Two people, Anika Moa and Kiri Allan, sit on yellow and white chairs in a cozy setting, engaged in a conversation. A sign reads "it's personal with Anika Moa" against a gray backdrop. The scene is casual with plants and small tables around them.

A still from the unreleased episode of It’s Personal with Anika Moa

MediaOctober 23, 2024

The Anika Moa and Kiri Allan interview RNZ didn’t want you to hear

Politics reporter

A still from the unreleased episode of It’s Personal with Anika Moa

Questions were raised after RNZ pulled one of its own podcasts featuring Anika Moa and the former Labour MP before its release. Now, The Spinoff can reveal what was actually said.

There’s nothing like an eleventh-hour retraction to stir up interest in the exact thing you would rather people didn’t see. In September, Radio New Zealand abruptly announced that after advertising a podcast interview between Anika Moa and former Labour MP Kiritapu Allan, the episode would no longer be released in season two of It’s Personal with Anika Moa.

The result was a wave of unprecedented interest in the longform interview podcast and growing speculation about what was said and why it was enough to be removed after the season had already premiered.

It’s Personal with Anika Moa was announced by RNZ in February 2024. The first series would be 12 longform interviews with “notable New Zealanders about life’s tough lessons”, hosted by singer and entertainer Anika Moa and released as both an audio podcast and a Youtube web series.

Moa’s approach to interviewing is well-known, with comedy shows like Face to Face with Anika Moa, and Anika Moa Unleashed, which saw her interview prominent New Zealanders – including politicians – heavily weighted to comedy and roasting. “It’s Personal with Anika Moa reveals what’s perhaps the multi-talented performer and broadcaster’s greatest gift – a remarkable ability to get people to tell her things,” read the RNZ media release announcing the podcast.

And while RNZ may be most known for combative politicial interviews on shows like Morning Report and Checkpoint, Moa was quick to distance herself and her show from that expectation.

“I’m not a journalist, I’m a human sharing a conversation about someone’s life. Empathy is everything. There is some pretty serious kōrero, but we have some great laughs as well,” she said in the release.

The first season, and particularly the first episode with producer Chelsea Winstanley, proved popular. In September, RNZ announced a second season of It’s Personal with Anika Moa, teasing “entertaining” and “emotional” interviews with actor Morgana O’Reilly, musician Jon Toogood and former Labour minister Kiritapu Allan.

Twelve days later, after the first episode of season two had already aired, RNZ issued an update and correction. “Following an editorial check of the episode of It’s Personal with Anika Moa featuring Kiritapu Allan, RNZ has made the decision not to air the episode.”

The statement specified that RNZ’s editorial policy applies to both staff and contractors (Moa is contracted to RNZ for the show). “While It’s Personal with Anika Moa is an entertainment, personality driven, interview show rather than news or current affairs, the topics covered in the interview included recent news events and they needed further context,” it read.

“While highly respecting the right of individuals to express their opinion, we found that given the subject matter of the interview, the episode did not meet our Editorial Policy with regards to impartiality.”

The release did not specify who or what was specifically ruled to have breached RNZ’s editorial policy, nor why the full episode was pulled rather than re-edited or updated.

The Spinoff requested the taping of the episode featuring Allan, and received it under the Official Information Act this week. It is 47 minutes long, recorded in the RNZ studios earlier this year, and opens with a content warning for readers that there will be discussion of suicide and strong language.

Below is an overview and snippets of key topics covered.

Life in parliament

Moa: Te Pāti Māori are going on about having their own Māori parliament, and then there’s Parliament, and that is inherently te ao Pākehā. So everything that they do within parliament is white man rules, white woman rules, white this, white that, white wash. How do you see te Pāti Māori values with their Māori parliament? How do you see that working, and if you had the choice again, would you join te Pāti Māori and get that vision across the line?

Allan: I’ll tell you a funny story: I think almost every single political party prior to me going into Parliament had asked me at some point in time to run for them. Greens, Act, National, NZ First …

Moa: National? Even Nats?

