Dear Hone

Q: What do the following, all from today's paper, have in common?

• A front page story
• Two articles, by two different journalists, on page A2
• No less than seven letters in the "Readers' Forum"
• Brian Rudman's weekly opinion column

A: They're all about New Zealand's latest penitent, Hone Harawira.


Haven't we got anything better to talk about? The front page story, "Pressure still on leaders over Hone", begins:

Hone Harawira's apology has done little to relieve pressure on the Maori Party leadership to take a strong stance against him when it meets the MP for the first time tomorrow.

Really? Where's this pressure coming from? Harawira, a man apparently very popular among Maori, is the electorate MP for Te Tai Tokerau. The Maori Party itself is voted for, as I understand it, almost entirely by Maori. So is this pressure coming from Maori? Not according to this article; it seems to be coming from John Key and, worse, Phil Goff - the man who, a year into his job, still lags behind Helen Clark in preferred PM ratings.

However, Mr Harawira's apology left Prime Minister John Key and Labour leader Phil Goff underwhelmed.

Mr Goff said it was "phoney" and it was time for the Maori Party leadership and the Prime Minister to take the matter more seriously.

Mr Key said it was an "apology of sorts" but he would leave New Zealanders to decide on its merits.

Article continues below

"I think everybody's getting a bit sick of the Hone Harawira sideshow."

He usually ignored Mr Harawira's outbursts, he said, but had found this one offensive. However, it was not up to him to discipline the MP.

Oh yes, I'm sure you were extremely offended. People who make it to the highest levels of politics, via a process not unlike Tim Robbins in the Shawshank Redemption crawling through hundreds of metres of shit, are well-known for being thin-skinned enough to be offended by a combination of blue language and what more-or-less amounts to an NCEA history class in a nutshell.

Mr Goff dismissed Mr Harawira's comments as "silly" but said it was time the Maori Party and Mr Key showed they were taking the matter seriously. "He has still not apologised for ripping off the taxpayer - in fact he's bragging about it - and nor has he apologised for making obscene and racist remarks. I don't think somebody that behaves in that way and shows no contrition for it has any place in Parliament at all."

It's time to show they're "taking the matter seriously"? Or what - you won't vote for them? As for the last sentence, I think you'll find there are only two major criteria for having "any place in Parliament at all": being on the Electoral Roll, and being voted in, in this case by the people of Te Tai Tokerau. Perhaps Mr Goff harks back to a more civilised, more Victorian age where MPs were gentlemen who doffed their hats to each other and said "please", "thank you" and "pip-pip, tally-ho", rather than "white motherfuckers". Good thing he's the leader of the Labour Party.

Moving on, the page 2 article "A sorry, sorry, sorry state of affairs" rather smugly looks at Harawira's 'apology' at the University of Auckland marae:

But don't give an inch for calls to apologise to Phil Goff who he'd called a "bastard" earlier and who he reckoned should be lined up and shot with the rest of the Labour Party for passage of the Foreshore and Seabed law.

"I think it's important to realise that while I'm prepared to acknowledge the things I've done wrong, I'm not prepared to sit down and shut up and take that kind of rubbish from another politician."

Funnily enough, that sounds to me like exactly the kind of person who should be in parliament.

At the back of the marae, a supporter called out that he wanted to hear about Paris. It was "great", Mr Harawira reckoned, but it's a city and an issue you can bet co-leaders Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples can't wait to see the back of.

Again, this claim that it has been a serious setback for the Maori Party. But the same paragraph gives some evidence, however anecdotal, of the opposite: that the people who, for the most part, actually matter to the Maori Party - Maori voters - are actually in significant support of Harawira.

I'll ignore the Readers' Forum - a rule-of-thumb I can't recommend strongly enough. But the normally reliable Brian Rudman made me yawn with his meta-diatribe, "Hypocritical Harawira let us all down". I've read the article twice, and I can't really work out where the "hypocritical" bit comes from, apart from the fact that Harawira visited Paris, "one of the centres of the imperial nastiness he's been fighting all his life". Presumably he should stick to holidaying in Parihaka.

If Parliament is a true House of Representatives, then pressuring Hone Harawira to apologise for spouting off in an email views he's been shouting from the rooftops all his life seems a tad counter-productive.

On this I'm with Dover Samuels, the former Labour MP for the Te Tai Tokerau seat Mr Harawira holds.

"Any apology from Hone would be absolute hypocrisy. He's advocating what he really believes in. He's done that for many, many years before going into Parliament," Mr Samuels told Radio New Zealand. He added any apology would "be artificial, superficial and he actually doesn't believe it".

