Paul Henry Interviews Chris Trotter On The Panama Papers - 9/5/16

FOLLOW THE LINK to last Monday's televised interview involving myself, PWC tax expert, Geoff Nightingale, and Mediaworks' Paul Henry. Though the best efforts of Nicky Hager, RNZ News and One News were brought to bear on the documents, and the results broadcast 24 hours before the worldwide release of the Panama Papers in toto, the revelations fell well short of the "smoking gun" needed to inflict genuine political damage on John Key and his government. As I would write for The Daily Blog later in the week:

The Panama Papers, they say,

Had Key worried for almost a day.

Yet, in spite of the press,

And Labour's best guess,

They had little of interest to say.

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road of 14 May 2016.

Blurred Vision: The Interview.

 

CHRIS TROTTER follows-up on many of the issues canvassed in the previous posting in this interview with Paul Henry, broadcast on Thursday, 17 March 2016.

This posting exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Driving In Illiberal Circles

However did he win? Rob Muldoon addresses a National Party-organised campaign rally in the Upper Hutt Mall, 1981. Our eyes are drawn immediately to the placards carried by the Labour-supporting rubber workers, but it was the voting strength of all those undemonstrative electors listening attentively to "Mr Muldoon" which counted on election day. Disgraced Breakfast host, Paul Henry, may have many more supporters out there than Liberal New Zealand likes to think.

LIBERAL KIWIS said it so often that conservative comedians turned it into a joke: "I don’t know how Rob Muldoon got elected – nobody I know voted for him!"

You’d be surprised how many liberals struggled to see the humour in that sentence. Conservatives, on the other hand, got the joke straight-away.

They, at least, understood that liberal New Zealand constituted a small, self-referential elite that was ideologically, culturally and socially cut off from the overwhelming majority of the population.

And that, of course, was the whole point of the joke.

In the isolated liberal communities of academia, the artistic community, the news media and whatever passed for bohemia in the 1970s hardly anyone ever voted for the National Party.

Hence liberal New Zealand’s profound sense of shock and dislocation when the rest of the population turned away from Bill Rowling’s Labour Government in 1975.

I well recall the day, a few weeks before the 1975 General Election, when I found myself in a room chock-full of the Wellington cultural elite. In one corner sat the acting head of the Arts Council, a couple of nationally renowned poets occupied the sofa, and the rest of the space was filled up with writers, film-makers, academics and art students.

I had not long returned from a hitch-hiking tour of the South Island, during which I’d exchanged ideas with all sorts of New Zealanders. Mile after mile of these conversations had left me harbouring serious doubts about the longevity of Bill Rowling’s Labour Government.

Norman Kirk, it seemed, had been a man like themselves. But Bill Rowling? (Not to mention all those "intellectuals" surrounding him!) Well, he was a different matter.

Though they struggled to put it into words, many of the motorists who picked me up clearly believed the country was slowly slipping from their grasp. There were too many people like me, they said. Too many footloose, restless and unanchored youngsters. Too many long-haired hippies willing to challenge the ideas and institutions upon which they had built their lives.

"Rob Muldoon will sort your lot out", they would say, grinning widely. But I couldn’t help noticing that in their eyes there wasn’t the slightest trace of mirth.

Among the gaggle of liberal worthies I’d joined that day was the headmaster of my old secondary school – a wise, tolerant and generous man I greatly admired. I told him what I’d heard on my travels and asked for his thoughts on the imminent election.

"Don’t worry, Chris," he reassured me, "New Zealand will never vote for a man as far to the right as Muldoon."

Certainly, no one in that room did.

Thirty-five years later, with Breakfast host, Paul Henry, offering-up yet another gobbet of reactionary tripe to his television audience, I couldn’t help recalling those 1975 conversations.

They helped me resist the temptation to add yet another liberal voice to the cacophony of outraged protest.

That the redoubtable Joris de Bres, acting on behalf of left-thinking liberals everywhere, would bring to bear the full weight of the Race Relations Conciliator’s office, I hadn’t the slightest doubt. Just as I was certain that every left-wing blogger capable of spelling "bigot" and "redneck" would be reaching for the nearest keyboard.

Recalling those thirty-five-year-old conversations, I was equally certain that there wouldn’t be a single liberal commentator who didn’t consider Mr Henry’s comments regarding the identity of Governor-General Anand Satyanand to be both adolescent and unforgivable.

There’d be no votes for Mr Henry in liberal circles.

But what about out on the road?

What would New Zealanders living outside the charmed circles of Kiwi liberalism have to say about Mr Henry’s outburst?

"For crying out loud, mate, he was only saying what right-wing buggers like me are thinking. That Governor-Generals are supposed to be like everybody’s grand-dad – stuffed shirts with heads of white hair and plums in their mouths. At least they were when I was a kid.

"This guy we’ve got now, Satyanand or-whatever-his-name-is. Wasn’t he one of Aunty Helen’s appointments? Someone who ticked all the politically-correct boxes?

