Fiji, down 10-17 to Portugal, confront a Perils of Pauline series of episodes to avoid a bonus-point loss that will boot them out of the finals.

Portugal, playing passionately for a first RWC win that will transport the side into rugby immortality, confront their Billy Elliot moment.

We are in disaster territory for Fiji.

And glory territory for the Os Lobos players, for Portugal rugby and their passionate supporters.

Portugal now make a mistake in the ruck.

From the penalty, Fiji kick to their opponents' five-metre mark. There is a ferocious series of mauls and hard-shouldered drives, with the Fiji onslaught resembling a beach-head invasion, before Mesake Doge powers across the try line.

Frank Lomani kicks the conversion. Fiji 17, Portugal 17.

We are in the 68th minute now. There is still time for Fiji to lose the game by eight or more points.

After some frenetic play from the kick-off, Portugal are caught off-side from a defensive lineout. Lomani boots the goal.

We are in the 73rd minute and Fiji now lead 20-17.

From the next series of play, Fiji field the kick-off, win a penalty from the ensuing lineout and Lomani kicks a 43m goal.

Fiji 23, Portugal 17.

The clock shows 76 minutes of play gone. The ticking clock has become the friend of Fiji and the enemy of Portugal.

For the crux of the drama has now changed. Fiji will make the finals. There are no more threatening perils for the side to be navigated.

But Portugal can still win the match if, and it is a mighty IF, they can score a converted try. The drama of the script now hangs on whether there will be a Billy Elliot triumph for the underdogs.

The commentators tell their television audience that Portugal look "fatigued" from the pace of the game. The tough draw against Georgia the week before is taking its toll on the energy levels of the players, they opine.

Portugal field the kick-off and go through a desultory ball-in-hand series plays that move the ball more across the field than forward.

It looks like the fatigue theory is right.

Then there is a flash of brilliance from the winger Raffaele Storti, a sort of bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky.

From a ruck inside Fiji's half and near the touch-line, Storti sprints down the short side which the fatigued Fijians, ironically, have not covered.

To his astonishment and amid the bellowing cheers of the crowd, Storti races towards the Fiji try-line. He deceives the covering defence with a deft pass to his left-wing partner Rodrigo Marta, who plants the ball across the line.

Fiji 23, Portugal 22.

But there is a conversion to come to win the match.

There is indecision from the referee and touch judges about just where the try is scored. The commentators note that Portugal's goal-kicker, halfback Samuel Margues, missed a penalty to defeat Georgia from a similar position the week before.

A mark is made about 17 metres in from the touch-line.

Margues, with the ice-cold temperament of a champion, converts the try with the ball just going inside the right-hand upright.

Fiji 23, Portugal 24.

Eighty minutes of play is up but because the try is scored in the 79th minute, there is time for one more play. Can Portugal hold on to their lead?

Fiji kick long. Portugal take the ball into a ruck. The ruck is fiercely defended. The ball comes out to Margues, who boots it into the crowd behind the posts - and into rugby history.

Portugal have won their first victory at a RWC tournament. And have done so playing with the panache, resolve and skill of a top-tier side.

The stadium explodes in a riot of noise with screaming, bellowing and chanting.

The brilliant coach of Portugal, Patrice Lagisquet, a former famous French winger, talks about his players as "a team of friends" and says he "loves our fans". Tears and hugs are flowing all around the stadium.

The Guardian's Gerard Meagher at the ground writes: "Os Lobos have won hearts and minds throughout the tournament and now they have a victory to savour. The sight of the players singing their lungs out in front of their delirious supporters soon after the final whistle will be one of the abiding memories of the tournament."

Portugal's iconic hooker, Mike Tadjer, tells reporters: "Obviously I can die tomorrow. I have retired after this World Cup, to finish like that it is unbelievable for me."

Later, Fiji's coach, Simon Raiwalui, goes to Portugal's changing room and gives the players a large bag of Fiji kit.

Let us hold those memories in our heads while we consider a series of complaints from some senior rugby journalists that the RWC 2023 tournament has already been too long, that there have been too many mediocre teams playing in it and, as a consequence of these defects, there have been too many blowout scores.

All complaints, in my opinion, are against the true spirit of rugby. The game at its best embraces all shapes, sizes and nationalities. Touring and long tournaments are part of the DNA of the game.