Except, of course, Harawira didn't apologise for his views - he apologised for the way he conducted his trip and for the language in that private email. So that was a waste of three paragraphs. Also, I can't help noting the fact that everyone is going round quoting Dover Samuels, the paragon of virtue known mainly for three things: constantly wearing a hat; alleged sexual impropriety; and urinating in a corridor of the Heritage Hotel.

An informal 1979 CV, quoted more recently, quotes him writing, we "beat the shit out of some smart arse Pakeha students at Auckland for ridiculing Maori culture".

Well of course it sounds bad if you put it like that. Actually, the event in question is a key part of Auckland University folklore. There was a tradition in the engineering school of (white, male, middle-class) engineering students drawing moko on their bodies with lipstick, wearing grass skirts and performing a derisory haka. After several years of complaints and no action, a group of activists gave them a hiding. No one was killed or seriously injured, a disgusting and unfunny practice stopped, and a bunch of 'casual' racists got their comeuppance. Sounds all right to me.

And on goes the list of his 'radical' actions and statements over the years, all leading to the 'hypocrisy' of going to Paris - sacre bleu! Come on Brian, you can do better than this.

Even the expression "white motherf***ers" hardly has much shock value these days when you can walk down Queen St and hear the "F" word trilling from the lips of teenage girls.

What is a little quaint about the email exchange is to hear a 54-year-old grandfather of two still using the angry slang of American rappers of a past generation.

As a time-to-time listener to American rappers of this generation, I can assure him that the 'mofo word' is still very much in current use.

I suppose we can expect more of the same tomorrow - a quick search on the Herald website shows 24 articles starring or co-starring Harawira in the last five days. His crimes, as far as I can see them, are as follows:

• He pulled a sickie at work to go sightseeing, and apparently paid for it himself.
• He used naughty, naughty language in a private email to a person he knew.
• He holds controversial but - let's face it - not completely unfounded views on race relations in New Zealand.

His main 'crime' however, was of course subtly different. He did all this right after Rodney Hide's shame, and thus found himself in the centre of one of those periodic witch-hunts that so captures the magpie-like eye of the national media. Sometime soon this gem will lose its lustre - I don't know, a dog will bite a child or something - and the Herald will spread its wings and dive to pick up the new, shiny news item; and MPs' expenses and perks, Rodney and Hone, they will all fall from the nest, unloved and ignored.

Dennis the menace

"Quaid? Yeah, I remember that guy..." *Post*

The news week starts there

SENSATIONAL HEADLINE
undermines newspaper's credibility

If you're into listening to people rant and complain on the internet - yes, like talkback radio - for quarter of an hour, you may be interested in hearing 'News Rage aka the Ebeneezer Report with Grinch Face', my segment on the bFM Sunday Breakfast yesterday.


If you're not, I have no advice; you're already doing fine.

Not a story

I've written about some pretty heavy stuff this week - crime reporting, politics, journalism and advertising - and it's left me physically and emotionally drained. In between the massive lapses in journalistic and editorial ethics, of course, there has been the usual small-time bollocks that I just haven't had time to deal with. As such, I hereby introduce a new regular* feature at EtH - "Not a story". I think the title speaks for itself.


*Probably not, really.

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"Hide's trip included LA theme park and wedding" (Page A2, Friday 6 November)

Act leader Rodney Hide took his girlfriend, Louise Crome, to an amusement park in Los Angeles during their taxpayer-funded trip that was also timed to coincide with her brother's wedding near London.

The Herald has learned Mr Hide squeezed in a visit to Universal Studios after an official meeting with a top Los Angeles City Council official.

Mr Hide's spokeswoman confirmed that the couple had some time before their flights home to New Zealand and thought, "We've got a couple of hours downtime, let's have some fun".

Here's a classic example of an interesting story turned boring by over-reporting. When news came out that Rodney 'Perkbuster' Hide had used taxpayer money to take his girlfriend on a luxury trip around the world in a time of recession and unemployment, people were rightly outraged. Here was a legitimately newsworthy political story - a waste of taxpayer money with the added frisson of hypocrisy.

And now it's dead; it's been pummelled, trampled into the ground by this humourless report. They took a weekend off - as I suspect many of us did - to go to his girlfriend's brother's wedding? They decided to do something with their pre-flight downtime instead of sitting around self-flagellating? I await with bated breath the next report - "Hide in meal scandal" - where it is exclusively revealed that Rodney Hide went to a restaurant for dinner and didn't eat a bowl of steamed rice in his hotel room like Patrick Gower would have done.