Allan: Oh, yeah! My aunty Georgina te Heuheu, she was trying to get me when I was young!

Moa: Even National? OK, were they wanting to top up the colours? Add a bit of brown to white town?

Allan: [Laughing] Oh, shush you.

A few minutes later…

Moa: What I want to talk about is intergenerational trauma [and] Māori wāhine in a political sense. You’ve got Marama [Davidson] who’s going through breast cancer. You went through cervical cancer, you had your raruraru … And then the media go down on brown, [like] Tory Whanau, they just want to annihilate a certain people. Why? Why are they doing this? Where’s the support for mana wāhine in politics?

Allan: It’s interesting that you’ve even raised that, because I don’t think that many people see that … because I think you have to be that to see that. And I can go through almost every wāhine Māori that has been into that institution: Nanaia Mahuta, how was she treated? Meka Whaitiri, Georgina, Donna Huata, Claudette Hauiti, Metiria [Turei] …

Beautiful wāhine Māori from so many different places, who were chewed by a system … the system wasn’t designed for us, it wasn’t by us and it wasn’t designed for us, you go into it to try and challenge some of those things. And for as long as you can, you do, but that machinery is made to eat you.

Look at how many wāhine Māori and takatāpui … All of them have left, every single one of us have left that place in not positive ways.

Kiritapu Allan on RNZ’s It’s Personal with Anika Moa. (Photo: Supplied / RNZ)

Jacinda Ardern’s resignation

Moa: Do you remember when Jacinda stepped down and I texted you and went ‘go bro, go for the leader!’ And you went “heeeelll nooo! Gay, Māori, a woman, I’d get absolutely slaughtered.”

Allan: [Laughing] Oh, man, straight up, the amount of text I got at that time, it was insane. I was just like, “Y’all gotta understand, this literally would be a suicide mission”. And to some extent, it ultimately was anyway, just being the position I was, that was enough. You know, being a front bench minister was enough to sort of be my lynching orders.

I actually cried when one of my dearest, dearest friends, Barbara Edmonds, became the spokesperson for finance in Labour. Because of what I perceive is going to be the scrutiny that she would come under that could be so detrimental to her. And she’s amazing. She’s incredible.

The RNZ speech

Allan: I just remember there was a period at the beginning of last year, feeling like I couldn’t breathe for a period of time, and kind of clutching for a lifeboat, and there just wasn’t one there.

There was a point in time, I gave a speech at this farewell gig, this little media institution called RNZ, Radio New Zealand. Everyone kicked up [about it], but that was a real pivot point. After that, there was this kind of like compounding, like it just became story after story after story. It just kind of unlocked this tone, I think, where every story from there out basically became this really negative one about me.

Moa: Toppling you. They’re toppling you.

Allan: It was. It was so interesting, just to see how it built momentum, [and] we could all see it happening. It takes one thing, and it was that speech at RNZ, and it just started this rolling ball … Jacinda [Ardern] had left by that time, and she’d obviously borne the brunt of a lot of, like, kind of the toxic media coverage. Perhaps there was some boredom, and they needed another target, I don’t know …

But once that started happening, it’s very isolating. When the highs are high, that’s also isolating. When the coverage is too good, that’s isolating. When the coverage is bad, it’s isolating. So you’re often isolated … it’s your face out there, and you’re getting smashed everyday. You get your mother crying on the phone every single day because of some other negative thing that you’ve done.

Bullying allegations

Allan: The words that were often prescribed to strong Māori women: “oh, she’s just so aggressive”, “ugh, what she’s saying is alright, but if she could just tone it down a bit, you know, just tone it down, all of it”. And then you’d say one thing in exactly the same way as [someone of] a different demography in the [exact] same meeting, and the way that you are heard, received, and the response is just immeasurably different. I explained it to one political editor who was trying to run a bit of a story on me one time. I said to her, “you go talk to people in this building, and you ask, ‘who is it that is yelling in this building?’ You tell me who it is, that’ll tell you who it’s not.” There was a particular demography of people where it was absolutely acceptable to slam tables, and kick and swear …

Moa: Who?