The top six blowout scores explain in their detail how unlucky Romania were to be in a pool with Ireland, South Africa and Scotland, and Namibia in the same pool as France and New Zealand:

France 96, Namibia 0

Scotland 84, Romania 0

New Zealand 96, Namibia 17

Ireland 82, Romania 8

New Zealand 73, Italy 0

South Africa 76, Romania 0

The fact that Italy, a Six Nations team, was blown away by the All Blacks 73- 0 shows that even experienced teams can be smashed when a top side, as three of the big winners (France, New Zealand and South Africa) are, gets its game together perfectly on the day.

This argument about too many blowouts is wrong factually and wrong from the perspective of developing depth of quality in teams around the rugby world.

As Chile's coach pointed out after his side was defeated 71-0 by England, the heavy loss was to be expected. "The only way to alter that is by playing them on more occasions in the future ... We play the top team every four years and we are facing tier-one countries at the top of their form ... It's our reality and its a shame."

In other words, the minnow rugby nations have to be exposed more to the top-tier nations, not less, if World Rugby wants to grow the minnows into strong teams.

Japan was defeated 147-15 by the All Blacks in RWC 1995. Twenty years later - these things do take time - Japan defeated the winner of RWC 1995, the Springboks, 34-32 in a victory described as "the greatest RWC shock ever".

There is one further point I want to make about the need to have as many teams as possible in a tournament as prestigious as the RWC. This goes to the psychic pleasure that players, especially, but supporters and their entire nation experience when their national team is taking part in a big sporting event.

I feel very strongly about this notion of psychic pleasure that competitors and fans experience during big sports events. It is personal. For I was once, when I was a university student, one of these out-of-their-league players playing for Wellington against the touring England cricket team in 1961.

England batted on the Friday and declared after 40 minutes or so of play on Saturday, 9 down for 511. Wellington were dismissed twice that day for 127 and 173. On the scale of defeats I would rank this one, in rugby terms, on the France 96, Namibia 0 level.

My contribution to the defeat I would put on the level of Japan's 145-17 defeat at the RWC 1995 by the All Blacks.

Yet the psychic pleasure I got from those two days have thrilled me all my life: opening the batting against Freddie Trueman and Frank Tyson and scoring 3 and 5, bowling to Colin Cowdrey and being stroked through the covers for three sumptuous 4s, being at mid-on when Tom Graveney hooked a bouncer from our feared fast bowler Bob Blair for a four and hearing him tell the infuriated Blair, "that length was perfect, Bob, keep them there", were memories, as Mike Tadjer said, to die for.

The special thing about a sports tournament is not how long it is. It is the experience itself.

In medieval times, if one believes Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe, tournaments were jousting competitions where the champions and their rivals showed their true colours in a fierce competition.

This latest edition of the RWC has certainly fulfilled these tournament ideals going into the finals.

The other point that needs to be stressed is that touring by teams and their supporters is part of the DNA of the rugby game. The rugby world is an oval ball.

Dr Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School and the real hero of Tom Brown's School Days, the novel that created the rugby myth, was an inveterate traveller. The day the school term ended, Dr Arnold would get into his carriage and head off to a port city to catch at boat to Europe.

This touring ethic was imbued in the Rugby School boys who created the rugby game in the 1840s. They became muscular missionaries, forcing the spread of rugby through the touring ethic. And when they toured they established the tradition of taking their colours with them on their jerseys - Rugby School's were white, later adopted by England - and encouraging their supporters and friends to travel with them to be part of the touring experience.

This touring ethic was picked up around the world wherever the game was played. In Australia, in 1882, a team from NSW toured Queensland and later embarked on the first tour of New Zealand by an overseas team. A year later, an Auckland team toured NSW and gave local rugby supporters their first experience of a pre-match haka.

The touring ethic of rugby became so entrenched in New Zealand and Australia that in 1904 a team from the famous Maori college, Te Aute, went to Sydney to play a series of matches against the GPS (Great Public Schools) and university sides. The Te Aute style of vigorous, skilful, fast and expansive play was picked up by St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, later to become a famed rugby school, after their match against the unbeaten "Maorilanders".

That Te Aute team brought over 100 supporters with them to Sydney. This tradition lives on.

The combination of a touring team playing in a tournament and being cheered on by supporters, on and off the field, has been a sensational aspect of the 2023 RWC, the 10th edition of the tournament. And at the heart of this enthusiasm has been a charismatic Ireland side.

Early on there was the remarkable spectacle of 12,000 spectators coming to watch Ireland have their first training run in France.

My favourite rugby writer, the Guardian's Robert Kitson, described how Ireland's Green Power has lit up RWC 2023 with this description of play, on and off the field, at the end of the game against a knocked-out Scotland:

"A ruthless Ireland were 36-0 up inside the hour ... With Johnny Sexton also comfortably winning his head-to-head with Finn Russell, it was a special Saturday night for the hordes of Irish fans who gathered in Paris to roar their heroes home ...