"That’s all Henry was trying to say for God’s sake. That Satyanand only got the job because the Labour Government needed to shore up its vote in the immigrant community. It’s hardly bloody rocket science – is it?"

To which I’d have to reply: "No, mate, it isn’t."

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 8 October 2010.

Where have all the grown-ups gone?

ARE there no grown-ups left in this country? No one capable of grasping the full significance of the multiple crises through which New Zealand is passing? Not one person with the authority to ‘round up all the spoilt and noisy children currently playing at being responsible adults – and send them to their rooms?

Rodney Hide, for example, is in dire need of some "time out". Confronted with expert advice from the Ministry of Health that up to 20 percent of New Zealanders are at risk of catching something nasty from their drinking water, what does our Minister for Local Government do?

Does he pound the Finance Minister’s, Bill English’s, desk – demanding a budget allocation sufficient to secure for the entire population that most fundamental of civic amenities: a secure supply of potable water?

No, he doesn’t. He demands that the Ministry of Health’s findings be "urgently reviewed".

Now every civil servant knows exactly what "urgently reviewed" means: it’s politician-speak for "take this report away and come back with a set of policy recommendations more in line with the Minister’s views".

Whether or not the Ministry of Health bows to Mr Hide’s astonishing temper tantrum over water quality standards will be a measure of just how grown-up a nation we truly are.

Either the water supplied to citizens by New Zealand’s local authorities is safe, or it is not. If it is unsafe, then a grown-up government initiates the processes required to make it safe. Only a child attempts to wish away the obstacles reality places in his path, and adult behaviour enabling such "magic thinking" is not only very wrong, it is also extremely dangerous.

Mr Hide is, of course, an enthusiastic convert to the ideology of neo-liberalism – an infantile conceptual system especially prone to magic thinking. At it’s core lies a childlike faith in the omniscience and omnipotence of "free markets". Central to this faith is the naïve conviction that, left to its own devices, the market is capable of fulfilling all of humanity’s needs.

Not surprisingly, nothing enrages the neo-liberal child more than being presented with evidence of market failure.

Anyone who identifies circumstances in which the disciplines of the marketplace simply don’t apply (as in the provision of such basic civic amenities as clean water, hygienic sewerage disposal and street-lighting) should expect a very short shrift.

It is no accident that Mr Hide holds the portfolio of Local Government. Because at no other point in the complex edifice of the State is neo-liberalism’s capacity for magical cogitation and wishful thinking more urgently required than at this crucial intersection of theory and reality.

The economists may refer to the destructive and unaccounted-for effects of market interactions as "externalities", but you and I experience them as pollution.

Allow the market for dairy products to operate freely, without effective regulation, and what do you get? Filthy streams, rivers, lakes and estuaries; exhausted acquifers; and constantly rising levels of expenditure for keeping New Zealand’s water supplies – especially those in rural areas – uncontaminated by harmful bacteria.

It simple enough. You’d think even a child could grasp it.

Not that infantile behaviour is restricted to the politicians.

Only last week I was reading about the judge who put away a gang of Chinese "P" (pure methamphetamine) dealers. They’d been running a sophisticated importation and distribution business out of the VIP Room at the Sky City Casino. So alarmed had the judge become at the scale of the operation (millions of dollars-worth of "P" had been traded) that he insisted on sending his sentencing notes to the Sky City Casino’s CEO.

So far, so grown-up.

Then I read about a group of media and sporting celebrities who’ve banded together to combat the use of "P" in the New Zealand community – reportedly the highest per capita in the world.
Rather appropriately, this star-studded bunch have come together under the auspices of the Stellar Trust.

To get the fund-raising ball rolling, the group has decided to "celebrity roast" the veteran broadcaster, Paul Holmes. At just over $3,000 for a table of ten, it promises to be a real red-carpet event.

Then I discover where the fundraiser is being held.

Yep, you guessed it: at the Sky City Casino.

Would the last grown-up leaving New Zealand please remember to switch off the lights in the VIP Room.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star on Friday 27 March 2009.

POST-SCRIPT: Right on cue, the day this column appeared, the host of TVNZ’s Breakfast show, Paul Henry, provoked consternation and outrage by reading out an e-mail commenting unfavourably on one of his female guest’s facial hair.

The saddest aspect of Henry’s gratuitous discourtesy is not so much that the host of a supposedly serious news and current affairs programme sees nothing wrong in insulting his guests on air, but the deafening silence from TVNZ management.

Many (perhaps most) television "personalities" suffer from a grossly inflated opinion of their own significance – it sort of goes with the territory. And that’s why shows like Breakfast have producers – to keep the egos of their "talent" in check.

The lack of grown-up behaviour on the set of Breakfast is unfortunate – if unsurprising. But its absence in the control-room, and, it would seem, the ranks of TVNZ management, is unforgivable.