Allan: I’m not telling. But [they] weren’t where the stories were generated from, it wasn’t about those people. Now, any of that behaviour is poor, and it’s rubbish, and should never, ever happen ever in any environment. But it always intrigued me to see who the story is about [in terms of] behaviour, because it’s acceptable from those that have been in power forever to perpetuate the behaviour.

Moa: So a man wouldn’t be called a bully, but a woman would be? “Bullying, she’s bullying …” and it’s like, um, I’m just doing my job. Is that how you saw it?

Allan: Imagine this: you’ve got a 30-something-year-old gay Māori minister boss, and you’re a 60–something-year-old Pākehā dude who’s been at the top of your career for a long time, and you’re having to listen to this young bucker from worlds I do not understand, or will try to understand, telling you what to do.

And then when you don’t do it and you failed to deliver, and then she’s saying “you’ve failed to deliver,” well, she’s just out of line, isn’t she? Could I have done things better? Heck yeah, every single day I could have done things better.

It’s Personal host Anika Moa has said she is ‘not a journalist’ (Photo: Supplied / RNZ)

The car crash and arrest

Moa: All the shit that you went through, you know, the night you drove, whatever the fuck, drunk or whatever. Can you look back at it now and think, ‘OK, of course I was going to go down this hole of despair and suicidal thoughts and drinking and blardy-blardy-bah?’

Allan: At the start of last year I really couldn’t manage [my depression and suicidal thoughts] any more. I’d told people I wanted to quit. I felt very obliged to stay. I needed to get out, I wasn’t OK. And I didn’t, and I should’ve. So that’s the first thing. I wish I’d just listened to myself.

It’s a funny one, the [media] story was I was rip-roaring drunk, got DIC’ed [charged with drink driving], crashed a car, got run down by dogs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That night was horrible, but first I’ll say it was nowhere near even close to one of my worst nights. It was just a shitty one that everyone saw. Secondly, I had consumed some drinks before driving – no one should ever do that – [but] it didn’t reach a threshold for DIC.

Note: Allan’s breath alcohol level that night was 335mcg. The legal limit is 250mcg, but criminal charges are only applied to readings over 400mcg.

Moa: So that’s your story: you drank, you got in a car, you didn’t get done for drink driving?

Allan: No. I got a $250 fine, though.

Note: Allan was charged and convicted in May for refusing to accompany police after crashing a car while driving over the legal alcohol limit.

Christopher Luxon and the 2023 election

Moa: What do you think of Chris Luxon? Are you allowed to have a thought about him?

Allan: Of course, I’m my own person now. I think Chris Luxon is a guy [and] that the world has always been a place that he can be very comfortable in, and operate very comfortably in. And it was always probably just an option on the table to become the prime minister. Because why not?

Moa: Could have been anyone, right? Well, any white, pale, male style. Could have been my granddad. You know, people wanted to vote for National because they were sick of Jacinda and Labour, and that’s just the fact. Not me of course, I’m just speaking for the people. For the farmers.

Allan: Look, I don’t think Chris Luxon is a bad guy. I think he’s a guy that has operated from a privileged position all of his life and continues to do so. And we’ve been talking about a lot of kind of the unconscious bias, or that privilege of not having to see things from, you know, different starting places in life, different rungs of the ladder. He wouldn’t have had to experience that before, and will not, and there’s comfort in that for others.

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Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
— Politics reporter

On being diagnosed with ADHD and PTSD

Allan: I was pretty broken, after everything with the work, the end of my working career in politics, like, basically, it took 10 weeks to go sit on a couch in my parents’ house and cry, or whatever else it is that you do. So it was through that period that I was getting all the diagnosis [ADHD and PTSD]. So once I went through that and didn’t believe the outcome [at first], and then I started having to have quite like, intensive therapy. And they talked to me about the role of medication and the role of therapy, and that they played two distinctly different roles. So I started taking the medication. It was this constant, like, push, pull of trying to get the right things. And we still change it every now and then, depending on what’s going on.

