MediaDecember 2, 2017

A play-by-play of Kim Hill’s medium rare roasting of Don Brash

Contributing writer

This morning on RNZ Kim Hill generously gave Don Brash 30 minutes in which to explain his problem with Guyon Espiner speaking te reo on the radio. Self-appointed Kim Hill expert and superfan Sam Brooks brings you her best burns.

When it was announced that Don Brash was going to be interviewed by Kim Hill on Saturday Morning, I was both excited and dismayed. Excited because I knew that it wasn’t going to be a softball of an interview, excited because I knew that she’d make fun of him a bit more than any other interviewer would, and excited because I would have a reason to wake up early. Dismayed because Kim Hill surely has better ways to spend half an hour, and because Don Brash is maybe literally the last person I want to hear talk about anything, ever, but especially about te reo Māori.

The interview is here, and you can listen to it if you really want to. It’s pretty painful, and if you can get through it without stepping away from your listening device and saying out loud, “I can’t, I can’t, I just can’t, I’m sorry, but I can’t” then you’re a stronger person than me.

But maybe you don’t want to listen to it, you just want the burns, and I’m here to give you the burns. I’ve included some of Brash’s comments for context. They are, if you can’t tell from the preceding paragraphs, not an endorsement. Similarly, you should be able to tell who is saying what because one of them is burning and the other one is being burned.

0:30 – “Let us speak of te reo.” No niceties here, straight into the oven, turned up to 180.

0:50 – “… I have to listen to a few sentences of Guyon Espiner in te reo.” “Does that worry you?” Gentle negging to start off with.

1:06 – “Most people who listen to Morning Report will find some segment or other in which they don’t understand a word of what is being spoken about, whether it’s in English or te reo.” It takes guts to neg your employer like that, well done Kim.

1:55 – Hill gives Brash the basics.

Does he think te reo should be an official language? Yes.

Does he accept that RNZ has a statutory duty as a public broadcaster to protect and promote a multitude of cultures but primarily the Māori culture? No, with a long explanation that includes my favourite “I pay taxes” explanation which, funnily enough, always seems to come from people who have accountants who make sure they pay as little tax as legally possible.

Does he accept that RNZ has a statutory duty set out in its charter to reflect New Zealand’s cultural identity including Māori language and culture? No, he hasn’t read it, which is hard to hold against him, honestly.

3:10 – Kim Hill reads out this website link, proving that even though she is a formidable human superior to us all, not even she can hyperlink through the airwaves.

4:05 – “Why should I listen to Māori–” Kim Hill rightfully cuts this off with the most leading question, “Why should you listen to Māori, Māori have got their own stations, their own radio stations, their own TV stations-” (I’m using macrons here to be grammatically correct, but you should assume that when Don Brash says this he is somehow saying it without the macrons.)

“Yes, that’s right.”

“But I thought you were against separatism.”

Slam dunk, go home, three pointer, Michael Jordan, other basketball things.

4:44 – “Answer that implied question, sorry if I didn’t ask it explicitly enough. You shouldn’t have to listen to te reo, Māori can go to to Māori radio stations or Māori television stations, why isn’t that separatism?”

“The separatism I object to is not the cultural separatism-”

“OH A DIFFERENT KIND OF SEPARATISM THEN.”

I’m not sure if this makes me want to attend The Hill Family Christmas Lunch, never attend, or just hope it is broadcast or at least podcasted.

5:02 – “We know your political position, which says that the government has no responsibility to address the overrepresentation of Māori in negative social stats.”

“When did I say that?”

“I’m quoting you. I think it was about seven years ago.”

“I have no recollection of that.”

5:36 – “The government have the responsibility with dealing with the social statistics of that, and Māori are heavily represented in that, in part because too many Māori don’t speak English properly.”

Kim Hill’s laugh at this ludicrous, racist, fantastical statement is honestly her at her most Sea Witch, like right after Ariel has signed over her voice, because COME ON.

COME ON.

8:20 – “Why is it that every time I quote you to yourself you act surprised and then repeat it?” No context required.