"As the Pogues, the Cranberries and U2 blasted out after the final whistle, it was as if half of Ireland had decamped to France. There were shamrock bucket hats paying their lunchtime respects at Oscar Wilde's memorial in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, Connacht jerseys in the sunshine at Republique and pea-green berets at the Gare du Nord."

The real problem with this RWC 2023 schedule, then, is not its length. It is the draw itself. The four best teams in the tournament, Ireland, France, South Africa and New Zealand, are in the same half of the draw.

The draw was drawn up based on the World Rankings in December 2020. Those ranking then are clearly not the same ranking now, when the draw should have been made:

The 2020 World Rugby Rankings:

South Africa (94.20 points)
England (89.49)
New Zealand (88.95)
France (85.30
Ireland (83.65)
Australia (83.08)
Scotland (80.82)
Argentina (80.31)

Brian Moore, the former England hooker, writing in the Telegraph, has rightly slammed a draw that has lumped the current top four teams in the world together in the same half of the tournament:

"It is an absolute farce ... Of the seeded teams in the bottom half of the draw only Wales can legitimately claim they have got near to performing somewhere near their best, and even then only sporadically ... To their credit no country from the top half of the draw has whinged inordinately about this, but with each unfolding week their lot can be clearly seen as unfair."

This weekend's quarter-finals, especially for the teams in the top half of the draw, are in effect semi-finals and final matches.

It is most unlikely that any team outside of rugby's new Big Four - Ireland, France, South Africa and New Zealand - will win the Webb Ellis Trophy at this tournament.

Ireland have never made the semi-finals of the RWC, yet they go into the Test against the All Blacks at the weekend as the top rugby power in the world.

In RWC 2019 in Japan, the All Blacks smashed Ireland in their quarter-final match. This followed a trend of the All Blacks winning 27 and drawing one of their first 28 Tests against Ireland.

But just before 2019, Ireland started to defeat the All Blacks. And in their last six Tests, Ireland have won four times, a record that includes their last two Tests in New Zealand.

All this represents a remarkable turn of fortune for Ireland, especially as back in 1991 Ireland was a minnow rugby power that lost two successive Tests to Namibia at Windhoek. Ireland's rise from this ignominy, albeit over 30 years ago, gives a rugby context to the famous Readers' Digest headline: "New Hope For The Dead".

The modern revival of Ireland coincides with the high-performance work at Irish rugby's Dublin headquarters of the former Wallaby hooker (and the only Brumbies coach to win a Super Rugby title and succumb to an ousting by player power), David Nucifora.

In 2013 Joe Schmidt, a New Zealander, took over as Ireland's coach for a seven-year tenure. Schmidt's Ireland won the Six Nations three times and defeated the All Blacks twice. For a time, and for the first time, Ireland was ranked number one in the world.

The new coach of Ireland, Englishman Andy Farrell, had a mixed start in 2020. But by 2022 Ireland began to record big wins over Japan and Argentina, and later an historic 2-1 Test series win against the All Blacks in New Zealand.

Farrell, a hard-as-teak player in the rugby league game, has given Ireland a toughness, both mental and physical, plus a rugby league-type of attention to detail from all his players. This allows props to substitute as hookers in a crisis and players like the dynamic half-back, the New Zealand-born Jamison Gibson-Park, to successfully replace Mack Hansen on the wing during the drubbing last weekend of Scotland.

I was particularly struck by Gibson-Park's play as a winger because Ireland, it seems to me, are playing a complicated three-wingers format during this tournament. At one point late in the match he took a tackle on his wing side of the field, then got up and raced across to the far wing to make the extra man, after a 20-metre run, to set up a try.

This three-wingers format, with fullback-wing Hugo Keenan and wingers Mack Hansen and James Lowe, allows Ireland to flood the outside attacking line with two and sometimes three runners.

The format puts enormous stress on the defensive line. When the line stretches to cover the touchline, Ireland's big backs, Bundee Aki and Garry Ringrose, then burst through the stretched middle defence.

The format also forces Johnny Sexton to be the only play-maker, something that suits his style and bossy temperament.

Pundits like Stuart Barnes are picking Green Power Ireland to defeat the All Blacks, and even the All Blacks coach Ian Foster suggests: "This is their moment. If they're ever going to win a World Cup, it's now."

This seems too much like putting the All Blacks as a hostage to fortune for my liking.

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.