Not a story.

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"Staff gaffe costs dog's life" (Page A3, Friday 6 November)

A staff error at an animal pound has led to a pet dog being killed before its owner could collect it.

Kaos, a shar pei-cross belonging to Michelle Griffiths of Manurewa, was impounded on September 17 and killed eight days later.

"I got a little handwritten card - they said they would hold her until the 26th," Ms Griffiths said.

"I went to the pound to pick my baby up and they said, 'She was killed yesterday. Sorry, we got the kill date wrong'."

Let me just say, first off, that I love dogs. I think they're great. Let me now qualify that with this: if I want to read articles about dogs, I will pick up a copy of Canine Monthly or Dog Fancier. Short of a dog being elected super-city mayor, I don't want to read stories about individual dogs in the news section of the Herald. Ta.

Secondly, there's something fishy about this 'story', a 'story' an actual 'reporter' spent time 'researching'.

Mr Gillingwater said Kaos was originally impounded because of welfare issues, but Ms Griffiths believes the situation could easily have been avoided.

She said although Kaos was seized on grounds of abandonment, she had simply been at work and thought her pet was safe at home.

Right. So on September 17 your dog was picked up by the pound when you were 'at work'. It then took you eight days to go to the pound and pick up your 'baby'? Were you at work the whole time? Oh, I know how it is - I always leave things to the last minute. Last day to pay the power bill, last day to get my warrant of fitness, last day to pick my puppy up from the pound before it gets euthanised... Yeah. Moving on.

Not a story.

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"If music be the food of love... let's eat" (Page A11 ("Opinion"), Friday 6 November)

Dear Noelle,

I thoroughly enjoy listening to you on Radio New Zealand National when I get the chance. However, I stumbled on your blog on the Herald website, which was a pleasant surprise.

I was intrigued by your comment about Jeff Buckley. I'm wondering perhaps if that is where I am going wrong with my relationships. Is Jeff Buckley like some sort of relationship repellent? On second thoughts, I doubt Jeff is of any concern to my relationships - it doesn't seem to get to the "let's get to know each other's music taste" stage. Nonetheless, I'd love to hear your opinion.

Cheers, Alexander

Dearest Alexander,

God, Jeff Buckley. Where to begin? We can begin with me at 19. Predictably naive, with a penchant for knee-high boots and short skirts, Rimmel Black Cherry lipstick and good-looking boys in flannel shirts. So far, so textbook. [...]

I'm sorry, what? Other articles on the Opinion page: Gwynne Dyer on the geopolitical importance of the elections in Afghanistan; and Professor Andrew Bradstock on the importance of relative social equality for making a better society.

Not a story an opinion.

Party on, Garth

Props to Danyl at the wonderful Dim-Post, who dragged himself out of bed at 5am and promptly compounded one mistake with another: reading Garth George's column, this week entitled "We should all salute our wonderful PM". On closer inspection, this turned out to be less a strict behavioural recommendation - although that wouldn't have surprised me - and more a general love-in, if a love-in could just involve a scary old man building a shrine to Great Leader in his basement.

It comes as no surprise that John Key and National remain top of the political pops a year into their reign. That's pretty much all down to Mr Key, a Prime Minister the like of whom we have never seen.

Our award-winning political commentator, John Armstrong, described him on Saturday as a "political phenomenon", which are the very words I had already chosen for this column. But, as is now and again the case when you write only weekly, someone beat me to it.

Let's be honest; you didn't really just steal independently come up with two words from John Armstrong's article. You have, in fact, repeated the same story, more or less; the same sycophantic rubbish that Armstrong's article on Key, Patrick Gower's article on "Crusher" Collins and the rest of the Herald's coverage on National's first year in power. As the Dim-Post points out, thank goodness that the Electoral Finance Act has been repealed so we can again have a balanced and critical Fourth Estate.

Oh, and something else: Garth has not only copied Armstrong's article - only replacing the dots on the 'i's with love hearts - he actually plagiarised himself. His article on March 19 - "Key is PM of a type never seen before" - is almost exactly the same in tone and content as today's. If this is a trend, we should expect another piece demanding the immediate return of Georgie Pie in the next fortnight.

Now here come the reminiscences:

I have met almost every prime minister since Sid Holland led the first National Government elected in 1949, and none of them resembles today's incumbent.