I quickly discovered it was a game changer, like, absolutely life saving. All the things I was worried about, my creativity going… That’s like, one of my things that I like about myself. I like the way that my mind works. I thought that would go. Turns out it didn’t.

Keep going!

Philip Crump – lawyer, blogger, NZ On Air board member

MediaOctober 23, 2024

Is there room for conservatives in culture? NZ On Air is about to find out

Duncan Greive

Founder

Philip Crump – lawyer, blogger, NZ On Air board member

A new member of NZ On Air’s board has sent a ripple of fear through the media. Duncan Greive explains why Philip Crump has them spooked.

In May of 2020, a new Twitter account debuted, under the pseudonym Thomas Cranmer, a prominent figure in 16th century English religious politics. Over the coming years, it attracted a cult following among those who believed that the combination of the post-George Floyd racial reckoning and pandemic-era restrictions had produced an over-correction in New Zealand’s government and media. By late 2022, Cranmer moved to Substack, saying “it’s become increasingly unwieldy to summarise all of the issues in Twitter threads”.

For a year, still anonymous, Cranmer wrote about hot button topics like the Three Waters co-governance provisions, the decision to approve Covid vaccines or the Posie Parker tour, attracting thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of views. His pieces interrogated topics which were suddenly hard to discuss in many broad media outlets, while also being still of huge interest to many right-leaning New Zealanders. The views were not always predictable, but tended to focus on areas in which he viewed New Zealand’s news media having failed in some way.

Cranmer tapped into the same energy which animated the likes of Sean Plunket’s The Platform, and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters’ 2023 stump speeches, but swapped the bluster for lengthy, intellectual arguments, often interrogating in fine detail proposed legislation or analysing OIA requests. Midway through last year, BusinessDesk outed Cranmer as Philip Crump, a senior lawyer who had recently returned to New Zealand after 20 years in the UK. NZME (owners of BusinessDesk) promptly hired him to edit ZB+, a paid digital offering intended to supplement the powerhouse talk radio brand.

While all this was going on, NZ On Air was on its own journey. The organisation was founded in 1989, dreamed up by Labour minister (and future Act party MP) Richard Prebble as a contestable public broadcaster. For most of its existence it funded popular TV shows which ran on TVNZ or Three, with production companies pitching ideas to networks, who picked their favourites for sign-off by NZ On Air.

The widespread adoption of digital distribution presented a multidimensional challenge to the agency. It had to decide how to serve a splintering audience, and both create content for and engage with the radically changed audience expectations of the emerging era.

It also became an organisation that had a much greater role in picking which projects to fund – largely because it turned down more ideas than it ever had in the past. In recent years it funded dozens of projects, including a web series for the NZ Herald exploring the lives of trans activists, a documentary about Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick for Three and a look into porn by The Spinoff.

Despite representing only a small portion of its decisions, they were highly scrutinised, and led to a theory that NZ on Air had succumbed to ideological capture by some. Particularly a range of conservative or right wing sources, including the Taxpayers’ Union, Family First and the Act Party. There is also a strain of current right-leaning politics which is sceptical about a number of aspects of the way we fund culture. The New Zealand Initiative’s chief economist Eric Crampton is a persistent critic of the Screen Production Rebate, which sends millions in tax back to film and TV makers. Act has recently openly put Creative NZ on notice about its decisions, particularly those pertaining to the poet Tusiata Avia.

Still, right-leaning organisations were not alone in perceiving an excess of interest in diversity and intersectionality. Screen veterans like Steven O’Meagher and John Barnett were also unusually public in their criticism of NZ on Air or the NZ FC.

‘Media is under threat. Help save The Spinoff with an ongoing commitment to support our work.’

Duncan Greive
— Founder

Two worlds collide

These forces have always existed in society – one which seeks to move forward to fix perceived faults, the other which asks what might be lost along such a path. They can feel entirely incompatible – yet as of last week, they were set on a collision course. In a Friday press release, media minister Paul Goldsmith announced two new appointees to the board of NZ On Air. One was Brett Banner, an uncontroversial appointee, a veteran of many commercial roles, with a background in finance and accounting. The other was Crump.