10:00 – “I think there are some words in te reo which I use, and which frankly are better than the English equivalent. Take the word whanau (mispronounced), I use it frequently because family doesn’t quite cut it, it doesn’t quite mean the same as whanau (mispronounced), I think whanau (mispronounced) is a useful addition to the vocabulary, but do I want to know this kind of stuff that Guyon talks in the morning, I don’t know because nothing about it he says can I understand.”

That right there is Don Brash holding his hand over the fire and not realising what he’s doing until he’s got no fingers left.

That other time Kim Hill dealt to an obnoxious right-winger, US ambassador Scott Brown. Read the highlights here.

11:20 – “But-” and Kim Hill has the most divine giggle here, “-most language is, most language was always made up at one point and language evolves. The point you’re making is…. question mark.” She actually says “question mark”, and I really wish that Kim Hill verbalised all her punctuation.

13:00 – “Is it a sine qua non, excuse the foreign language, is this position you hold on Māori a sine qua non, and I ask this question completely ingenuously, a sine qua non of right wing politics?”

16:10 – “He’s just saying ‘hello, good morning, whatever.’ Is that such a hardship for you to listen to?” “Well I try not to, let’s put it that way because it irritates the hell out of me, I’m sorry.”

“That just seems so separate, I’m sorry but I have to keep returning to this idea that you are against separatism but you keep on insisting on it.”

17:40 – “[Dave Witherow] made no comment on te reo, he just didn’t want to bloody listen to it!” “That’s right! Why should he have to?”

“Why should he have to? For the same reason, I guess, that Māori had to listen to English and learn it.”

You left your stove on and it is burning up your house, Don.

22:20 – “You cannot go into a kindergarten or playcentre anywhere in the country now without learning te reo, even if there’s not a brown face within fifty miles.”

“So only brown faces should learn te reo?”

“Well, for brown faces it’s presumably useful because it’s their culture, for me it is not of value.”

“I come back to separatism, I’m afraid Dr. Brash. You strike me as the archetypal separatist. Which seems so ironic don’t you think?”

Don Brash uses the phrase ‘brown face’ on public broadcast radio in 2017. Remember that and internalise it, use it to fuel your inner hatred of whatever and whomever you want. Remind yourself that at least you, in your human life, have never used that phrase on public broadcast radio, and you almost certainly never will.

25:30 – “Do you think your opinion on this is [long, exasperated sigh] old-fashioned?” Brash, also perhaps unsurprisingly, does not think this.

29:00 – “So, English is the lingua franca, sorry another foreign expression, you see we incorporate foreign expressions into English, so why can’t we just do what we’re doing on RNZ, which is incorporation?”

Call back to a previous burn, slam dunk, try, hit it out of the park, well done, collect home base, Kim.

30:20 – “You see Māori as just another ethnic group?”

“Of course. Why are they not?”

“Because they’re tangata whenua.”

Don Brash disagrees with this, and brings up the Moriori, because at this point in every argument of this kind, where the racism is about as thinly veiled as a bride at her fifth wedding, someone brings up the Moriori, and every right-minded person listening to this screams at whatever listening device they’ve had to hear it from because that is a bullshit addition to every argument of this kind, and is intended not to continue the argument but to send it off the rails entirely.

This renders Kim Hill briefly speechless, she cuts the interview off with the most curt and savage:

“If only Sir Michael King were here today, thank you for your time, Dr Don Brash.”

Honestly, thank you for your time, Kim Hill. Because if you don’t want to put up with this bullshit for more than half an hour, none of the rest of us should either.

Keep going!

MediaDecember 2, 2017

How a student journalist brought out the Trump in Winston

Joel MacManus

Wellington editor

As a journalist at a student magazine, Joel MacManus wrote a straightforward report on a media appearance by Winston Peters. In return, Peters called him a moron and questioned whether he deserved to be in university.

Winston Peters is a man with many grudges. His desire for vengeance against those who wronged him is one of his most defining traits and his latest target is the journalists who revealed his overpayment of superannuation funds, Newshub’s Lloyd Burr and Newsroom co-editor Tim Murphy. His attacks on their journalistic credibility included calling Burr a “National Party activist”, which earned the scorn of E tū union journalists representative Brent Edwards.

“As Foreign Minister, Mr Peters should uphold his obligation to support press freedom and journalists’ safety around the world, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region,” Edwards said.