When it comes to affability and consensus, perhaps Keith Holyoake comes close, but not all that close. I still remember as an early teenager barging into my father's office to find a little, dapper chap sitting there on his own. He sprang to his feet, held out his hand, and declaimed: "I'm Keith Holyoake, who are you?"

The odd thing about this is that it made me think about Garth George as a young person. It's not that I thought he had emerged, opinions fully-formed, from an egg. It's more that I saw him as existing through, or perhaps outside of, time: here he is, meeting Pitt the Elder; there he is complaining about how young Romans have no respect for the Emperor anymore.

But I digress. The next section of the article I am just going to auto-summarise:

[...] man of the people ... unspoiled by the poisonous atmosphere of power politics ... remains one of us ... at home in the company of a class of primary schoolkids ... or in the company of the world's high and mighty ... amiable, engaging, good-natured, highly intelligent, humorous and, most of all, unaffected [Yeah, that's all one sentence.] ... there is no "side" to him, no insistence on protocol, no efforts to protect him from the hoi polloi ... attractive traits ... unbridled enthusiasm ... utter delight in being Prime Minister ... fatherless state house kid made good ... achieved significant personal success in the real world ... short on theory and long on practice ... readiness to admit to making a mistake ... He doesn't U-turn; he simply closes one door and opens another.

What? What does that even mean.

Nor is he - as so many wealthy people are - miserly.

Nor is he a paedophile, a Nazi war criminal, a 'P' addict or a slaveowner. God bless you, JK.

He is reported to give freely to charitable causes, and insists on paying for his wife to accompany him when he has to travel overseas.

As a proud New Zealander, this makes me cringe. He is our Prime Minister, the chief executive of our nation's business amounting to much more than $100 billion. He is, by private business standards, paid a pittance in salary and expenses.

As our principal face to the world, he should always travel in style, first class all the way, and should be able to take his wife, and even family, with him if he chooses - all at the Government's expense.

Good lord. Does this remind anyone else of that 'Leave Britney alone' video from a couple of years ago? A cross between that and Cleopatra's giant golden barge in that Asterix book where they go to Egypt.

[...] But back to our popular PM. John Armstrong hypothesises that failure to deliver on the economy could see Mr Key's sparkling performance in his first year count for nothing more than burned-out neon come the 2011 election. I doubt it.

Mr Key is an avid fan of the All Blacks, a frequent attendee at their games and a regular, potently encouraging presence in their dressing room.

This is a political stratagem of astounding brilliance. For if the All Blacks win the World Cup on October 20, 2011, New Zealanders will be in such a state of euphoria that National will stroll over the line in early in November.

"Astounding brilliance"? Don't you remember when Helen Clark, a sensible, pragmatic woman who would rather have watched paint dry than rugby, had to be driven at 170 km/h to get to an airport so she could make it to an All Blacks game - all just so that morons could make the link between her and rugby.

Yeah, I think the "support the All Blacks" strategy has been tried before.

As to the more general point that Armstrong sensibly made about Key's popularity, I'm sure we can all think of another well-known politician who was extremely popular after a year in office:

Food for thought, n'est-ce pas?


(And I actually quite admire John Key.)

We can start a newspaper... under the sea

No ice cream... geddit?

Meet the heavyweight of the jellyfish world. The Nomuras jellyfish can grow to 2m wide and weigh more than 200kg. And although it is boneless and floats aimlessly, it can be a menace. Yesterday, a 10-tonne fishing boat trawling off Japan's east coast was capsized by the weight of dozens of the ocean giants caught in its net. New Zealand fishers need not worry - the jellyfish breed in the East China Sea, and are pushed by currents close to Japan.

New Zealand readers need not worry - the photo of a sea creature taking up half the front page has nothing to do with New Zealand or any significant news story.

In the wake of sharks and whales on the front page, I think we can officially call this a trend.

Use Your Conclusion

I have written before about the oddly 'naive' way in which the Herald writes about crime statistics. They'll run a lead story like the one on the front page today - "Gangster kids keep time for church" - where the amazing revelation is made that young people aren't the Antichrist. It's not even a thing that happened, it's just something a judge said. Judges say things all the time that don't get reported in the paper - why did this comment get on the front page? The irony is that, despite the headline and start of the story implying that young people are slimy little bastards, the article ends up making the rather sympathetic, if blindingly obvious, point that youths involved in gangs still like their families.