My phone lit up immediately. Within production, media, funding and commissioning, there was a broad sense of anxiety. A significant proportion of Crump’s writing could be characterised as media criticism, both news media and the sector more broadly. It diagnosed a combination of overreach, or failure to meaningfully address the complex, controversy-courting questions he was asking.

There was a widespread perception that Crump’s appointment was part of a broader pattern. The Spinoff editor Madeleine Chapman recently revealed that incoming race relations commissioner Melissa Derby and chief human rights commissioner Stephen Rainbow were each appointed without the endorsement of bipartisan appointment committees. That process was overseen by Goldsmith, who is also in charge of filling places on NZ On Air’s board.

Crucially, the board of NZ On Air is not a typical and narrow governance arrangement. It also is the final arbiter of funding decisions. While funding committees within NZ On Air assess applications and make recommendations, anything over $1m in budget goes to the board for approval, while other projects which are considered in any way controversial can also be elevated for discussion.

The Spinoff understands he did not seek the appointment. It’s easy to view this as part of a broader right wing plot to either destabilise, radically reform or ultimately dismantle some key institutions that are perceived as having an inbuilt left wing tilt, or have acquired one in recent years. Opponents would suggest that platforms know NZ On Air’s preferences, and bring them what they want – or that it signals its politics through what it funds, and what it doesn’t.

Those within and around NZ On Air would strongly resist such a characterisation of their decisions, and point out that it can only fund what is put in front of it. There is also a key clause in the Broadcasting Act 1989 which actively compels it to consider diverse audiences in its decision making – it believes that all it is doing is attempting to ensure that provision is satisfied.

Part of section 36 of the Broadcasting Act 1989

What will Crump do?

I know Crump. Early last year I saw the heat his Substack was generating, and wanted to see if he would reveal his identity and express his views in an on-record interview. After a brief correspondence, he agreed to meet me for a beer, and ultimately that he would take the pseudonymous mask off in a story for The Spinoff. Ultimately BusinessDesk ended that approach with its scoop, but we stayed in touch, and he appeared on my podcast The Fold earlier this year, talking about his Substack, and his role at ZB+, which has since ended.

I sought him out for the same reasons I approached the founders of now-mothballed commentary site The Common Room, and the funder of The Platform. It felt important to know what was driving this disaffection. There is now a well-established alternative media ecosystem within New Zealand which has a general theory of New Zealand’s media – that it has succumbed to ideological capture. Gone woke.

Crump’s views were suddenly a pressing, potentially existential question for an already embattled media. I called Crump, and he declined an on-record interview, citing his freshness in the role.

If he has a critique of New Zealand media, it’s that it lacks the ideological breadth and intellectual energy he enjoyed while reading London’s print media. Where some parts of the right wing alt media can feel confrontationally opposed to arts and culture, Crump expresses affection for it. He cites the fact the late Barry Crump was a first cousin, and Joy Cowley is a relation by marriage as evidence of a connection to the arts. If anything, he comes across as someone who wants to understand why media is the way it is, rather than to burn it down. His 90s Bachelor of Arts was in Māori studies, something he believes shows that his persistent critique of co-governance provisions was in their drafting, rather than from a place of anti-Māori sentiment. In conversation, he comes across as quiet and wonkish, rather than a ideological rigid firebrand.

There’s also the question of just how impactful any single board member can be. He is one of six, one lawyer replacing another, and the NZ On Air board has previously survived politicisation scandals in the past. In 2012 board member Stephen McElrea, who was chair of prime minister John Key’s electorate committee at the time, raised concerns over the broadcast of a documentary about child poverty close to election time. Just last year former TVNZ exec Andrew Shaw resigned after describing the incoming government as a “gang of thugs” on LinkedIn.

NZ On Air’s next board meeting is in November. Its decisions are always closely scrutinised; these next ones will be especially so. It’s only then that the screen community will see if Crump is the thoughtful, slightly pedantic character he comes across as in person, or whether his appointment really does represent the sharp ideological realignment some fear – and others are rooting for.