It was upon reading this that I realised I had a story of my own about what it was like to be harassed by Winston Peters. I laughed it off at the time, but now I think about it, it was pretty fucked up.

For the last two years, I worked as a reporter for Critic, the student magazine at the University of Otago. I wrote a story in May about the NZ First policy of cracking down on international students earning work visas and permanent residency.

It wasn’t an op-ed, it was just a bog standard news piece. At no point was there any criticism of NZ First policy on my part. It wasn’t even original reporting, I pretty much just recounted and quoted an interview he did with The AM Show. Apart from an editorialised headline, it was a boring, regular story. I forgot about it the minute I sent it away.

Which is why I was baffled when I got a message three weeks later from the chair of the Southern Young Nats. “Congrats on the Winston Peters attack! Poor man’s Donald Trump.”

Then I checked Twitter and saw this:

Turns out, Winston was in Dunedin and had given a speech on campus in which he thrust a copy of Critic in the air and, pointing at the article I had written saying, “First question, who was the unreconstructed, four flushing moron that wrote that article? Second question, and how did he or she get into this university?”

“Despite all the downsides of mass immigration where students are concerned – high student rents, crammed accommodation, tens of thousands from overseas with work permits competing for your work, and depressed wages and conditions – someone at this university wrote that article.”

Again, what I wrote was not an opinion piece. At no point did I criticise Winston Peters or New Zealand First for their position on the issue. I basically just quoted Winston himself.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t even read the article, just glanced the headline, saw the word “rant” and assumed it was a criticism of him.

A more cynical person might say he saw an opportunity to fall back on that old populist trick of trying to paint himself as a victim of media bashing, regardless of the actual content of the article.

In the next issue, my colleague wrote a short article about the speech Peters gave on campus.

Winston responded by accusing Critic of “unprofessional bias” and “slanted reporting” because we chose to focus on his attacks on us rather than writing about the rest of his speech which he said included “topics of interest to students such as… NZ Super”.

Honestly, I was stoked. Being attacked by Winston Peters is almost a badge of honour among journalists. I thought the whole thing was hilarious. For a week, I went around telling nearly everyone I knew about my run-in. It was made all the better by the fact that his attacks were so nonsensical.

But I know not everyone would have taken it as well as me.

I was recently appointed as the new editor of Critic, which got me thinking how I would have felt if rather than me, Winston Peters had chosen to attack one of my staff. I would have been furious.

Like all student magazines, most of Critic’s writers are volunteers. Most of them are university-aged, and we even have the odd high schooler contribute. For almost all of them, Critic is the first time their writing has been published.

The author of that piece could have easily 18-year-old volunteer writing their first news story. This is exactly the kind of story a new volunteer would be asked to write because it doesn’t require independent investigation, just a recounting of facts.

It could be a young aspiring journalist looking to dip their toe in the waters of student media – and in response they get a very powerful man, the former (and future) deputy prime minister launching a cyber-bullying campaign against them, calling them a moron and saying they don’t deserve to be in university. After that, I wouldn’t be surprised if they never wanted to write again.

Winston Peters’ response was not to criticise the content of the article. He insulted me personally. He insulted my intelligence. Someone who was campaigning to be a government minister questioned whether I had gained valid entry into the University of Otago, a government institution.

By this point I had almost graduated and was already pretty checked out of my degree. But again, if that were an 18-year-old volunteer, already feeling the creeping self-doubt that inevitably comes with your first year of university study? To hear the former deputy prime minister say they aren’t smart enough to deserve a place there would be incredibly disheartening. That’s bullying, plain and simple.

This is not student media asking politicians to go easy on us. We don’t want to be handled with kid gloves. We are a member of the Press Council, and as such can (and do) get taken to the council on occasions when readers feel we have breached journalistic standards.

If Winston Peters had claimed inaccuracies in the content of the article, that would have been fine. But I’m pretty confident there were none. That he accused us of being biased was in my opinion incorrect and unfair, but arguably a valid complaint in theory. That he chose to personally attack and insult a reporter is not acceptable for someone in his position of power.

Those kinds of personal attacks on journalists are Trump politics at their worst. Actually, it’s lower than that: even Trump hasn’t stooped to the level of picking Twitter fights with individual writers on college newspapers.