I digress. They run a lead story like that, and then when actual statistics come out that show the murder rate decreasing and the 'increases' in violence to be "driven almost entirely by increased recording and reporting of family violence", it gets buried and left without comment. (You'll notice the above link is in fact an NZPA article, not a Herald one.)

It was with all this in mind that I read this article on page A2 of yesterday's paper. "Crime is someone else's problem", goes the headline, which is itself an interesting take on what the article says.

New Zealanders can recognise crime in other areas, but prefer to dismiss it as part of everyday life in their own, a study suggests.

Ok. Go on.

More than 1400 people took part in a Victoria University survey, Not in my backyard? Crime in the Neighbourhood, conducted by Institute of Criminology director Associate Professor Michael Rowe.

The study focused on four areas - Murrays Bay on Auckland's North Shore, Otahuhu in South Auckland, Westown in New Plymouth and Havelock North in Hawkes Bay. They were selected for their varying socio-economic status, demographic profile and police-recorded crime rates.

The survey found that while more than 80 per cent of respondents agreed - or strongly agreed - crime was a serious problem in New Zealand, 63.2 per cent believed it was a problem only in other areas.

Now, this is interesting. Why would so many people think it was a problem elsewhere? How would they know? Let's read on and find out what the conclusions of the report were.

Respondents from Otahuhu - the area with the highest crime rate - did identify crime as a serious problem in their neighbourhood but, like the other regions, tended to dissociate it from the local community.

Ok...

"Otahuhu has got a lot of bad people, I know, but not as it's made out to be [that] all crimes are committed by people in Otahuhu."

[...] One laughed off finding comatose teenagers in her yard at weekends.

[...]"But most of them we sort of know because our children grew up in Havelock North so ... I'm not threatened personally by it, it's just disorder, if you can call it disorder."

And.... that's it. That's the article. Finis. It's just a series of anecdotes, with no talk of why these outcomes might be the case. "What an odd paper to publish," I thought. "An academic paper with no discussion or conclusions?" So I decided to track down the one of the authors of the original report, who was kind enough to send me a copy of it. (He emphasised that it has not yet been approved for publishing, but that didn't stop the Herald half-reporting the results.)

What probably shouldn't surprise you is that the report does in fact draw some conclusions, albeit tentative, about why the disparity exists between people's concern for crime in their area and their angst about crime in New Zealand. And it's not like they're buried at the back, where an overly rushed Herald reporter might miss them. The abstract itself starts:

Contrary to much political and media discourse, quantitative and qualitative results of a research study suggest that the New Zealand public do not regard crime and disorder as escalating or serious problems in local neighbourhoods. Across a range of different areas, the study found that a majority of respondents did not regard crime in their local community as a serious problem compared to other districts, neither did they report that it was an escalating problem.

Weird! Because the article didn't mention anything about that!

In contrast, respondents were much more likely to report that crime problems were serious and increasing across the nation as a whole. This discrepancy might be explained by the reliance of the public on media coverage of crime for information on national crime trends and patterns.

Media coverage! Like in the Herald. Later, in the discussion, the authors conclude that such media coverage and populist politics - "Crusher" Collins, anyone? - might have serious negative effects for the country:

That media and political perspectives on crime are inconsistent with public opinion might be of general concern given considerable and continuing legislative and financial investments undertaken as a consequence. They are also problematic since efforts to develop local community policing and community safety community safety initiatives are likely to be hampered if the complexities of public perspectives are overlooked.

The interesting question concerns how it came to pass that an article about an academic criminology study managed to leave out any sort of analysis or conclusion - material that was clear and obvious in the paper that the journalist (presumably) made some attempt at reading. I suppose I don't know enough about how newsrooms work to answer that question. Does the journalist, consciously or unconsciously, leave out material that conflicts with the media's line? Is it an editorial decision, a case of some higher up figure gutting the article? Did the journalist really think that the discussion wasn't interesting or relevant?

It's interesting to see what they did find relevant, with a capital 'R' in big red letters.


You know, I would laugh - look, there's been a crime! - if I didn't think that it (both this article and general crime reporting) was a serious failure to meet the most basic standards of disinterested journalism. I'd really like to hear from anyone who thought otherwise.

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On a completely unrelated note - not at all related whatsoever, the Herald assures me - yesterday's Your Views topic was "Is crime a serious problem in New Zealand?" It's possibly the most depressing YV ever, but it's interesting to read in light of the paper discussed above:

Orcinus (Kaukapakapa): Bank robberies are everywhere; living closer to those bank and central town area makes me worry if such incidence falls on to me when I walk aroun the town.

Sigh.